The Board

Room fourteen was on the ground floor of the glass block, with a whole wall of window onto the yard and three buckets along the bottom of it, red, blue and a paint tin that said MAGNOLIA, each with a drip going into it from a different place.

Mr Pettigrew stopped in the doorway and counted them.

“Three,” he said, with satisfaction. “In my day the old building only ever managed two before break. Progress.” He took his rain hat off at last and looked for somewhere to put it, and put it on the head of the plaster bust of Benjamin Franklin that Mr Ferrante kept on the windowsill, where it looked much better than it had on Mr Pettigrew. “On the desk, Hanover. Gently. The cards are in order and I’d like them to stay in an order, even if it isn’t that one.”

Frederick put the box on Mr Ferrante’s desk.

Mr Pettigrew opened it. It was full, to the top, of index cards held in bundles by elastic bands that had gone brittle and snapped as he touched them, one after another, tick, tick, tick, so that the cards sighed outwards across the desk like a pack of playing cards being let go. On top of them was a wooden pointer with a brass tip and a tin that said CHALK in letters older than anybody in the room.

“Ah,” said Mr Pettigrew, and opened the tin. It was empty except for a small grey stub and a great deal of dust. He looked at the stub, and then at the board, which was white and shiny and had nowhere on it for chalk to go.

“It’s a whiteboard, sir,” said Lucía.

“I can see it’s white.”

“You use the pens.” She held up one of the markers from the tray. “These.”

Mr Pettigrew took it from her and pulled the cap off and sniffed it.

“Good heavens,” he said. “It’s like writing with a fruit.”

---

He took the roll from Mr Ferrante’s list, which was in Mr Ferrante’s small, fast handwriting and which he had to hold at the end of his arm to read.

“Adeyemi. Alvarez. Bannerman.” He looked up at each of them as he said the name, properly, as if fixing them. “Castro. Delacroix. Ebner. Hanover.” He found Frederick. “My box man. Good. Hartigan.” He found Theo. “You’re very large, Hartigan.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you play anything?”

“Football, sir. Defensive line.”

“Excellent. Defence is the only honourable position on a football field. Everybody else is trying to get somewhere.” He went on down the list. “Okafor. Paredes. Patel. Price.” He looked at Devon Price, who had his telephone on the desk in front of him, face down, in a way that suggested it was not there. “Price. You’ve a look of a boy with a telephone.”

“No, sir.”

“Good.”

He came to the end of the list and put it down, and stood behind Mr Ferrante’s desk with his hands on the edge of it and looked at them all for a moment without saying anything, and the rain went on against the glass behind them, and somewhere in the ceiling the drip over the magnolia tin changed its note.

“The Crown,” said Mr Pettigrew.

---

He turned to the board and wrote it, in capitals, with the fruit:

THE CROWN.

His capitals were very large and very straight and leaned slightly to the right, like a row of men walking into a wind.

“Mr Ferrante’s note,” he said, “tells me you have been doing the Charter since Christmas. Good. You’ll have got as far as the second article, then, unless he’s gone about it backwards, which I wouldn’t put past him, he did everything backwards at sixteen, including the sixties.” He picked a card off the top of the pile, looked at it, put it down, picked up another. “Article Two. Of the Crown. Nine clauses. Who can tell me what the first one says?”

Nobody put a hand up.

Mr Pettigrew waited. He waited in a way Frederick had never seen a teacher wait, with his hands behind his back and his chin up and an expression of great patience and very slight amusement, like a man watching a kettle he knows perfectly well is going to boil.

“The executive government of the Union is vested in the Crown,” said June, at last, without putting her hand up.

“It is,” said Mr Pettigrew. “And what’s the Crown?”

Silence.

“Is it a hat?”

A small laugh.

“It is not a hat. Although you will find a great many people, including some of my colleagues in 1974, who argued that it was very nearly a hat, and that that was its great advantage. A hat cannot be bribed.” He wrote NOT A HAT under THE CROWN, and underlined it. “The Crown is the King in his public capacity, and the King is whoever the law says he is, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the whole of the Charter’s second article in a sentence, and you may have it for nothing.” He tapped the board with the pointer. “Clause eight. The succession. Who?”

“The succession in America follows the succession in Great Britain,” said Lucía, reading from her book, “so long as the two remain the same; and if they differ, the Parliament of the Union shall determine it.”

“So long as the two remain the same,” said Mr Pettigrew, and smiled at the window. “They wrote that in 1783 thinking they were being careful, and they were, and they had no idea. Thank you, Miss Paredes.”

