The Investiture

The ballroom on the east front had been used for a ball twice since 1795. It was used for this.

Long and white and gold, with tall windows down one side over the Axis and mirrors down the other, so that the room seemed twice as long and full of people twice over. At the far end, a low dais with no throne on it, only a place to stand, and beside it a table with a dark red cloth, and on the cloth, in rows, in open cases, the decorations.

Sixty-three of them. He had counted them in the box in December. He did not count them now.

Rows of gilt chairs down the length of the room for the recipients and their guests, two guests each. A string quartet in a corner playing very quietly. Along the wall by the windows, near the dais, a short row of chairs for the Household: Dame M, the Private Secretary, the equerry, and at the end, in the dark blue coat with the scarlet facings, Theo, who as a Page of Honour had a seat at any of the King’s occasions whether it was one of his three duties or not, and had been told so by Dame M in February in a sentence he had asked her to repeat. And the Lord Chamberlain of the Household, an old man with a white moustache and a voice that could fill a ballroom without trying, at a lectern beside the dais, with the list.

---

At eleven the doors closed and he came in and stood on the dais.

The room stood. He had asked it not to, in the note Dame M sent with the invitations; he had asked for that once in a gym at Ellicott and it had worked. It did not work here. They stood anyway, three hundred people, and he saw that they were not standing for him. They were standing because it was the day, and because they had been told in a letter that they were to be given something by the King, and they wanted the King to see that they had stood.

“Please sit,” he said, and they sat.

The Lord Chamberlain looked at his list.

“The George Cross.”

---

Brannigan came up the room from the second row on the left, in a dark suit that fitted across the shoulders for once, because the Household had found him one, and stopped at the foot of the dais, and bowed his head, and stood.

His hands were folded at his waist. The right over the left. Lightly. The way you would hold a hat if you had one.

At the side of the room, by the windows, in the black wheelchair, with Niamh behind him, the Duke of Cumberland watched him do it, and his mouth moved at one corner.

The Lord Chamberlain read the citation. All of it. The bluff stairs, the beach, the sea withdrawing, the old man, the teacher, the stair rail, the sea at the teacher’s mouth. The room was very still while he read it. Halfway through, somebody in the third row on the left, a small grey-haired woman in a good coat, put her hand over her mouth.

Brannigan came up the one step.

The Cross was silver, plain, on a ribbon of dark blue. Frederick took it from the case on the red cloth. He had practised with Dame M in the library with a coat on a stand. He reached up, because Brannigan was a great deal taller than a coat on a stand, and pinned it to the left breast of the dark suit, over the heart.

“Sergeant,” said Frederick.

“Sir.”

“Thank you.”

Brannigan looked at him. His face did the thing it had done at the top of the bluff, looking at the tree.

“You sent me, sir,” said Brannigan, very low.

“I know. You went.”

Brannigan stood for a moment longer with his hands folded at his waist and the silver on his chest. Then he bowed his head, and stepped back off the dais, and turned, and went back down the room to the second row, and sat down beside the small grey-haired woman in the good coat, who took his enormous hand in both of hers and held it and did not let go for the rest of the morning.

---

The George Medal.

“Mr Daniel Ferrante.”

Mr Ferrante came up the room without a stick and with the small hitch on the left that you would only see if you knew, in the jacket with the leather patches on the elbows, which he had evidently decided was correct dress for an investiture, and which nobody had told him was not. He bowed his head. The Lord Chamberlain read about the sand and the old man and the stair rail. Frederick pinned the medal, silver, on a red ribbon with blue stripes, next to a leather patch.

“Mr Ferrante.”

“Sir.”

“Who heard it?”

Mr Ferrante looked at him for a moment. Then he smiled.

“The question for this one, sir,” he said, “is who saw it. And the answer is the people at the top of the bluff, and the people in this room, and nobody else.” He touched the medal, once. “Which is the right number.”

---

“Mr Dale Kessler.”

