Chapter Twenty
Back then
The trick with Barnaby had always been to mention a horse. Any horse would do.
James let the news drop casually over the last of the port. “I meant to say, Bash, I’ve finally got hold of a Zauberkonig filly. For the stud programme.”
Barnaby’s head snapped up. “You’ve what?”
“I’ve sourced a daughter of Zauberkonig, out of a rather promising—”
“When did this happen? How did this happen?” He set his glass down with a sharp clink. “And why am I only hearing of this now?”
“I’d rather hoped to surprise you.”
“Surprise me? You sat on a Zauberkonig daughter for weeks to surprise me?” Barnaby was already pushing his chair back. “James, you absolute knob. Take me to her. Now.”
This was how the entire party came to be picking its way through the dark grounds at half ten. The grounds were soaked from the afternoon’s rain, and the torches turned the wet grass silver ahead of them. Barnaby set the pace, while the less motivated of them straggled along behind him.
Vidal’s sense of cooperation lasted as far as the first stretch of open lawn. “These shoes,” he announced to the night, lifting one patent-leather-clad foot clear of the grass for inspection, “are BERLUTI. They were made by hand in Paris. And you have forced me to march them into a bog.”
“They’ll clean.” Beauchamp had him by the elbow, steering him neatly round a puddle Vidal hadn’t seen.
James let them get a few steps ahead, then dropped back to where Lex was bringing up the rear with his hands shoved deep in his coat pockets. He hadn’t said a word since they’d left the table.
“You all right?” James asked, in a low voice.
“Yeah. No. Ask me again in ten minutes.”
“He’s going to say yes, you know. There’s no question about it.”
“I know.” Lex blew out a long breath. “Doesn’t help calm the nerves, though.”
The yard was warm and close, thick with the scent of hay and horse.
Barnaby went straight to the end box, his arm going through the bars and reaching for the foal, which meant he entirely failed to register that his mother, his father, Perry, and Lex’s mother Linda were all standing in a tidy rank by the tack room watching him.
The filly stepped up to the bars to meet him, and she was, James had to concede, absurdly gorgeous.
A scrubby dark bay with too much leg, and a forelock standing bolt upright between her ears.
She had a fat brush of a tail, and a white blaze running crooked down a muzzle still soft with foal fuzz.
She lipped at Barnaby’s sleeve, and then went for his fingers.
Barnaby fell to bits in an instant. “Oh,” he said, as he crouched down to her level. He ran a hand down her neck, then turned it to feel the bone below her knee. “Look at the length of her. Look at that shoulder! Oh, James, she’s an absolute winner.”
“Barnaby.”
He looked up at the sound of his mother’s voice. “Oh! Mother.” He rose and kissed her cheek, then took all of them in. “Hi Linda! What on earth are you all doing here?”
Lex stepped up and took his hand. “Come here a sec, Barns.”
He drew Barnaby back to the box and reached in for the foal’s plaited head collar, freeing the ring from the loop of white ribbon that held it to the noseband. Lex held it up for Barnaby to see.
Barnaby’s eyes went wide, and his mouth trembled.
“That’s your proposal foal right there, Barns. Brookridge Sakura Zephyr.” Lex had dropped his voice, just for him. “Got her for you ’cos I wasn’t going to give you any reason at all to say no.”
Barnaby smacked him on the shoulder. “There’s no such bloody thing as a proposal foal, Lex. I was having you on.”
“Shall I take her back, then?” Lex kept hold of his hand. “James offered to do unspeakable things with me for her. He’ll have her in a second.”
Barnaby smacked him again with no strength behind it. “Obviously not.” He let Lex turn his hand over and settle the ring against the tip of his finger so that the only thing left to do was for Lex to push it home.
“Yes.” The word burst out of Barnaby, his grey eyes fixed intently on Lex’s grinning face. “Yes.”
“I haven’t asked you anything yet, Barns.” Lex blinked hard against his tears.
“Yes,” Barnaby insisted, and shoved his own hand the rest of the way onto the ring, too impatient to wait out the pace of his own proposal.
The band sat flush against Barnaby’s finger, the black diamonds catching the low light of the yard.
Then Barnaby was through the bars again, both hands on the filly, rhapsodising about the conformation of her shoulders and the length of her cannon bone, while the man he’d just agreed to marry knelt in the muck beside him to watch.
“Out of the way, Lex! I want a closer look at Sakura,” Barnaby snapped as Lex bent down to press a kiss against the corner of his mouth.
