Seventh Period

“Back again!” said Mr Pettigrew, as they came in. “Back for more! Sit, sit. Wherever you were. The alphabet’s as good a seating plan as any, as my old colleague Abernathy will tell you, at length, if you let him.”

He was standing behind Mr Ferrante’s desk with his hands on the edge of it, as he had stood at half past eight, and he looked, if anything, more pleased with the world than he had then. He had had his sardines. He had had his cards. He had had, Frederick thought, the best day he had had in a long time, among the buckets and the fruit-pens and the nice quiet class, and he did not know any of it.

They sat in the alphabet.

Frederick sat in the H’s, under the board. He did not look up at it. He did not need to. He could feel it above and behind him the way you can feel a window open in a room.

“Now,” said Mr Pettigrew, picking up a card. “This morning we did the Crown, and the Regency Act, and established, with young Hanover’s help, the matter of the minority. This afternoon, I thought, we’d take it further. We’d take it back. I’ve a card here somewhere on the minority of Henry the Sixth, who became King of England at nine months old, which you’ll find is a great deal younger than sixteen, and is the best story in my box.” He held the card up to the light. “Where was I.”

Frederick put his hand up.

---

He had not put his hand up all day.

He realised it as he did it. He had not put it up in history at half past eight or in geometry or chemistry or Spanish, and in gym there was nothing to put it up for, and in art Ms Varga did not believe in hands. He had sat in the H’s all day with his hands on the desk, being asked things, and being wrong, and being inattentive, five times, in a strict upright hand. And now it was up, in the air, in room fourteen, at seven minutes to three, and he could feel the whole class see it and go still, the H’s and the P’s and the C’s, the way a class goes still when somebody does a thing nobody expected, which had not happened to him very often and had happened to him all day.

Mr Pettigrew looked up from the card.

“Hanover,” he said, with pleasure. “A hand. Excellent. Yes?”

“Sir,” said Frederick. “The board’s wrong.”

---

Mr Pettigrew lowered the card.

He did not look at the board. He looked at Frederick, with his head a little on one side, the way a man looks at a bird that has just done something he has read about and never seen.

“Is it,” he said.

“Yes, sir. I was wrong this morning. I answered the question wrong. And it’s got my name on it, and it shouldn’t be up there.”

“Were you wrong,” said Mr Pettigrew. It was not a question. It was the way a man says something when he is turning it over to look at the underneath. “At half past eight you were right, Hanover. Confidently, correctly and up to date. I said so. I wrote it down. And now, at” (he looked at the clock) “six minutes to three, you’re telling me you were wrong.”

“Yes, sir.”

“On whose authority?”

The room was very quiet.

“Sir?”

“On whose authority,” said Mr Pettigrew, quite gently, “were you right at half past eight, and on whose authority are you wrong now? It can’t be the same one. Something’s changed, Hanover. Either the law has changed since breakfast, which I doubt, even in October, or you have. Which?”

Frederick thought about it.

“Me, sir.”

“Then show me,” said Mr Pettigrew, and sat down behind the desk, and folded his long hands on top of the box of cards, and waited, kettle-patient. “From the beginning. As if I’d been among the geese.”

---

He stood up.

He had not meant to stand up. It was what you did, in Mr Pettigrew’s room; you could feel it was what you did. He stood up in the H’s, beside Theo, who had his planner open on his knee under the desk and was not writing in it, for once, but holding the pen still, over the page.

“There are terms, sir,” said Frederick. “The governments of all the realms agreed them. On the thirtieth of October. About the King. About the new one. And they were given effect here by an Act, on the thirty-first.” He stopped. He had to get this right. He could hear Mrs Pruitt: you have to prove it from what you’re given. “The terms say that the age at which a sovereign reigns in his own right is sixteen.”

“Go on.”

“In his own right, sir. That’s the bit. Those four words.” He did not look at Priya. He could feel her not looking at him. “I left them out this morning. I said you can’t reign till sixteen. But that’s not what the terms say. They say you can’t reign in your own right till sixteen. You can still reign. A sovereign under sixteen still reigns. He’s still King. He just doesn’t do it himself. Somebody does it for him, in his name. A Regent.”

“And how do you know he still reigns?” said Mr Pettigrew. “If he doesn’t do anything?”

“Because the Regent swears to act in his name, sir. In the name and on behalf of. That’s the oath. You can’t act in somebody’s name if he isn’t there yet. You can’t do a thing on somebody’s behalf if he hasn’t got a behalf.” He stopped. That was not quite how he had meant to say it. “And because the proclamation says now. Not in May. Do now proclaim. And because…” He stopped again.

“Because?”

