Chapter Twelve
Back then
The portrait had taken eighteen months, and now that the studio cloth was off it, James let himself look his fill. Immediately he understood why the artist had needed every single day of the commission.
They had hung it for the unveiling in the Yellow Drawing Room, propped on a draped easel where the morning light came in clean off the park.
Pryce had worked from a single photograph, and the brushwork carried it, loose where it could afford to be, and exact across the brow and mouth, where it counted.
Here was a younger version of his father, one whose dark hair had not yet started greying.
His mother had taken the photo that had been used as a reference a couple of years before she’d died. James was nine, Papa at his desk with the red box open and a sheet of correspondence in one hand, bent towards him to explain the pronunciation of some enormous word.
He couldn’t, for the life of him, recall what word it was.
Instead, he remembered Caroline and how she’d been perched on the edge of the desk with her legs swinging, the skirts of her dress flaring up.
Every time Papa said the word she laughed harder and harder, until their mother reached for her camera and took the private shot of the three of them.
James crossed to the portrait, his hand coming up towards the painting.
“What do you think, Sir?”
It was the first thing Pryce had said since the cloth came off.
He was the most garlanded portraitist working in England, a Royal Academician with his own wall at the National Portrait Gallery, and he stood a pace to James’s left now, turning the cap of a varnish bottle in his fingers, watching the King and pretending not to.
“It’s a very fine likeness,” James said, extending his hand to the man. “Thank you.”
The date for final delivery had been set eighteen months ago, by a diary secretary who wouldn’t have realised the significance. It fell a week before the third anniversary of his father’s death.
When Pryce had left, James stayed standing where he was.
The light had moved and it came across the portrait at a shallower angle now, catching the place where Pryce had laid the paint thickest along his father’s jaw and the back of the hand that held the correspondence.
From where he stood, the red box looked real enough for him to pull a stack of papers from.
“Sir.” Benton’s tread was soft on the parquet. He stopped a respectful distance off. “Where would you like to take your tea?”
It wasn’t really a question about tea. ‘Where would you like to take your tea?’ meant ‘are you all right’ in Benton. James tried to work out how long he’d been standing there, but couldn’t.
He had a full diary for the rest of the day. His afternoon belonged to his red box. But he was peaky, and tired in a way that a full night of sleep wouldn’t fix. He could give himself the afternoon.
He’d hold the job of King until he died, the way his father had. The box would keep for one afternoon.
“Don’t worry about tea, Benton,” he said. “I’m going to Clarence House.”
A flat cap and an old Barbour from his BP apartments were disguise enough.
James knew from experience that going incognito relied more heavily on walking like a man with nowhere important to be.
He bargained his protection detail down to one, which took rather longer than the walk itself would, and slipped out through the garden gate at the Palace end.
He was at the gates of Clarence House inside ten minutes without once setting foot on open Mall pavement. He passed through unchallenged as security had called ahead.
Caroline opened the door to her apartment herself. “Oh, hello, you!” She studied his face, then took him by the coat, tugged him inside, and set about helping him shed the Barbour. “Oh, Jams, come here. I know.”
He stood in the middle of her hallway, arms going where she put them, and let himself be peeled out of the coat. When she lobbed it at the rack and it caught the hook by one shoulder, he said nothing. On another day he’d have fixed it. Today he let it hang.
“It’s not until next week.” She pulled him deeper into her home.
“Then we’ll be at Windsor, just the two of us, same as always.
We’ll go to the chapel first thing, and then we’ve the whole day to ourselves.
No service, no chaplain. We’ll just spend the day trading stories about Papa. Can you hold on until then?”
“I have to.”
Her face fell. She closed the last of the distance and wrapped both arms around him, holding onto him the way she hadn’t since Papa’s funeral. He bent his head to her hair and breathed her in.
She was the only person alive who carried the same thing he did. Vidal and Barnaby came close, a prince and a marquess, both born to high society and to the scrutiny this put them under, but there were still corners of his life that they’d never understand.
A floorboard creaked in the next room and James looked up. “You’ve got company.”
Caroline let go of him, her gaze flicking to the sitting-room door. “Tristan’s come for a visit.”
He was already moving towards the sound the second she said his name.
