The Wold

There were two queues.

Over one of them a yellow sign said UK GREAT BRITAIN, and under it, smaller, Gibraltar and British Overseas Territories. Over the other, a much longer one that went back and forth between tapes in a zigzag like a snake that had given up, the sign said ALL OTHER PASSPORTS, and under it, smaller still, as though it were slightly ashamed, including the United Kingdom of America.

Thirty-one seniors from Ellicott High School stood at the place where the two queues divided and looked up at the signs.

“Which one are we?” said Devon.

“We’re all other,” said Inés, without looking up from the ship on her book.

“We’re the same King.”

“We’re not the same passport.”

Mr Abernathy, at the front, in his tweed cap, consulted a sheet of paper from the inside of the roll book. “All other,” he said. “Single file. Have your letter from the school in your hand with your passport. Do not make jokes to the officer. The officer has heard them.”

The class went into ALL OTHER in single file, the snake receiving them with indifference, and began the long slow shuffle back and forth between the tapes.

Frederick stood where the queues divided, with the letter from the school in his hand and nothing to put with it, and did not know which one he was.

Castellanos stood beside him. Kimura beside Castellanos.

“Sergeant,” said Frederick.

“Sir.”

“Which one am I?”

Castellanos looked at the two signs for a while.

“I was told,” he said, “that somebody would come.”

---

Somebody came.

He was a tall thin man of about seventy in a dark overcoat and a bowler hat, and he came along the side of the hall from a door marked PRIVATE with the unhurried walk of a man who has been coming through doors marked PRIVATE at Heathrow since before it had a third terminal, and in his hand, held against his chest at a slight angle, was a piece of white card, the kind drivers hold up in arrivals with a name on, and on it, in large neat capitals in black felt pen, it said HANOVER.

He stopped in front of Frederick, and lowered the card, and bowed his head about an inch.

“Good afternoon, sir,” he said. “Brigadier Huxtable. I’m in waiting.”

“In waiting for what?”

“For you, sir. It’s a sort of job.” The Brigadier tucked the card under his arm. “The Household thought, and I’m afraid I agreed, that you might like to come through the way you came in November. No queue, sir. A car. Tea in the Royal Suite, if you’d like it, which nobody ever does.” He looked past Frederick at the snake. “But I’m told you’ve said you’d like to be treated like the others this year.”

“I did say that.”

“So I’ve brought a sign.” He held it up again, briefly. “In case you’d like to go to the desk like the others, sir, but with somebody to explain to the officer why you haven’t got anything to show her.”

Frederick looked at the snake. At the back of it, Theo had turned round and was watching, with his rucksack on one shoulder, and his face was saying, very clearly, go on, then, do it, I dare you.

“I’ll go to the desk,” said Frederick.

“Very good, sir. Which one?”

Frederick looked at the two signs.

“Which one would a King go to,” he said, “if he were a passenger?”

The Brigadier thought about it seriously. He had clearly been asked a great many things at Heathrow and none of them was this.

“The law’s not entirely clear,” he said at last. “Strictly, sir, neither. You’re the one person landing at this airport today who doesn’t need anybody’s leave to come in. But I’d go with your friends, sir. It’s what I’d want, at your age.”

So Frederick went into the back of ALL OTHER PASSPORTS, behind Theo, with the Brigadier behind him holding the card that said HANOVER against his overcoat like a hymn book, and Castellanos and Kimura behind the Brigadier, and the five of them went back and forth between the tapes for twenty-five minutes among holidaymakers from Lisbon and a choir from Seoul and a family from Lagos with a very small child asleep on a very large suitcase.

Nobody looked at him. That was the second astonishing thing. He was in a queue at Heathrow in a jumper that said nothing on it, and nobody looked at him, because everybody in a queue at Heathrow at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon is looking at the queue.

---

The officer at the desk was a woman of about forty with reading glasses on a chain.

Theo went first. She took his passport and his letter from the school and looked at the photograph and at him and at the photograph.

