The boy’s days otherwise were dull and hot, damp and still. It was the burden of being eleventh. No one expected too much of eleventh. When he was younger—and twelfth—and the nursemaid still dressed him, he’d spent his days standing under the hornbeams, poking at the frogs and water bugs with sticks to see them jump and scatter. Now that he was older—and eleventh—and with a governor to dress and watch him, he spent his time staring toward the hornbeam-shadowed waters, wishing he might still go and poke at the creatures on the banks. But no. Eleventh had to know some things. His governor insisted, for example, that he know the letters of his own name. “You are well old enough. Why, I learned to write and read when I was just a child of ten,” he’d say, his nostrils flaring at the boy’s clearly-taller-than-ten height. So the boy’s mornings were spent tracing shapes—sharp mountains, steep valleys, stiff lines and crosses—in case he might ever need to sign, Governor told him, any documents related to the management of the estate when he came of age. “And you are eleventh,” Governor always reminded him, his voice oily and gray. “Eleventh is not inconceivable.”

The boy was not entirely sure what inconceivable meant, but he did not like the way the governor’s thin lip twitched when he said this word.

On this particular morning, the governor’s lip was twitching a good deal. The boy, sitting across from him at the long table, tracing the lines up and over their little mountains, glancing now and again at the ripples in the water and thinking of the frogs swimming there, could not help but notice the lip twitching and the way Governor kept looking toward the road with squinting eyes and furrowed brow.

Up and over the mountain, oh, were I poking frogs, how they’d jump—like that, eep! A splash—and that lip, look, that thin little worm, twitch, its tail, there it goes, twitch, again… and Mother, I hear her step, she is on the stair…

“Might I have some cooked cream now?” the boy asked hopefully. He tapped the just-traced letters. The lines were good.

The governor glanced at the marks. “That is not your name.” Twitch.

The boy looked at the lines, but he was not thinking of the lines. He knew a basket of quinces had been carried into the house; surely Cook had boiled them soft and jammy by now. How sweet they’d be stirred into cream. He tried again. “The shapes are right.”

“But not in the right order.” The little worm of the governor’s lip squeezed the words so tightly that each dropped away by itself into the air between them.

The boy, staring into the space where the words had fallen, was silent, thinking of the quinces.

“Go!” Governor waved violently.

The boy stood. He hesitated. “Cooked cream?”

“No! No cooked cream! Just go!” Governor waved again.