Chapter Nine
Mercè was turning tight circles by his feet, which Vidal recognised as a sign of her imminent betrayal of the flagstones.
Connor was sitting on the low garden wall in his shorts and a t-shirt that had seen better mornings, towel around his neck, waiting for Vidal to stop talking long enough to begin his press-ups. Vidal had no intention of stopping.
“Forty million, Connor. Forty. Look at it, look at the number.” He thrust the mobile under Connor’s nose. “And the comments! A man in Reykjavík has begun a petition. Someone in Lagos has written a sonnet in iambic pentameter, and the scansion is perfect, I have checked.”
Connor took the mobile out of his hand, scrolled, and began to laugh. He leaned across the gap between them and kissed Vidal on the mouth, ending with his forehead pressed against Vidal’s own.
“You absolute troublemaker.”
“I am a statesman, Connor.”
“You’re a troublemaker who knows how to take advantage of good lighting.” Connor’s eyes dropped, and his hand came to Vidal’s elbow, easing him a half-step sideways. “Move your foot, sweetheart, she’s about to go on your slipper.”
Vidal looked down. Mercè had stopped circling and was beginning the purposeful crouch that preceded her usual atrocities. He stepped neatly back onto a safer flagstone and watched her settle her business into a tuft of moss.
“Connor, you are a natural. Truly. I have known her three years and I cannot read her like that. You took one look and you knew. It is a gift. Mi amor, yes, yes, that’s it, my darling girl, do not be shy on your father’s account, he has seen much worse. Connor, look at her form!”
Connor snorted, distanced himself slightly, and lowered himself into the press-up position.
His shoulder-knots, which Vidal had at last been permitted to press his thumbs into two nights ago, a sensation that had proved every bit as satisfying as he’d suspected, flexed and released under the thin cotton of the t-shirt.
Vidal sat down on the warm stone Connor had vacated, propped his chin on one hand, and divided his attention between the rhythmic descent of those shoulders and the scroll of his own screen.
“Listen to this one. This man could read me the Cardonan tax code and I would weep. Connor, I have read the Cardonan tax code. It is, in fact, moving in places —”
His mobile rang in his hand. He looked down at the screen, and the smile that broke across his face was the one he had been holding in reserve since the moment the view counter passed a million.
He swiped to answer at once.
“Papà!” Vidal swung his legs up onto the wall and tucked his feet beneath him, mobile pressed close to his ear. “Have you seen it? Tell me you have seen it. Forty million views, Papà, forty! I have made the morning bulletin on the BBC!”
“Vidal.”
The sound of his own name stopped him. “Yes, Papà?”
“What in the name of God do you think you are doing?”
The sun went off the back of Vidal’s neck all at once, and the chill came up through him. “I — the video, Papà, I was —”
“You were what? You were performing? You were making jokes about Ferrer’s moustache at the window of the safe flat that the King of the United Kingdom has arranged for you?
” Carlos’s voice didn’t rise, and yet his anger was clear.
“You stood in front of that window, fill meu. With the curtains open and the street behind you. Do you understand what you have done?”
“I —”
“I have spent the last three hours on the telephone with men who do not sleep, Vidal. Men whose entire profession is the keeping of people like you alive. Do you know what one of them said to me, twenty minutes ago? He said, Your Serene Highness, with respect, your son has just broadcast his address across the internet. The view through the glass. The angle of the light. A determined man with a half-decent map of Mayfair could be at his door inside the hour.”
Vidal’s free hand had crept up to the gold necklace at his throat. He closed his fingers around the crucifix.
“You are not in Cardona any more, my son. You are not surrounded by men who have known you since you were in short trousers. There are people, Vidal, who wish you harm. Not all of them far away, and they would prefer that the Montcada name stop appearing on the news. Ferrer has a long reach, and you have just made yourself the most visible exile in Europe over the course of one morning.”
Carlos paused. When he spoke again his voice was quieter.