“Purpose of visit?”

“School,” said Theo.

“How long?”

“A year.”

“Where?”

“Gloucestershire.”

The officer looked at him over the glasses. “Gloucestershire,” she said, with feeling. “You poor love.” She stamped the passport, a hard satisfying thump, and gave it back. “Next.”

Frederick went to the desk with the Brigadier one step behind him.

He put down the letter from the school. There was nothing to put with it.

The officer picked up the letter, and read it, and turned it over in case there was something on the back, and there was not. She looked at the desk in front of him, at the place where a passport ought to have been.

“Passport, love?”

“I haven’t got one.”

“Everybody’s got one.”

“I haven’t. Nobody’s ever made me one.”

She looked at the letter again, at the name on it, which was Frederick Hanover, and then at him, and then up, over the reading glasses, at the Brigadier, who held up the card that said HANOVER very slightly, as if to say that he had done his best.

“Is this,” said the officer, “a joke?”

“No, madam,” said the Brigadier.

“Because we’ve been told not to make jokes.”

“So have they, madam.”

The officer looked at Frederick for some time. Then she looked at her screen. She typed something, and read something, and her eyebrows went up a little way and stayed there.

“Purpose of visit?” she said, as though she had decided to do it properly anyway.

“School.”

“How long?”

“A year.”

“Where?”

“Gloucestershire.”

She took off her reading glasses and let them drop on their chain.

“There’s nothing for me to stamp,” she said. “It says. On here.” She tapped the screen with one finger. “You don’t need leave to enter, love. You don’t need to come through here at all. It’s yours. You could have gone round.”

“I know,” said Frederick.

“Then why didn’t you?”

He thought about it.

“I wanted to see what it was like,” he said.

The officer looked at him a moment longer. Then she picked up a biro, and the letter from the school, and in the margin at the bottom of it, very small, where a stamp would have gone if there had been anything to stamp, she wrote: Gloucestershire. You poor love.

She gave it back to him.

“Welcome home,” said the officer. And then, because she had been told not to make jokes, and had just made one, and knew it: “Next.”

---

The coach was waiting outside at a bay at the end of a long wet pavement, a large white coach with COTSWOLD CRUISERS painted on its side in a sweeping blue script, and on the front, in the window, a sign that said PRIVATE. The driver was a short broad man in a short-sleeved shirt in spite of everything, who heaved the thirty-one suitcases into the hold one after another without any visible effort and without looking at any of the names on any of them, and slammed the hold shut, and said, “Right, then,” and got in.

The Brigadier did not get in. He stood on the pavement under the edge of the shelter in his bowler hat with his card under his arm.

“I’ll be in touch, sir,” he said. “Or rather, you won’t hear from me at all, which is how you’ll know it’s going well.” He bowed his head another inch. “Enjoy the Cotswolds. My mother’s family were from Painswick. Everything in the county is either very old or very wet, and the best things are both.”

“Thank you, Brigadier.”

“Sir.” The Brigadier hesitated. “May I say one thing?”

“Of course.”

“You did the right thing. At the desk.” He looked at the coach, at the thirty faces looking out of its windows, most of them asleep. “Your grandfather would have gone round. Your father would have gone round, and minded. You stood in a queue.” He nodded once. “They’ll hear about it. The officers. It’ll be all round the airport by tonight. That’s worth more than a tea in the Royal Suite.” He touched his hat. “Good afternoon, sir.”

And he went back along the pavement in the rain to his door marked PRIVATE, and Frederick got on the coach.

---

There was a seat for him halfway down on the left, by the window, with Theo in the aisle seat beside it already asleep again, which Frederick had not thought possible after a night by the runways at Kennedy and three and a half hours of sleeping on an aeroplane that had been travelling faster than the sun. Castellanos was in the front seat by the driver. Kimura was across the aisle from Castellanos, with the murder in the country house open on her knee.

The coach went out of the airport under a sky like a wet sheet and onto a motorway.

