Chapter Nineteen #2
He hit the second. And the third. And the fourth.
Each time, the clay arced across the field, and each time, Lex’s hands and eyes did what they’d always done: found the target, calculated the lead, and put the shot where it needed to be.
He didn’t think about it. He just let his reflexes do the work.
“Good Lord,” the Duke said, after the fifth consecutive hit sent a puff of orange dust across the sky. “You’re a natural.”
“He’s not a natural,” Barnaby said. “He’s a professional athlete with elite visuomotor processing. He’d hit a clay pigeon blindfolded if you gave him the trajectory.”
“Thank you, Barns,” Lex said. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said about me.”
“Oh, I doubt that…” James smirked into the flask he had up against his face.
The afternoon settled into its rhythm. The sloe gin went around.
The shortbread went around. The game pie was demolished by Perry, who ate three wedges.
James shot well. The Duke shot better. Barnaby matched them both, while Perry continued to miss, and continued to blame the wind, the gun, the clay, the angle of the sun, and at one point the protection officers for distracting him by standing too quietly.
By the third round of the sloe gin, the formality had burned off entirely.
James had undone his collar and rolled his sleeves.
The Duke was sitting on an upturned crate, his gun broken across his knees, telling Perry about a shoot in the seventies where a beater had accidentally flushed a badger instead of a pheasant and the entire line had scattered.
Perry wasn’t listening. He was filming something on his mobile, presumably for the content calendar that governed his waking hours.
James loaded his gun and turned to face the group with the barrel pointed upward.
He planted his feet, brought the stock to his shoulder, and executed a quarter-turn that swept the gun in a tight arc, finishing with the barrel tipped skyward and his left hand extended in a flourish that belonged in a Napoleonic oil painting.
“The Spanish parada,” he announced. “Vidal taught me. It’s a traditional military salute from the—”
“Put the gun down, James,” Barnaby said.
“It’s a perfectly safe manoeuvre. The barrel was pointed—”
“The barrel was pointed at Perry’s head for approximately one-fifth of a second, which is one-fifth of a second too long, and Vidal taught you that at a nightclub in Cardona after an entire bottle of grappa, so forgive me if I don’t trust the provenance of this ‘historic parade move’.”
“Fair point,” James said. “Fair point.”
“You’re all cut off,” Barnaby said, though no mechanism existed to enforce this, and the Duke was already unscrewing the Thermos to top up his coffee with another measure of gin.
Barnaby was drunk. His rider’s discipline kept his spine straight even as the rest of him softened. But his guard was down. The careful distance he maintained between his body and other people’s bodies had dissolved, and Lex was the nearest warm surface.
It started with Barnaby’s shoulder pressing against his arm while they watched Perry attempt his seventh consecutive miss.
Then Barnaby’s hand was on Lex’s forearm while he talked about the time Meridian had refused a fence at Burghley and deposited him into a water jump.
The hand stayed there after the story ended, his fingers light on Lex’s skin.
When Lex loaded his gun for the next round, Barnaby leaned into his side and stayed there, his weight tipping against Lex’s ribs.
Lex held still. He let Barnaby lean. He let the contact happen without remarking on it. Drawing attention to it would make Barnaby aware of what his body was doing.
After Lex hit his next clay, Barnaby tipped forward and rested his forehead against Lex’s shoulder. Just rested it there, his face turned into the sleeve of Lex’s borrowed jacket, his breath warm through the waxed cotton.
Lex breathed in. He looked out across the field. Florence was asleep under the folding table, her nose tucked under her paw.
“He’s extraordinary,” Barnaby said, to nobody in particular and everyone at once. His voice was hoarse from the gin. His forehead was still against Lex’s shoulder. “He’s the most extraordinary person I know, and he doesn’t know it, because he’s too busy being loud.”
Nobody spoke. The field was quiet except for the wind in the hedgerow and Perry’s thumbs on his mobile screen.
Lex kept his eyes on the horizon and let the words settle in his chest. He didn’t make a joke. He didn’t deflect or undercut or resort to their usual banter. He just stood there, with Barnaby’s head on his shoulder, and let someone say something kind about him.
James broke the silence. “Did Bash ever tell you about the time he set off the fire alarms at Eton?” James said, turning to Lex with the particular brightness that meant he was about to commit character assassination on his closest friend.
“Don’t,” Barnaby said, lifting his head.
“It was my birthday. Half five in the morning. Barnaby decided he was going to bake me a chocolate cake, which is a lovely gesture from a boy who had, at that point, never buttered his own toast, let alone operated an oven.”
“I’d operated an oven.”
“Mrs Farrow let you play at turning the dials. That’s not the same thing.
He set the butter on fire, Lex. Not the cake.
The butter. Before it had been added to anything.
He somehow managed to ignite a block of Lurpak in a saucepan, and the smoke set off every alarm in the house.
Fifty boys were evacuated onto the front lawn in their pyjamas at dawn.
The headmaster was apoplectic. The fire brigade came.
And Barnaby was standing in the kitchen in an apron holding a flaming saucepan with oven gloves. ”
“The butter was supposed to melt,” Barnaby said. “That’s what the recipe said. Melt the butter. It didn’t specify a temperature or a time frame.”
“You were supposed to remove it from its highly flammable paper packaging before you did that, Bash.”
Lex was grinning so hard his face ached. “Did you get the cake, though?”
“No,” James said. “I got a fire safety lecture and a letter sent to my housemaster. Barnaby got a week’s worth of sanctions. The cake was a write-off. All I ever wanted for my fourteenth birthday was a chocolate cake from my best friend, and what I got was a building evacuation.”
“I made you a cake the following year,” Barnaby said, stiffly. “A successful one.”
“You had Mrs Farrow make it and put your name on it. I know this because you can’t ice a cake and the lettering was professional-grade.”
Barnaby drew himself up to his full height, which was undermined by the fact that he swayed slightly and had to correct himself by grabbing Lex’s sleeve.
“I stand by the intent behind my gesture,” he said.
“Wait until your next birthday, James. I’ll just pop into the nearest high street and get you some generic scented candles from John Lewis, shall I? ”
“They’ll be better than the ones you handmade that had wicks too big and made the jar shatter.”
Barnaby made an aggrieved noise and lunged at him. James caught his wrist without spilling his drink. “Vidal appreciated them,” Barnaby sulked.
“Then why does he only ever have Diptyque candles in his place, Bash?”
Lex pulled him back against his side. Barnaby went without resistance, settling into the space under Lex’s arm. “I’ll take one of those candles off you, Barns,” Lex murmured.
Barnaby was quiet for a moment, pressing his frowny face into Lex’s shoulder. “I’ll give you the one that smells like fig,” he said. “You’ll like it.”
“I will,” Lex agreed.
It was a good day.
The thought arrived without fanfare. The afternoon light was thinning across the parkland, and the Duke was loading the trap for one last round.
Perry was eating the final wedge of game pie, and James was sitting on the crate with his gun across his knees and a half-smile on his face that belonged to Jams and not the King, watching Lex coddle Bash into a better mood.
The Duke raised his flask. His eyes were on Lex and Barnaby, on Barnaby tucked under Lex’s arm, Barnaby’s hand still curled around the sleeve of Lex’s borrowed jacket, and his expression held no surprise or discomfort. He tipped his flask in a deliberate toast, and drank.