A tall man came up from the fourth row on the right. Sixty or so, thin, brown, in a suit that had been bought for a funeral, with his grey hair in a ponytail tied with a black ribbon for the occasion, and on his belt, under the jacket, Frederick saw, a ring of keys.

He bowed his head. He did not know how. He bobbed it, like a man ducking under a low door.

The Lord Chamberlain read about the wheel, and the sea withdrawing, and the cars brought down one at a time by hand to the platform, and the box.

Frederick pinned the medal.

“Mr Kessler.”

“Sir.” The voice was rough, a smoker’s, from the coast. “I’m sorry I didn’t come forward. When they were looking. I didn’t know they were looking.” He shifted. “I went back to Oregon. My sister’s. I didn’t see a paper till September.”

“You brought us down.”

“I brought the wheel down, sir. You were on it.” Kessler looked at the medal on his chest. “And I locked the box. I always lock the box.” He looked up. “It’s still locked. The pier’s closed. Nobody’s been on it. But the box is locked.”

“Good.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Dale Kessler, and bobbed his head again, and went back down the room with his keys under his jacket.

---

The surfers, together, Kai Nakoa and Danny Ortega, in suits that had clearly been borrowed from people of quite different sizes, very brown, very nervous, who bowed their heads at exactly the same moment, as though they had practised it on a beach, and who, when the medals were pinned, looked at each other and grinned and then remembered where they were and stopped.

Grace Tamura, the nurse, small, in a navy dress, very composed, who listened to her citation with her eyes on the floor and at a child she did not know looked up, once, at the ceiling, and then down again.

Staff Sergeant Duarte in uniform, with grease, he was almost certain, under one fingernail, who saluted instead of bowing because she was in uniform, and said sir and nothing else, and when he said thank you for the water said thank the inner tube, and went.

The Coast Service crew, four, in a row. The third of them, Petty Officer Iwu, had a small white scar on the back of his right hand.

“It was a good dog,” said Frederick, pinning.

“It was frightened, sir,” said Ray Iwu. “I’d have bitten me.”

---

The King’s Commendation for Brave Conduct.

“Señora Carmen Ruiz.”

She came up the room from the third row on the right in a dark green dress with the plastic folder held against her chest in both arms. She had brought it. Of course she had brought it.

She had not known. Who kept the record. Two pages of names in the morning paper on New Year’s Day, and her own among them, and nobody had told her it would be. Mr Abernathy had said don’t tell her, on an aircraft over Kansas, and nobody had.

She bowed her head. The Lord Chamberlain read it. Three lines. The folder, the fifty-eight slips, the medical forms, the telephone numbers that did not work, carried down ninety-eight steps and up them and to Franklin and to Government House and home.

Frederick pinned the commendation to the dark green dress, a small silver spray of leaves on a ribbon, beside the folder, which she did not put down.

“Señora.”

“Majestad.” Her voice was very low. “Somebody put my name in. I have been trying since January to find out who.”

He did not answer.

She looked at him a moment longer. Then her eyes went past him, down the room, to the front row on the left, where a man in a brown jacket was sitting very still with his hands on his knees, looking at nothing.

Her face changed.

“Ah,” said Señora Ruiz, very softly. And then, putting her hand flat on the folder: “Of course.”

---

“Miss Hannah Park.”

Twelve, in a blue dress, with her hair in a plait, and her mother three rows back with a handkerchief. She came up the room very fast, as though she had been told to walk slowly and had decided against it, and stopped at the foot of the dais and curtsied, a deep one, practised, and came up the step.

Who gave water.

He pinned it on the blue dress, low, because she was small.

“I’m in seventh grade now,” said Hannah Park, at once, as though it were the most important thing.

“Is it good?”

“It’s all right. There’s a boy who’s a lot.” She looked at the commendation on her dress. “Mom says I have to tell you I still have the cool box. I keep my swimming things in it.” She considered. “I didn’t do anything. I just had water.”

“That’s what it says.”

