Chapter Five
Now
The Bentley pulled into the gravel courtyard at Kensington Palace, and James got out before his protection officer had closed the distance to the door. He turned left, towards the service entrance that fed down into the warren of offices on the lower floors. Benton fell into step beside him.
The corridors down here had none of the grandeur of the upper floors.
The carpet was a hard-wearing grey-brown pile favoured by airport hotels, and the lighting was overhead strip rather than chandelier.
It smelled faintly of coffee gone cold in a pot and the mustiness of old furniture in a damp room.
The press office was in full panic. James spent significant chunks of his day in here, and he had never seen it quite like this.
The room was full, and four different televisions were on four different news channels.
A phone rang somewhere, but nobody moved to answer it.
In the corner, a young woman James didn’t recognise was crying quietly into a mug of tea, while the senior duty officer stood behind her with one hand on her shoulder, dictating something into his own mobile in a low, rapid undertone.
The room registered him in waves, desk by desk, until the entire press office was on its feet.
“Carry on,” he said.
Nobody quite did. They had all heard it. They must have. The palace machinery had been aware of the recording for hours now, and every person in this room had a job that required them to have listened to it.
James moved his eyes across the faces of his staff, waiting for the unmet gaze, the half-second where a person who had known him one way resettled him as something else. He got back the same alert professional attention as always, from people trained not to react in a crisis.
Sir Cecil emerged from a doorway, white-haired and immaculate as ever, and crossed the office. He took James’s elbow and steered him towards the conference room at the rear.
“Sir. Through here, if you would.”
James let himself be steered. Benton followed at his shoulder, and a fourth figure peeled away from a cluster of aides and joined them: Marina Halpern, the Director of Communications.
Sir Cecil opened the conference room door, ushered the three of them inside, and shut it behind himself.
The room was too cold and far too bright, the strip lights buzzing overhead.
Cecil set his folder down on the long table, and then, before James could move to his usual chair, he turned and put his hand on James’s upper arm.
He didn’t say anything. He squeezed down once on James’s bicep, and held on.
Cecil had spent forty years in royal service and had touched James perhaps three times in all of it: a handshake at thirteen when he was heading off to board at Eton, a hand at his back the morning of his father’s state funeral, and now this.
James fixed his eyes on a point on the wall just above Cecil’s shoulder.
If he looked at Cecil’s face he was going to come apart in the conference room, and that was not an option right now.
“Sir.” Cecil released his arm and gestured to the chair. “Please.”
James sat. Benton took the seat to his left while Marina remained standing at the foot of the table.
“Cecil. Start yelling. Please. It would make me feel better.”
“This isn’t the moment for that, Sir.”
“It rather feels like the moment for it.”
“It isn’t.” Cecil opened his folder. “Sir, we have options. Permit me to walk you through them in order. But I also think it’s important for us to consider the current landscape.
Polling on the question of a gay monarch has sat above sixty per cent for three years, and above seventy among the under-forties.
The Church of England, since the Lambeth concordat, no longer considers the matter a bar to coronation.
And your late father, with his customary foresight, pushed through the Royal Succession (Surrogacy) Provisions in 2019, which cleared the legal route to an heir of the body conceived outside a marriage between a king and a queen.
The constitutional architecture, Sir, is already in place.
It has been in place for some time. We are not, in any meaningful sense, in 1953, or in the midst of a Lavender Scare. ”
“Go on.”
“The first option is a super-injunction.” Cecil set a single sheet of paper in front of him.
“Marina has spoken with Carter-Ruck. They believe we have grounds, and they believe a judge can be found tonight. Mr Justice Hadley is on the rota. He’s sympathetic to the Palace and to the privacy arguments, and Carter-Ruck have appeared in front of him eleven times in the past two years. ”
“With what success?”
“Nine in our favour. The other two settled out of court before judgment.”
James turned the sheet over. It was blank on the back. “How long does an injunction hold?”
“Indefinitely, in principle. In practice, until someone names it in the Commons under parliamentary privilege, or until a foreign outlet runs the story and the British press argues the cat is out of the bag. We estimate we could run it for between six and eighteen months. Possibly longer.”
“And the recording?”
“Suppressed. The Sun would be barred from publication. Mr Wells would be barred from speaking. Any subsequent leak would be in contempt.”
James looked down at the sheet. The country would go about its business with no idea that its King had ever sobbed down a mobile phone about desperately wanting another man. Six to eighteen months of waiting for the news to break. Possibly longer.
“Sir. Forgive me. If I may speak frankly.”
“Always.”
“We knew,” Cecil said. “I knew. Your father knew, in his way, though he never asked the question outright. There has been, for some years now, an unspoken understanding in this office about the men, such as Mr Whitlock, who you have trusted. I still have the programme I drew up for him. Before that, for a time, we did some scenario planning around Lord Ashworth. If anything had developed between the two of you, we were prepared. We considered him most acceptable. He would have made an excellent Prince Consort, and the Duke of Clarence title was to be settled on him. We have all of us looked the other way, Sir, because it was easier, and because we believed it was kinder. We let it happen without comment.”
