examiners made this morning, and it appears you’re eligible. They did say ‘All residents of the Midsummer School.’ ”

“Excuse me for being rude, sir,” Henry said through clenched teeth, “but I highly doubt that they are going to let a servant boy sit the exam for becoming a knight.”

“They have to,” Professor Stratford said, emphatically thumping his fist against a textbook. “And so do you. I swear on my folio of Twelfth Night, if you don’t take that exam I’ll … I’ll report you myself for sneaking into the library every night and borrowing books.”

“But,” Henry said, his brain spinning to make sense of what was happening, “it’ll never work. Even if I pass—and no Midsummer boy has passed in five years, in case you’ve forgotten—they’d never let me go. I’m a commoner. A ward of the Realm. I’m—”

“A perfect candidate,” Professor Stratford finished. “They’d be mad not to take you. Unless, of course, you want to scrub blackboards for the rest of your life?”

Henry sighed. Of course he didn’t. Why else had he struggled through math and history and that horrible Latin in his precious free hours? But Professor Stratford was only trying to help. They both knew that there weren’t many prospects for a fourteen-year-old with a birth certificate that read, baby boy found on church steps on the grimmest day of the year.

“I’m sorry,” Henry said, “but I am trying. I’m putting away money for proper schooling, and maybe one day I’ll have the chance to make my life less unfair, but until then I’m not going to aim for the impossible.”

“I think that’s a brilliant plan,” Professor Stratford snorted. “Why don’t you tell it to Galileo, to Milton, to Michelangelo? Tell them they shouldn’t have aimed for the impossible. Because, Henry, the most terrible thing in this world is to be haunted by those two little words ‘What if ?’ until the end of days.”

Henry sighed. He stared at his tutor, so determined to force the world into a new way of being, where hard work was valued and rewarded in the place of social standing. But the only meritocracy that Henry knew of belonged to their northern neighbors, and there were dark whispers of what price the Nordlandic people really paid for their so-called equality. For Henry, the world had always been divided into commoners and members of the aristocracy, with an unbreakable line between the two.

But times were changing—everyone said so. There were electric lights now and telegrams and steam engines and even the occasional automobile. It was nearly the turn of the century, and that alone was cause enough to wonder what novelties the future would hold. And what if Professor Stratford was right—what if he could sit the exam? He might fail. But he might pass. Would they really let him attend Knightley? To learn medicine, fencing, and diplomacy? To sit as a real student in the lectures at the most elite academy in the country, and not scramble for scraps of leftover lessons in darkened corridors, a mop over his shoulder?

“Professor, do you truly think this is what I should do?”

Henry and the professor stared at each other, fully aware of the consequences this decision might have. Both of them could lose their jobs. The late-night tutoring sessions they’d worked so hard to hide over the past nine months would be instantly obvious. But despite all this, Henry still hoped Professor Stratford would say yes. Henry tensed, waiting for his tutor’s answer.

“Je ne le pense pas, Henri. Je le connais.”

Translation: “I don’t think, I know.”

THE KNIGHTLEY EXAMINATIONS

Ten students stood nervously inside the Great Hall the next morning, awaiting the exam. Despite the early hour, they appeared immaculate, not a hair out of place, not a wrinkle in their trousers.

Henry, having rejected his staff uniform and donned instead his rumpled, secondhand trousers and badly patched shirtsleeves, tried not to fret that his brown hair spilled past his collar or that he hadn’t been able to locate his necktie. He peered through the doorway at the students inside the hall, none of them commoners. These were the boys whose dormitories and classrooms he had scrubbed for the past year, whose suppers he had served. But more important, none of them wanted to go to Knightley as badly as he did. For these boys, getting into Knightley would be an honor to boast about, like getting picked first at sport, but for Henry, it would mean everything.

And so he took a deep breath and