Chapter Eighteen
Meridian had been restless in the cross-ties, stamping and tossing his head while Barnaby picked out his hooves, but an hour of groundwork in the outdoor school had settled him.
Barnaby had lunged him through his paces, long rein to working trot to collected canter, until the tension left his quarters and his stride came through even and soft.
Then he’d groomed him out, rugged him, turned him into the paddock, and stood at the fence for ten minutes watching him roll in a patch of mud that undid every minute of the grooming.
Horses were, in Barnaby’s experience, the only creatures on earth more committed to dismantling your work than a younger sibling.
He came in through the boot room, scraped his yard boots on the iron, and hung his Barbour on the peg beside his father’s.
The house smelled of toast and coffee and something rich, bacon fat rendered in a pan rather than grilled, which meant Mrs Farrow had been persuaded to do a full cooked breakfast instead of the continental his mother preferred on weekdays.
Barnaby washed his hands at the scullery sink, dried them on a towel, and walked through to the dining room.
The long table was laid for breakfast in the usual Chatham House fashion.
Silver chafing dishes on the sideboard, a rack of toast under a cloth, a pot of marmalade that Mrs Farrow made herself from the Seville oranges his mother had shipped from a supplier in Andalusia every January.
His father was at the head of the table in a tweed jacket and reading glasses, the Telegraph open beside his plate.
His mother was opposite, in a cream blouse with her hair pinned back, one hand resting on her coffee cup while she read something on her mobile.
Peregrine was hunched over a bowl of something violently coloured.
The cereal turned the milk a shade of blue that did not occur in nature.
Barnaby had once checked the box and discovered it contained more E-numbers than a chemistry set and listed its primary ingredient as “maize flour (with added vitamins!),” the exclamation mark performing an extraordinary amount of work. Perry ate it every morning.
Lex was there, in the chair beside his mother, holding a cup of tea. His hair was still damp from the shower. His forearms were bare on the white tablecloth, and the Duke was leaning forward in his chair, examining the ink that crept from beneath Lex’s sleeve.
“And this one?” His father tapped the edge of his reading glasses against the table. “The script, there. On the inside of your arm?”
Lex turned his wrist. “That’s my nan’s handwriting. She wrote me a note before my first professional fight. Give ‘em hell, baby. I got it done the week after she passed.”
“Marvellous,” the Duke said, with feeling.
“I nearly got one myself, you know. Sixty-seven, I think it was. No — sixty-eight. We were stationed in Aden. Chap in my platoon had a friend who did them out of a tin shed near the port. Anchor and crossbones. I had my shirt off and was ready to go, and then Dickie Fanshawe pointed out that my mother would have me disinherited, and that was the end of that.”
“You should get one,” Lex said. “It’s never too late. I know a bloke in Shoreditch who could sort you out. His place is very clean and he does all the footballers.”
The Duke looked genuinely tempted. Barnaby’s mother, without raising her eyes from her mobile, said, “No.”
Lex laughed, full-throated and delighted, and the Duke went pink with pleasure at having produced it. Barnaby pressed his tongue against his teeth to keep the grin from reaching his face.
Then he registered the figure at the far end of the table.
James was sitting to the right of the Duke, in a waxed jacket and a checked shirt with the collar open.
He would have had to plan this visit, make arrangements with his private secretary, and driven an hour and a half into Kent without telling Barnaby he was coming.
He looked up when Barnaby appeared in the doorway, and smiled.
Just a month ago, Barnaby would have crossed the room, dropped into the chair beside him, and stolen a triangle of his toast. Today, Barnaby bowed and said “Your Majesty,” before he pulled out the chair beside Peregrine and sat down.
The room absorbed his formality. His mother’s gaze lifted from her mobile for a fraction of a second.
His father turned a page of the Telegraph.
Perry’s spoon continued its circuit from bowl to mouth without interruption.
The Fitznorman-Bicesters had been hosting royalty since the Restoration.
They knew what a formal address at a family breakfast meant, and they knew better than to acknowledge it.
Lex looked between them, his brow creasing.
