“Now, Headmaster, was that really necessary?” Sir Frederick asked.
“It has nothing at all to do with you, Sir Examiner.”
“Ah, but it does. I feel responsible. You are saying that the professor’s teaching is at fault here, but did you ever consider that the fault might lie”—he paused—“in the exam?”
“The exam?” Headmaster Hathaway echoed.
“Yes, the exam. Perhaps the professor taught the boys extraordinarily well. But none of your students has passed the exam in five years, and surely Professor—Stratford, was it?—can’t have been teaching here for more than a few years.”
“Two years,” the headmaster grumbled.
“So perhaps the exam is to blame, and that is why it’s been so long since a Midsummer boy has passed.”
Henry bit back a smile. He was certain the examiner wasn’t saying what he really meant—that the exam was designed so that horrible boys like the ones at Midsummer would not pass, that none of them was chivalrous enough to gain acceptance to Knightley.
“Perhaps so,” the headmaster begrudgingly agreed.
“Now, you’ve been headmaster here a long time, if my memory serves.” Sir Frederick paused for just a tiny moment. “I’m sure a man as secure in his position as yourself would find no harm come to him if he showed a young colleague some compassion and offered him back his job.”
“Professor Stratford has already resigned,” the headmaster said. “It’s in the past.”
“The recent past,” the examiner said.
“The past,” Headmaster Hathaway corrected firmly.
“I see,” the examiner replied, his tone implying that he didn’t see at all. “Well, there is another matter on the table. Henry here.”
“He. Is. Not. Going,” the headmaster said.
“I’m afraid that isn’t up to you, Headmaster. It’s up to Henry. Henry, do you plan to reject my offer?”
Henry looked up, hardly daring to believe it. “No, sir, I don’t.”
“Clear as rain,” Sir Frederick said. “Now, Headmaster, it appears the boy will indeed be attending Knightley. And so, if he’s going to continue working here until the fall term, I wonder if you might afford him a few hours each evening to properly continue his studies? We wouldn’t want him to fall behind.”
“But he isn’t a student!”
“You can bill Knightley Academy for his tutor. He will be needing a new one, now that our dear Professor Stratford has resigned.”
“Bill … Knightley … tutor … I …” the headmaster stuttered.
“Yes?” the examiner urged.
“You’re fired!” the headmaster shouted at Henry. “Fired! Get Out!”
“Now, that really isn’t necessary,” Sir Frederick soothed. “In fact, I think everything has gotten a bit out of hand.”
“Six years!” the headmaster moaned. “For six years now my boys have failed your ruddy exam, and a servant boy passes.”
“An ex-servant,” Henry said coldly. “Seeing as I’ve just lost my job.”
Sir Frederick stood. “And, Headmaster, you might want to return to the dining hall. I believe the boys are waiting for you to end the morning announcements.”
“What am I going to tell them?” the headmaster said with an odd little laugh, as though thinking aloud.
“What you wish,” Sir Frederick said. “Come along, Henry. I believe we’re finished here.”
AN EXPLANATION, OF SORTS
Upon the occasion of being called into the head-master’s office, and especially upon the occasion of being fired from one’s job, there is rarely a reason to rejoice. And yet, as Henry followed Sir Frederick down the narrow hallway with its flickering gas lamps and portraits of past headmasters, Henry certainly felt like rejoicing.
He was going to Knightley!
But … he was also fired, and worse, Professor Stratford was in trouble and it was all Henry’s fault. Henry might never see his tutor again, never have the chance to thank him or to apologize.
“Sir? Where are we going?” Henry finally asked.
“To my room, so we can speak in private. I believe I owe you an explanation.”
An explanation? As they walked, Henry’s mind began to churn out possibilities of what Sir Frederick wanted to explain. Maybe—maybe Henry wouldn’t be able to attend Knightley after all. That had to be it. Glumly, Henry followed Sir Frederick up the grand staircase and down the lavishly wallpapered East Corridor on the second floor. The East Wing rooms housed visiting scholars.
