Chapter Eighteen
Back then
The car came up the drive for a full minute before the house showed through the trees, and Tristan, who had grown up on studio backlots and stood inside houses in Bel Air with frontages big enough for a strip mall, still had nothing to set against the sheer scale of Sandringham House.
“Mr Whitlock. Welcome to Sandringham.” The house manager introduced himself as Marshall, but Tristan was distracted from the man’s spiel by the staff who’d emerged from the building to retrieve his bags from the trunk of the car and carry them off.
“Your rooms are in the east wing. I’ll take you through to the others first. They’re having tea in the small drawing room. ”
The ‘small’ drawing room turned out to be enormous, and the six people in it stopped talking when he came in.
“There he is.” Caroline was up before James, crossing to kiss his cheek, her hand coming to rest lightly on his lapel.
“Everyone, this is Tristan. Tris, that’s Barnaby, Lex, Vidal, and Beauchamp who is technically my Assistant Private Secretary, but is also burdened, romantically and otherwise, with that one. ” She pointed at Vidal.
Four sets of eyes locked onto him and ran a slow inventory, shoes to fringe. The willowy blond Caroline had named as Barnaby didn’t move. “A pleasure to meet you.” The words were welcoming. His crossed arms and his flat mouth were not.
Lex was off the sofa and crossing over to him, his hand swallowing Tristan’s when he shook it.
“All right, mate. Don’t let this lot scare you.
This place is mental, isn’t it? There’s a bloke whose entire job is to wind the clocks.
There’s two hundred of them scattered around. I asked him once, when we got talking.”
“There are two hundred clocks?”
“At least. None of ’em tell the right time on purpose. Don’t ask me why, I gave up trying to understand it and just go by the time on my mobile.”
Then Vidal had Tristan by both shoulders and was holding him out for inspection.
“Oh, but he’s darling,” Vidal announced. “A proper American Boy, fresh out of the Disney mines, with freckles!” He patted Tristan’s cheek twice. “He is precisely what one orders when one wants a malleable husband. Caroline, you must keep him for at least half a year. He is good for that much.”
“Vidal, you’re scaring him.” Beauchamp had arrived at his elbow without a sound, and he detached Vidal’s hand from Tristan’s cheek before giving Tristan a firm handshake. “The trick is to be very boring. He can’t sustain interest in the well-adjusted.”
Tristan was folded into the small huddle of the three of them while James, Vidal, Caroline and Barnaby drew off towards the teapot.
The group had naturally split between the principals and the brought-ins.
The British were so very neat with their hierarchies, and Tristan really didn’t mind it half as much as he’d expected to.
“Tell me you didn’t pack anything you’d not want a stranger’s hands on, mate.
” Lex tipped his chin at the ceiling. “Before I came on one of these country weekends, James texted me dead seriously and told me about the unpacking business. There are things that Barns and I keep between ourselves that no man or woman in white gloves should ever have to come across unexpectedly.”
Lex stood there, perfectly at peace with what he’d just released to a near-stranger while Tristan scrabbled for a response that wouldn’t cost him an ally.
Beauchamp got there before the silence could set.
“They’ll have started your unpacking already,” he said. “Someone’s up there in your room right now, hanging everything out. They iron the bags too, if you leave them to it.”
Tristan smiled, and went cold from the scalp down, trying to remember whether his good underwear had actually made it into the case, or whether some stranger in the east wing was at this exact moment laying out the threadbare grey pairs with the dying waistbands.
? ? ?
Rich British people, Tristan was beginning to understand, did not merely tolerate discomfort; they sought it out and thrived on it.
He’d reached the conclusion on the afternoon walk, when the sky split open and started flinging rain at them almost sideways, and none of the others so much as broke stride.
They marched as a group for three miles, lashed and sodden, while Vidal delivered a monologue on the erotic possibilities of bad weather to a wind that tore every third word out of his mouth.
