know how to explain that members of the serving staff didn’t usually sit down in the presence of a superior, much less across from them in comfortable, expensive chairs.

To his credit, Sir Frederick seemed to guess this. “Henry, please. You’re going to be a knight. You’ll have to stop acting like a serving boy sooner or later. Now sit.”

Henry sank into the luxurious chair, his left leg bouncing nervously.

“I’ve promised you an explanation, my boy,” Sir Frederick began, “and that will come in time. But no doubt you have questions, and we’ll tackle those first. For all that you held your tongue in the headmaster’s office, you seem an inquisitive sort. So ask away.”

Henry stared at the examiner in disbelief. Of course he had questions. Come to think of it, he was bursting with them. But Henry was used to taking orders from adults, to being told things rather than given the opportunity to find them out himself. And so Henry asked his question, the one he had been wondering ever since the dining hall had gone silent a half hour earlier.

“Sir, am I truly to attend Knightley?”

“Of course,” Sir Frederick assured him, as though it were the most natural thing in the world and not an exception that flew in the face of five hundred years’ tradition.

Sir Frederick began patting the pockets of his pin-striped vest and pulled a carved wooden pipe out of his left hip pocket and a book of matches out of his right. With the flare of a match, a bit of smoke, and a few contented puffs, the examiner leaned back in his chair, smiling at Henry.

“Anything else?”

Emboldened, Henry asked, “I don’t suppose it’s usual for you to allow anyone to take the exam—not just the students, I mean.”

Sir Frederick smiled, and his eyes glazed over as though he were not staring at Henry through the haze of his pipe smoke, as though his thoughts were very far away indeed.

“No, not usual. But not unusual either. You see, my boy, this is my first time as an examiner. I’m the medicine master at Knightley, and the new headmaster wanted to appoint his own examiner from among the willing faculty members.”

Henry frowned. He hadn’t known that Sir Frederick was one of the schoolmasters—and of medicine, no less—but Sir Frederick hadn’t answered his question at all.

“But—”

“But why, you mean?” Sir Frederick smiled wryly. “There is an explanation, you know. Quite simply, I grew up in a position similar to yours.”

“You were a servant?”

Henry doubtfully scrutinized the examiner’s well-cut suit and elaborately carved pipe, looking for traces of a kitchen boy or apprentice gardener.

“Similar, not identical,” Sir Frederick conceded. “I was the chaplain’s son at a respectable upper school, and they let me study there without fees, a sort of hanger-on student. In the evenings, I had to run school errands, and I lived with my father and not in the dormitory with the other boys. There was a famous exam at this school as well, for a prestigious scholarship to Camwell University. One of my schoolmasters wrote to the proctor and asked him if there mightn’t be a loophole to allow me to sit the exam, even though I was not listed as a proper student on the school register. The proctor took pity, and I won the scholarship. Of course, this was many years ago, but I’ve always wanted to do the same for another boy.”

“So that’s why you said any resident of the school was eligible,” Henry mused.

“Precisely,” Sir Frederick agreed, puffing on his pipe only to realize that it had gone out while he spoke. With a shrug, he tucked the pipe back into a waistcoat pocket. “I thought there might be another charity boy allowed to sit in the backs of the classrooms, perhaps a sick matron’s son or a cook’s nephew.”

“You wouldn’t want Cook’s nephew, sir,” Henry said, trying not to grin at the thought of Sander becoming a knight. “I’m afraid he took sick at the pub last night.”

Sir Frederick frowned for a moment, and then his face brightened. “You mean that older boy from breakfast who looked as though he had flu? Is that what was the matter with him?” Sir Frederick chuckled, delighted.

Henry stared at Sir Frederick, understanding what the examiner had wanted to explain: his past. And his motives for letting Henry take the exam.

Henry smiled weakly. A new thought was nagging at him, whispering doubt into the dark recesses of his mind: the students at Knightley