Tristan sat cross-legged in front of the low table in his socks, his sleeves shoved up to his elbows. He was sorting jigsaw pieces into colour-coded piles. The border was already done. He fitted two pieces together, studied the join, and set the pair aside.
Christ, James thought. This man is fucking boring. I do hope he marries my sister.
The puzzle box sat propped against the table leg. James picked it up and read the lid.
Saucy Sausages, it announced, in a jaunty red font.
It featured a photograph of a charcuterie board on which dozens of sausages had been arranged in configurations no self-respecting caterer would have permitted.
At its centre, someone had coiled a Cumberland ring with real care into an unmistakable set of cock and balls.
James snorted.
Tristan glanced up at him, then went back to his sorting. “It was the only thousand-piecer in the store,” he said. “Don’t make it weird.”
“I haven’t said a word.”
“You snorted.”
“I have a deviated septum from Caroline kicking me in the face when I was five.” James sat on the floor beside him and picked up a piece. It was, as best he could tell, part of a sausage.
Caroline folded herself onto the floor on Tristan’s other side. At some point Tristan reached for the remote and put the news on low for background noise.
They found a rhythm. Tristan worked the right side of the puzzle, while Caroline claimed the Cumberland ring at the centre, and James assembled the lower left, which was where the worst of the suggestive sausage placement had congregated.
The conversation hobbled along until James’s face made an appearance on the television.
It was file footage of him at a recent engagement at a hospital, looking down seriously at a row of incubators that held tiny, wrinkled babies. Caroline reached into the crisp bowl without looking, took a fistful, and lobbed it at the screen.
“That is the face of a man who needs a poo and can’t say so,” Caroline declared. “Tristan. Honestly. Would you trust this man around a baby?”
Tristan looked from the screen to James and gave it real thought. “…No,” he decided.
“That’s fine,” James said. “I don’t like being around babies anyway.
They squirm around too much. Like they can’t control themselves.
I don’t know why people insist on handing them to me.
” He jabbed a finger at a heap of pink pieces near Tristan, causing a minor avalanche into the russet reds.
“You’ll want to break these down further. ”
Tristan didn’t even look towards him. “They’re broken down. That’s the pink pile.”
“That’s a pink pile containing three distinct grades of fat marbling. The Cumberland coil has a coarse speckle. The chipolatas are smooth. Yet you’re still treating them as a singular pink cohort, which is how you end up an hour from now with forty pieces you can’t place.”
“The jigsaw is of a literal pile of sausages. They’re all sausage-coloured.” Tristan set down a piece with a click. “I sort by colour. That’s the system.”
“Colour should just be the first pass. I’m proposing that you need to get more granular and sub-categorise by fat patterning.”
Caroline put down the piece she’d been holding, looked between the two of them, and got up without a word. She came back with a dented commemorative biscuit tin that featured a bewhiskered Arundel ancestor stamped onto the lid.
“If I have to listen to one more second of this,” she said, settling back onto the rug and tipping a sealed baggie of weed onto the lid of the puzzle box, “I’m going to need to be considerably more relaxed.”
James watched her work. She crumbled a bud apart over a king skin and rolled a twist of card into a filter against the pad of her thumb.
It was licked, sealed, and tapped to a point before Tristan even managed to place another piece.
She’d been rolling their joints since they were teenagers, and James had given up trying to match her flair with it years ago.
She lit it, took a pull that hollowed her cheeks, and passed it to Tristan. He drew deep, held it too long, and handed it to James with his eyes already watering. By the time the joint came round to him a second time, Tristan had stopped sorting altogether.
“You really should try fat pattern grouping,” James insisted. “Within the colour grouping. Yes, it’s a bit of a time sink, but it’ll pay off in the long run.”
“…Okay,” Tristan said. “Okay. Walk me through your process.”
“Coarse speckle here. Smooth there. Then of course the marbled ones get their own pile.”
“The marbled ones get their own pile.” Tristan lifted a piece and held it an inch from his nose. Then he started to laugh. “Oh my God. You’re right. There’s a whole — it’s got a pattern! How did I not see the pattern? Caroline. Caroline, look at the speckle!”
“I see the speckle, darling. It’s quite pronounced.”