Book Ten: Senior Year Part Three: Trinity Characters
Chapter Thirty-one
The Green
Frederick. Dover's Hill and Coln Saint Aldwyns. Friday, 30 May, to Saturday, 31 May 2031.
It is the one field in which two countries sharing a King, a language and a legal tradition have simply failed to converge, and both find it funny.
The Cotswold Olimpick Games had been held on Dover’s Hill above Chipping Campden since 1612, which was, Mr Ferrante said, on the coach, at length, a hundred and seventy-one years before the Charter, and four years before the death of Shakespeare, who had very possibly been to them, and they had been started by a lawyer called Robert Dover who wanted the people of the Cotswolds to have something to do on a Friday that was not going to church or getting drunk, and they had done both ever since.
There was a bonfire. There was a torchlit procession. There was a tug of war and a sack race and a race up the hill and a race down it, and dancing, and a man in a yellow coat on a horse who was Robert Dover, or was supposed to be, and was in fact, Will said, a dentist from Evesham.
And there was the shin-kicking.
“The what?” said Theo.
“Shin-kicking,” said Will, at the top of the hill, in the evening, in the crowd, by a ring of rope on the grass. “Two of you. You hold each other by the shoulders. Like this.” He took hold of Kit’s shoulders, and Kit took hold of his, at arm’s length. “And you kick each other on the shins. With the side of your foot. And the first one to go down loses.” He let go of Kit. “Best of three. There’s a man with a stick who says when someone’s down. He’s called the stickler.”
“Why?” said Theo.
Will thought about it.
“It’s 1612,” he said. “You didn’t need a reason in 1612.”
“You stuff your trousers with straw,” said Kit helpfully. “To pad your shins. Everybody does. There’s a bale over there.” He looked at Theo. “You’d be good at it. You’re tall. Your legs are a long way down.”
Theo looked at the ring of rope, where two large farmers in white smocks with straw sticking out of the bottoms of their trousers were holding each other by the shoulders and kicking each other in the shins, hard, grimly, in silence, with a crowd of several hundred people round them roaring.
“No,” said Theo.
He entered at eight.
Nobody knew why. He did not know why himself, afterwards. He said it was Kit. Kit said it was Freya Lomax, who had come up to Dover’s Hill on the coach with Evenlode and stood beside Theo at the rope for half an hour with her arms folded watching the shin-kicking with an expression of profound medical disapproval, and had said, at a quarter to eight, this is the most barbaric thing I’ve ever seen, and you’d never last a round. And Theo had looked down at her from a great height, with the same expression he had used on the touchline after the rugby in October, and gone and stuffed his trousers with straw.
He was drawn against a farmer from Broad Campden called Howard, who was about forty and about the shape of a gatepost and had won it twice.
They held each other by the shoulders.
The stickler, an old man in a smock with a long stick, said go.
Howard kicked Theo in the shin.
Theo did not move.
He did not seem to notice. He stood in the ring of rope on the top of Dover’s Hill in the evening with his trousers stuffed with straw and his hands on Howard’s shoulders, at arm’s length, very straight, and looked down at Howard from a height of six foot two with an expression of polite and patient interest, as though Howard were a ewe in a lambing shed and he was waiting to see what she would do.
Howard kicked him again. Harder.
Theo did not move.
Howard looked up at him.
Theo looked down at Howard. Then, very carefully, without any apparent effort, without changing his expression at all, he lifted one long foot, and put the side of it against Howard’s shin, not hard, quite gently, the way you would push a door that was already open, and Howard, who was the shape of a gatepost and had won it twice, went over sideways like a tree and sat down on the grass.
The stickler looked at Howard on the grass.
“Down,” said the stickler, sounding surprised.
The crowd made a noise like a train.
He won all three rounds. He beat Howard two falls to nil. He beat a young man from Mickleton in a rugby shirt two to one. In the final, at half past nine, in the dusk, with the bonfire lit and the torches going round the hill, he beat a man from Chipping Campden called Roger who had won it four times and was, Will said, a legend, two to nil, and on the last fall Roger lay on his back on the grass at the top of Dover’s Hill and looked up at Theo against the darkening sky for a long time and said, who are you?