Sir Frederick’s room was one that Henry had never before entered. It was a grand bedroom with an elegant four-poster bed, colorful tapestry rugs, large windows overlooking the front drive, and a marble mantelpiece.
Sir Frederick motioned toward two plush chairs on either side of the fireplace and Henry felt his cheeks redden.
“Is something the matter?” Sir Frederick asked, settling into one of the chairs.
“It’s just …” Henry didn’t know how to explain that members of the serving staff didn’t usually sit down in the presence of a superior, much less across from them in comfortable, expensive chairs.
To his credit, Sir Frederick seemed to guess this. “Henry, please. You’re going to be a knight. You’ll have to stop acting like a serving boy sooner or later. Now sit.”
Henry sank into the luxurious chair, his left leg bouncing nervously.
“I’ve promised you an explanation, my boy,” Sir Frederick began, “and that will come in time. But no doubt you have questions, and we’ll tackle those first. For all that you held your tongue in the headmaster’s office, you seem an inquisitive sort. So ask away.”
Henry stared at the examiner in disbelief. Of course he had questions. Come to think of it, he was bursting with them. But Henry was used to taking orders from adults, to being told things rather than given the opportunity to find them out himself. And so Henry asked his question, the one he had been wondering ever since the dining hall had gone silent a half hour earlier.
“Sir, am I truly to attend Knightley?”
“Of course,” Sir Frederick assured him, as though it were the most natural thing in the world and not an exception that flew in the face of five hundred years’ tradition.
Sir Frederick began patting the pockets of his pin-striped vest and pulled a carved wooden pipe out of his left hip pocket and a book of matches out of his right. With the flare of a match, a bit of smoke, and a few contented puffs, the examiner leaned back in his chair, smiling at Henry.
“Anything else?”
Emboldened, Henry asked, “I don’t suppose it’s usual for you to allow anyone to take the exam—not just the students, I mean.”
Sir Frederick smiled, and his eyes glazed over as though he were not staring at Henry through the haze of his pipe smoke, as though his thoughts were very far away indeed.
“No, not usual. But not unusual either. You see, my boy, this is my first time as an examiner. I’m the medicine master at Knightley, and the new headmaster wanted to appoint his own examiner from among the willing faculty members.”
Henry frowned. He hadn’t known that Sir Frederick was one of the schoolmasters—and of medicine, no less—but Sir Frederick hadn’t answered his question at all.
“But—”
“But why, you mean?” Sir Frederick smiled wryly. “There is an explanation, you know. Quite simply, I grew up in a position similar to yours.”
“You were a servant?”
Henry doubtfully scrutinized the examiner’s well-cut suit and elaborately carved pipe, looking for traces of a kitchen boy or apprentice gardener.
“Similar, not identical,” Sir Frederick conceded. “I was the chaplain’s son at a respectable upper school, and they let me study there without fees, a sort of hanger-on student. In the evenings, I had to run school errands, and I lived with my father and not in the dormitory with the other boys. There was a famous exam at this school as well, for a prestigious scholarship to Camwell University. O
ne of my schoolmasters wrote to the proctor and asked him if there mightn’t be a loophole to allow me to sit the exam, even though I was not listed as a proper student on the school register. The proctor took pity, and I won the scholarship. Of course, this was many years ago, but I’ve always wanted to do the same for another boy.”
“So that’s why you said any resident of the school was eligible,” Henry mused.
“Precisely,” Sir Frederick agreed, puffing on his pipe only to realize that it had gone out while he spoke. With a shrug, he tucked the pipe back into a waistcoat pocket. “I thought there might be another charity boy allowed to sit in the backs of the classrooms, perhaps a sick matron’s son or a cook’s nephew.”
“You wouldn’t want Cook’s nephew, sir,” Henry said, trying not to grin at the thought of Sander becoming a knight. “I’m afraid he took sick at the pub last night.”
