Chapter Fourteen
Back then
James stood just inside the marquee flap, watching a man from the energy consortium test the microphone by tapping it and saying “one two” into the feedback.
Beyond him, two hundred people in fleeces and lanyards stood in rows facing a single turbine blade, which had been laid lengthways on the grass for the photo-call.
Benton appeared at his elbow with the order of proceedings. “Two minutes, Sir. You’ll be introduced by the chief executive, you’ll say your piece, and then you’ll be handed the scissors.”
“The laughably large ones?”
“Yes, Sir. There’s a man whose entire job today is to hold them. I don’t think you’ll have any issues trying to look impressed.”
James fished his buzzing mobile out of his inside pocket, expecting Marina with a last-minute change to his speech, and found instead a message from Lex.
James, mate, I need to talk to you about something important. And you need to not let Barns know about it.
He read it twice. The chief executive began climbing the three steps to the stage. James stood with his thumb hovering over the screen. Behind him, a sound technician counted down.
It wasn’t anywhere near Barnaby’s birthday, and even if it were, Lex knew better than to try for another surprise party after last year’s disaster.
The Segway polo had been Vidal’s idea, executed at Lex’s considerable expense, and it had ended with three partygoers in A&E and a velodrome demanding compensation for damage to the grass pitch at its centre.
Barnaby and Lex had been together nearly a year and a half, and from the outside it had only ever gone one direction, upwards and onwards from strength to strength.
Barnaby accepted the ultra-modern flat and the matching Rolexes, while Lex went on the deer-stalking adventures and found the horse boy in him later in life.
Lex was about to make it official.
He typed back fast, because the chief executive was now nearing the point when he would hand over to James.
Of course. Whenever you like, just line up a time with Benton. But DO NOT, under any circumstances, talk to Vidal about this first, or bring him into it for now.
Lex didn’t do modest. Left to himself he’d already be costing up fireworks and a flash mob.
Put Vidal in the room and the pair of them would feed off each other like a chip-pan fire.
There’d be talk of doves, a string quartet, getting the Spice Girls in for a private performance of 2 Become 1.
James could talk down one maximalist. Two of them, escalating in tandem, were beyond the powers of even the King of the United Kingdom.
“Sir.” Benton’s hand came to rest at his shoulder. “You’ll be on in a second.”
James pocketed his mobile and stepped out onto the stage to the usual flurry of applause.
He let it pass over him without taking it as his due, a discipline his parents had drilled into him before he was even old enough to understand why people kept staring at him.
The clapping was for the Crown, and for the thousand years stacked behind it.
He happened to be the man currently standing in for the lot of it.
He took his place at the lectern and looked out at the upturned faces. He set his prepared remarks down, and had to bite back a smile as he remembered Tristan shaming him for his involvement in the whole thing.
“It’s a great privilege to be here today,” James said, “to mark a genuine milestone in this country’s clean energy future. Before I go on, I want to make my position on wind turbines very clear.”
He paused for effect. “I’m an enormous fan.”
The audience laughed as one, and off to his left he could hear the chief executive wheezing into his own lapel mic. Tristan was going to be bloody outraged.
James waited for the room to settle, picked his notes back up off the lectern, and began to talk earnestly about the future.
? ? ?
Lex came up to James’s Kensington Palace apartments straight from the gym, holdall over one shoulder, his hair still damp at the temples. He dropped it the moment he was inside, and it hit the parquet hard enough to bring Benton half out of his chair by the window.
He bowed to James, dug into the pocket of his joggers, and held out a black velvet box. “Right. Tell me if you think Barns is going to throw this right back at my face.”
James took it. He had prepared for this. Lex’s gifts ran towards the gleefully gaudy, so James had a tasteful response ready, capable of absorbing whatever came out of that jeweller’s box. He’d exclaim over its boldness, and how he was sure that Barnaby would understand the thought behind it.
He opened it and saw a plain gold band, set all the way round with a line of small black diamonds, sunk flush so that they held the light. Barnaby was going to absolutely love it.
