Chapter Four
Now
James was midway through a rather charming anecdote about the Highgrove damson jam, how his father had insisted on hand-picking every fruit himself, how the resulting preserve had been served to three heads of state and a deeply unimpressed Duchess of Devonshire, when he caught the movement at the edge of the room.
He didn’t break stride. One of the first lessons his father had taught him was that a king had to be able to observe a crisis approaching and still finish his sentence.
So he held his smile, delivered the punchline about the Duchess and the scone, and laughed along with the cluster of red-faced farmers from the National Association of Agricultural Producers, all while tracking Benton’s reflection in the glass cabinet behind the chairman’s left shoulder.
Benton was crossing the room with a sense of purpose that was suspicious by virtue of its showy casualness. He paused to exchange a word with the protection officer by the door. The protection officer’s posture didn’t change, which meant it wasn’t a security threat.
This was something worse, then, because security threats had protocols. Everything else was iffier.
Benton materialised at James’s elbow. “Sir, if I may.” He smiled at the chairman. “I’m terribly sorry, we’re needed back rather sooner than expected.”
The chairman began the usual waffle of goodbye, but James was already shaking hands, because Benton never pulled him early from anything.
Certainly not from a scheduled appearance, an engagement that the Palace diary had confirmed six weeks ago and that three regional newspapers had sent photographers to cover.
Benton would let James finish a conversation if the building were on fire, provided the fire was not yet an imminent threat, and the conversation was with someone who mattered.
James ran the scenarios as they walked. A death; but Benton’s face was wrong for a death.
Deaths made him go still and solemn, and right now he looked like a man trying very hard not to shit himself.
A constitutional crisis, then. A leak? A scandal involving someone whose fall would splash onto James?
He cycled through the shortlist of people whose catastrophes could penetrate a Tuesday lunch in Gloucestershire and pull him back to London. The list was not long, and none of the names on it were comforting.
The car door closed behind him and the noise of the afternoon disappeared.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” James commanded. “Is my sister all right?”
Benton sat opposite him in the back of the Bentley, tablet on his knee, and didn’t immediately speak. This was unprecedented, as Benton never passed on any opportunity to put James in his place.
“Sir Cecil called from Kensington Palace twenty minutes ago,” Benton said. “He’s asked that you return immediately.”
Sir Cecil Kemp-Lowe was the Principal Private Secretary James had inherited from his father, along with the Crown, the corgis, and an institutional memory that stretched back to the Falklands.
“On what grounds?”
James watched his aide’s hand go to his jacket pocket, hesitate, and then withdraw his mobile.
“The Sun contacted the press office forty minutes ago requesting a right of reply.” Benton held the phone between them. His fingers were not entirely steady. “They sent an audio file with the request. Sir, I think you need to hear it.”
“Play it,” James said.
The first thing he recognised from the recording was his own breathing. It came through the phone’s speaker tinny and uneven. Then his voice followed, and James’s stomach dropped through the floor of the car.
“I’m drunk.” A wet laugh. “Not properly pissed, just… enough that I can actually do this. Say what I need to say. Because sober James is a coward, isn’t he? Sober James keeps his mouth shut and does what’s expected, and is a very good little king who pretends everything’s fine.”
He remembered this call. Every word of it.
He recognised the thickness in his throat.
Remembered how the carpet had felt rough under his knees when he’d slid down the wall of his dressing room.
His hand had shaken so badly that he’d had to press the mobile against his ear with both palms just to keep it there as he spoke.
“But it’s not fine. Nothing about this is fine, and I can’t—” A breath that snagged. “I don’t think I can sleep with her. But I will. I have to.”
James sat very still. Outside the car, Gloucestershire was rolling past in an endless stream of hedgerows and dry-stone walls.
“I need to. Because I need to move on from you. I need to be good. But I can’t pretend that I want what everyone else demands I want.
A wife, a gaggle of children. Fuck—” There was that laugh again, rawer this time.
“I can do this. I’ve slept with women before.
I’ll just… I’ll think of you while I do it.
That time in the groundsman’s cottage in Windsor, when I couldn’t even wait for you to get your pants off.
Your perfect arse, your mouth, your cock—”
Benton was looking at the mobile. He had not blinked in some time.
“But fuck. FUCK.” His recorded voice had gone ragged, all the composure stripped out of it until what remained was just a man, alone and terrified.
