Rule One

The back room of Eight Bars was where Mrs Merriweather kept the things that did not fit anywhere else. There were six crates of empty bottles, a Christmas tree in a box with XMAS 2019 on it in marker, a framed photograph of a navy destroyer, a filing cabinet with no handles, a round table, five chairs, and on the far wall, at exactly regulation height, which somebody had measured with a tape and written on the plaster in pencil, a dartboard.

At two o’clock on Tuesday the ninth of September, the Household’s Committee on the Conduct of the Sovereign While Employed met there for the first time.

Dame M sat with her back to the dartboard, because she was in the chair and the chair was the only one with arms. Bridget sat on her left, in her coat, with her handbag on her knees, looking at the Christmas tree in the box as though it had personally offended her. Inspector Castellanos sat on her right, in a jacket and an open-necked shirt, with his hands folded on the table, having come from the training school on the Axis, where he had a class at four. And at the end of the table, with a clipboard, a fountain pen, a second fountain pen in case the first one failed, and a copy of the Licensing Act of the Columbia District with seventeen coloured tabs in it, sat Mr Edmund Quennell.

Mr Quennell was twenty-five. He had joined the Household in June from the civil service examination with the highest marks in his year, and he had been given the committee, Dame M said, because he had never in his life been inside a bar and could therefore approach the question with a clear mind. He had a long, earnest, eager face, like a heron that has been to a good school. He had arrived at a quarter to two to set out the papers. He had stood in the doorway of the bar, at a quarter to two, looking at it,, before coming in.

Frederick was not on the committee. The committee was about him, and Dame M had said that it would be improper for him to sit on it, in the voice in which she said things that were not going to change. He was behind the bar, polishing glasses, which did not need polishing, eleven feet away through the open door, where he could hear every word.

“I have drafted,” said Mr Quennell, “a preliminary schedule.”

He passed copies round the table. They were typed. They were four pages long.

“Section one,” said Mr Quennell. “The Sovereign’s hours. Section two, the Sovereign’s duties. Section three, permitted beverages. Section four, the Sovereign and the public. Section five, emoluments. Section six, the cellar.” He looked up. “I have taken the liberty of leaving section six blank, pending the report on Friday’s incident.”

“The foam,” said Bridget.

“The pressurised release,” said Mr Quennell, “yes.”

Castellanos was reading section four. He read slowly, all of it, and then put it down.

“Good,” he said.

“Thank you, Inspector.”

“Not that.” Castellanos put a finger on a paragraph. “This. The Sovereign shall at all times remain behind the bar.” He looked up. “That’s good. That’s the only one that matters. The rest of it’s paper.”

Mr Quennell made a note, with the first fountain pen.

---

At six minutes past two the door to the yard opened and two men came in backwards carrying a keg of lager between them.

“Sorry,” said the first, a large young man with a beard. “Sorry, sorry, through here, love, is it, she said through the back, mind your feet.” They came past the end of the table with the keg, between Mr Quennell’s chair and the wall, and Mr Quennell lifted his clipboard above his head like a man crossing a river, and they went on through the door into the bar and down the cellar steps, and came back, and went out, and came in again with another one.

They brought six kegs. It took eleven minutes. Nobody at the table spoke. Dame M sat through all of it with her hands on the papers and her face showing nothing whatsoever, the way she had once sat through a forty-minute speech by an Archbishop who had lost his place, and when the door shut behind them for the last time she said, “Section two,” and they went on.

---

At twenty past two the Duke arrived.

He arrived, as Frederick had known he would, because he had been told on Sunday at lunch and had said, “Tuesday. Good.”, on the Thirty-Two. He came in through the front door of Eight Bars on his own, in his tweed cap and his jacket, without a stick, as he went everywhere now, slowly, with his left foot dragging very slightly on the tiles, and Kimura stood up off her stool by the window, and sat down again when he looked at her. He came down the length of the bar, past his son, and stopped.

“Ninety-one,” said the Duke.

