The Crowned Lion
I sketched the concept of the painting in a few words. I had even named the place that was to stand in the background, so the artist would be able to pack the paints and be on the road before long.
"How long will it take?"
"I can have it finished within a week."
I checked the desk calendar. A week. That ought not to be too tight.
"I'm counting on you."
A month later, with every preparation behind me, I flew to London for the interview. Baker was waiting at the airport. From the Royal School admission papers to the rooms where I would stay for the time being, he had arranged it all. It had been a personal favor, and still he gave no sign of finding it a nuisance. The reason was simple.
"Do you have any idea how much they're paying me?"
As expected, the finest motivation in the world is a bank balance. A Bentley limousine stood waiting in the car park.
"The interviews started yesterday. I went over to get a feel for the place, and wouldn't you know it—every last one of them rolled up in a Bentley. So I borrowed one."
Fair enough. If they were going to weigh the parents' money as well, there was no harm in arriving properly dressed for it. That aside—
"The interviews started yesterday?"
"Yes. More than ten thousand applicants, I hear. The interviews alone look like they'll take about a week."
A hundred and twenty places, and more than ten thousand people turning up? That put the odds somewhere around a hundred to one. No—they had said aristocrats were admitted without an interview at all. Fight it out over the seats that remained, and it would be closer to a hundred and fifty to one. Absolute madness.
"In you get, then."
Baker and I sat side by side in the back.
"Where shall I take you? We can stop at the lodgings first, or you could have a look at the Royal School..."
"The school."
"I thought you'd say that."
The Bentley gathered speed at once, and yet not a whisper of noise reached the inside of the car. I was left to gaze out the window in a silence as complete as anyone could ask for.
"This isn't a school. It's a castle."
"It's something of a pride of Britain, after all."
Astonishingly, a broad river ran straight through the grounds. At this rate you could take a boat out during games. And that was not the end of it. Across the vast lawn, several horses stood in full tack, waiting on their masters' word. Well, riding, polo, and the rest—horses are indispensable to aristocratic sport, I'll grant that. And here we are, with the twenty-first century on the doorstep, still carrying on about aristocrats. Not many people would look kindly on a spectacle like this. And yet the moment those same people came into money, they could think of nothing but playing at nobility. Strange, how it always went. No wonder there were more than ten thousand applicants.
The place was a crush. The parents who had come along each wore a face of perfect confidence. Men and women who had seized success in their own fields, they would never imagine failing here, whatever the odds. Today, tomorrow, and the day after that, parents with the very same expressions would keep gathering, and then they would try to confirm their own specialness on these grounds.
"This is fun."
"...?"
"I'm glad I came."
I turned and started for the car park.
"A-already? You're leaving?"
"I've seen it. What else is there?"
Back at the lodgings I unpacked and changed into my running clothes. A flight that long ought to have worn me out, but perhaps I was still young enough; the travel fatigue already felt as if it had lifted. I tied my shoes and stepped outside. A fine London drizzle was coming down, and I paid it no mind. May as well run, and see the neighborhood while I'm at it.
The richest house in Britain belonged to the Duke of Grosvenor. They were said to own most of the choicest ground in London, and perhaps that was why. Wherever I went, the family's crest turned up. The interesting part was that the heir of the house was due to enter the Royal School next year. The unusual flood of applicants this year probably owed something to that as well—a chance to become friends with the Grosvenor successor. Word had it that the disclosed assets alone ran to something like twenty trillion won, tens of billions of dollars. Land a connection with a ducal house, and it would beat winning the lottery a few dozen times over. That would be the thinking.
They could think what they liked. I didn't need anyone to make a friend of me. Please, just let me in. I refuse to end as a science-high-school boy! More precisely, I didn't want to inherit Hyeon-gang. Heh. Wait. Now that I thought of it, that boy from the ducal house was an heir too, wasn't he? Was he chewing on troubles like mine? The sense of kinship lasted only a moment. First, look after my own business.
I picked up speed, everything in me narrowed to the tips of my feet. Good. Faster, then. More, and more, and more—a pace that set my calves burning. And then, of all things, someone tore past me. I was no athlete, but when it came to running I didn't fall behind just anywhere, and still the gap widened the harder I ran.
"Ha!"
I was so startled I stopped dead. I stood there staring blankly after the receding back: a glossy green windbreaker, and across the center of it a grizzly bear with its jaws stretched wide. An athlete? If he played football, that kind of pace was enough to make me want to offer him a contract. Regrettably, the wish went nowhere. The man slipped into an enormous mansion and vanished. Some young master from a distinguished house, then. A house that size in London—just how rich did you have to be? I let out a short laugh. Not the sort of thought the third generation of Hyeon-gang ought to be having. Time to head back. Drizzle, and more drizzle, and so my first day in London came to a close.
