Chapter Twenty-Three
Back then
The jigsaws came to Clarence House by way of Benton.
James could have acquired them himself, in theory, from online.
But where would the fun in that be? Instead he delegated the task of standing at a till with two boxes of Butts on Things: Sweet Cheeks under his arm.
He had spent much of his morning picturing it: Benton in his charcoal suit from Chittleborough a halved Liquorice Allsort had just gone into the bowl Vidal had set aside for the melancholy pieces, and Beauchamp fished it back out without a word.
Mercè, the fourth member of the team, was asleep.
Opposite them, the enemy hummed along like a production line. Caroline worked with her sleeves shoved up and her head down, while Tristan supplied what he plainly considered indispensable advice.
“Cheek.” He tapped the table. “That’s a butt cheek from the cupcake, Caroline.”
“It is, darling. Well spotted.”
Benton had laid out the entire border and was closing in on the middle. James watched their patch of the puzzle resolve itself piece by piece.
“Beauchamp,” he said. “We’re losing.”
“We are, Sir.”
At this low point, Mercè stirred. She rose, stretched, picked her way along the table’s edge on her dainty hairless legs, then closed her mouth around a corner piece and lifted it clear.
James met her eyes.
“Mercè,” he said. She held his gaze and did not blink. The stolen piece stayed clamped in her jaws. “Put it down.”
Instead, Mercè bolted at a speed James could only attribute to her streamlined, hairless form. He lunged after her.
“Mercè. Mercè, come here. There’s a good girl. There’s my girl…”
He kept his tone warm and coaxing the length of the passage, on the theory that a dog might be reasoned into surrender if you sounded enough like you were holding a treat.
She stayed a clean three feet ahead of him, nails skittering on the parquet, the stolen piece still gripped in her jaws, and ducked through the one door in the corridor that stood open, into Caroline’s bedroom.
James went in after her. She’d gone to ground under the bed, and he could hear her back there in the dark, working the cardboard between her teeth with great satisfaction.
James lay on his stomach on his sister’s bedroom floor and lifted the hem of the valance to retrieve the stolen bum piece.
Mercè was a pale shape at the far side of the bed, well out of his reach.
Set neatly against the leg of the bed, a foot from his face, was a pair of men’s brogues.
Oxblood, the wing-cap boned by hand to a hard mirror shine.
James knew them. He had admired them openly not a fortnight ago and asked the man wearing them where he’d had them made. They were from John Lobb of St James’s.
They were Benton’s, and Benton was at this very minute sitting next to Caroline in his socks, methodically assembling a border.
James rescued the puzzle piece after Mercè abandoned it in favour of a deep foot licking session. Then he returned to his friends and took his seat again.
A lesser man might have flung his wine at Benton’s face and demanded the satisfaction of a duel at dawn for the honour of the Princess Royal. James kept quiet, found the cupcake’s left buttock, and pressed it home.
The game wound down by attrition. Caroline’s team had routed him. Tristan had folded an hour ago, migrating to the sofa, where he now lay flat on his back, one arm flung up over his head and his mouth open to the ceiling as he snored. Nobody had the heart to wake him.
Vidal went next. He rose and pronounced the evening a triumph. “Goodnight, my darlings, my sweet sleeping American,” Vidal called over his shoulder as Beauchamp steered him out by the collar, Mercè cradled carefully to his chest. “I love you ALL. But Beauchamp the most, completely and utterly.”
That left the three of them.
James didn’t go back in straight away. He shook out the throw folded over the arm of the sofa and laid it over Tristan to the chin. Then he worked a cushion under Tristan’s head.
By the time he returned to the kitchen, Caroline was stacking glasses. Benton had moved off the border and into the body of the puzzle.
“Will you be staying the night, Benton?” James asked.
“I found a pair of brogues under Caroline’s bed earlier, while I was trying to get Mercè out.
Oxblood. John Lobb of St James’s, exactly like the ones I admired on you a while ago.
You’ve not worn anything but black or brown in all the years I’ve known you. Caroline chose them, didn’t she?”
Benton didn’t look up from the puzzle. But beneath his chair, his sock-clad toes curled tight against the parquet. His eyes flicked to Caroline.
“Don’t,” James snapped. “Don’t look to my sister, Benton. You’ll look at me.”
Benton dragged his attention back to James.
“How long has this been going on?” James demanded.
Caroline set down the glass in her hand. “Nine months, near enough.”
For months Benton had sat across a desk from him every working morning, briefing him and managing his diary, and that entire time he’d been going from James’s offices at Kensington Palace right into the Princess Royal’s bedroom.
A throaty snore carried through the open door from the sofa, and the last of James’s composure went with it. He brought his voice down low, out of consideration for the sleeping Tristan. “What about Tristan?”
“What about him?”