Sir Frederick frowned for a moment, and then his face brightened. “You mean that older boy from breakfast who looked as though he had flu? Is that what was the matter with him?” Sir Frederick chuckled, delighted.
Henry stared at Sir Frederick, understanding what the examiner had wanted to explain: his past. And his motives for letting Henry take the exam.
Henry smiled weakly. A new thought was nagging at him, whispering doubt into the dark recesses of his mind: the students at Knightley would all be important. Elite. And Henry would still be Henry, a nobody orphan. They might treat him the way the Midsummer boys had when he had shown up to take the exam.
“Sir?” Henry asked. “What do you think it will be like for me at Knightley?”
“Academically,” Sir Frederick said, “it’s a difficult place, challenging for even the most disciplined scholars. That’s not to say the lessons won’t be fascinating, or even useful. But I’m certain you’ll have no trouble keeping up and will probably earn good marks. The boys there are the best we can find from the country’s finest schools, and perhaps you’re worried whether or not they will accept you.”
The examiner paused knowingly.
“In truth,” he continued, “I don’t know the answer to your question. The boys at Knightley are not cruel, but they are privileged, and they have a sense of entitlement and loyalty to their own kind. In order to protect the common good, you must consider yourself in a position elevated from that of a common citizen, and many of these boys have considered themselves thus elevated from birth. I don’t think the other students will welcome you with open arms, but I don’t think they’ll treat you horribly either. Then again, chivalry can stretch only so far against the rigid structure of centuries-old tradition, even if this is a time of great change.”
Henry nodded. Sir Frederick’s answer had been honest.
“Everyone keeps saying that this is a time of great change, sir,” Henry mused. “But do you truly believe it?”
Sir Frederick considered this, his brows furrowed together, and just when Henry thought Sir Frederick might not answer him at all, the examiner cleared his throat and said, “Equality is contagious. What Chancellor Mors has done will undoubtedly have irreversible echoes throughout the Isles, and perhaps not the echoes we immediately suppose. But you can’t dwell on perhapses, Henry. You can only wait and see.”
Wonderful, Henry thought. Another evasive answer, another adult afraid to speak the truth about everyone’s fears, no matter how unfounded those fears might be. Wait and see. He could do that.
“Well, if equality is catching, it’s too bad there won’t be other boys with backgrounds like mine at Knightley,” Henry said finally, reflecting on how much pressure was upon him to succeed, not just for himself but for boys in positions similar to his own who might be able to take the exam in the future.
In fact, Henry was so deeply caught up in his thoughts that he failed to notice a gleam in Sir Frederick’s eye.
Five minutes later, Henry was running down the second- floor corridor when his feet slipped out from under him and he took a spectacular fall, landing facedown on a plush carpet.
“Ugh,” Henry moaned, climbing to his knees.
“Servant boy,” a voice drawled, and Henry looked up to find Valmont and Harisford leaning against the striped wallpaper, holding a length of rope between them, with nasty, satisfied smiles on their faces.
Henry stood, resisting the urge to rub his sore knees and elbows. He wouldn’t give Valmont the satisfaction.
“What do you want?” Henry grumbled.
He and Valmont were the same height, both of them tall for their age. Valmont glared, and Henry raised an eyebrow, waiting.
“Here, servant, I’ve spilled a glass of juice a ways down the corridor, so you should get the mop,” Valmont said.
“I’m not a servant,” Henry said, crossing his arms. “I don’t work here anymore. So go clean it up yourself.”
Henry shoved past Valmont and tried not to limp from his fall. After a couple of steps, Henry turned around. “I’ll send you a letter from Knightley,” he called, “to let you know what you’re missing.”
“Like you’re really going,” Valmont sneered.
“Why else would I be leaving the Knightley examiner’s room just now?”
“Unclogging the toilet?” Valmont suggested. “You certainly smell like it.”
“Well, if I do,” Henry returned, “that’s probably because I’ve just done your laundry.”
Harisford snorted, and Valmont turned red.