Heat climbed the back of James’s neck. He was running through the last few years, every shoot at Sandringham, every Thursday Barnaby had dropped by on his way to somewhere else, trying to work out what had given him away.
His team had been scenario planning, Cecil had said, around him ending up with Barnaby. Some working group in the bowels of the office had noticed how he’d been around his best friend, and had been preparing for him to find his nerve.
What none of them knew was that he and Bash had already tried.
There had been a year at Eton when they had been something to each other in private, sharing stolen moments in each other’s rooms after lights out, in the back of the sports sheds, and once in a tack room at Windsor on an exeat weekend.
They had been sixteen, and clumsy with it, and James had loved Barnaby in the breathless way you could only love someone when you were that young.
If anyone had given him the slightest indication that Barnaby was a possibility, that it wouldn’t be the end of the Crown if he made a life with Barnaby as his Prince Consort, he might have tried his luck one more time before Lex had made his appearance and removed the option altogether.
Maybe.
“We told ourselves that we were protecting you,” Cecil said.
“And perhaps in some narrow sense we were. But we were also protecting ourselves, and the institution, from a conversation that none of us wished to have at the time. So if you ask me for an injunction, Sir, I will go and get you one. I will have Hadley on the line in ten minutes, and I will do everything in my power to keep that awful man and The Sun quiet. But I would be failing in my duty to you if I did not first ask whether suppression is what you actually want, or whether it is what we have trained you to want.”
James didn’t speak. The institution might be ready to stop pretending. The architecture was in place to allow James to live out in the open, and his mind went, of all places, to Lex’s flat the other night.
Vidal had drunk too much, eaten too little, and fallen asleep against Beauchamp’s shoulder sometime between the second sex scene and the third of the episode.
James had watched Beauchamp adjust, easing the cushion behind Vidal’s head, lifting an arm to settle him, and holding him there for the rest of the night.
At some point Beauchamp had bent his head and pressed a kiss to Vidal’s mouth, slack and parted in sleep.
He’d looked up afterwards and caught James watching, and the colour had risen in his face.
James had given him a nod. Beauchamp had returned it, and neither of them said anything further about it.
That was Beauchamp. Sandhurst-trained, and there he’d been on Lex’s sofa, kissing his sleeping prince in front of the King, as natural as anything.
Then there was Barnaby, who at Eton had once gone white at the suggestion that he might fancy the head boy, but who was now married and living in a glass tower with a heavyweight boxer who adored him.
Earlier in the evening, with two glasses of red wine in him and his shoes off, Bash had leaned across, eyes bright, and confessed in a stage whisper that Lex had taken to calling him his Pillow Princess.
“And the worst of it, James, is that I can’t be cross about it.” A small, conspiratorial smile had appeared on Barnaby’s face. “Because I absolutely am one.”
Vidal had let out a noise James had once heard from Mercè when he’d accidentally sat on her.
“He just moves me about. Like a doll,” Bash had reported. “Wherever he wants me. Whenever he wants me. I haven’t had to lift a finger in the bedroom in months. I think it might be the best I’ve ever felt.”
“DARLING.” Vidal had seized both of Bash’s hands. “I have never been prouder. You have surrendered. You have evolved.”
James had laughed along with the rest of them. But in the conference room now, the bittersweet pang caught up with him.
At thirteen, the three of them had found each other across the dining hall at Eton.
He couldn’t, even now, say how it had happened.
He had simply gravitated to Bash, who was small and fine-boned and unlike any of the wide-shouldered boys around him, and to Vidal, who at thirteen was already wearing his blazer wrong on purpose.
They had recognised each other on sight, before any of them had the words for it.
And then they had grown up.
Bash had turned into a man who kissed the person that he wanted in front of 16,000 people in a packed Las Vegas stadium. Vidal fell asleep on his partner’s shoulder and dozed through being kissed. They were living as they wanted. Taking what they pleased.
James had stayed in hiding.
He could sign the injunction, walk out of this conference room, and resume the careful management of his life. Cecil had said they could hold this back long enough for the story to die while James got on with the business of being King.
He had managed Abigail.
After he’d rung off, he’d washed his face and walked the length of the corridor to her room.
He had got on with it, and she had been kind to him throughout.
She’d laughed at something he’d said about the curtains.
The moment had loosened enough that when he put his mouth on hers and his hand under her nightdress, his body cooperated without any issues.
Afterwards, she had curled against his shoulder and gone to sleep.
In the morning, she had brought him tea and asked whether he’d slept well, and he had told her, with perfect honesty, that he had.
He could marry Abigail, stand beside her on the Buckingham Palace balcony, and the country would have its Queen. They’d have at least three children that they’d dutifully display on the Lindo Wing steps, and his smile would be genuine as the country rejoiced around them.
He could do ten years of that. Possibly twenty, through state banquets and garden parties. His life would be so seamless that nobody looking in would guess he had ever wanted anything else.
“Cecil,” James said. “Walk me through the alternatives to a super-injunction.”
Cecil’s mouth lifted at one corner. “Good lad,” he said, so quietly that James wasn’t entirely sure he’d been meant to hear it. “We have three options that don’t involve suppression, Sir. With your permission, I’ll talk to them in order of risk.”