Chapter Thirty-Eight
Now
Benton’s supplementary notes alone ran to nine pages for this year’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Summit.
They laid out, in painstaking detail, country positions, known objections, a précis of every delegation leader’s recent public statements on matters touching the Crown, and a two-page annex that Benton had titled, with characteristic understatement, Persons of Interest — Revised Protocol Considerations.
James turned to the annex and found a photograph of Prime Minister Věra Sou?ková of Valania, a woman in her early sixties with a practical grey bob and lips pressed thin.
She led a coalition whose junior partners included the Christian Renewal Alliance.
Its leader had described the British monarchy, in an interview three weeks ago, as “an institution in visible moral decline.” Sou?ková herself had said nothing on the record.
“She’s the one Marina’s flagged,” Benton said. “The Foreign Office considers her manageable. She’s pragmatic. The coalition pressure is domestic, not ideological.”
“So she doesn’t care that I’m gay, she just can’t be seen not caring.”
Benton’s mouth compressed. “That is one reading of the situation.”
James set the annex down on the seat between them and looked out of the window.
The Bentley was slowing as it approached Parliament Square, where the Abbey’s western towers rose pale and enormous against an overcast sky.
He could see the edges of a crowd behind the barriers, camera phones already up, and the line of accredited press stretching along the north side of the square.
He had been attending the Commonwealth service at the Abbey since he was fourteen, his first year standing beside his father in the Abbey’s nave rather than watching on a monitor in the vestry with Caroline.
He’d been nervous then, too. The difference was that at fourteen, the nervousness had a clean source: he might trip on the steps, or forget where to stand.
Today it was diffuse, settling in the base of his throat like the first suggestion of a cold.
The congregation would include fifty-four national delegations, the diplomatic corps, six hundred schoolchildren from London comprehensives, the Archbishop, the Dean of Westminster, fourteen bishops, and the broadcast cameras of every major network.
Every greeting, and the angle of his body to whoever he was speaking to, would be captured and interpreted by every pundit with a satellite van parked outside.
He fiddled with the knot of his tie while Benton pretended not to notice.
Cecil met them at the car with an umbrella that proved unnecessary, the rain having paused in a temporary ceasefire. He fell into step on James’s left as they crossed the pavement towards the Great West Door, where the Dean of Westminster and two canons were waiting.
“The Jamaican delegation arrived early,” Cecil murmured. “High Commissioner Clarke has positioned herself in the front pew and is, by all accounts, in excellent spirits.”
“Good.”
“The Valanian Prime Minister is seated in the fourth row, right of the nave. She arrived without remark.”
James acknowledged this with a nod. The greeting line at the West Door was short: the Dean, the canons, and the Abbey’s Receiver General, each bowing neatly as James passed.
The space compressed around him as he stepped through the doorway and into the nave, where the ceiling vaulted away above him.
The congregation rose. He processed up the aisle with Cecil half a pace behind, the organ filling the upper reaches of the nave.
The flags of the fifty-four member nations stood in their stands along both sides of the aisle, and the schoolchildren in the choir stalls turned their heads to follow him as he passed.
He took his seat beside Caroline, who was already settled with her order of service open on her lap and her ankles crossed beneath the pew. She glanced at him, gave him the same small nod she’d given him every year, and turned back to the programme.
It all went as planned. The hymns were strong. A seventeen-year-old from a Croydon comprehensive read a poem about belonging that silenced the nave, and James caught Cecil blinking rather more rapidly than usual.
During the interval between the readings and the address, James registered a rearrangement of bodies in the fourth row. He didn’t look over directly. He’d learned, over a decade of public life, that the fastest way to magnify a minor disturbance was to be seen noticing it.
After the service, in the vestibule, the presentation line assembled itself. Commonwealth representatives and senior clergy queued in order of precedence, and James moved down the row, shaking hands, exchanging short pleasantries.
High Commissioner Clarke took his hand in both of hers, held it, and told him her granddaughter had brought a pound coin to school for show and tell and let everyone know that Granny was friends with the man on it. James laughed.
The Valanian delegation was three positions down the line.
James watched it approach in his peripheral vision.
Sou?ková reached him. Her handshake was brief, and accompanied by a remark about the lovely service that required no more than polite agreement.
She met his eye and moved on. There was nothing in her manner that any camera could have pulled into a frame of consequence.
James unclenched his jaw and turned to the next person.
The queue continued. A Canadian senator. The Tongan High Commissioner, whose wife had brought a gift of woven tapa cloth that Cecil received on James’s behalf.
And then there was Janusz Svoboda.
He knew the name from the annex. Prime Minister of Szarovia, a landlocked central European republic that had joined the Commonwealth as an associate member in 2019, the same year Svoboda’s National Sovereignty Alliance had swept to power on a platform of traditional values and a muscular scepticism of what his manifesto had called “the cultural obligations of Western liberal internationalism.” He was tall, in his mid-fifties, with silver hair combed back from a high forehead.
He wore a dark suit with a small enamel flag pin of his nation on his lapel.
He received James with his fingers clasped behind his back and a tight smile. He didn’t extend his hand. The pause sat between them, before James instinctively closed the distance himself and offered his own.
Svoboda didn’t move, and let James’s hand hang for far too long. It forced James to draw back.
“Your Majesty,” Svoboda said, as though he hadn’t just snubbed James in front of the entirety of the Commonwealth.
“Prime Minister,” James said, managing to keep his voice even. “How good of you to come.”
The whole thing took less than four seconds, but James knew that it would be picked apart on every rolling-news channel by teatime.
James’s smile held. His posture held. He greeted the next delegate, then the one after that, continuing down the line with metronome regularity.
? ? ?