Because Dr Brooks said is on the loudspeaker for fire drills and snow. Because the Private Secretary says sir. Because the Prime Minister said you reign, square to the edge of the table. Because Señora Ruiz says you can’t estar King. Because Mr Kaminski picks the sides on Tuesdays and the captains are still captains.

“Because it’s the only way any of the rest of it makes sense, sir,” said Frederick.

---

Mr Pettigrew looked at him for a long time.

“So,” he said slowly. “A person under sixteen can be King.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And reign.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But not in his own right.”

“No, sir. Not till he’s sixteen.”

“So this morning,” said Mr Pettigrew, “I asked you whether a person under sixteen may reign. And you told me he may not reign in his own right, without saying the last four words. And I, being seventy-eight, and pleased with you, and not having read a newspaper since the autumn, wrote down that he may not be King at all.” He turned in his chair, at last, and looked up at the board, at his own large capitals leaning into the wind. “Which neither of us said, and which is entirely wrong, and which has been on that board, in letters a foot high, with your name after it, since twenty past nine.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr Pettigrew looked at the board for a while.

“Three mistakes,” he said, “in one sentence. That’s very nearly a record. The record is four, and it was set by a member of the House of Lords in 1791, on the subject of the fisheries.” He turned back. “And how, Hanover, do you come to know all this at six minutes to three, when at half past eight you knew the opposite? Did you do the reading at lunch?”

“No, sir. Somebody showed me. In art.”

“In art.” Mr Pettigrew’s eyebrows went up into his white hair. “Well. They taught the law on the walls of churches for a thousand years, in pictures, for people who couldn’t read. I don’t see why Ms Varga shouldn’t.” He stood up, and picked up the marker from the tray, and looked at it. “Then let’s put it right. It’s your name on it. You do it.”

He held out the marker across the desk.

---

The door opened.

Mr Stroud came in, without knocking, the way he always came in, and closed the door, and went to the chair by the magnolia tin, which was fuller now and had a new drip going into it, and sat in it, and laid the clipboard on his knee, and uncapped his pen.

“Carry on,” he said. “I’m not here.”

Then he looked up, and saw the marker held out across the desk, and the boy in the H’s standing up with his hand half out to take it, and the board.

“Mr Pettigrew,” said Mr Stroud. “What is happening to that board?”

“It’s being corrected.”

“Corrected?”

“Young Hanover,” said Mr Pettigrew, “was wrong this morning. And so was I. He’s come to tell me so, with an authority, which is the first time a boy has come to tell me I was wrong with an authority since 1996, and that boy is now a judge. We’re putting it right.”

Mr Stroud put down his pen.

“A board, Mr Pettigrew,” he said, “is not to be altered during an inspection. The proposition on it was examined this morning, in my presence, and found sound. I have it written down.” He touched the clipboard. “History. Board. A person under sixteen cannot be King. Sound.”

“Then you’ll have to write something else down,” said Mr Pettigrew. “Won’t you.”

---

“If I may,” said Mr Stroud, and stood up.

He came two steps up the room with the clipboard against his chest, the way he had at half past nine, and Frederick, standing in the H’s with the marker not quite in his hand, watched him come and thought, very clearly, here it comes.

“The difficulty,” said Mr Stroud, to the class, in the voice of the Richmond Rotary, “with the young man’s argument, which is ingenious, and does him credit, is that a King who does not reign in his own right does not, in any meaningful sense, reign. He is a King in name. A figurehead. A placeholder. The real power, you see, children, lies with whoever exercises it, and in this case that is the Regent. So the board, while perhaps loosely expressed, is substantially correct, and I gave a talk on precisely this point at the Richmond Rotary in 2009, which…”

“Sir,” said Frederick.

Mr Stroud stopped.

He had not been interrupted, Frederick thought, very often. The hand went along the shelf and stopped, on the boy in the H’s, standing, with the marker.

“Hanover,” said Mr Stroud. “The boy with the sixteen.”

“Yes, sir. Sir, if the King’s only a placeholder, then who is the Regent acting for? She swears to act in his name. If he doesn’t really reign, she’s acting in the name of nobody. And you can’t be a Regent for nobody. Then she’d just be…” He thought about it. “In charge. And she isn’t. She’d tell you herself. She’s very clear about it.”

There was a pause.

“Who would tell me herself?” said Mr Stroud.

Frederick heard Theo, beside him, breathe in through his nose and hold it.

“The Regent, sir,” said Frederick. “Any Regent. It’s in the oath.”

---

“Young man,” said Mr Stroud, after a moment, “I have been an inspector of schools for thirty years. Before that I was the headmaster of a boys’ academy in Virginia for eleven. I think I may be allowed to know what a Regent is.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I have given a talk on it.”