Jack stepped into the hall and shook the rain from his coat. From somewhere deep in the house his mother's voice came floating out.
"It's raining. What are you doing, exercising?"
"Weather doesn't matter in the slightest to a soldier."
"You're a soldier? You're still a student..."
A savory smell drifted in from far off.
"Didn't I tell you the interview is tomorrow? Have you prepared?"
"What's there to prepare? I won't get in anyway."
"And why on earth wouldn't you?"
He had put the application in under his parents' nagging, but Jack had only ever wanted to be a soldier, and among soldiers, special forces. The sort you see in films—the counterterror men. To serve his country in the British SAS had been Jack's dream for a long time.
"I'll wash up and be out."
He went to his room for a change of clothes, and the moment he saw the posters papering the walls his heart kicked for no good reason. The SAS on operations in the Falklands War: a sight he met every time he came through that door. Thump. Thump. How could it still thrill him, every single time? To settle himself he started on pull-ups. Ordinary ones gave him nothing, so he had to hang a twenty-kilogram plate from his belt. Only after three sets did he finally feel calm. Come to think of it, the interview really is tomorrow. His true goal was only Sandhurst, the British Army's officer academy. Whatever came before it—the Royal School or a state school—was nothing but a stepping-stone. Still, they had said he had to show his face.
"I'll talk whatever nonsense comes to mind and come home."
The next day, at the London Royal School.
"You're telling me all of this is your own property?"
The preliminary interviewer stared at me, openly startled. In truth I was startled too. It was only admission to a secondary school, and yet there was a preliminary interview, and a proper interview after that. They claimed it was nothing but a few simple questions to confirm who you were, but I couldn't quite shake the feeling that the whole thing was excessive.
"These are pounds? Not won?"
"Pounds. I'm certain."
They had asked after my parents' assets, and I had said I didn't know. Leaving it there felt awkward, so I had roughly converted my own money into pounds and written the figure down. I could understand the disbelief.
"Did you inherit it?"
"No. I earned it."
"Polished a billionaire's shoes for him every day, did you?"
If it wasn't an inheritance, then a gift?—that was the question, dressed up in British humor. Not quite a sneer. His imagination simply stopped there.
"The papers should say how I earned it."
Only then did the interviewer turn to the attached documents. He had not read three lines before he looked up.
"There seems to be something here that isn't very pleasant."
"The da Vinci?"
"Don't tell me you wrote it down knowing what it was."
"No reason to hide it. I didn't do anything wrong."
Perhaps it struck him as the obstinacy peculiar to a rich young master. He shook his head, slow and disbelieving. Right. You're the one who fails, not me. Something along those lines.
"One last thing. It says three recommenders, but there are only two letters."
"Yes."
"We didn't mislay one, I trust?"
"Of course not."
"Very well. That will be all."
He handed me a badge to show that the preliminary interview was finished. Presumably I would need it to get into the interview room. A lion wearing a crown. I looked down at it for a while.
The interview itself seemed to be done in groups of three. I studied the students who had been put with me. On my left sat a white boy whose red hair was the first thing you noticed. Set aside the long face, and he was handsome enough. He had been muttering to himself the whole time, so I had assumed he was preparing for the interview.
"To be, or not to be, that is the question..."
And what do you know—he was reciting a line from Shakespeare's tragedy, Hamlet. After that he went on rattling off Hamlet's speeches, the tone shifting again and again. Was he preparing for a play? Sure enough, the script he kept taking out was crowded with interpretations in his own hand. He must have felt me looking. He turned my way.
"Am I disturbing you?"
"No. I was only curious."
"Then I may continue?"
"Of course."
I turned the other way. The boy on my right was solidly built and white, wearing the gravest expression in the world. There was nothing rough about him; if anything, he gave off the air of an eccentric. What was strange was how short he looked sitting down, even allowing for the fact that I was on the tall side. Can two pairs of shoulders really sit that far apart? Uneasy, I dropped my eyes. What is this?
He was sitting on empty air. The invisible chair they used to make you hold as a punishment back at school—why? He looked as if he had been at it for a good thirty minutes, and there wasn't the slightest sign of strain. He wasn't a gymnast. How was he doing it? Just then a member of staff, there to keep things moving, turned toward us.
"Benedict Hiddleston, Jack 'Tiger' Grylls, Jihun Park. You're next, so please be ready."