Hanover, Here

The newspapers on Monday were still Los Angeles, all of them, as they had been every morning since Friday: the same photograph on three front pages, of the Japanese team with their dogs in the rubble of an apartment building in San Bernardino, and under it, in each paper, a different sentence saying that nobody would yet say how many. The Commons was to vote the money that evening. His mother read every paper to the end and said nothing about any of them.

Dame M came to breakfast with a sheet of paper.

It was not on a tray. It was in her hand, a single sheet, folded once lengthways, the way order papers came, and she stood at the end of the long table with it, between his mother and the toast, and waited until he had finished his mouthful.

“The order of the wreaths, sir,” she said. “For Saturday. From the Legion. They have sent it a little earlier than they usually do, because they have a question, and they would like the answer before the programme is printed on Wednesday.” She paused. “They would like the answer from you.”

He put his spoon down.

His mother, at the end of the table, did not look up from her coffee. She had read it already. He could tell from the way she was not looking at it.

Dame M unfolded the sheet and laid it on the table in front of him, square to the edge.

It was the Legion’s list, on the Legion’s paper, the same list he had seen every November since he was twelve. The Crown’s wreath. The Prime Minister. The Leader of the Opposition. The services. The schools’ wreath. The polities, all forty-nine of them, and the District, and Loreto. The High Commissioners of the sister realms. And last, The wreath of a bereaved family, which this year was a family from Ohio whose son had died in the Pacific in 1944 and whose grandson had found his letters in an attic in the spring.

Beside two of the lines there was a small pencilled question mark.

The first was beside The Crown’s wreath.

“Every year, sir,” said Dame M, “the Crown’s wreath is laid by the Governor-General, as the resident Crown, except in the years when a King has been present to lay it himself. There have been three such years. 1921, 1958 and 2021.” She paused. “The Governor-General has written to the Household this morning. She has asked me to tell you that it would be her very great honour to stand aside this year, if the King wishes to lay it, and her very great honour to lay it if he does not, and that she would like him to decide and not to be told.”

He looked at the question mark.

He had laid the schools’ wreath at the Tomb every year since he was twelve, three times, after the services and before the polities, carrying it the last twenty paces from the chain alone, with the Watch at the end of the mat and a few thousand people on the grass not making a sound. And once, in 2021, he had watched his father lay the Crown’s.

He had been eight. He had stood on the grass beside his mother in a coat that was too big for him and watched his father walk the twenty paces alone, slowly, in the rain, with the wreath held out in front of him in both hands, and lay it at the foot of the stone, and step back one pace, and stand, and then turn and walk back to the chain, and he had thought, at eight, that it was the longest walk anybody had ever taken.

“I’ll lay it,” said Frederick.

Dame M did not say anything. She inclined her head, the inch.

“Is that all right?” He looked at his mother. “Is that mine to say? Or is it yours?”

His mother put her coffee down.

“It’s yours,” she said, in Swedish. “It isn’t a thing that’s done in your name. It’s a thing that’s done by you. A wreath isn’t a law. Nobody advises you about a wreath.” She looked at him over her cup. “I asked. On Thursday. I asked the Clerk of the Council, because I thought you would ask me, and I wanted to give you the right answer. He said it was the first question about the Crown anybody had asked him in thirty years that he could answer without looking anything up.”

“Then I’ll lay it.”

“Then you’ll lay it,” said his mother. “The fourth. And the first who lives here.” She picked up her cup again. “He’d like that. Your father. Ask him.”

---

The second question mark was beside The schools’ wreath.

He looked at it for a long time.

“And that one, sir,” said Dame M.

“It was mine.”

“It was yours, sir. Since 2025. It was arranged for a schoolboy.” She stood very straight at the end of the table. “You are still a schoolboy, sir. You go to Ellicott. Nobody disputes that. But the King cannot lay two wreaths at the Tomb on the same morning, one for the Crown and one for the children, because then the children’s would be the Crown’s as well, and the whole point of the arrangement in 2025 was that it should not be.” She paused. “The Legion asks who will carry the schools’ wreath now.”

He looked up at her.

“Who?”

“That is the question, sir,” said Dame M. “The Legion does not know. The Household does not know. Dr Brooks has been asked, and has said that it is not for her to say, because it was never her wreath to give.” She looked at him. “It was hoped, sir, that you might say.”

He did not have to think about it at all. He had known since the word schoolboy. He had known, he thought, since the mud on Saturday and nobody’s looked at me once, and since the stairs at the flat.

“Theo,” he said.

Dame M did not move.

“Theo Hartigan,” said Frederick. “He goes to a school in the Realm. He’s a schoolboy. He was nobody’s job for three years. He’s the one person in this whole thing who was never asked anything until they’d done it to him already.” He looked at the list. “He should carry it. If he wants to. He has to be asked. Properly. He has to be able to say no.”