“Theo,” said Theo. “Hartigan. From New Westminster.”
“Where’s that?”
“The Realm.”
Roger lay on the grass.
“Do they do this in the Realm?” he said.
“No,” said Theo.
“Then how did you win?”
Theo thought about it.
“I didn’t fall down,” he said.
“How,” said Freya Lomax, at the rope, afterwards, with her arms folded, while Theo was having straw taken out of his trousers by Kit, “did you do that?”
Theo looked at her.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just stood there. And they kicked me. And I didn’t fall down.” He considered. “I’ve been standing still on purpose all year. I was a wall in March. I held a train in the Abbey for twenty minutes. I stood outside a hospital in Cirencester for eight hours on Wednesday.” He looked at his shins, which were going to be, he could tell already, the colour of plums. “I think I’m just very good at not falling down.”
Freya looked at him for a long time.
“That,” she said, “is the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard. And you’re going to have the worst bruises I’ve ever seen. And I’m going to have to look at them.” She unfolded her arms. “Sit down. On the grass. I’ve got arnica.”
“You’ve got arnica?”
“I brought it,” said Freya Lomax, “in case,” and sat him down on the grass in the dark at the top of Dover’s Hill, with the bonfire going and the torches going round, and rolled up the legs of his trousers, and looked at his shins, and said something under her breath that the Reverend Alan Prothero would have declined to repeat, and got the arnica out.
The next day was perfect.
Nobody could believe it. It came up out of the valley at six in the morning, clear, already warm, with the sky over the wold a pale clean blue with nothing in it, not a cloud, not a wisp, and the green behind the church shining in the early sun with the dew on it, and the river going, and the blackbirds in the yews. By nine it was hot. By ten it was the kind of day that Mr Purvis, ninety-one, at his gate in his shirtsleeves, said he had seen perhaps four times in his life, a proper English summer day, like they tell you about, like in a book, and that he did not expect to see another.
It was the thirty-first of May.
It was two years to the day.
Frederick woke at six and lay in the bed by the window in the room at the end of the corridor in Windrush and looked at the ceiling and thought about it. Two years ago, on this morning, at six, he had been in a hotel in Santa Monica on Ocean Avenue, sixteen, with fifty-eight sophomores, and the ground had not yet moved. He had woken at six every morning for a year and twelve days afterwards without an alarm, in that city’s hours, in case it was needed, until one morning in June last year he had woken at ten past seven and it had stopped.
He thought about it for a while.
Then he got up and wound his father’s watch.
There was a cricket match in the morning and a baseball match after tea.
It had been arranged since September. It had been arranged, in fact, on the second evening, at the New Inn, by Jack, standing on a chair, who had announced to the whole pub that the Americans were going to be taught to play cricket properly by the end of the year and then they were going to be slaughtered, on the green, in front of everybody, in May, and Lucía, at the table by the fire, had stood up on her own chair and announced back that the English were going to be taught to play baseball and they were going to be slaughtered, the same day, after tea, and the pub had cheered, and Sue Fennell had written it on the blackboard behind the bar, CRICKET V BASEBALL, 31 MAY, and it had stayed on the blackboard, under the specials, all year.
The English side was the English form and the village. The American side was the class. Nobody had thought it was fair. Nobody had wanted it to be.
And both sides, separately, in March, had come to Frederick and asked him to umpire.
Both matches.
“Why me?” he had said.
“Because you’re the King,” Jack had said, at the bar.
“Because you’re the King,” Lucía had said, at the table by the fire, on the same evening, ten minutes later.
“I’m the King of both sides.”
“Exactly,” they had both said, separately, ten minutes apart.
So he was umpiring both.
He put on the white coat at half past ten.
It was a proper umpire’s coat, long, white, cotton, from the cupboard in the pavilion, that had belonged to Mr Purvis’s father, who had umpired for the village from 1920 to 1958, and it had been washed and ironed by Sue Fennell, and it came down to his knees and had pockets full of things he had been told he would need: six small stones, to count the balls in an over; a pencil; a piece of paper; a cloth for the ball; and, at the bottom of the right pocket, put there by somebody, a single silver Maundy penny.
