Chapter Thirty-Six
Back then
Nobody in the inner circle discussed Tristan’s integration into James’s life.
That was the part Tristan couldn’t get over. He’d braced himself for a formal conversation with Sir Cecil, and a laminated document on the Procedures Governing the Overnight Presence of Non-Spousal Companions in Royal Residences. Instead the household simply adjusted around him.
The kitchen at Kensington began stocking his preferred coffee.
Not the Fortnum’s Colombian that James drank, but the oat-milk flat-white pods for the Nespresso machine that Tristan had brought over himself one weekend.
When the box ran out, a new one replaced it.
And then when that one ran out, two more appeared.
Someone on the household staff had noted the trend in his consumption rate and adjusted accordingly.
Walters, who ran the Kensington apartments, greeted Tristan with a “Good evening, Mr Whitlock” that carried exactly the same inflection as his “Good evening, Your Majesty” to James.
Henford, James’s valet, who came down to Windsor with him, asked Tristan once whether he preferred his eggs scrambled or poached on Saturday mornings, noted the answer, and never asked again.
He mentioned it to James once, lying on the sofa at Windsor with his feet tucked under James’s thigh and a mug of tea going cold on the floor.
“Your staff are terrifyingly good at their jobs.”
James turned a page in his document without looking up. “Yes. They’re very discreet.”
“They just — adjusted. Like I’m furniture they’ve always had to work around.”
“That is precisely how they would describe it, and you should take it as the highest compliment the household is capable of paying.” James reached down and squeezed his ankle.
“They’ve decided you belong here, Tris. There’s no higher security clearance than Henford asking how you take your eggs and Sir Cecil pretending you don’t exist while he writes up his integration plan.
Wouldn’t want to show his hand too early. ”
Sir Cecil remained a distant figure. Tristan glimpsed him through doorways and at the far ends of corridors. The man was always immaculately tailored, and always at James’s side.
James was locked in a working lunch with the Commonwealth Secretary-General, leaving Tristan alone for the early afternoon, so he’d wandered into the East Gallery to kill time.
It ran the full length of the east wing, lit from above by a glazed lantern ceiling that poured cold English light across sixty feet of parquet.
One wall held grand portraits of the sovereigns.
The other held their consorts. The arrangement was chronological, running from the earliest Hanovers down to the twentieth-century sovereigns near the door.
Whoever had hung them had taken exacting care to position each consort directly opposite their sovereign, so that the married couples faced each other squarely.
Tristan was standing in front of a woman in pearls and a diamond choker when Sir Cecil appeared beside him.
“That’s Queen Alexandra.” Cecil clasped his hands behind him and regarded the portrait. “Princess of Denmark. His late Majesty King Arthur’s grandmother.”
Tristan glanced at him, surprised, while Cecil’s gaze stayed on the painting.
“She was famously beautiful, as I’m sure you can see,” Cecil went on.
“She was an accomplished musician, and played for state dinners well into her sixties, which drove the household pianists to distraction, because she was rather better than any of them. She spent forty years smiling through King Richard’s affairs.
He was not discreet, and she was not blind, and between them they produced an heir and maintained the most convincingly functional public marriage of the age.
It was easier to keep up a facade in those days, with no twenty-four-hour news cycle.
” His voice carried no judgement. “She channelled everything that might have broken her into charitable work. The Alexandra Rose Day. Nursing reform. The London Hospital. By the end of her life she was the most beloved consort in a hundred years, and she had achieved it by deciding, very early on, that the institution would be her purpose when the marriage could not be.”
Cecil moved to the next portrait, and Tristan followed, since he was clearly meant to.
“Queen Eleanor,” Cecil said. “Née Lady Eleanor Lacey, daughter of the Earl of Rede.” She was pale-haired and composed, her chin lifted.
“The Laceys and the Fitznorman-Bicesters have been intermarrying since the fifteenth century. There was a dispensation required in 1743, I believe, and another in 1812. One begins to suspect the families simply ran out of other options in the county.”
Cecil allowed himself a thin smile at his own joke, which vanished as cleanly as it had arrived.
“She read Classics at Newnham and was offered a fellowship in her final year. Within twelve months of turning that fellowship down, she was engaged to the heir to the throne. She was a remarkable scholar. Truly a first-rate mind. She founded the Queen’s Literacy Trust and built it into the largest reading charity in the Commonwealth.
She had sixty-three patronages by the end. ”
They came to the final portrait on the consorts’ wall.
Cecil was quiet. Across the gallery, the sovereign opposite was King Arthur, painted in military dress with his decorations and a half-smile that mirrored James’s.
“Queen Amelia,” Cecil said with a wistful smile.
“Studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. Three of her canvases hang in the private apartments. They could hold their own in any public gallery.” He considered the portrait.
“She sold watercolours for the Red Cross. The proceeds funded field hospitals.”
He turned to Tristan for the first time since they’d begun walking.
“She was extraordinarily gifted, Mr Whitlock.” His voice had shed its tour-guide cadence. “She was also extraordinarily devoted to the Crown. And if you had asked her which of those things defined her life, she would have told you, without hesitation, that it was the second.”
They came to the end and turned.
James’s portrait hung on the sovereign side, the most recently placed.
The paint still had a freshness to it that the older canvases had lost, a sheen under the lantern light.
He was in Navy dress uniform, one hand resting on the arm of a gilded chair.
The painter had got his eyes right; they were steady, and gave him the appearance of being faintly amused by something just beyond the frame.