Hannah Park read her own citation, upside down, on the Lord Chamberlain’s list, from where she stood.

“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”

---

“Mr Martin Abernathy.”

The room did not move. Nobody in it knew, except perhaps four or five, that this was the one.

Mr Abernathy stood up from the front row on the left. Brown jacket. Glasses. The white scar across the back of his left hand. He came up the room at the speed he read the roll, not fast and not slowly, and stopped at the foot of the dais, and did not bow his head, and then did, barely, as though it were a matter of form and he was a man who observed forms.

The Lord Chamberlain read it. Being injured, and with the sea withdrawing, he declined to leave until every pupil in his charge was accounted for.

Mr Abernathy listened to it with an expression of mild disagreement.

He came up the step.

Frederick took the medal from the case. Silver. Red ribbon, blue stripes. The same as Ferrante’s.

He had seen the guest list on Monday, in the box. Every recipient had two lines, for two names. Most had filled both. Brannigan’s mother and his aunt. Kessler’s sister from Oregon. Señora Ruiz had written one, Mr D. Ferrante, and left the other blank.

Mr Abernathy’s had one name on it, in small neat capitals.

MR T. HARTIGAN.

A line had been drawn through it, by the Household, and beside it, in Dame M’s small upright hand: Mr Hartigan attends as Page of Honour and is seated with the Household. Under that Mr Abernathy had written nothing else. He had left both lines empty rather than fill one with anybody but the name that had been crossed out.

He did not look at the chairs by the windows. He did not need to. He knew who was sitting at the end of them, in the dark blue coat with the scarlet facings, with his gloved hands on his knees, looking at nothing: a boy on no list, who had written forty minutes on the back of a flattened water carton with his back to the man on the dais, and given it to a sergeant, folded, and never been told what happened to it.

He pinned the medal to the brown jacket.

“Mr Abernathy.”

“Sir.” Very low. “I’d prefer not.”

“I know.”

Mr Abernathy looked at the medal on his jacket. Then at the King.

“This was Hartigan,” he said, so quietly that the Lord Chamberlain beside the dais did not hear it, and nobody else could have.

Frederick looked at him.

He was standing in the ballroom of Columbia Palace with three hundred people in it and a list on a lectern and a pen in his inside pocket. He could say yes. He could say he wrote it, and you should know, and Mr Abernathy would know, and in a month there would be a letter, and a second investiture, and a boy in a school blazer standing at the foot of this dais with his ears red, being given something by the King that he had asked, on a lawn under the galaxy, not to be given.

Don’t put a crown on it.

“I don’t know what you mean, Mr Abernathy,” said Frederick.

Mr Abernathy looked at him over his glasses.

“No,” he said. “Quite right.”

He stepped back off the dais, and turned, and went back down the room at the speed of the roll, and sat down in the front row on the left, and did not look at the chairs by the windows at all, which was how Frederick knew that he knew exactly where they were.

---

Afterwards, in the long gallery, with sandwiches, and the string quartet still playing, and three hundred people talking at once, Theo found him by a window.

“You didn’t put me on it,” said Theo.

“I promised.”

“I know you promised. I watched you not.” Theo looked out at the Axis. “He knew. Didn’t he. Abernathy. He put my name on his list. Dame M told me. She said the Household had to cross it out because I had a seat already, and he didn’t put anybody else.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Theo turned and looked at him. Then he laughed, once, very quietly.

“That’s what he said,” said Theo. “Isn’t it. Just now. On the dais. You said that to him.”

Frederick did not answer.

“I saw his face,” said Theo. “From over there. By the window. When you said it. He looked like he did when Kowalski wore the axe.” He looked back out of the window. “Four seconds.”

They stood at the window together. Below, on the Axis, in the March sun, people were walking along the railings looking up at the Standard, which was flying, unfrozen, in the wind off the river, because the King was in the building.

“Thank you,” said Theo. “For not.”

“You said that in January.”

“I’m saying it again,” said Theo. “It’s still true. Some things are.”