He did not ask who. He knew who.
At a quarter to eleven, in the nets behind the pavilion, where the English were warming up, a small stocky red-haired man of about fifty in a pair of grey flannels and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a disappointed boxer’s face was bowling at Jack Fennell.
Frederick stopped in the gap in the netting.
“Prime Minister,” he said.
Rennie looked round.
“Sir,” said Rennie. “Good morning. Grand day.” He picked up another ball. “I’m not here.”
“You’re bowling in the nets.”
“I’m a private citizen bowling in the nets,” said Rennie, “on a Saturday, in Gloucestershire, at the invitation of the captain of the village side, who wrote to me at Downing Street in April on lined paper and said that if the Prime Minister of Great Britain had any sense he’d turn up and bowl for England against the Americans, and I thought, well, he’s right.” He turned back to the crease. “I bowled for Anstruther for eleven years. Medium pace. Off-cutters. I was quite good.” He ran in, and bowled.
Jack hit it for six.
It went straight back over Rennie’s head, high, a long way, over the top of the netting and over the pavilion and out across the green, and landed somewhere near the war memorial, and bounced, and rolled toward the New Inn, where Gaz, sitting outside with a pint, at a quarter to eleven, got up without a word and went to fetch it.
Rennie stood at the crease and watched it go.
“Hm,” said Rennie.
He bowled again.
Jack hit it for six. Over the pavilion. Toward the war memorial.
Rennie bowled again.
Jack hit it for six. Over the pavilion. Toward the war memorial. Gaz, who had come back with the first one and was halfway back with the second, stopped on the green, and looked up, and watched the third one go over his head, and turned round, and went after it, slowly, with an expression of deep and comprehensive sadness.
Rennie stood at the crease in his flannels with his hands on his hips and looked at Jack Fennell for a long time.
“Who,” said the Prime Minister of Great Britain, “are you?”
“Jack,” said Jack. “Fennell. I bowl, mostly. I’m not supposed to be able to bat.”
“Who told you that?”
“Mr Ellis.”
“Mr Ellis,” said Rennie, “is wrong.” He walked down the net. “Three sixes. Off the Prime Minister. In a row.” He stopped in front of Jack. “Do you know what that is?”
“No,” said Jack.
“Neither do I,” said Rennie, “but I’ll tell you this, I’ve been bowled at by three Chancellors of the Exchequer and a Foreign Secretary and none of them ever hit me for one.” He held out his hand. “Rennie. From Fife.”
Jack shook it.
“You’re not going to arrest me?” said Jack.
“I’m going to buy you a pint,” said Rennie. “After. If you’re old enough.”
“I’m eighteen.”
“Then I’m buying you a pint,” said Rennie, “and you’re going to tell me how you did that, and I’m going to go back to Downing Street on Monday and tell the Cabinet that the most dangerous man in Britain is a lad from a village in Gloucestershire who doesn’t think he can bat.”
Harold Quayle arrived at eleven.
Nobody had known he was coming. Not even Frederick. He arrived at the green by taxi from Cirencester, a stout elderly man in a crumpled linen suit and a Panama hat with a notebook in one hand and a camera round his neck and an expression of a man who has flown four thousand miles to find something out and has found it, and he got out of the taxi by the war memorial and stood on the green and looked at it all: the pavilion, the white-coated King, the Prime Minister of Great Britain in the nets in his flannels, the whole village on rugs and deckchairs round the boundary, the church, the river, the perfect sky.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he took his hat off.
“Well,” said Harold Quayle, to the green. “There he is.”
Sue Fennell, who was in charge of the scoreboard, which was a large wooden board on the side of the pavilion with hooks on it and a box of tin numbers to hang on the hooks, looked at him across the green.
She had never seen him before. She had read every one of his columns, cut out and posted by the Queen of Sweden to her son and pinned on the wall of a room in Windrush and read aloud, one by one, every Friday night, at the New Inn, by Jack, standing on a chair. She knew the face from the photograph at the top of the column. She came across the green to him with her arms folded.