It was not like a motorway in the Realm. It had three lanes, not five, and the lanes were narrower, and the cars in them were smaller and closer together and went faster than anybody in the Realm would have dared, and every so often, without any warning at all, a lorry would decide to overtake another lorry over a distance of about six miles, and the coach would sit behind them both in the middle lane with its driver drumming his fingers on the wheel and saying, quietly, to the windscreen, “Come on, my son. Come on.”

For a long way it was the edge of London: warehouses, hotels, a reservoir, a row of houses with their backs to the road and washing out. Then it thinned. Then there were fields on both sides, green, wet, small, with hedges round them, and the hedges were full of something red that Frederick did not have a name for.

Mr Ferrante got up from his seat near the front and came down the aisle holding the rolled map of 1779 under his arm like a man carrying a ladder into a church.

He stopped by Frederick’s seat.

“Hanover,” he said. “Window. Do you mind?”

He unrolled the map, a yard of it, across Theo, who did not wake, and held it up against the glass with both hands, so that the fields outside showed faintly through the paper, and looked at the map and through it at the country and back at the map, for a long minute, with his lips moving.

“Berkshire,” said Mr Ferrante. “We’re in Berkshire. Still. This is all Berkshire.” He moved the map along the window a few inches. “There was a turnpike here. 1779. Bath to London. That’s the road. Look.” He tapped the paper with one finger, and then, without taking it away, tapped the glass through it at a line of trees on a rise. “And that’s the road. The same road. Under the motorway. Two hundred and fifty years.” He looked at Frederick over the top of the map with an expression Frederick had seen on his face only once before, in the archive at the university, in front of a letter from 1783. “They had milestones.”

“Sir,” said Frederick. “You’ve got the map upside down.”

Mr Ferrante looked at the map.

He turned it round. He held it up against the window again.

“Ah,” he said, after a while, in a different voice. “No. That’s Oxford.”

He rolled it up and went back to his seat.

---

They left the motorway at Swindon, which Devon said looked like a car park that had been allowed to grow up and get a job, and which Mr Abernathy said, from the front, that Devon would be living near for ten months and would do well not to say again in the hearing of anybody from Swindon. They went up a long hill on a road with a number Frederick did not catch, and at the top of it the coach came out onto high open country under the low sky and the whole world changed colour.

The fields were bigger up here. Wide, rolling, pale gold where the corn had been cut, with the stubble shining wet in lines, and the hedges between them low and dark. The sky came right down to them. Far off, a church tower stood up out of a fold in the ground, alone, square, grey, with the green round it like a pond.

And the walls.

He had not expected the walls. They ran beside the road and away across the fields in long grey lines, low, waist-high, made of flat stones laid one on top of another with nothing to hold them together, no mortar, nothing, just stone on stone, mile after mile, round fields and up hills and over the tops of them, as though the whole country had been sewn together with grey thread.

“Who built them?” said Frederick, to nobody.

“Nobody knows,” said Inés, from the seat behind, without looking up from her book. “Lots of people. Over hundreds of years. Every farmer adds a bit and puts back the bits that fall down.” She turned a page. “They’re dry-stone. There’s a word for them. I read it.”

“What’s the word?”

“Walls,” said Inés.

---

The coach turned off the main road onto a smaller one, and then off the smaller one onto one that was barely the width of the coach, with grass growing up the middle of it and a stone wall on each side so close that Frederick could have reached out of the window and touched the moss, if the windows had opened, which they did not. The driver slowed to the speed of a man walking. Every hundred yards a car came the other way, and one of the two of them, the coach or the car, had to back up to a place where the wall went in a little, and wait, and the driver of the car would lift one finger off the steering wheel as he went past, and the coach driver would lift one finger back, and nobody said anything.

“Is it always like this?” said Lucía, at the front.

“No, love,” said the coach driver. “Sometimes there’s a tractor.”

The road went down.