Tristan looked at the face he’d kissed awake that morning, and then at the blank wall opposite.
Every other sovereign in the room faced their consort. James faced bare plaster.
Cecil followed his gaze, and his thin smile returned.
It wasn’t unkind, but Tristan felt assessed all the same.
“The Crown asks a great deal of those who love the head it sits on, Mr Whitlock.” He folded his hands behind him.
“One might liken it to tying oneself by the ankle to a meteor. Hurtling along at tremendous speed, no control over the trajectory, burning quite visibly for the entertainment of the nation.” He paused.
“Worth it, one supposes, for the chance to be with ‘Sovereign Daddy’.”
Tristan’s jaw dropped.
Cecil’s eyes held a glint that Tristan suspected very few people had ever been permitted to witness. He turned on his heel and walked the length of the gallery without looking back, his footsteps loud on the parquet.
Tristan stood alone between the sovereigns and their consorts, laughing until his ribs ached.
He kept going back to the gallery, spacing out his visits carefully as though that might disguise the compulsion.
The blank wall opposite James’s portrait had not, in the interim, sprouted a painting, but Tristan kept looking at it anyway.
He kept measuring the dimensions of the space and calculating whether he could fill it.
The plaster was smooth and pale, unmarked by any nail or bracket, and the gilded frame to its left, Queen Amelia, stopped a good four feet short of where James’s consort would hang.
He returned the next week, and the week after that, slipping in during the dead hours when James was shut away in meetings and the east wing was empty. Each time he stood in the same spot, chin lifted, studying that rectangle of bare wall as though it might eventually tell him something useful.
The same thought arrived every time: Could that be me?
He was twenty-five, American, and sleeping with the King of the United Kingdom in a relationship that existed entirely within the safe confines of royal properties and the King’s inner circle.
The distance between Tristan Whitlock of Pasadena and the gilt-framed figure who would one day hang opposite James III was laughable.
And yet James kept hinting at it.
They were watching the news one evening at Windsor, Tristan cross-legged on the sofa with a bowl of pasta balanced on one knee, when the coverage cut to a military ceremony. On screen, James stood on a raised dais, and the cameras caught Caroline dropping into a curtsy as she reached him.
“You should always bow to Caroline,” James said, not looking away from the screen.
Tristan wound spaghetti around his fork. “I do bow to Caroline.”
“You nod at Caroline.” James reached across and stole an olive from Tristan’s bowl.
“A nod is what you give the barista at Pret. Caroline is the Princess Royal. She gets a bow. From the neck, not the waist. You hold it for one second, not two, because two looks servile and she’ll think you’re taking the piss. ”
“One second. Got it.”
“However.” James held up the stolen olive.
“That rule only applies when you encounter her on your own. If we were married and I was with you, the order of precedence would reverse. My presence elevates whoever is accompanying me above every other member of the family except the sovereign, and since I am the sovereign, that makes things simpler.” He ate the olive. “Caroline would curtsy to you.”
Tristan set his fork down. “James.”
“If you were at my side in any formal capacity, the Princess Royal would defer to you, because the King’s consort outranks his sister in the order of precedence. It’s all laid out quite clearly in the Precedence Tables. Benton has binders with it all printed out. I’ll have him give you a copy.”
“Binders, you say?”
“Several of them. And there are briefings, obviously. A consort’s programme of preparation covers protocol, constitutional law, the basics of the Sovereign Grant, ceremonial duties, correspondence—” He ticked each one off on his fingers.
“Wardrobe guidance, which you’d receive from my dresser.
Media training, which you frankly don’t need.
In fact, I think they’d try to train the American out of you.
You read a bit too rehearsed sometimes. There’d be introductions to the Privy Council, the Commonwealth Secretary-General, and the Archbishop, who is a perfectly pleasant man once you get past the vestments.
” He paused. “There’s also a module on hostage negotiation, which I’m told is largely theoretical, but still useful to know in case you’re ever seated next to the French Ambassador at a state banquet. ”
Tristan stared at him.
“What?” James picked up the remote and muted the television.
“James.” Tristan set his bowl down. “That can’t happen.”
“What can’t happen?”
“Any of it. The binders, the briefings, the Caroline curtsying to me. None of that can happen.”
James blinked at him. “Why not?”
“Because I’m American.”
James considered this. “Yes. That is a bit of a handicap. But it’s hardly an insurmountable one, Tris.
Billions of people throughout human history have managed to cross cultural lines without the entire fabric of civilisation collapsing.
The Danes did it. The Greeks did it. Queen Alexandra was Danish, and she got on perfectly well.
The binders exist because it’s all learnable. ”
Tristan’s pasta sat cooling while his brain tried to process the fact that James had just dismantled the barrier between sleeping with the King and preparing to stand beside him in public for the rest of his natural life.
“I haven’t said yes to anything,” Tristan pointed out.
“And I haven’t asked you anything. Yet.” James unmuted the television. “I’m simply letting you know that the infrastructure is in place, should the question ever arise. Think of it as advance notice. The Crown is very keen on advance notice.”
“Would Barnaby have to bow to me?”
James’s laugh came out in a single, delighted burst. “Barnaby would have to bow. Vidal would have to bow. Anyone below you in the order of precedence, which, when you’re standing beside me, is essentially everyone in the room, would bow.”
Tristan ate his cold pasta and watched the rest of the news without taking in a single word of it. In his head, Caroline kept dropping into a curtsy for him, and James kept standing beside him, watching it happen like it was nothing.