“You’re him,” said Sue Fennell.
“I’m afraid I am, madam,” said Harold Quayle.
“Where is the King,” said Sue Fennell.
“Yes.”
“Every Thursday. For nine months.”
“Yes.”
Sue Fennell looked at him a moment longer. Then she unfolded her arms, and took him by the elbow, the way she had taken Jack by the ear on the first night, and walked him across the green to the pavilion, and stood him in front of the scoreboard, and put the box of tin numbers in his hands.
“Right,” she said. “You wanted to know where he is. He’s out there. In the white coat. Umpiring.” She pointed at the hooks. “Runs on the left. Wickets in the middle. Overs on the right. Don’t hang the six upside down, it’s a nine.” She walked away. “And don’t put it in the paper till it’s finished.”
Harold Quayle stood in front of the scoreboard of the Coln Saint Aldwyns Cricket Club with a box of tin numbers in his hands and his Panama hat on the back of his head and his notebook in his pocket.
“Madam,” he said faintly, after her.
“Runs on the left,” said Sue Fennell, without turning round.
The cricket began at half past eleven.
The English batted first. Twenty overs each, which was not proper cricket, Mr Ellis said, but would do, given that half the other side had never held a bat before September. They made a hundred and twelve. Jack made forty-one of them, before he was caught by Lucía, at the boundary, running backwards, with one hand, in a way that Mr Ellis said afterwards he had never seen done on that green in nineteen years, and Lucía, holding the ball up, said, it’s just like a fly ball, and Jack, walking off, said, it is NOT like a fly ball, and Lucía said, it is EXACTLY like a fly ball, and Frederick, at the bowler’s end, in the white coat, raised one finger, which meant out, and was the only thing an umpire was allowed to say.
Rennie bowled four overs for the English. He took two wickets, Devon and a boy from Coln who had been lent to the Americans to make up the numbers, and both times he looked at the King in the white coat with an expression of a man who has been waiting all his life to say howzat to a sovereign, and said it, enormously, and Frederick raised his finger, and Rennie said thank you, sir, and walked back to his mark with tremendous satisfaction.
Harold Quayle hung the six upside down twice.
Lunch was at one, in the pavilion, sandwiches and tea, and the whole village in deckchairs on the boundary, and Bridget’s lemonade in a jug, and at two the Americans went in to bat.
They needed a hundred and thirteen to win.
He would remember the afternoon as a kind of heat. The sun on the white coat. The smell of cut grass. The sound of the ball on the bat, which was a sound like nothing else, a hard clean tock, that went out across the green and came back off the side of the valley a fraction late. The village on the boundary in deckchairs saying shot and oh, well bowled and ooh in a long low murmur that rose and fell like the river. Harold Quayle at the scoreboard with his hat on the back of his head and his sleeves rolled up, hanging numbers, getting faster.
The Americans were not good. That was the thing. They had been taught since November in the indoor nets in Cirencester and they were not good, any of them, at cricket, because they had grown up hitting a ball with a round bat as hard as they could and running, and cricket was not that, and it took more than six months to get it out of the elbow.
But they were not rubbish.
Kit Barraclough, lent to the Americans, made nineteen. Devon made eleven, all of them in a single over, swinging like a man at a fairground. Lucía made twenty-four, running between the wickets so fast that the village gasped, and was run out by about a yard by Hattie Ellis, who had never played cricket in her life either and threw the ball in from the boundary like a girl who has been throwing things at her brother since she was four.
At four o’clock the Americans were ninety-eight for seven, with three overs to go.
At ten past four they were a hundred and five for nine, with one over to go.
They needed eight. With one wicket left. Six balls.
And Theo Hartigan walked out to bat.
He had been batting for an hour.
That was the thing. He had come in at number four, at ten past three, after Kit, and he had been there ever since, at one end or the other, for an hour, and he had scored eleven runs. Eleven, in an hour. He had blocked every ball. Every single one. He stood at the crease very straight, all six foot two of him, in a borrowed white sweater and a pair of pads that came up to his thighs, with his bat held straight down in front of him like a wall, and every ball that came at him, he put the bat in front of, and the ball hit it, and stopped, and lay at his feet, and he looked down at it, and then up at the bowler, with an expression of polite and patient interest, and the bowler, whoever it was, went back to his mark and bowled again, and the same thing happened.