“I wish those were the only things I cared about. I could live without all that. I’d manage.
It’s the rest of it that’s done for me — all the nothing in between.
I’ve stood in Westminster Abbey and had a choir tell the whole watching world that God Himself picked me out to be King, and that didn’t satisfy me as much as a night of absolute nothing, watching Escape to the Country with you in bed beside me. That’s what I’ve gone and lost.”
The Bentley took a corner. James’s lager from lunch shifted in his stomach.
“I know I can’t ask you to blow up your life for me.
I know I’ve made the choices that led us here, and I know how impossible this all is.
But I need you to know. Before I go to her room and try to get it up for her…
” His voice broke properly now, the consonants dissolving.
“I need you to know that you’re the one I think about when I wake up.
You’re the one I wish I could build my life around.
I wish I could have children with you. Children that have your eyes, and my nose, and your laugh, your brilliant bloody mind.
Your ability to reach for the most fucking brutal putdowns…
viciousness is inheritable, right?” Another wrecked laugh.
“But no. That’ll never happen. Not for the two of us. ”
The recording hissed. James could hear himself breathing on it, ragged and wet. He listened without making a sound.
“Even if it changes nothing. Even though I know what I need to do for my country… I need you to know that what we had…it was the most real thing in my life. And I will always, always love you for it. No matter what.”
The recording ended, and the silence in the car was absolute.
James turned from the mobile to the hedgerow sliding past the window. “How long?” he asked. “How long before they publish?”
“Sir Cecil believes we have until the morning edition. They’re offering right of reply by six o’clock this evening.”
James nodded. The nod was mechanical, his body still operating while the rest of him processed the simple, catastrophic fact that by tomorrow morning, every person in the country would hear him say your perfect arse, your mouth, your cock in a voice thick with tears.
They would know that their King was in love with a man, and had been lying about it, because the audio did not leave room for interpretation.
“How did they get it?” James asked.
His first thought, before decency or logic could intervene, was Tristan.
Tristan, who had every reason to leak James’s last confession to him.
Whose career, while back on the right track now, could always still benefit from the incendiary headline a royal sex scandal would generate.
James hadn’t spoken to Tristan in six months, but he still thought about him every morning when he woke up and every night when he turned the light off, or wrapped his own hand around his cock, which was truly pathetic…
But it didn’t hold. Tristan was calculating, but not cruel. And Tristan, in spite of everything, had truly loved him.
Benton turned the tablet around to face him. “Sir, you called the wrong number. The voicemail was left on the mobile of a Thomas Wells. He was taken on at Balmoral to assist with the foaling of Marchioness.”
The air left James’s lungs in a sound that sat between a laugh and a moan. He pressed the heel of his hand against his eye socket and held it there.
One miskeyed contact on a mobile screen.
Thomas rather than Tristan, his fingers clumsy with whisky, his vision blurred.
The voicemail had landed in the inbox of a man who’d been hired to sit up with a pregnant mare through the small hours.
Someone who had absolutely no reason to keep the King’s drunken love confession to himself.
Because why would he, in the face of a few hundred thousand pounds?
“A wrong number,” James said. His hand was still pressed to his face. “I poured my heart out to a stranger’s voicemail because I couldn’t dial a mobile number properly?”
Benton said nothing.
James remembered that night with absolute clarity.
The shooting party at Balmoral, the whisky with Barnaby and Vidal and the others, the September air coming in cold and sharp through the open windows.
And Lady Abigail Chilton across the dinner table, with her dark hair and her clear blue eyes, and the freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose that had reminded him, with a violence that took his breath, of Tristan.
She’d made him laugh. The Cambridge Lover’s Knot tiara would have suited her.
She was a cousin of Barnaby’s, twice removed or something of that sort, and had been raised in a house with a name and a gravel drive.
Nobody in his sphere could have found a single thing to disapprove of about her, because she was so inextricably a part of The Set.
So he’d gone upstairs to ring Tristan, because he’d needed to hear his own voice say the truth out loud before he walked down the corridor to Abigail’s room and tried to be the king everybody wanted him to be.
And his stupid, whisky-clumsy, heartsick fingers had hit Thomas instead of Tristan, and lucky Thomas had gone and negotiated the price of James’s destruction with the bloody Sun.