Tristan caught it in pieces. “…Beauchamp’s father’s Oxfordshire property…
packed in the house…his six siblings and their families…
We were desperate for privacy!” A gust took the next stretch entirely.
“…completely nude, as God made us, on the croquet lawn…Beauchamp kept his SOCKS on. His SOCKS…” The path turned, the wind came at them broadside, and several seconds of crucial context were lost to the hedgerow.
“…an entire herd of deer, simply WATCHING our love, and then of course the gamekeeper—”
Beauchamp sidled up from behind Vidal and laid a hand across his mouth. Vidal subsided against him and gave every sign of enjoying being manhandled by his partner.
The only person to register any discomfort had been Tristan, who spent the back half of the walk plotting how he could best avoid another round of tramping around the sodden countryside the next day.
Then they trooped back inside, peeled off their wet things, and reappeared an hour later in black tie.
Dinner ran long, lubricated by an endless supply of wine and snarky conversation. Tristan worked through four courses and watched Vidal and Barnaby take lumps out of each other across the candlesticks.
“…which is precisely why the SOUL recognises its mate before the body does,” Vidal announced. “It is CHEMICAL. It is FATED. Beauchamp knew me the instant he laid eyes on me.”
Barnaby laughed. “You chased the poor man down, Vidal. Into his office at Clarence House. You had your way with him, and James had to have an entire afternoon of security footage destroyed.”
“He did not RESIST.” Vidal set his glass down with great dignity. “Beauchamp!”
Beauchamp sighed. “I resisted initially. I tried to keep it professional, since we were in the Princess Royal’s household. But you’d broken your arm, and I couldn’t hold you off without risking further injury.”
“There.” Vidal turned to the table, the picture of a man vindicated. “Romance.”
Barnaby snorted into his wine glass.
By the time the plates were cleared, Tristan’s jaw ached from a full day of keeping up his end of the conversation. The patter came fast and posh, freighted with years of shared history, and he’d spent the meal a half-beat behind everyone else, laughing on faith alone.
When a gap finally opened in the conversation, and the dinner seemed to be winding down, Tristan folded his napkin beside his plate and made to stand. “That was fantastic,” he said. “Well, good night.”
Caroline set down her glass. “Oh, you can’t go up before the games, Tristan. It simply isn’t done.”
Which was how Tristan came to be sitting on the floor of the drawing room at past eleven, watching the King of the United Kingdom roll up a copy of that morning’s Times.
“Gentlemen.” James rose with the paper held aloft, and his voice dropped into a fairground bark, all rounded vowels and showman’s relish. “On my left, weighing in at two Olympic golds and a great deal of misplaced confidence, Mr Alexander Murphy, the Barking Bulldozer.”
Lex took the rolled-up newspaper James pressed on him and shook it over his head to a smattering of applause. Barnaby attempted a wolf-whistle, which died somewhere on its way up the scale, and Lex blew him a kiss for it anyway.
“And on my right, deposed, exiled, and weighing a good deal less, the Prince of Pain, His Former Serene Highness, Vidal Montcada.”
“I will DESTROY him,” the Prince of Pain announced, accepting his weapon. “Lex, I say this with love. I am going to take your head clean from your shoulders.”
“Course you are, mate.”
“The rules are old and sacred,” James said. “Both men, onto your bellies. You will join your free hands across the divide, you will ask, with feeling, whether Moriarty is there, and once he confirms it you will attempt to lay a punishing blow upon his skull with your weapon.”
Barnaby crossed the rug, knelt behind Lex, and tied his own pocket square over Lex’s eyes, smoothing the silk down.
“Get him,” he murmured, and patted Lex’s arse hard enough that the smack carried to the windows.
Both men lowered themselves onto their bellies, nose to nose, and reached out for each other’s hands.
Tristan slouched against the sofa and watched Barnaby.
He and Lex were basically Ben and his husband brought to life.
Lex took up half the rug, big and sure of every inch of himself.