---

Frederick sat in the H’s beside Theo and took notes, because it was history and history was the one thing at Ellicott he was good at without trying, and because Mr Pettigrew, it turned out, was very good indeed.

He taught the way some people tell stories at dinner, without notes, although he had a hundred notes in front of him and picked them up and put them down all the time as if they were props. He told them about the morning in 1783 when the Charter was read in the Hall at Philadelphia, and a delegate from Delaware had fallen asleep during clause nine and woken up to find himself bound by it. He told them that the Charter said nothing whatever about how old a King had to be, and nothing about what happened if he was ill or mad or missing, and that the men who wrote it had simply assumed there would always be a grown man in London to be King and had not thought about it further, which was the most American thing they had ever done.

“So where does the law on all that live?” said Mr Pettigrew. “If not in the Charter?”

“Statute, sir,” said Priya, without putting her hand up and without looking up from her notes. “The Regency Act 1811.”

Mr Pettigrew stopped, and looked at her with real pleasure.

“Name?”

“Patel.”

“Miss Patel. Yes. The Regency Act 1811, passed when the old King went mad for the last time and somebody had to sign things. It’s the reading, I see.” He held up Mr Ferrante’s note. “Pages one hundred and twelve to one hundred and eighteen. The minority of the sovereign. Who’s done the reading?”

Seven hands went up. Priya’s did not, although Frederick knew perfectly well that she had done it, because she had done every reading since seventh grade and had never once put her hand up to say so.

His did not go up either.

He had not done the reading. He had told his mother at breakfast that he did not need to, because it was him. He sat with his pen on his notes and his face doing nothing and felt, for the first time that day, a very small and very distant unease, like the drip in the ceiling changing its note.

---

“Very well,” said Mr Pettigrew. “Then let us find out who’s absorbed it by the skin.” He looked down at the class list. “A question. And I want a confident answer, because there’s no use in an unconfident one, the Realm’s had two hundred and forty-five years of those.” He looked up. “Under the law of this Realm, may a person under sixteen reign?”

Nobody put a hand up.

The room was very quiet. Frederick could hear the three drips, red, blue and magnolia, each in its own time.

He could feel, without turning his head, the whole of the H’s and the P’s and the C’s not looking at him. He could feel Theo, beside him, not looking at him so hard that it was nearly a sound.

Mr Pettigrew waited, kettle-patient.

“Come along. Somebody. Hartigan?”

“Pass, sir,” said Theo.

“You can’t pass in history, Hartigan, it isn’t bridge.” Mr Pettigrew ran a long finger down the list and stopped it, and looked up, and found the boy who had carried his box.

“Hanover.”

Frederick looked at him.

He thought about May. He thought about Dame M with her cup of tea like a regimental colour, in May you’ll do the boxes yourself, and the Private Secretary’s in May, sir, and the bicycle in the garage that was his and that he was not allowed to ride until the spring. He thought about the number, which he knew, which everybody knew, which had been in the papers on the thirtieth of October in letters an inch high: SIXTEEN. He thought that if anybody in this room knew the answer to this question it ought to be him, since he was the answer, and it seemed to him, sitting in the H’s in the rain, a very easy question indeed.

“No, sir,” he said. “You have to be sixteen.”

---

Mr Pettigrew’s face lit.

“Sixteen,” he said. “Sixteen. Now that’s interesting, Hanover, because my notes say eighteen.” He picked up a card and held it at arm’s length. “Eighteen. Regency Act 1811, section something, majority of the sovereign, eighteen years.” He looked at Frederick over the card. “Have they changed it?”

“In October, sir.”

“Did they! In October. While I was among the geese.” Mr Pettigrew put the card down, delighted, as though Frederick had handed him a small and unexpected present. “Well, I’m very glad somebody’s keeping up. Sixteen. Not before. Excellent. That’s a confident answer, ladies and gentlemen, and a correct one, and an up-to-date one, which in my experience is the rarest thing in a history room.”

He turned to the board, uncapped the fruit, and wrote, in the large straight capitals that leaned into the wind:

A PERSON UNDER SIXTEEN CANNOT BE KING.

And then, after a moment’s thought, because he was the kind of teacher who gave credit where it was due and had done so for forty years, he added, smaller, in brackets, at the end:

(HANOVER)

He stepped back and looked at it, and capped the pen.

---

Frederick looked at it too.