It went down steeply, round a bend, between banks of trees that met overhead so that for a minute they were in a green tunnel, dim and dripping, with ferns along the banks and the sound of the engine coming back off the trees, and then the trees opened and the road came out at the bottom of it, and there was the valley.

The coach stopped, because the driver had stopped it, at the side of the road, by a gate, with the engine running.

“There you are,” said the driver. “That’s where you’re going. I always stop here. Everybody wants a look.”

The valley was narrow and green and very quiet. A river ran along the bottom of it, a small river, no wider than the kitchen at Columbia Palace, clear and quick over stones, with willows along it. On the far side of the river, on the slope, there was a village: grey stone cottages with stone roofs, close together, all leaning slightly in the same direction like people at a bus stop, a church with a square tower among some dark trees, a pub with a sign Frederick could not read from here, and smoke from somebody’s chimney going straight up into the wet air and then bending.

And beyond the village, further along the valley, in its own grounds, among old trees, a long low building of the same grey stone, with tall pointed windows down one side and a tower at one end with a clock in it.

The clock said a quarter to seven.

It had been there, he knew, because he had read the papers that came from the Household with the clothing list, since the twelfth century as an abbey and since 1612 as a school. It had been a school for longer than the Realm had had a Charter. It had been a school when his own house was a family of dukes in a small German state nobody had heard of. Boys had gone to school in that building in the reign of every King and Queen of England since James I, and some of them had been the sons of men who had gone to fight in America, on both sides, and come back, or not.

Somebody behind him said, quietly, “Oh.”

He did not look to see who it was. It might have been anybody. It might have been him.

---

The coach went the last half mile at a walk, along the river, past the village, which did not come out to look at them, though Frederick saw a curtain move in one cottage window, and then not move, and then move again. There was an old woman sitting on a low wall by the churchyard gate, in a coat and a headscarf, with a small dog at her feet, and she watched the coach go past with her chin up and her hands on the top of a stick and an expression of fierce and comprehensive interest, the way a judge at a show watches a new class of cattle come into the ring. Frederick, at the window, met her eyes for perhaps a second as they passed.

She did not look away.

He did.

---

The gates of Coln Abbey School were stone, and old, and open, and between them stood a man in a waxed jacket with a clipboard who waved the coach through as though coaches full of Americans came through his gates every day. The drive went up through the trees in a long curve, and the coach came round the curve and stopped on the gravel in front of the long grey building, which up close was larger than it had looked from the road, and older, and much more crooked, with a wooden door in the middle of it that was clearly older than everything else and had been made for people a foot shorter than anybody now alive.

On the gravel in front of the door, in a line, stood thirty-one English sixth-formers.

They were in their own clothes, as the Americans were, because it was the last day of the holidays. Some of them had their hands in their pockets. Some of them had their arms folded. One of them, a tall fair boy at the end of the line, had a sheepdog sitting at his feet, which Frederick thought was probably not allowed. They were all looking at the coach with exactly the same expression, which was the expression of thirty-one people who have been told for six months that the King of fourteen countries is coming to their school, and who have privately agreed among themselves that whatever happens they are not going to be impressed.

The coach door hissed open.

Nobody moved.

At the front, Mr Abernathy stood up, and put his tweed cap on, and turned round, and looked down the aisle at the thirty of them, and at Frederick halfway down on the left, and then at all of them again.

“Well,” said Mr Abernathy. “Here we are.”

He went down the steps.

Theo woke up.

He sat up, and looked out of the window at the long crooked grey building and the line of English sixth-formers with their arms folded and the sheepdog, and the tower, and the clock in the tower, which said seven.

“Oh,” said Theo. “Are we here?”

“We’re here.”

Theo looked a little longer.

“There’s a dog,” he said.

“I know.”

“Is the dog in the school?”

“I don’t know.”

“I hope the dog’s in the school,” said Theo, and got his rucksack, and stood up, and hit his head on the luggage rack, and said the same word as at Heathrow, and the tall fair boy at the end of the line outside, who could not possibly have heard it through the glass, grinned.