He was not trying to score. He had decided not to. He had said so, at lunch, in the pavilion, with his mouth full of a sandwich, to the whole American side, and to Mr Ellis, who was the English captain and had no business listening: I’m not going to hit anything. I’m going to stay in. Somebody has to stay in. You lot hit things. I’ll stand there.
And he had stood there. For an hour. Like a wall. Like a man at the top of Dover’s Hill being kicked in the shins.
Now the others were gone. Nine of them. And it was the last over. And he needed eight. And the man bowling it was Jack Fennell.
Frederick stood at the bowler’s end in Mr Purvis’s father’s white coat with six small stones in his right pocket and a Maundy penny at the bottom of it and did not look at either of them.
First ball: Theo blocked it. It lay at his feet.
Frederick moved one stone from his right pocket to his left.
Second ball: Theo blocked it, and looked down at it lying at his feet for so long, with such polite and patient interest, that half the boundary thought the bowler had bowled it twice.
Frederick moved a stone.
Third ball: Theo blocked it. The village on the boundary, who had been murmuring, went quiet. Frederick moved a stone. Three left.
Fourth ball: Theo pushed it, very gently, along the ground, past the bowler, and ran, and ran back, and ran again, two, and Harold Quayle at the scoreboard hung a seven on the hook for the hundred and seven, and then took it down and turned it round, because he had hung it upside down, and a seven upside down was nothing at all, and hung it the right way. Frederick moved a stone. Two left.
Six needed. Two balls.
Jack ran in. He bowled. It was a good ball, full and straight, at Theo’s feet, at the wall.
And Theo did not block it.
For the first time in an hour and a quarter, Theo Hartigan, Page of Honour, who had been standing still on purpose all year, moved.
He did not swing. He stepped forward. One long step, the whole length of his leg, down the pitch, toward the ball, and met it, with the bat, in front of his front foot, straight, the way Mr Ellis had shown him in the nets in Cirencester in January and he had never once got right, and the ball came off the middle of the bat with the sound, tock, hard and clean, and went.
Not up. Along the ground. Fast. Straight past Jack, who turned to watch it. Straight past Rennie, at mid-off, who dived, and missed it by a yard, and lay on the grass. Straight across the green, through the gap between Gaz and Little Rob, who were standing about four yards apart and looked at each other as it went between them, and on, and on, over the rope at the boundary, under Mr Purvis’s deckchair, and into the bank by the war memorial.
Four.
And the whole green groaned.
Two hundred people on the boundary had been counting, all of them, with their lips moving, the way the New Inn had counted the guns, and two hundred people had counted six balls, because they had counted the second one twice, and six balls was the over, and the Americans had needed six and got four, and lost by two.
Jack, halfway down the pitch, had his arms in the air. Mr Ellis, at mid-on, was taking off his cap. On the boundary, Lucía had sat down on the grass with her head in her hands.
Frederick put his hand in the right pocket of the white coat.
One stone. And the Maundy penny.
He moved the stone to his left pocket, slowly, and took his hand out, and held up one finger.
Not out. One more.
The green went silent.
“One more ball,” said Mr Ellis, at mid-on, slowly, looking at the King, with his cap in his hand. “He’s counted with stones.” He looked at the boundary, at two hundred people with their mouths open. “It’s the umpire’s count. Not yours.” He put his cap back on. “One more ball. Two to win.”
Jack, at the end of his run-up, looked at Frederick across the pitch for a long time.
Then he grinned. All of it.
He ran in.
He bowled the last ball of the match, and it was full and straight and on the stumps, and Theo Hartigan stepped down the pitch and met it in front of his front foot, tock, and it went along the ground, straight past Jack, straight past Rennie, who did not dive this time, who stood and watched it go with his hands on his hips and his disappointed boxer’s face doing something it did not usually do, and through the gap between Gaz and Little Rob, who did not even look at each other this time, and over the rope, and under Mr Purvis’s deckchair, beside the first one.