It was not quite what he had said. He had said reign. The board said be King. He looked at the two of them, the word he had said and the words on the board, and they seemed to him, sitting there, very close together, like two trains on parallel tracks going the same way at the same speed, and he could not at that moment have said which was which or why it mattered.

It was near enough, he thought.

Beside him, Theo had gone very still. He had his planner open under the desk on his knee, and Frederick saw him, without moving his head, write something in it very small.

Across the room June had put her hand over her mouth. Felix was looking at his ducks. Lucía was writing the sentence down in her notes, carefully, word for word, with the brackets. And Priya, at the back, had stopped writing altogether, and was looking at the board with an expression Frederick had seen on her face only once before, on the day in geometry when Mrs Pruitt had written that a square was a kind of rhombus and then said it the wrong way round.

Priya opened her mouth.

The door opened first.

---

The inspector came in without knocking, the way inspectors do, and closed the door behind him and went straight to the chair at the back by the magnolia tin, and sat in it, and laid his clipboard flat on his knee and uncapped a fountain pen.

“Carry on,” he said. “Carry on, please. I’m not here.”

“Oh, but you are,” said Mr Pettigrew pleasantly. “Good morning.”

“Stroud. Inspectorate. Lent to the District for the week from Richmond.” The inspector looked at the board, and at the three buckets, and at the bust of Benjamin Franklin in Mr Pettigrew’s rain hat, and wrote something down after each of them. “History?”

“History. The Crown. Article Two. We have just established,” said Mr Pettigrew, with a wave of the pointer at the board, “with the help of young Hanover here, that a person under sixteen cannot be King.”

Mr Stroud read the board. He read it slowly, the way he had read the stairs. Then he nodded.

“Quite right,” he said. “Quite right. A very sound proposition, and very sensibly set out.” He wrote something on the clipboard. “In Virginia, Mr Pettigrew, when I was headmaster of the Fairfax Academy, we had a rule that nothing went on a board that a boy couldn’t defend under examination. I see you keep the same rule.”

“I keep no rules at all,” said Mr Pettigrew. “I’m seventy-eight.”

“Quite,” said Mr Stroud, and smiled the smile of a man who had decided that was a joke and would allow it. “Though if I may.” He stood, and came two steps up the room with the clipboard against his chest. “If I may, Mr Pettigrew, a small amplification, for the children. The Charter, you see, is silent on the age of the sovereign.”

“I had just said so.”

“Quite. Quite. But the reason it is silent,” said Mr Stroud, “is a very interesting one, and I’ve given a talk on it, at the Richmond Rotary, in 2009, which I can recommend.” He turned to the class. “The Realm, children, has never had a King under age, and the Charter’s drafters, who were sensible men, knew it never would, because the succession is a grown-up’s business and always has been. So the board is quite right. And you” (he looked round the room, and his eye went across the H’s like a hand across a shelf, and touched Frederick, and moved on without stopping) “are lucky to have a teacher who puts the right things on it.”

---

The bell went at twenty past nine.

Nobody moved for a moment. Then everybody moved at once, in the way a class moves when it has been holding still for a reason and the reason has stopped, and bags came up off the floor and stools scraped and Marcus’s trombone case knocked into a desk and said bonk.

“Sir,” said Devon Price, standing, with his telephone already in his hand. “Can I photograph the board? For my notes. My handwriting’s bad.”

“In my day we copied it out,” said Mr Pettigrew. “It was very good for the character and very bad for the wrist.” He waved the pointer. “Go on. Photograph away.”

Devon held up the telephone and took the board, THE CROWN, NOT A HAT, and under it, in large straight capitals leaning into the wind, A PERSON UNDER SIXTEEN CANNOT BE KING. (HANOVER), and put the telephone in his pocket and went out.

Frederick picked up his bag.

At the door he looked back. Mr Stroud was writing at the back of the room. Mr Pettigrew was gathering his index cards into a pile with both hands, the way a man gathers leaves. The rain hat sat on Benjamin Franklin. The board said what it said.

Through the glass door to the walkway, on the other side, in the rain, Castellanos was standing with his hands folded in front of him, exactly like a parent, reading it.

His face did nothing at all. He was very good at that. But he read it twice, and Frederick watched him do it, and on the second time something at the corner of Castellanos’s mouth moved, very slightly, and then was put back, the way a man puts a book back on a shelf he has been told not to touch.

Theo was waiting in the corridor with the planner open.

“Well,” said Theo. “That’s one for the record.”

He showed him the page. Under SUB KNOWS: 0 and INSPECTOR KNOWS: 0 he had added a third line, in small careful capitals:

KING KNOWS: ?