His mother had put her cup down again. She was looking at him across the long table with an expression he had seen on her face only twice before, and both times, he thought, in this kitchen.

“He’ll be your Page,” said Dame M, slowly. “On the day. He’ll attend you to the chain.”

“And then he’ll step back,” said Frederick. “And I’ll lay mine. And then later, after the governments, after the Navy and the Air Force, he’ll walk up to the chain on his own, from wherever he’s standing, and carry theirs. The children’s. On his own. Twenty paces.” He looked at Dame M. “Can he do both?”

Dame M considered this for some time, as though she were working out the course of a ship through a difficult channel.

“I don’t see why not, sir,” she said. “There is nothing in the Legion’s order that says a Page may not lay a wreath. There is nothing in anything that says it. Nobody ever imagined it.” She folded the list along its crease. “I will ask him this evening, sir. At the fitting. If you would like to be there.”

“Yes,” said Frederick. “I’d like to be there.”

---

Mr Abernathy called the roll.

“Hanover.”

“Here.”

It was the same as on every school day since he was twelve, and he had stopped, he noticed, waiting for it. It came, and he said here, and it went past him to Hartigan, and that was all.

---

Mr Ferrante gave the essays back in third period.

He did it the way he did everything, pacing between the desks with the pile in one hand and the red pen in the other, dropping them face down on people’s desks as he passed, without stopping, and saying nothing, so that you had to turn your own over to find out. Frederick’s came down on his desk face down. Theo’s came down on Theo’s.

He turned it over.

It was his two sides on What is a proclamation for. He had written most of it at the hospital on the Monday, on his knee, with the reader open at page ninety-two, at the box, and finished it on the Wednesday night after supper at the flat, after he had become King and before he had written to Alexander, and he had not looked at it since. He did not remember what it said. He looked at the top of the first page.

A minus.

And under it, in the red pen, in Mr Ferrante’s large blocky capitals, one line:

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A THING BEING TRUE AND A THING BEING KNOWN IS THE WHOLE OF THIS SUBJECT. YOU FOUND IT ON YOUR OWN. KEEP IT.

That was all, except a single wavy red line down the side of a paragraph about the Governor-General of 1840 that went on too long, and he knew exactly what the wavy line meant, and that the A minus was not more than he had earned.

He looked at the line in capitals for a while.

Beside him, Theo turned his own essay over and looked at the top of it and made a small sound.

“What did you get?” said Frederick.

Theo held it out. C plus. And under it, in red capitals:

HALF. THE GOOD HALF.

“He remembered,” said Theo, in a voice of deep wonder. “He remembered from last Monday. He’s put it on the paper.” He looked at it. “I’m going to frame it. I’m going to put it next to the boy from Milwaukee who supports Chicago.”

“You can’t frame a C plus.”

“Watch me,” said Theo.

---

At four he went to the hospital, and did the chemistry, and at a quarter to five read his father Tuesday’s trains in the dark, and the long train from the north came in under the window with all its windows lit, and the Senator would be twelve minutes late tomorrow, because of the bridge at Havre de Grace, and he told his father so.

Then he shut the timetable.

“Papa. I’ve got to tell you something. About Saturday.”

His father’s eyes opened.

“The Eleventh,” said Frederick. “At the Tomb. The Legion asked who’d lay the Crown’s wreath. The Governor-General said she’d stand aside if I wanted. And I said yes.” He swallowed. “I’m going to lay it. Like you did. In 2021. In the rain.”

His father looked at him.

It was a long look, but not the longest. His father’s mouth moved, once, without anything, and then again, and Frederick waited and did not help, and the word came, low and rough and quite clear, and it was not a word at all, it was a number.

“Twenty,” said his father.

Frederick sat very still on the end of the bed.

“Twenty,” he said. “Twenty paces. From the chain. On your own.” He found that his voice had done the thing in the middle again. “I know. I’ve done it three times. With the schools’ one. But that was different. That was after the services.” He looked at his father. “This one’s first.”

His father’s eyes stayed on him.

Then his father’s right hand moved on the blanket. It came up off it, slowly, an inch, two inches, and held itself out, flat, palm down, at about the height of a man’s chest, the fingers together, in the air, very slightly unsteady, and stayed there, and Frederick looked at it and did not understand, and then did.

It was the height. It was how you held a wreath. Out in front of you, in both hands, not against your chest, not up, at the height where the Watch would see it come and the stone would see it come, and where it would not swing as you walked. His father was showing him the height.

“Like that,” said Frederick.

His father’s hand came down onto the blanket again. His eyes closed. The corner of his mouth on the right side went up, very slightly, a quarter of an inch.