“Yes, sir. At the Richmond Rotary.”

“In 2009.”

“Sir,” said Frederick, and stopped, and then said it, because Mr Pettigrew was holding the marker across the desk and waiting, and because Lord Whitlock had said thank you for telling me the truth, and because it was nearly three o’clock and he was tired of being wrong in a strict upright hand, “it’s on the radio, sir. All afternoon. The Prime Minister’s office put out a statement at a quarter to three. About exactly this. It says the King is King.”

Mr Stroud looked at him.

“I do not,” said Mr Stroud, with great dignity, “listen to the radio in working hours. It is a matter of principle. A man who listens to the radio while inspecting a school is not inspecting the school, he is listening to the radio.” He looked round the room as if daring it. “I have not listened to the radio in working hours since 1998. And I will not be told what the Prime Minister has said by a boy who, I may say, has been inattentive in five lessons out of six today and has the board in his own lesson wrong by his own account.”

“Yes, sir,” said Frederick. “That’s why I’m correcting it.”

---

Mr Pettigrew had not moved. He was still holding out the marker. He had been holding it out for nearly two minutes, across the desk, at the end of his long arm, perfectly still, like a man holding out a lamp for somebody to see by.

“Mr Stroud,” he said pleasantly.

“Mr Pettigrew.”

“Whose board is it?”

Mr Stroud turned. “I beg your pardon?”

“The board,” said Mr Pettigrew. “That one. Behind me. With my handwriting on it, and the boy’s name. Whose is it?”

“It is the school’s board, Mr Pettigrew. And the school is under inspection.”

“It is the school’s board,” Mr Pettigrew agreed. “And I am the school, for today, in this room, at eight hours’ notice, from the Dakotas. And I have been teaching history on boards in this school since 1971, and in forty years, Mr Stroud, I have never once left a thing on a board that a boy could prove was wrong. I’m not going to start now because there’s a man in the room with a clipboard. I left a thing on it for an inspector once, in 1977, out of spite, and it was the word perfidious, and it was right.” He held the marker a little further out. “Hanover. Your name. Your board. Go on.”

Frederick took the marker.

---

He went to the board.

It was strange to be at the front of room fourteen, facing the whiteboard, with the class behind him. He could feel them all. Theo with his planner open and the pen held still. June with her hand over her mouth again, but differently. Felix and his ducks. Priya, at the back, not looking at him, looking at the rain, very straight. Devon with his telephone face down on his desk for once and both hands flat on top of it. Lucía. Marcus, with his trombone case between his feet, entirely sure.

He uncapped the marker. It smelled of fruit.

He looked at the sentence. A PERSON UNDER SIXTEEN CANNOT BE KING. Mr Pettigrew’s large straight capitals, leaning into the wind.

He rubbed out CANNOT.

He did it with the side of his hand, the way Mrs Pruitt rubbed out a dot on a circle and drew it somewhere else, and the word smeared and went, and left a ghost of itself on the white, the way words always do on those boards. In the gap he wrote CAN. His capitals were smaller than Mr Pettigrew’s and did not lean at all.

Then, after KING, where the full stop was, he rubbed the full stop out, and put a comma, and went on, along the board, in the same small upright capitals:

AND REIGN. HE CANNOT REIGN IN HIS OWN RIGHT UNTIL SIXTEEN.

He looked at it. It was right. He could prove it from what he was given.

He looked at the brackets at the end. (HANOVER).

He thought about it for a moment. Then he did not rub it out. He wrote, inside the brackets, after his name, very small:

(HANOVER, CORRECTED)

And capped the pen, and put it in the tray, and turned round.

---

Nobody said anything.

At the back of the room, by the magnolia tin, Mr Stroud had sat down again. He was writing. He wrote for some time. He did not look up. When he had finished he looked at what he had written, and crossed something out, carefully, with a single straight line, and wrote something next to it, and Frederick, who could not see it from the front, knew exactly what it said, because he knew the hand by now as well as he knew Mr Abernathy’s voice.

History. Board altered during inspection. Proposition: corrected by boy in the H’s (sixteen). Previously recorded as sound.

And then, after a pause, and with what Frederick would have sworn, if he had been asked, was a very small sigh:

Revised.

Mr Pettigrew stood up behind Mr Ferrante’s desk and looked at the board for a long time, at his own capitals and the boy’s, the ghost of CANNOT and the small CAN in its place, and the brackets.

“Sit down, Hanover,” he said at last. “That’s the best thing that’s happened in a history room in this school since 1991.” He picked up a card. “And in 1991 two chairs were lost.”