The Bentley pulled away from Parliament Square at 1:47pm, fourteen minutes behind schedule because a bishop from Lesotho had wanted to discuss beekeeping and James had been unwilling to cut him short. Benton sat in the facing seat clutching his mobile.
James loosened his tie and watched London slide past the tinted glass.
“It’ll be on the wires by now,” he said.
“It is.” Benton didn’t look up from his screen.
“Sky News ran the first cut ninety seconds after you reached the car. The angle is diplomatic, not personal. ‘Commonwealth leader declines handshake with King at Abbey service.’ The BBC are using pool footage and haven’t identified Svoboda by name yet, but that won’t hold past the next bulletin. ”
“And the tabloids?”
Benton’s thumb went still on the screen. “The Mail has it on their homepage. The headline references the handshake. The sub-headline references your sexuality and Svoboda’s right-leaning politics.”
He’d expected that.
“Marina has drafted a holding line,” Benton continued. “The Palace does not comment on the private diplomatic exchanges of visiting heads of state. She’d like your approval to run with it.”
“Of course.”
They drove in silence for a stretch. James found the cufflink on his left wrist and rolled it between his fingers, a habit he’d picked up from his father, who had done it during audiences when the conversation became unpleasant.
The movement gave him something to do while the rest of him held still.
? ? ?
“The Szarovian Embassy has issued a statement,” Benton said, reading from his mobile as James came into his Kensington apartments.
“They characterise the incident as a ‘regrettable misunderstanding arising from differences in diplomatic custom.’ They note that Prime Minister Svoboda holds the deepest respect for the institution of the British Crown.”
“How diplomatic of him.”
“Quite.” Benton laid his mobile on the hall table. “Marina’s team are monitoring. The overnight cycle will determine whether the story holds or moves on.”
By the following morning, Svoboda’s handshake refusal had split open the story of James’s sexuality. Every outlet that had been running the broadly sympathetic line since his outing now had permission to revisit the question from the other direction.
A Times leader argued that the incident exposed the tension at the heart of the Commonwealth’s founding proposition: a family of nations united by shared values, led by a sovereign whose personal life now placed him at odds with the legal and cultural frameworks of some of its member states.
Diversity of opinion was natural, and a wonderful thing.
One had to remember, the piece suggested in its concluding paragraphs, that the Commonwealth was not a monolith, and that a substantial proportion of its two-and-a-half billion citizens held views on marriage and sexuality that differed meaningfully from the consensus in central London.
Marina had generated a word cloud from the day’s coverage and pinned it to the top of his briefing folder. The largest word, dead centre, was TRADITIONAL. Radiating outwards: VALUES. MORAL. FAITH. APPROPRIATE. FAMILY. CONCERNS.
Nobody said wrong. They’d built the whole cloud around the space where it should have been.
Cecil appeared with the morning’s programme at eight thirty, and James went to work.
There was a hospital opening in Lewisham, a reception for Commonwealth youth delegates at St James’s Palace, and a private audience with the New Zealand Prime Minister that Benton had arranged three weeks in advance.
The hospital visit ran long because a nine-year-old called Maisie wanted to show him her leg brace and explain how the pins worked. Of course James sat on the edge of her bed and listened to the whole thing.
He was back at Kensington by four, working through the red box in his study, when Benton appeared in the doorway.
“There’s something you should see before the evening briefing.” He held out his mobile, the screen already loaded to a clip on the BBC News website. “This was filmed an hour ago outside the Abbey.”
James took the mobile and pressed play.
The footage was steady, a single camera positioned at the Abbey’s west entrance catching departing clergy after a meeting. The reporter moved in as a figure in a dark overcoat emerged.
The Right Reverend Geoffrey Harland, Bishop Emeritus of Carlisle.
Harland had been one of the longest-serving bishops on the bench before his retirement.
He was eighty-one, widely respected across the traditional and evangelical wings, and had served as chair of the Lambeth Commission on Doctrine for a decade.
James had met him twice: once at a Palace garden party where Harland had spoken warmly about James’s father, and once at the Maundy Thursday service in York, where Harland had officiated as James distributed the alms.
In the footage, the reporter asked the bishop whether he had any response to the events at the Commonwealth service.
Harland stopped walking. “I have spent my life in service to the Church. And I have been loyal to the Crown throughout. I do not believe those two commitments are in conflict. But I am an old man, and I was raised to understand that the sovereign’s role as Supreme Governor carries with it a particular weight.
A moral weight that is not reducible to politics or to the social mores of the day.
” He paused. The lines around his mouth deepened.
“I hold His Majesty in the highest personal regard. I shall continue to pray for him, as I have done every day since his accession.”
The reporter pressed: did that mean the bishop disagreed with the King’s public acknowledgement of his sexuality?
“I have said what I came to say. I will pray for the King, and for his struggle.” Harland turned and walked towards a waiting car, and the clip ended.
James gave the mobile back to Benton.
The clip would be everywhere within the hour.
The news cycle had been starving for precisely this angle: not a foreign populist with a flag pin and a transparent political agenda, but a gentle, retired English bishop with sixty years of service and sadness in his eyes, declining to condemn and offering prayer instead for someone he saw as a lost soul.
He’d chosen the gentlest possible way to say that something was wrong with James.
“Shall I have someone bring tea, Sir?” Benton asked.
“No thank you, Benton,” he said. “That’ll be all.”
Benton retreated, pulling the study door closed behind him.
James reached for his mobile. Tristan was three taps away from him. He could wheedle a silly pun out of Tristan in minutes, something that would make him laugh and, for ninety seconds, forget the bishop’s face.
But Tristan would be on set. He was in the middle of the best professional stretch of his life, and James wasn’t going to be the bad day that intruded on it.