Chapter Twenty-Six
Back then
James had a fair idea of the state Tristan would be in before the car reached the top of the Long Walk, and the man who climbed out of it confirmed it. The smile arrived on schedule and set in place there with nothing real loaded behind it.
So he’d cleared the decks. He’d kept Vidal away, since Vidal could turn a quiet weekend into a fringe production with two costume changes, and Bash, whose feelings about Tristan hadn’t thawed, hadn’t been asked either.
A personal guest of the King’s at Windsor would ordinarily get the full pageant, the staff lined along the steps, dinner off the good silver, but James had waved all of it off.
He had told Benton to take the weekend. Benton had received this with a single raised eyebrow and a “Very good, Sir” that indicated he expected a late-night call letting him know that the East Wing had gone up in flames at some point in his absence.
A King left two days without a Private Secretary was, in Benton’s cosmology, a King one short step from being found dead-centre of an orgy.
James had assured him the monarchy would survive forty-eight hours and one houseguest.
And the man had his own claim on the weekend, in any case.
Benton kept a life wholly separate from the diary he ran with such ferocity: he sang bass in a choir that took itself entirely seriously, with a concert that Saturday at a church in Surrey.
James had been along the year before and could confirm that Benton had a fine voice.
With Caroline marooned in the Netherlands, there was nothing left to keep him from his rehearsals.
Tristan and James ended up in the small sitting room off James’s apartments, the fire lit and a decanter between them that Tristan had barely touched. He’d fallen quiet on the sofa, and James watched him lay a flat hand on the arm of it and press, slowly.
“You’re doing something,” James said. “I’ve been watching you since you came in.”
Tristan caught himself. He spread his fingers wide on the sofa arm, then turned his hand over and studied his own palm.
“De-roling,” he said. “It’s a — it’s a thing actors do.
Or are meant to. You spend twelve hours being someone who isn’t you, someone having a much worse day than you are, and you can’t just—” He clicked his fingers.
“You have to walk yourself back out of it. Say the date out loud. Tell yourself where you are. Find five things you can touch, and name every one. It might sound like nonsense, but if you do it enough, your body works out that the day’s over, and you’re allowed to be yourself again.
I’m bad at it lately. Ben’s a sticky one. ”
James thought this over. “Thank you,” he said.
“For what?” Tristan asked.
“You’ve just given me the word for something I’ve done my whole life. I never knew it had one.”
He set his glass down on his knee and held it there.
“The difference is that my role doesn’t ever come off,” he said.
“Out there I’m James. The King. Your Majesty.
Then I come home, and none of it falls away, because it can’t be allowed to.
You’ve seen how they are with me, Caroline and my friends.
There’s the bow, or the curtsy, and the Your Majesty, before anything else.
Even now, when it’s only us, you had to go through the routine. ”
“I figured that was just the way things are…” Tristan shrugged.
“It looks absurd from the outside. They’ve known me since we were children.
But the Institution only holds together if there’s reverence in it, Tristan, and it has to come from the people nearest me most of all.
The morning my own friends stop bowing is the morning it starts to die. So there’s no taking the Crown off.”
Tristan said nothing.
“What I do,” James said, to his glass rather than to Tristan, “is get myself home, with the people I trust. And once all the ceremony is done with, I shut the last door inside me, and think: right, Jams.” He tapped the bottom of his glass against his knee.
“And then I’m not the King in the room any more. I’m just theirs. Just their Jams.”
Tristan rose from the sofa and caught James by the wrist, hauling him to his feet. “Right. You can’t do this part sitting down.”
“Do what, exactly?”
“De-roling exercises. Come on, I swear it works.” Tristan let go of him and shook both hands out from the wrist. “Hands first. Get all the King out of your fingers.”
James stayed still.
“Get moving, James! Arms next.” Tristan set his arms swinging, then took it down into his hips, working them in a loose figure-of-eight. “Shake the day off. The crown, whatever’s stuck in you that might keep you from being Jams. We’re shoving it all out through the floor.”
It was the wriggling hips that did it for James, who started laughing. “You look possessed.”
Tristan kept at it, grinning, his fringe shaken down over his forehead. “I’m not stopping till you do it yourself, James. This is life-changing stuff I’m teaching you.”
James rolled his eyes towards the cornicing and, because it was the shorter path to peace, shook out one hand.
“Get your whole body into this, Jams. Don’t half-ass it.”
There it was. Jams, out of Tristan’s mouth. The name had been on offer for all of ninety seconds, and he’d already claimed it as his. James didn’t correct him.
So James committed. He shook out his hands, then his arms, and was surprised by how much there was in there to shake off. By the time he’d got his shoulders into it, the set of them gave way all at once, and he stood there looser than he’d been in days.
Tristan had stopped to watch him, smiling. “On to part two. We’re doing five things you can touch now. Name each one as you go, to tell your body where it actually is.”
He circled the room, touching each thing in turn: the mantel, the brass of the fire surround, the back of the sofa, the curtain, the spine of a book left on the side table.
“See? I’m not on set. I’m not Ben. I’m just Tristan Whitlock in Windsor Castle with Jams…
which actually is kind of fucking insane… ”
James touched the table. “The table.”
“There you go, Jams.”
He set his palm on the worn leather of the chair back. “The chair.”
Tristan was smiling at him, warm and entirely himself, and James found he wanted to touch this man, so he reached out and laid his palm on the fuzz of Tristan’s jumper. “Tristan,” James said.
Tristan stilled. Then James pushed the loose fringe back off Tristan’s forehead, fingers sliding through his fine dark hair. “Tristan’s hair.” Then he let his palm settle on the side of Tristan’s face, his thumb skimming along his cheekbone to the corner of Tristan’s mouth.
Tristan didn’t move away from that either.
“Tristan’s smile.”
Tristan’s breath caught beneath his palm, and he moved away from the touch.
“There.” Tristan wet his lips. “Are you feeling like Jams now?”
“Yes,” James said, drawing his arm back. “And have I got Tristan here with me, rather than Ben?”
Tristan treated him to the full force of his smile. “Yeah.”
“Good.” James retrieved his glass. “Then let’s go down and raid the kitchen, shall we, Tris? I think Jams quite fancies a sandwich.” He stopped at the door. “Nothing poncy. No egg and cress. Something solid and mustardy.”
The weekend folded around the two of them.
On the Saturday they slept in late and picked at an informal brunch laid out in James’s apartments. When the rain finally let up they headed out into the grounds, Tristan in a pair of borrowed wellingtons two sizes too big, stamping along at James’s side and complaining about the cold.
There were no red boxes for James to clear, and nothing in the diary, not even so much as a clay shoot. The staff let them keep to themselves, leaving them to the quiet of the castle and each other’s company.
They found the deer late on the Sunday. A scattered herd of hinds cropped the grass at the far edge of the park, the light golden behind them, and James stopped at the rail with Tristan drawing up beside him.
Neither of them spoke, which was rare enough with Tristan in the vicinity to be worth noting. The hinds grazed on, unbothered. A stag kept his distance further off, his antlers stark against the treeline.
James was aware of the heat of Tristan at his shoulder. Tristan drew breath, the small hitch James had learned to read that meant a pun was loading.
He got a grip round Tristan’s arm and pressed into him. “Don’t,” he said. “Let’s just look at them.” And Tristan let his breath out with the joke still in it, then leaned into James’s side to watch the deer with him.