“Lex.” James turned it under the lamp. “He’s never going to want to take this ring off when you put it on him.”
“Yeah, well.” Lex grinned at the ring. “You don’t have to sound so shocked.”
“I’m pleasantly surprised that it’s not got a great big horse head coming out of a diamond-studded horseshoe, Lex.”
“I thought about that. Then I pictured Vidal seeing it and going yes, more diamonds! and then decided against it.” Lex lifted the ring out of the box between two fingers, turned it over, and held it up with the inner band facing James. “See that?”
Sealed flush beneath the gold ran a thin strip of striped ribbon, a section of it showing the five interlinked rings of the Olympic logo.
“It’s off my medal from the Tokyo Olympics,” Lex said.
“I had them cut a bit of the ribbon off and set it in. So he carries it round all the time and nobody knows it’s there but us.
It took me years of work to get that. I broke myself for it, and the best thing it ever got me is him, so he can have it. ”
The boy who’d come up out of Barking with nothing behind him and no safety net under him had taken the thing he was proudest of and buried it inside a ring for Bash.
“What do you need from me to make this happen?” James asked.
Lex clapped James on the back hard enough to knock the breath right out of him. “Right. So. I’ve been at this for weeks, yeah? Got his mum and dad’s blessing first thing, obviously. And Perry’s putting together a relationship highlights reel.”
“Barnaby is going to hate that.”
“Yeah,” Lex said, entirely unbothered. “He is. But it’s my engagement and all too, and I want one. So he can sit through three minutes of his own gorgeous face for me.”
There was nothing to argue with in that, so James didn’t try.
“There’s that Sandringham weekend coming up,” Lex went on, “and I was thinking, if you’re all right with it, I’d do it there.
He’s different at Sandringham. His shoulders come right down, and he loves being around you lot.
I’ll put his mum and dad and my mum in a hotel just up the road, ready to bring in on the night. ”
“Of course, Lex. Just tell me how you want things, and Benton will make it happen.”
By the window, Benton closed the folder he’d been skimming through. He crossed over, drew a pen and a small black Moleskine from his inside pocket. Out came the cap, as he flipped to a fresh page.
“Whenever you’re ready, Mr Murphy,” he said.
“Saturday, after dinner. I get the parents driven up to the grounds while everyone’s still sat at the table.” Lex drew the plan in the air with both hands. “I’ll stash them in the stables where I’ve got the foal.”
“You’ve bought a foal?”
“Yes, a proposal foal.”
“I’ve attended more engagement parties than any man living should have to, Lex, and I can tell you definitively that there is no such thing as a proposal foal.”
“Yeah. I know that now.” Lex dropped onto the sofa arm. “About a month back we’re in bed, yeah? And he’s just ridden me like he’s going for a second gold. So I’m feeling good about things, and I tell him I’m gonna have to lock him down and put a ring on him.”
“Fast forward ahead please, Lex.”
“Right. So we’ve both made each other very happy.
But he’s not taking me seriously, even though I’ve just basically laid out what I mean to do with him, yeah?
Barnaby says to me, dead serious, that I can’t just give him a ring.
His lot don’t just do rings. He says when people whose families are written about in Debrett’s get engaged, the ‘interested party’ presents a foal to their intended.
Proper bloodstock. You have to braid the engagement ring into the foal’s mane, lead it out, and if the horse gets kept, that’s a yes to you as well. ”
James kept his face straight.
“Of course I bought the whole story, James. I’m lying there going, that’s mental, that’s gorgeous, I love your weird family customs. It’s like us Murphys and the good biscuit tin.
It only comes out for company, and you do not touch the Viennese whirls unless Nan tells you you can.
So I go down to Chatham House, dead nervous, to let his mum and dad know I’m about to propose.
I get about three words into the foal story, working up the courage to ask his dad to help me find prime bloodstock, and the old man just—” Lex mimed something detonating off the side of his head.
“Gone. He’s in bits and he tells me there’s no such thing as a proposal foal.
Barns invented the whole thing on the spot just to wind me up because he thought I was bullshitting him. ”
“Naturally.”