“Like that,” said Frederick again, to himself, and held his own hand out in the air in front of him at the same height, flat, unsteady, and looked at it, and put it down.

---

The fitting was in the Blue Drawing Room at half past five, because it had the longest mirror in the house and nobody was using it.

Theo was there when Frederick came in. He was standing in the middle of the Blue Drawing Room on the carpet in his school trousers and his socks, with his shoes in his hand, looking at the room as though it might bite him. It was a very blue room. It had blue walls and blue curtains and blue chairs with gold legs and a great many flags in a row along one wall, furled, in brass stands, all fourteen of them and Sweden, and a portrait over the fireplace of Ernest the First in a red coat with a sword, looking down at Theo with an expression of tremendous disapproval.

“Freddie,” said Theo. “Thank God. Who is that.”

“Ernest the First.”

“He hates me.”

“He hated everybody,” said Frederick. “It’s in the history book.”

The tailor was a small grey neat man called Mr Szabo, who had been making the Household’s clothes for twenty-two years and had a tape measure round his neck and pins in his lapel in a row like a medal ribbon, and he came forward and bowed to Frederick, a very small bow, from the neck, and said, “Your Majesty,” and then, without any change in his voice, “Mr Hartigan, if you would stand on the little stool, please, in front of the glass,” and Theo stood on the little stool.

Mr Szabo measured him, fast and silently, writing the numbers in a small black book, and Theo stood on the stool with his arms out like a scarecrow and looked at himself in the long mirror and then, quickly, away, at the ceiling.

“Mr Szabo,” said Theo, to the ceiling.

“Sir.”

“Don’t call me sir. Please. Theo.”

Mr Szabo paused with the tape at Theo’s inside leg.

“Mr Hartigan,” he said, after a moment, with great dignity, which Theo seemed to decide he could live with.

“Mr Szabo,” said Theo. “Is there a hat?”

Mr Szabo looked up at him from the inside leg.

“A hat, Mr Hartigan?”

“I looked it up,” said Theo. “Pages. There’s a picture. From 1911. In London. He’s got a hat with a feather in it. A big one. A white one.” He looked at the ceiling very hard. “I said to Freddie if they give me a hat with a feather I’m resigning. I meant it. I’d like you to know that before you measure my head.”

There was a pause in the Blue Drawing Room.

Mr Szabo put the tape down and stood up, and looked at Theo, and then at Dame M, who had come in behind Frederick and was standing just inside the door with a sheet of paper under one arm.

“Mr Hartigan,” said Mr Szabo, “this Household has never had a Page. There is no uniform. There has never been one. I was asked on Wednesday to make one, and I was told only that it must be plain, that it must be warm, that it must be something a young man could stand in for an hour in November without disgracing himself, and that it must not, under any circumstances, include a hat.” He paused. “That last was underlined. Twice. I was not told by whom.”

Theo looked down from the ceiling at Frederick.

“Freddie.”

“It wasn’t me,” said Frederick. “I didn’t know there’d be a fitting until Thursday.”

They both looked at Dame M.

Dame M looked at the portrait of Ernest the First.

“There will be no hat, Mr Hartigan,” she said, to the portrait. “There will be a dark blue coat, cut short, with the Realm’s buttons, and dark trousers, and black shoes that you are to wear for the whole of this week, at home, so that by Saturday they are your shoes and not somebody else’s, because a man who stands for an hour in new shoes will be thinking about his feet and not about the Tomb.” She paused. “I was told that by your mother. On the telephone. On Thursday. She also said to tell you not to lock your knees.”

“She always says that,” said Theo.

“She is a nurse,” said Dame M, “and she is right.”

---

Mr Szabo brought the coat. It was not finished; it was tacked together with long white stitches, and one sleeve was longer than the other, and it had no buttons yet. Theo put it on over his school shirt, standing on the stool, and Mr Szabo walked round him slowly with pins in his mouth, pinning and tugging, and Theo stood very still in front of the long mirror in the Blue Drawing Room and looked at himself in a dark blue coat, short, plain, with no hat, and did not say anything for a long time.

“I look like a waiter,” he said, eventually.

“You look like a Page,” said Frederick.

“Same thing,” said Theo. “In a hotel.” He turned a little, on the stool, to see the back. “It’s warm, though. It’s really warm.” He looked at the sleeve, the long one. “Is that one going to stay like that?”

“No, Mr Hartigan,” said Mr Szabo, through the pins.

“Shame,” said Theo. “I liked it. I could have kept things up it.”

Dame M stepped forward from the door.

She did not come all the way across the room. She came to the edge of the carpet, by the furled flags, and stood there with the sheet of paper from under her arm in her hand, folded once lengthways, and Theo saw it in the mirror and went still on the stool, the way the whole of Mrs Pruitt’s room had gone still when the loudspeaker clicked.