“I have been so frightened today, Vidal. I am frightened now. I am sitting in a borrowed room, watching my son TREND on the internet, and I cannot reach across the water and put my hand on the back of your neck and tell you to be careful.”
Vidal pressed the crucifix hard enough that he felt the shape of it dig into his palm. “Sí, papà.” His voice came out smaller than he had heard it in some time. “I understand.”
“Promet-m’ho, that you will be more careful.”
“I promise.”
Across the lawn, Connor had paused mid press-up, head turned towards him. Vidal lifted one hand in a steady wave that showed him nothing was wrong, and turned his face away towards the wall.
The garden door banged open hard enough to rattle the iron boot-scraper beside it, and Beauchamp came through it at a pace Vidal had not, in nearly a fortnight of close acquaintance, seen the man use for anything other than the pursuit of his fugitive charge through Mayfair.
Beauchamp wasn’t in his usual suit. He was in dark jeans that fitted him properly, a soft grey Henley with the sleeves shoved to the elbow, and a pair of trainers. His hair had not been combed into its usual tamed state, and a day’s worth of stubble was coming in across his jaw.
Beauchamp’s eyes found Connor on the grass and gave him a short nod. Connor, who had pushed himself up to sitting on his heels with his towel bunched in one hand, returned it.
“Your Serene Highness.” Beauchamp’s head dipped into his customary bow. “We need to return to the flat.”
Vidal didn’t stand. He let one silk-clad ankle drift a fraction higher across the other and looked at Beauchamp down the length of his own nose.
“Beauchamp. It is a beautiful morning. I have been given a dressing down by my father, I have been attempting to recover my equilibrium in the company of a friend, and you are standing before me, looking as though someone has set your car on fire. Would you care to explain yourself before you begin issuing directives?”
“Come inside, sir. Please.”
“Am I a prisoner now, Major?” His accent was thickening the edges of his consonants.
He could hear it, and he didn’t care. “Is that where we are this morning? I’m to be confined to my quarters because I have made a joke about a politician’s facial hair?
I had understood that in this country one was permitted to sit in one’s own garden — ”
“Sir.”
“ — and enjoy what passes here for sunlight, without an armed escort loitering on the flagstones like —”
“Vidal.” The sound of his name, flat and unsoftened, cut him clean off.
Beauchamp had never used it before. Not once in any of their ordinary exchanges over the past eleven days.
He had always been sir or Your Serene Highness in Beauchamp’s mouth, and the careful career-military hierarchy of that had become, somewhere between the Bentley and the vet’s, a sort of private joke they were both in on.
But Beauchamp wasn’t joking around now.
“I got a call this morning, sir. From my commanding officer. I’m on detached duty.
It means the Household has formally placed me in a posting that doesn’t exist on any organisational chart, so that I can devote myself, without distraction, to the single task of settling you safely in the United Kingdom.
That is the entire brief. And I am, as of this morning, failing it in every measurable way. ”
His voice had gone quieter and flatter. Vidal, listening to it, understood for the first time how Beauchamp had made Major. You would follow a voice like that into battle without thinking to ask why.
“You lied to me, sir, and so I filmed you. I was behind the tripod. I moved the angle of the camera when you told me to. My commanding officer’s been gracious enough to accept that I wasn’t briefed on the content, and to attribute the lapse to my unfamiliarity with you rather than dereliction of duty.
So right now, I would very much like to have a small win by getting you back inside the building while we figure out how to move forward from this. ”
Connor, on the grass, had gone very still. Vidal didn’t look at him.
He wanted to say several things at once to Beauchamp.
First that he was sorry, and then that his father had already said all of this moments ago and he didn’t need to hear a rehash from the man he’d spent the last couple of weeks gently coaxing, inch by inch, out from behind his parade-ground manners.
Instead, Vidal slid down off the wall without another word. He bent and scooped Mercè up, tucked her against his ribs, and walked past Beauchamp towards the door.
He didn’t look back at either of the men behind him. He took the stairs two at a time in his slippers and shut the flat door behind him with considerably more force than the hinges had been designed to absorb.