“So now I’ve got him one, haven’t I?” Lex shrugged.
“Now he can’t say no. The Duke and Barnaby’s trainer helped me pick out a winner.
They took me round to three stud farms before we landed on the perfect one.
I’ve named her Sakura Zephyr for cherry blossom.
I’m keeping to the Japanese theme, since that’s where it all started. ”
“What’s her breeding?” James asked.
“Oh, she’s a cracker.” Lex brightened. “The bloodline got the tick from the Duke, James. Her sire, that’s the dad, he’s got one of them names that’s all Z’s and K’s, German, I can’t even say it. He won Badminton twice.”
“Zauberkonig,” James breathed out.
Lex pointed at him. “That’s the fella. You know him?”
“Yes, Lex. I know of Zauberkonig.” The syndicate had retired him from stud, which meant there would never be another foal by him, anywhere, again.
James had bid on one of his daughters at Goresbridge the year before last and lost her in the ring to an Irish dealer. He’d been unwell about it ever since.
“Sakura’s mum’s chucked out a load of other foals and every single one of them’s gone and done the five-star. Barns’s dad saw the page and had to sit down on a hay bale.”
James licked his lips. “Lex. I’ll marry you myself for that foal.”
“Nah, James. I wouldn’t look good in a tiara.
So picture it.” Lex was off the sofa arm now, pacing.
Benton’s pen went still. “Our dinner’s done.
We’ve had a lovely time, and I get everyone out to the yard.
Fireworks go up over the stables. Big ones!
In gold and white. In the shape of his initials maybe.
I know a guy who knows the group that does the pyro displays for New Year. ”
“No,” Benton said.
“There’ll be sparklers lining the walkway in, so when he comes through it’s all lit up, romantic, and there’s Sakura waiting at the end of it with the ring.”
“No,” Benton said again. This time he looked over at James, clearly expecting him to intervene.
“You want to set off fireworks above a stable full of horses?” James asked, just to make sure he was following Lex’s master plan correctly.
“Yes? They like a bit of colour, don’t they? S’why jockeys wear those really colourful outfits.”
“They don’t like a bit of colour, Lex. They are prey animals.
A fireworks show over a stable yard is how you get a dozen thoroughbreds going straight through their own doors.
And the sparklers—” James pinched the bridge of his nose.
“You’d be walking your intended down an aisle of open flame, in a timber building packed to the rafters with dry hay. ”
“…Right.” Lex deflated. “No fireworks, then.”
“No fireworks anywhere near the animals. If you must have them, you have them out in the park, well clear, once Barnaby’s safely said yes and there’s nothing flammable within reach of our group. The sparklers stay outside. I mean it, Lex. Not in the yard, and definitely nowhere near any hay.”
“Okay, got it. What about the saddle idea, though?” Lex was already moving on, the prospect of immolating his entire future family safely forgotten.
“I think she’d look adorable with a tiny saddle on her, with a little cushion on top, and the ring sat on the cushion.
Then I can just lift it off and put it straight on his finger.
Reckon that reads better than braiding it into Sakura’s mane? ”
“She’s a foal, so she’s never worn a saddle. Put one on a four-month-old filly the night of your engagement and she’ll buck it, the cushion, and your ring clean into the muck. You’ll spend your proposal on your knees in a stable, hunting a hundred grand of black diamonds by torchlight.”
“Mane it is, then,” Lex said.
“We’ll have it plaited in loosely, so it lifts out clean,” James said, warming to the idea.
“A plaited head collar would present better, Sir,” Benton pointed out.
“We can thread the ring onto the noseband and tie it off with a ribbon. That way, there’s a fixed point for Mr Murphy to reach for, and he won’t have to fumble through a mane in front of an audience.
We can station a groom out of sight, in case the foal objects to the entire enterprise. ”
Lex looked between them. “That sounds amazing!”
“I’ve had three minutes to consider this, Mr Murphy.” Benton settled onto the sofa with his notebook on his lap and gestured for Lex to join him. “Give me the afternoon and we’ll have a proper event worthy of your marquess.”