“Mr Hartigan,” said Dame M. “I have a question to put to you. On behalf of the Legion, and the Household, and the King. You may say no. Your mother has been told that I am going to ask it, and she has said that it is yours to answer, as she always does.”

Theo looked at Frederick in the mirror. Frederick looked back and did not say anything.

“On Saturday,” said Dame M, “the King will lay the Crown’s wreath at the Tomb, first, before the governments. It is the fourth time in a hundred and seven years that a King has done so. You will attend him to the chain as his Page, and step back, as you have been told.” She unfolded the paper. “After the services, there is a wreath that has been laid since 2025 by a schoolboy, on behalf of the schoolchildren of the Realm, so that the children come ahead of the governments. The King laid it three times. He cannot lay it this year, because he is laying the Crown’s.” She looked at Theo directly. “The Legion asks who will carry it. The King was asked, this morning, at breakfast, and he said your name. He said it at once. He said that you should be asked properly, and be able to say no.” She held the paper a little higher. “So I am asking you properly. Will you carry the schools’ wreath at the Tomb on the Eleventh, Mr Hartigan, the last twenty paces from the chain, alone?”

There was a long silence in the Blue Drawing Room.

Theo stood on the stool in the tacked-together coat and looked at Dame M, and then at himself in the mirror, and then at the portrait of Ernest the First, as though Ernest the First might have an opinion, which he clearly did.

“On my own,” said Theo.

“On your own.”

“In front of everybody.”

“In front of a few thousand people on the grass, Mr Hartigan, and the cameras, which are not allowed at the chain but are allowed everywhere else, and the King, and your mother, who will be in the second row of the invited seats, on the left, where she can see you.”

Theo looked at his feet, in his socks, on the stool.

“I’m from Milwaukee,” he said.

“You go to a school in the Realm,” said Dame M. “You have done since you were twelve. You are a schoolboy. The wreath is for schoolchildren. I have read the Legion’s arrangement of 2025 three times this morning, Mr Hartigan, and it does not say anything about where the schoolboy is from.”

Theo did not say anything for a while.

Then he looked at Frederick in the mirror, properly, for the first time since Dame M had started speaking.

“You did this,” he said.

“Yes,” said Frederick.

“Without asking me.”

“I’m asking you now,” said Frederick. “Dame M’s asking you. You can say no. I said you had to be able to say no.” He stood by the door with his hands in his pockets, where nobody could see them. “You were nobody’s job for three years. Nobody asked you anything until it had already happened to you. I wanted you to be asked. First. Before. With a piece of paper.” He swallowed. “That’s all.”

Theo looked at him for a long moment in the mirror.

Then he looked down at the long sleeve of the tacked-together coat, and pulled at it, and let it go.

“Okay,” said Theo.

Dame M did not move.

“Okay,” said Theo again, to Dame M, more clearly. “Yes. I’ll carry it.” He swallowed. “On one condition.”

Frederick closed his eyes.

“What condition, Mr Hartigan?” said Dame M, without a flicker.

“That nobody gives me a feather,” said Theo. “On the wreath. If it’s got feathers on it, I’m not carrying it.”

Dame M looked at him for a moment. Then she took a pencil out of the pocket of her grey jacket, and unfolded the Legion’s list against the back of a blue chair with gold legs, and wrote something beside the second question mark, in small square capitals, and showed it to him.

T. HARTIGAN. CONDITION: NO FEATHERS.

“It will go to the Legion tonight,” she said. “Underlined.”

“Twice,” said Theo.

“Twice,” said Dame M, and underlined it twice, and folded the paper, and inclined her head to Theo, the inch, exactly as she inclined it to Frederick, and went out of the Blue Drawing Room, past the furled flags and under Ernest the First, and shut the door.

Theo stood on the stool and looked at the door.

“Freddie,” he said.

“What?”

“She did the nod,” said Theo. “At me. The thing she does at you. The inch.” He looked at himself in the mirror in the tacked-together coat, and his face did something complicated, and he looked away from it quickly, up at the ceiling. “Nobody’s ever done the nod at me.”

“Mr Hartigan,” said Mr Szabo, with pins in his mouth, “if you would stand still, please. The sleeve.”

Theo stood still. He looked at the ceiling of the Blue Drawing Room, at the plaster and the gilding and the chandelier, very hard, for a long time, while Mr Szabo pinned the sleeve, the way Castellanos looked at ceilings, and Frederick stood by the door with his hands in his pockets and looked at the portrait of Ernest the First, who disapproved of everything, and thought that he had never in his life seen anybody look so pleased about not having a hat.