From over by the tack room came a wet, undignified noise that proved to be Linda sobbing with joy.
Then the lights cut out, and the yard dropped into darkness, but for a dim glow over the end boxes.
A square of white bloomed on the whitewashed wall above the tack room, and Perry’s reel began to play.
BLEX: THE LOVE STORY SO FAR
A punchy title card declared. The reel opened on Lex in the Brookridge staff room, holding a kebab an inch away from Barnaby’s mouth. Then the picture cut to a hillside, the pair of them mid-hack, Barnaby folded over his pommel laughing as a horse took a tidy nip out of the back of Lex’s hand.
Barnaby’s mother had taken a grip on her husband’s arm, and the Duke had fixed his gaze on his son and Lex.
It was John Fitznorman-Bicester who broke first. The Duke of Chatham crossed the yard in three long strides, gathered his son and Lex up together in his arms, and folded the pair of them into his chest. Whatever he said into the side of Barnaby’s head was pitched too low for anyone but the couple to catch, but it made Barnaby’s smile wobble, and earned a tear out of Lex.
Linda went in after him, and the Duchess after her, pressing her face to her son’s shoulder.
Then, because there had never in recorded history been a group embrace Vidal could stand to watch from the outside, he flung himself bodily onto the pile.
Barnaby had vanished into the centre of his own family, happier than James had ever seen him. He waited for the old ache for Barnaby to come up underneath it, the way it always had. Nothing did.
Then he stepped over to join them, and a hand shot out of the scrum and fisted in the front of his jumper. Barnaby hauled him in, and Lex closed in on him from behind.
? ? ?
James gave up on trying to sleep at two in the morning. He’d spent the past hour flat on his back replaying the proposal, and smiling blindly out into the darkness of his room as he remembered how Barnaby had got the ring on himself before Lex was even able to get the ‘will you marry me’ out.
So he pulled his robe on over his pyjama bottoms without bothering to knot it properly, and went out into the darkness of the east wing. He drifted through the corridors until he saw the glow of overhead lights bleeding out under the library door.
Tristan had folded himself into the big reading chair by the cold grate, his socked feet tucked up beneath him, with a heavy leather-bound volume propped against his knees.
He looked up at James as he approached. “Couldn’t sleep?”
“No.” James shut the door behind him and took the chair opposite. “What’ve you unearthed there?”
Tristan turned the spine towards him. “Some guy’s diaries from the 1700s.
He spent forty years hating the man who owned the next estate over, and he wrote it all down.
Every fence dispute. Every snub at church.
” He thumbed a page over. “I’m exhausted, but I can’t put it down.
It’s beautiful, James. This man has had a big, important life, and the throughline is just the one guy in the village that he couldn’t stand. ”
“What’s the diarist called?”
Tristan checked the bookplate. “Higginbotham. Josiah Higginbotham.” He pulled a face. “Sounds like a made-up person, doesn’t he?”
James’s gaze fixed on the cracked leather. “You’re reading the private grievances of the man who composed ‘Set a Crown Upon His Head’.”
“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
“They’ve sung it at every coronation since 1703, mine included.
I walked the full length of Westminster Abbey to four minutes of Josiah Higginbotham, in front of the watching world, wearing a robe that weighed rather more than you do.
” James gave a full-body shiver. “It’s held to be one of the great sacred works of the century, and just thinking about it gives me trauma flashbacks about how I was absolutely convinced the Imperial State Crown would end up falling from my head as I walked out of the Abbey. ”
Tristan looked down at the diary in open betrayal. “He spends a page in here calling his neighbour a pestilent swede-headed oaf.”
“He had a real way with words.” James let his head drop back. “He was good at the day job, too. The anthem starts: ‘Set thou a crown upon his head, a crown of purest gold; the Lord hath fixed it fast and sure, his throne from days of old.’”
“Man,” Tristan said. “What a mindfuck it must be, being you. You’ve got an entire choir belting out a song about God personally choosing you to rule, when really, you’re just this guy trying not to drop a really fancy, really heavy hat in front of the whole planet.
I get nervous doing a Tonight Show couch.
You went through an actual coronation. So how’d you keep it on? ”
“I kept my chin up, and I didn’t look down. That’s the secret.” He waited for the next question. There was always a next question: how much the crown actually weighed, whether being chosen by God had frightened him. He had the answers ready.
“How’d the proposal go? Did Vidal manage to make it all about himself?”