Hearts of Oak

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Dedication

For Catherine, Gabriel, and Jago

1

THE KING GLANCED ACROSS his chambers and saw his morning letter had arrived. He picked it up from the floor and was surprised by its weight. He turned it over in his hands. “It’s a thick one today,” the king said to his cat.

“I know,” agreed his cat, who was large and ginger and called Clarence. Clarence always delivered the morning letter to the king’s chambers, carrying it in his mouth, and so he was bound to notice when it was thicker than usual.

“What’s happened to make it this thick?” asked the king, squeezing the letter between his thumb and forefinger.

“Open it and we might find out,” said Clarence impatiently.

The king opened the envelope and pulled out the wad of paper that had been folded into thirds. He skimmed the summary on the uppermost page. “Oh right,” he said. “All the funerals for the victims of the building site collapse are being held today.” This meant the letter would be full of tributes from their friends and colleagues. And one of the victims, a man called Weston, had been a teacher for a long time. People always remembered their old teachers and they often sent tributes. The king counted the dead listed on the summary. “Wow. Nine funerals.”

“A terrible disaster, Your Highness,” said Clarence, shaking his head.

The king sat in his chair by the window, turned to the first page, and started reading.

Clarence sat on the small table by the king’s chair. After the king finished reading each page he placed it facing upward on the table so Clarence could read it. But Clarence was visibly disinterested and somewhere around the seventh page he became impatient. “Can’t we skip ahead?”

“No.”

“I need to read the construction report.”

This was sometimes a bone of contention between them. The king was always keen to read about the lives of his citizens but had no interest in the dry details of construction reports—as long as building was progressing he didn’t feel the need to know about it. Clarence was the other way around. But the king firmly believed he was right about this and Clarence was wrong—if the construction report was more interesting than the tributes they wouldn’t put it at the back.