“Ninety-one?”

“The bus. Took. Ninety-one. From the.” He stopped, and found it. “Gate.” He looked pleased. “Forty minutes.”

“Did anybody recognise you?”

His father thought about it.

“Everybody,” said the Duke of Cumberland, with deep satisfaction, and went through into the back room.

He did not sit at the table. He had not been asked to sit at the table, and he was not on the committee, and he knew it. He went past the table, and past Dame M, who rose half out of her chair and was waved down, and past the crates and the Christmas tree, to the far wall, and took a set of darts out of the pocket of his jacket, three, with brass barrels and red flights, that Frederick had never seen before in his life, and stood at a line on the floor that somebody had painted there in white, and looked at the board.

“Sir,” said Dame M.

“Go on,” said the Duke, not looking round. “I’m. Practising.”

He threw.

The first dart went into the treble twenty. The second went into the treble twenty. The third went into the treble twenty, so close to the other two that it knocked the second one’s flight off, and the flight fell on the floor by Mr Quennell’s shoe, and Mr Quennell looked at it.

“Section three,” said Dame M, after a moment. “Permitted beverages.”

The Duke went to the board, and took the darts out, and came back to the line, and threw again.

Frederick stood behind the bar with a glass in one hand and a cloth in the other and looked through the door at his father, and thought: where did he learn that, and found that he did not know, and that there were, apparently, after eighteen years, still things about his father that nobody had told him.

---

“Section five,” said Mr Quennell, at a quarter to three. “Emoluments.”

“Wages,” said Bridget.

“Emoluments include wages,” said Mr Quennell, “but are not limited to them. The Sovereign is paid an hourly rate by the proprietor. That is a private contract and the Household has no view on it.” He turned a page. “The question that arises is gratuities.”

“Tips,” said Bridget.

“Gratuities,” said Mr Quennell. “On Friday the fifth, according to the report of Sergeant Kimura,” he lifted a beer mat out of a plastic sleeve clipped to his clipboard, “at nine thirty-three in the evening, a member of the public, a driver on the Forty-One, left the Sovereign a coin of one pound.” He looked round the table. “The coin bore the Sovereign’s head.”

“I’ve seen it,” said Bridget. “It’s on the wall.”

“It is on the wall,” Mr Quennell agreed. “It is in a small frame, between the photograph of the first keg and a photograph of the Minister for Transport which I am advised the Minister has asked to have removed. The question for the committee is whether the Sovereign may lawfully accept a gratuity.” He looked at Castellanos. “Inspector?”

“Not my department.”

“It is a security question in part. A gratuity is a gift. Gifts to the Sovereign are recorded. If every patron of this establishment leaves a coin.”

“Then he’ll be very rich,” said Bridget, “and it’ll still be his. It’s a tip. You do the work, you get the tip. I’ve had tips. I had tips for nine years at the Station Hotel, on the floor, before I ever went in a kitchen, and nobody wrote them down, and nobody told the King.” She folded her hands on her handbag. “I’ll tell you what you want to know about tips, young man, which is that the only people who don’t like them are the people who don’t get them.”

Mr Quennell wrote this down.

“Nevertheless,” said Dame M.

She said it quietly. Everybody stopped.

“Nevertheless,” said Dame M, “the Sovereign is not a waiter. The Sovereign is the fount of honour. He gives. He is not given to, in that way, by strangers, for service. The constitutional position is not ambiguous.” She looked at the papers. “I propose a rule. The King shall not be tipped.”

“Seconded,” said Mr Quennell, before anybody else could.

“In favour?”

Dame M raised her hand. Mr Quennell raised his. Castellanos looked at the ceiling for a moment, and then raised his.

“Against?”

Bridget did not raise her hand. She looked at the Christmas tree.

“Abstaining,” she said. “On the grounds that it won’t work.”

“Carried,” said Dame M. “Rule One.”