“That was my place you took at Knightley, servant boy,” Valmont mumbled, trying unsuccessfully to recover from Henry’s verbal blow. “You took it from me, and you don’t deserve it, and don’t you think for a moment that I’ll forget or let it drop.”
Henry didn’t dignify Valmont’s empty threat with even the tiniest of responses. Instead, he turned the corner and took the stairs up one more level to the corridor where the schoolmasters kept their lodgings.
A door with a brass plaque that read jonathan stratford, english was ajar. Henry knocked, and then, without waiting for an answer, pushed the door open.
Professor Stratford’s suitcase sat on his bed, and the professor stood over it, folding an armload of shirts and trousers.
“Hallo, Henry,” Professor Stratford said, trying to smile cheerfully although he had just lost his job. “What did I miss?”
“I’ve been fired too,” Henry said glumly, staring at his shoes.
“But what about Knightley?” the professor urged.
Henry looked up and allowed himself to smile. “I begin in August.”
Professor Stratford let out a cheer, his armload of clothing tumbling into the suitcase in a wrinkled heap. “That’s wonderful! Fantastic! Henry, you’re going to be a knight!”
“I know,” Henry said, closing the door. “But I’ve nowhere to go until the term starts, and Sir Frederick’s worried that I won’t get on with the other boys once they find out about my background.”
“That’s easily solved,” Professor Stratford said, piling an armload of books into his suitcase.
“It is?”
“Certainly. I’m leaving on this afternoon’s train bound for Hammersmith Cross Station to try and find work as a tutor. You could, er, I mean, you’re welcome to join me.”
Henry’s face broke into a huge grin. Go to the City with Professor Stratford? Perhaps the next few months would not be so dark and doubtful after all!
“Let me just call a servant boy to pack my trunk and we’ll depart directly,” Henry joked, imitating a ridiculously posh accent.
But even though he’d meant it in jest, Henry couldn’t help thinking that his new classmates would have accents just like the one he had mocked and that, at the start of next school term, he would be in a position to order around servant boys.
Everything in his life was about to change—no, not about to; it already had. And so Henry climbed the rickety old stairs to his attic room and packed his few belongings into his falling-apart suitcase without a second thought to Sir Frederick’s peculiar forecast
.
ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES
Henry stared out the window of their compartment, watching the grass-covered Cotswolds wobble past. Clutched in his fist was a rumpled ticket labeled Midsummer Station–Hammersmith Cross Station. He’d been on the train for two hours, and in just an hour more, he and Professor Stratford would reach the City.
Eight years had passed since Henry last left the town of Midsummer, and indeed, this was the only route he’d ever traveled. When Henry was six, his orphanage had taken a day trip to visit some museums and monuments in the City, and Henry, fascinated by a famous painting he’d once seen in a book, had been left behind.
A gentleman had mistaken Henry (with his threadbare coat and worn-thin shoes) for a beggar and given him a penny “so he mightn’t go hungry.” Embarrassed, lost, and afraid, Henry had sat down on the curb outside the museum and cried.
When Henry had looked up, a police knight stood over him, wearing a coat with buttons made of brass, a gleaming peacekeeper’s sword at his side. The knight had bought Henry a hot cider to warm him up and helped him find the orphanage matron.
And now, eight years later, Henry was heading back toward the same city, no longer just a grubby orphan boy who lagged behind in the museum and got mistaken for a beggar but a soon-to-be student at Knightley. Perhaps one day he would be the kind face that comforted a lost boy, the honest police knight who settled a dispute between customer and shopkeeper, or the trusted guard of a member of the royal family. Perhaps even King Victor himself.
Next to Henry in the cramped train compartment, Professor Stratford dozed, chin tucked against his chest, a thick and scholarly book pages-down across his lap.
Henry turned his gaze back toward the passing landscape, watching the fields become smaller and the houses clump together as though they were afraid of open spaces. He watched the roads become more trafficked and the churches grow grander, with spires that seemed to stand on tiptoe, reaching toward the heavens like children stretching for the top shelf.
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