Four.
The Americans had won.
On the last ball.
And nobody, not one person on the green, not the English or the Americans or the village or the Prime Minister of Great Britain or the columnist from the New Westminster Evening Star at the scoreboard with a tin number in each hand, ever entirely understood how.
They stormed the pitch. Both sides. Everybody. The Americans because they had won and the English because they had never in their lives seen anybody who could not bat hit two fours off the last two balls of a match, and the village because it was the thirty-first of May and the sun was shining and it was the best thing that had happened on that green since 1951.
Theo stood at the crease with the bat in his hand and did not move.
He stood there in the middle of the green in his borrowed white sweater and pads up to his thighs with the whole of the senior class of Ellicott High School running at him across the grass, and Freya Lomax, from the boundary, with her arms not folded for once, running too, and his face entirely empty of thought.
Then it did something.
Frederick, at the bowler’s end, in the white coat, saw it. He was the only one close enough. He saw Theo’s face go, from the inside, all at once, like Hattie’s had gone on the last night in the tithe barn, and then the class arrived and Theo disappeared underneath them, and somewhere at the bottom of a heap of Americans in the middle of the green a voice that was Theo’s said, quite clearly, I didn’t fall down.
Tea was at half past four. The baseball was at half past five.
He changed out of the white coat into a mask.
The mask was a catcher’s mask, which Lucía’s father had brought from Pomona in his bag, with a chest protector and shin guards, and he put them on in the pavilion, and walked out onto the green, which now had four bases on it, cushions from the New Inn, and a pitcher’s mound, which was a doormat, and stood behind home plate, which was a chopping board, behind the catcher, who was Theo, in the American kit, still not entirely able to speak.
The Duke threw the first pitch.
He had asked. He had asked in March, at the round window, in single words, when Frederick had told him about the match: Pitch. A breath. First. And Frederick had said Dad, you can’t, and his father had looked at him for a long time and said, Paredes, and Frederick had not understood, and then had.
So at twenty-five past five on the thirty-first of May, on the green at Coln Saint Aldwyns, Mr Paredes, motorman, of Pomona, in his cap that said POMONA, walked the Duke of Cumberland out from the pavilion to the doormat that was the pitcher’s mound, slowly, with the hazel stick, and stood beside him, and put a baseball in his hand.
The whole green was silent.
“Look at the glove,” said Mr Paredes, quietly. “Only the glove. Nothing else.”
The Duke looked at the glove. Theo’s glove. At home plate. Sixty feet away. Held up, open.
“Don’t throw it with the arm,” said Mr Paredes. “Throw it with the whole of you. Step. Turn. And let it go when your hand’s in front of your face.” He stepped back. “It doesn’t have to get there. It just has to go toward it.”
The Duke stood on the doormat on the green with the ball in his hand and the hazel stick in the other.
He handed the stick to Mr Paredes.
Without looking. The way Mrs Haverfield had handed her stick to Frederick at the gate of number nine. He handed it sideways to the motorman from Pomona, and Mr Paredes took it, and the Duke of Cumberland, eighty-four, two years and eight months from the sea, stood on his own two feet on a doormat on a village green in the sun with nothing to hold, and looked at the glove.
He stepped. He turned. He let it go.
It did not get there. It went about forty feet, in a high slow curve, through the bright air over the green, turning, and came down on the grass about twenty feet in front of home plate, and bounced, twice, and rolled, and stopped, at Theo’s feet, in front of the glove.
Theo picked it up.
He held it up. Above his head. In the glove. So everybody could see.
And the whole of Coln Saint Aldwyns, and the whole of the senior class of Ellicott High School, and the whole of the English form of Coln Abbey School, and the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and Harold Quayle of the New Westminster Evening Star, and Mr Purvis in his deckchair, and Mrs Haverfield on a kitchen chair that Sue had brought out for her by the boundary, and the Queen of Sweden beside her, with her hand over her mouth, stood up.
The Duke stood on the doormat with his hand still out in front of his face where the ball had left it.