Mr Quennell wrote it at the top of a clean sheet, in capitals, with the second fountain pen, and underlined it twice, and looked at it with an expression of deep and quiet happiness, as though it were the first sentence of a very long book that he had always wanted to write, which, as it turned out, it was.

At the far wall, the Duke threw three darts into the treble twenty and said, to nobody, “Won’t. Work.”

---

Through the hatch, which was a square opening in the wall between the back room and the end of the bar, where plates came through when there were plates, a voice said, “Item.”

Everybody turned round.

Kimura was sitting on her stool on the other side of the hatch, at the end of the bar, with her back to it, and had not turned round, and was drinking a glass of something pale that Frederick had made for a woman at one o’clock and got wrong.

“Sergeant Kimura,” said Dame M.

“Ma’am. Section four, paragraph three.” Kimura did not turn round. “The Sovereign’s protection officer shall at all times be visible to the Sovereign and shall maintain a professional distance from the bar.”

“Yes?”

“I’m on a stool, ma’am. At the bar. It’s a bar stool. It’s the only professional distance there is.” She drank. “If I’m not at the bar, I’m in the street. If I’m in the street, I can’t see him. If I’m standing up in the middle of the room in a suit, everybody looks at me and not at him, and he drops a glass.” She put her own glass down. “I’d like it struck.”

Dame M looked at Castellanos.

Castellanos looked at the hatch, and the back of Kimura’s head, for some time.

“She’s right,” he said.

“Struck,” said Dame M.

Mr Quennell struck it, with a single neat line, and initialled the margin.

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Kimura, through the hatch, and went back to her glass, which was, Frederick realised, a sauvignon blanc with the lime cordial in it that should have gone into the woman’s soda, and which she was drinking anyway, without expression, because it would otherwise have been poured away.

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On Friday the licensing inspector came.

She came at half past five, before the crowd was thick, a small brisk woman in a grey trouser suit with a laminated badge on a lanyard, and she went to the bar and showed Mrs Merriweather the badge, and said that it was a routine visit, that she visited every licensed premises in the Fourth Ward twice a year, that it was entirely a coincidence that she was visiting this one on the second Friday in September, and that she would like to see the identification of all members of staff serving alcohol, please, so that she could confirm that they were over eighteen.

“Of course,” said Mrs Merriweather, and looked at Frederick.

Theo had his already. Theo had a Realm identity card and a St John Ambulance card and a library card and an Ellicott student card that had expired in June and a Milwaukee Public Transport youth pass from 2026, which he had kept, and he laid them all out on the bar in a row, like a hand of cards, and the inspector looked at the identity card and said, “Thank you, Mr Hartigan,” and pushed the rest back.

Then she looked at Frederick.

“Sir,” she said. “Identification.”

“I haven’t got any.”

The inspector waited.

“I’ve never had any,” said Frederick. “There isn’t any. I don’t have a passport. I don’t have a driving licence. I don’t have an identity card. They don’t make one.” He thought. “I had a library card at Brookside. In 2019. But it said Frederick, Prince of Columbia, so I don’t think it’s valid now. And I don’t know where it is.”

The inspector looked at him.

“The law,” she said, “is perfectly clear. Every person serving alcohol on licensed premises in the Columbia District shall, on the request of an inspector, produce proof of age.” She looked at her clipboard, which was shorter than Mr Quennell’s. “It doesn’t make an exception.”

“No.”

“For anybody.”

“No,” Frederick agreed. “I don’t think it should.”

There was a pause. People had started to listen. People at Eight Bars, he was finding, always started to listen.

The inspector looked at the till, and at the brass bell over it, and at the wall behind the bar, where there were now four framed photographs and a pound coin, and at the pound coin.

Then she put her hand in the pocket of her trouser suit and took out a coin of her own, a pound, and put it on the bar, head up, and looked at it, and at him, and at it.

“Is that you?” she said.

He looked at it. It was him at fifteen, in profile, looking left, in a portrait he had sat for over three hours with a man walking round him with callipers.

“Yes,” he said.