But it was Barnaby that Tristan tracked, watching the precise movement of his hands, and the graceful way he’d settled back into his chair.
He’d copied Barnaby’s pose without noticing, drawing himself up against the sofa with his ankles crossed and one hand laid neatly over the other in his lap.
“Are you there, Moriarty?” Vidal asked, sweet as a choirboy.
“Yeah, mate, I’m—”
Vidal brought the Telegraph down on Lex’s skull with a sharp thwack. Lex, who had survived two Olympic finals and a childhood in Barking, took it somewhere around the ear and started laughing, which enraged Vidal beyond all reason.
His next swing missed by a foot. The next caught Lex across the shoulder, and Lex only laughed harder.
“Love taps, these,” he said. “You hit as soft as the olive oil off your family estate, mate.”
That did it. Vidal abandoned the sacred rules entirely and went at him on his knees with both fists, the newspaper forgotten on the rug. Beauchamp set down his wine and hauled his man bodily off the boxer by the collar of his dinner jacket.
“That’s quite enough,” he said, holding a thrashing Vidal clear of the carpet.
By the time order was restored and Vidal had been squeezed into an armchair beside Beauchamp to sulk into a fresh glass of wine, James was already rolling up the paper again into a tight cylinder.
“Right,” James said, making a show of shaking out his arms. “Next round: Mr Whitlock. You and me.”
Tristan would have given a year of his life to be anywhere else, but five people were watching, and folding now would cost him more than the indignity of crawling around on his belly. He got down on the carpet, retrieved Vidal’s abandoned Telegraph from the rug, and let James knot the blindfold on.
He found James’s hand by feel and held on.
“Are you there, Moriarty?”
“I’m here,” James said, his voice coming from right in front of him.
Tristan swung where the voice had been and hit nothing but carpet. He swung again, missed again, and somewhere above him James was laughing, so Tristan lunged for the sound on pure instinct.
“Are you there, Moriarty?” James asked, sounding very close and far too amused.
Tristan had barely got his answer out before the Times came down where his head had been. He felt the wind of it pass his cheek and rolled blind, fetching up hard against the leg of an armchair.
“Foul,” he said, to a round of booing. “That was a foul.”
“There are no fouls, darling,” Caroline called. “There is only Moriarty.”
He groped for James’s hand again and caught it. The humiliation of crashing against the armchair burned off whatever caution he had left. “Are you there, Moriarty?”
“I’m here,” James answered, quietly.
Tristan hauled himself in by their joined hands, and threw his weight at the sound of that voice.
James caught him mid-lunge and rolled them both so that Tristan landed on his back with the King of the United Kingdom on top of him, James’s blindfold knocked sideways, one hand still tangled in Tristan’s.
He should have wriggled free and made a joke of it.
Instead he stayed where he was, the King’s full warm weight pressing him down into the carpet.
Heat went through Tristan in a long pull, gut to groin, his cock thickening against his fly.
He turned his face into the carpet and willed it down, while James laughed on above him, with no idea what he’d done.
Tristan shoved himself out from under James and dragged the pocket square off his face. “All right. You win.” He flung it at James.
The group broke into applause, and Vidal was already lobbying for a rematch with Lex.
Tristan stayed sitting up on the carpet and worked on getting his breathing under control before anybody could notice the state of him.
The flush he could explain away. He’d spent the last fortnight watching hours of gay porn in the name of research, because Ben spent a huge amount of time being bent over by his husband, and Tristan intended to walk onto that set knowing exactly how he wanted these scenes blocked out.
He was wound tight and pointed at the nearest available stimulus, and that had been James landing square on him.
It didn’t mean anything. James was a good-looking man. Anyone could see that much.
James stayed down on the rug beside him, propped on an elbow with the blindfold shoved up into his hair. His face had come open into a wide smile and he put his hand out.
Tristan took hold of it and let him pump it up and down. “Good match,” he said. “Good match.”