Then he held out his other hand, sideways, without looking, and Mr Paredes put the hazel stick in it.
“Good,” said Mr Paredes.
“No,” said the Duke. “Short.”
“It doesn’t have to get there,” said Mr Paredes. “I said.”
The Duke looked at the ball in Theo’s glove, sixty feet away, held above his head.
“Next,” said the Duke, “year.”
The English won the baseball by eleven runs.
Nobody could explain it. Least of all the Americans. The English had been taught since November, by Lucía and Devon and Mr Paredes over the telephone, in the gym at Coln Abbey in the evenings and on the green on Sundays, and they were not good, any of them, at baseball, because they had grown up hitting a ball with a flat bat along the ground and running, and baseball was not that.
But Jack Fennell hit everything like a cricket ball.
He did not swing. He did not swing the way you were supposed to swing, round, flat, with the hips. He stood at the chopping board that was home plate with the bat held up behind his head like a cricket bat and when the ball came he stepped into it and brought the bat down and through, straight, the way Mr Ellis had taught him since he was six, and the ball went off it, every time, along the ground, low and hard and fast, through the gaps, between the fielders, past the cushions that were the bases, all the way to the boundary.
He did it four times. Four home runs. Lucía, at shortstop, stood with her hands on her hips after the fourth and looked at him running round the cushions with an expression of the most complete and comprehensive outrage.
“That’s not how you HIT,” she shouted.
“It is now!” shouted Jack, rounding third.
Frederick, behind the chopping board, in the mask, raised his arms, and called him safe.
At the end, at a quarter to eight, with the sun going down over the hill behind the church and the green going gold and the scoreboard on the side of the pavilion reading, in tin numbers hung by Harold Quayle, two of them upside down, CRICKET: AMERICANS 115/9 ENGLISH 112. BASEBALL: ENGLISH 19 AMERICANS 8, he took off the mask.
He stood behind home plate with the mask in his hand, on the green, in the gold light, and the two sides came off the field toward the pavilion, mixed up, Americans and English, everybody talking at once, nobody listening, and Mr Ellis with his arm round Mr Paredes, and Rennie with his arm round Jack, and Theo with Freya Lomax beside him, and Lucía shouting at Jack about the cricket bat, and Kimura, at the boundary, with her hands in her pockets, watching all of it with her head on one side.
Castellanos was at the back of the green, by the churchyard wall. Where nobody would notice him. Which was the point.
Frederick walked across to him.
“Sergeant.”
“Sir.”
“Each side won the other’s game.”
“I noticed, sir.”
“Is that the right result?”
Castellanos looked at the green for a long time. At the two sides, mixed up, going in.
“I don’t know, sir,” he said. “I don’t understand either game.” He folded his hands. “But I think it’s the only result that would have been fair.”
On the side of the pavilion, at the scoreboard, Harold Quayle had stopped hanging numbers and was sitting on the grass with his back against the wooden board and his Panama hat over his face and his notebook on his knee, writing.
He did not stop until dark.
The column, on Thursday, ran to two pages. It was the longest Harold Quayle had ever written. It was headed, for the first time since October, not WHERE IS THE KING? but:
THE KING IS ON A VILLAGE GREEN IN GLOUCESTERSHIRE, UMPIRING
And it ended:
Your correspondent has covered the Crown for thirty-four years. He has seen it opened in, and crowned in, and buried in, and lost at sea. He had never, until Saturday, seen it umpire. He would like to report that it umpired very badly, being accused by two hundred people of losing count of the balls in the last over of the cricket, and being right and calling a home run safe that was, in the view of every American present, a foul by eleven feet. He would like to report, also, that nobody minded; that a Duke of eighty-four threw a ball forty feet and two hundred people stood up; that a Page of Honour who cannot bat hit two fours off the last two balls; that the Prime Minister of Great Britain bought a pint for the boy who had hit him for six; and that your correspondent, who flew four thousand miles to find out where the King was, found him, in a white coat, with a Maundy penny in his pocket, and was put to work.
He hung the six upside down. He was not asked back.
He intends to go back.