“Born when?”

“Second of May, 2013.”

The inspector did the arithmetic, visibly, with her lips.

“That’s over eighteen,” she said, and picked up the coin, and put it back in her pocket, and wrote something on the clipboard, and said, “Thank you, sir. Very good. Carry on.” And left.

On Tuesday the committee met again, and Mr Quennell, who had heard about it from Kimura’s beer mat, proposed Rule Two, which was carried unanimously, Bridget voting for the first time:

Rule Two. Where the Sovereign is asked for proof of age, he shall produce a coin of the realm.

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At a quarter past eight on the second Friday, Mr Abernathy came in.

He came in the way he had come into homeroom every morning for four years, at the same time, at the same speed, in the brown jacket, and the bar, which was loud, did not go quiet, exactly, but went down a little, the way water goes down in a bath when somebody large gets in. He walked to the bar. There was a stool at the bar, the third from the window end, that had been empty since six, although the bar was three deep everywhere else, and Frederick had wondered why, and now understood, because Mr Abernathy sat on it, and it was evidently his, and had been for years, and the whole of Garfield Street knew it.

“Mr Hanover,” said Mr Abernathy.

“Sir.”

“A pint of bitter. If you would.”

Frederick pulled it. Forty-five degrees. The side of the glass, not the bottom. Straighten as it fills. A finger of head. He put it down on a beer mat in front of Mr Abernathy, and Mr Abernathy looked at it.

He looked at it. Then he took it up, and drank about a quarter of it, and put it down again, exactly on the mat, and took a red pen out of the inside pocket of the brown jacket, and uncapped it, and moved the glass two inches to the left, and wrote on the beer mat, in the small square hand that had written on thirty-one lab reports a week for four years.

He capped the pen. He moved the glass back.

He did not say anything.

Frederick, when he went past with a tray of empties a minute later, looked.

On the beer mat, under the ring of the glass, in red, it said: C+. Head: adequate. Temperature: adequate. Angle: lost at the end. See me.

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At nine, Marcus played.

His mother had said not the first Friday, and this was the second. He had been in the booth by the pool table since seven with the case on his knees, waiting, wearing a jacket and tie, which he did not otherwise wear, and at nine o’clock exactly his mother rang the brass bell once and said, very loudly, over the whole bar, “Ladies and gentlemen, my son,” and stood back, with the camera.

The bar did not go quiet. It went quieter. People looked round. The English form, in a booth, looked at each other in the way of people who are about to be polite about something. Marcus stood up on the little platform by the window, which was a pallet with a carpet over it, and took the trombone out of the case, and put it together, and looked at the room, and Frederick, behind the bar, braced himself, because he had heard Marcus play eight bars of God Save the King in lost property at fifteen, and had stood up for it, and had loved it, and it had been, in a technical sense, very loud.

Marcus played something slow.

Frederick did not know what it was. It was a jazz tune, an old one, the kind that sounds like it was written in a basement at two in the morning by somebody who had just been left, and Marcus played it low and soft, with the slide barely moving, and every note came out round and dark and exactly where it was supposed to be, and the bar went quiet. Really quiet. The English form stopped looking at each other. A man at the bar put his glass down very carefully so as not to make a noise. Kimura, on her stool, turned round, for the first time that night, and looked.

When it ended, nobody clapped for a moment. Then everybody did.

Mrs Merriweather did not take a photograph. She stood by the till with the camera in her hands and did not lift it, and looked at her son on the pallet with the trombone, and her face did the thing that faces do when they have been proved right about something, in front of everybody, after a very long time.

“I told you,” she said to Frederick, not taking her eyes off Marcus. “I told everybody.”

Mr Abernathy, on his stool, uncapped the red pen, and pulled a clean beer mat towards him, and wrote on it, and pushed it to the end of the bar, where it was passed hand to hand along the counter, through six people, to the pallet by the window, and Marcus picked it up, and read it, and went red to the roots of his hair.

It said: A.