“D’you have a good ride?” James asked.
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Meridian behaving?”
“Perfectly.”
James picked up his tea. He took a sip, set it down, and tried again. “I was telling Lex about the time you fell off Meridian at Badminton. He stopped at the brush fence and you went over his neck and landed in the—”
“I remember.”
Mrs Farrow appeared with a fresh pot of coffee.
Barnaby poured himself a cup and drank it black, because adding milk required reaching past Perry for the jug, and he didn’t want to move more than was necessary.
Perry, who possessed the emotional radar of a coat stand, carried on eating his blue cereal and scrolling through something on his mobile beneath the table, where their mother couldn’t see the screen.
“How’s the cross-country course shaping up for Burghley?” James asked.
“Fine.”
“And the dressage scores from the last—”
“Fine.”
James set his toast down. He folded his hands on the table.
“Lex,” James said, turning. His voice shifted, warming to a register that was conversational and easy.
“How’s the youth programme, going? I’ve been reading the quarterly reports, and the Barking facility’s retention numbers are extraordinary.
What are you doing differently from the standard —”
Lex sat up straighter. He set his mug down and started talking about the gym, about the kids, about the new mentorship framework they’d built with the King’s Trust funding, and Barnaby could see him responding to the attention the way anyone responded to the King’s attention.
James listened. He asked follow-up questions that proved he’d read the reports properly, not just skimmed them, and his body was angled towards Lex.
It was masterful. It was also a performance Barnaby had watched James give a thousand times to a thousand people who didn’t know they were being set up for a charm offensive, and watching him give it to Lex made Barnaby’s jaw tighten.
“James.”
The name landed in the middle of one of Lex’s sentences. Lex stopped talking. James turned.
“Lex is a guest in my family’s house,” Barnaby said. His voice was level and cold. “You’re interrogating him at breakfast.”
“I’m having a conversation with him.”
“You’re cross-examining him on programme metrics over toast and marmalade. He didn’t come here for a performance review.”
Lex’s gaze moved between them. He opened his mouth. “It’s fine, Barns. We were just—”
“You were being interrogated,” Barnaby said, without looking at him. “He does it beautifully. It’s his greatest talent. But you don’t have to answer to him in my house.”
James’s hazel eyes were steady on Barnaby’s face. He didn’t flinch or pull rank. He just sat there, holding the hit, and said nothing.
? ? ?
The house emptied in stages. His mother left first, kissing Barnaby on the cheek and telling him there was cold chicken in the larder if he wanted lunch.
Then Lex, Perry, and his father departed for the village, which apparently required the same kind of elaborate preparation that would accompany a crossing of the Cairngorms, rather than just walking a mile down a lane to buy the Saturday papers.
Lex had hesitated in the doorway. “Coming, Barns?”
“I’ll stay. I want to do some reading, and we’ll go on our own walk with Florence later.”
Florence, who was asleep under the breakfast table, twitched one ear in acknowledgement of her name and resumed her nap. Lex’s gaze jumped between Barnaby and James, clearly nervous about leaving the two of them alone together.
“Go,” Barnaby said. “Perry wants to show you the pub.”
Barnaby took his book to the sun room at the back of the house.
The light was cool and even, the sofa was deep enough to disappear into, and nobody came in here except Barnaby and Florence.
He stretched out with his stockinged feet on the arm, opened his novel, a Patrick O’Brian he’d been meaning to reread since Cambridge, and let the quiet of the house settle around him.
Florence padded in after ten minutes and collapsed at his feet with a groan that suggested the walk from the dining room had cost her dearly. He managed to get through three pages before James appeared in the doorway.
Barnaby didn’t look up. He heard James cross the room, felt the sofa dip under his weight, and registered that James had sat not in the armchair opposite, not at the far end of the sofa, but directly beside him, close enough that his hip pressed against Barnaby’s thigh.
Barnaby turned a page without acknowledging this encroachment into his personal space.
“Barnaby.” James’s voice was quiet and stripped of performance. “I like him. I like him with you.”