Chapter Twenty-Nine
Now
Benton had been halfway through an explanation of the revised security protocols for the Commonwealth Heads of Government summit when the door to James’s study opened without a knock.
James’s private study at Kensington Palace operated under a system of knocking that Benton enforced as though civilisation itself depended on it. People knocked. Even Caroline knocked, if only to give herself the pleasure of walking in before receiving an answer.
“Oh, hello, Bash. Vidal.” James looked up from the briefing papers spread across his desk and smiled, because Barnaby and Vidal appearing unannounced in his study was not, in itself, cause for alarm.
They’d done it before, usually with a bottle of something expensive and an evening’s entertainment planned around dismantling each other’s reputations.
His smile died when he saw Barnaby’s face.
Barnaby was still perfectly put together, not a hair displaced, but every line of his body vibrated at a frequency so violent that it acted like one of those sonic blasts that discouraged lingering in public space. Behind him, Vidal trailed in without a word, keeping to the edge of the room.
Benton got to his feet. His gaze moved between the two arrivals.
Barnaby bowed. “Your Majesty.” Vidal followed suit, bowing lower and with considerably more theatre.
James put down his pen. “It’s good to see—”
“You fucking idiot.” Barnaby hadn’t raised his voice, but James stilled. “I told you not to stick your cock into that one again.”
“And I,” Vidal said, one hand pressed to his chest in a gesture of deep personal injury, “wrote you a perfectly serviceable Raya profile. Curated, James. CURATED. Tailored to your specific romantic deficiencies. It would have got you plenty of bites. DOZENS. Distinguished, cultured, emotionally solvent male bites.” He swept his arm towards the window, as though the entire eligible population of London were assembled on the lawn for James’s inspection.
“And instead of allowing yourself to be MATCHED with a man who deserves you, you’ve gone crawling back to the American. ”
James looked past them both to Benton, who had gathered the Commonwealth papers and was already making for the door. James fixed him with a look of wounded betrayal that stopped Benton mid-stride.
Benton lifted his shoulders into a shrug. This has nothing to do with me. Then he murmured “Your Majesty,” and let himself out, leaving James alone with the two people in the world best equipped to flay him alive with their words.
Barnaby pulled a chair out from the conference table, dropped into it, and crossed his legs.
“Caroline sold you out. She thought it was cute, James. That the two of you were sneaking about like teenagers. And she told Vidal, but not me. Swore him to secrecy, which of course lasted about ten minutes.”
“I didn’t tell you about it,” Vidal said huffily, lowering himself into the chair opposite Barnaby with great dignity.
“You always overreact, Barnaby. You once rang me at six in the morning because you took offence at Lex’s comment about morning breath!
I have to TRIAGE with you, Barnaby. And in this case, I was the very picture of discretion. ”
Barnaby turned on him. “You told my husband. With the expected results, Vidal.”
Vidal scowled at him.
“Lex rang me from the gym,” Barnaby went on, his attention now on James.
“Mid-session, still in his wraps. He had to have someone do the dialling for him. He said, ‘Bash, did you know Jams is shagging the American again?’ and then he hung up before I could ask him a single follow-up question. He was due on the bag. So I’ve spent the last hour and a half in a car to Kensington, detouring to pick up Vidal, because surely, surely this can’t be true.
You cannot possibly be that much of a masochist.”
“Bash—”
“You can’t have forgotten,” Barnaby interrupted him, “how far gone you were after Balmoral, the first time he left you. You didn’t eat for a week, James.
Benton had to ring me and ask me to come over, because you wouldn’t open the door for anyone else, and when I got there you were sitting in the dark in your dressing gown watching reruns of some baking programme you don’t even like, drinking Scotch at eleven in the morning. ”
“The drinking, at least, sustained him,” Vidal offered.
Barnaby’s head swivelled around on his neck like a possessed doll in a horror film, his glare fixing on Vidal. “Shut up, Vidal. If you’re not going to say anything helpful, then just shut your mouth and sit there.”
Vidal shrank away as Barnaby uncrossed his legs and set both feet flat on the floor.
“James.” The fury had gone out of his voice.
“What are you doing? You have a chance to actually have something real here. The public support is behind you. Your voicemail leaked, and by some miracle the core narrative came out sympathetic. You’ve got a country that’s decided to love you for being honest about who you are, and instead of using that to build a life with someone who deserves you, you’ve run straight to the one man who’s already proved he’ll bolt. ”
“That isn’t what happened—”
“It is exactly what happened,” Barnaby snapped.
“He chose his career over you, James. And I’d understand if this were some passing weakness on your part, if you’d rung him once after pickling your brain and made a tit of yourself.
But you’re seeing him. You’re sneaking out to his flat.
Caroline’s covering for it, Benton’s arranging cars for you, and the whole circus is up and running again as though he’d never fucking gutted you in the first place! ”
“Bash,” James said. “Calm down.”
“No, James. The whole country’s asking itself why the most powerful man in it spent years lying about who he wanted.
They’re ashamed of the answer and what it implies about society and the way it treats gay men.
” He met James’s eye directly. “You could walk out of here tomorrow holding the hand of a man you declare to be your soul mate and be absolutely adored for it. That’s what you’d be wasting on Tristan. ”
James could have been angry. Barnaby had marched into his study without knocking, called him a fucking idiot, and laid out his romantic history as though it were a case for the prosecution.
Instead, James got up from behind his desk and pulled Barnaby into his arms.
Barnaby went rigid. He didn’t do hugs, and had spent twenty years perfecting the art of conveying affection through a raised eyebrow and a well-timed insult. James held him anyway. Eventually, Barnaby squeezed him back.
“Barnaby.” James’s chin settled over the crown of his head. “I love you. The greatest thing that ever happened to me was landing at Eton the same year as you and Vidal. I cannot begin to tell you what I owe to the pair of you.”
In his chair, Vidal had gone very still, a palm lying flat on his own breastbone.
“I know that this is coming from love,” James said. “I can hear it. But I need you to listen to me when I tell you that nothing you or Vidal say is going to steer me away from Tristan.”
Barnaby pulled back and looked up at him. His grey eyes were glassy with fear and sadness.
“I just want you to be happy, James.”
“I know,” James said. “I know that. But you need to let me do this, Bash.” He reached down and tapped a finger against the black-diamond band on Barnaby’s left hand.
“You would never have ended up with Lex if you’d let go of the idea of him.
If you’d given up on the promise of what you could have together, Bash, you wouldn’t be wearing that ring now. ”
Barnaby’s gaze dropped to his wedding band. There were episodes in Barnaby and Lex’s history that the Privy Council had sealed from discussion by mutual agreement. But the point needed making.
“The Tally, Bash.”
Barnaby flinched. The Tokyo Tumble Tally had been a sex game Lex and his mates ran at the Olympics, involving a point system for conquests that Lex had treated as a laugh and that had swept Barnaby up as one of the targets on the board before either of them understood what their fling would turn into.
The discovery of it had nearly ended them.
“Lex made a serious mistake,” James said.
“And you forgave him, Bash. Not because the mistake didn’t matter, but because the man who made it did, and you knew that he had it in him to be better than that.
Sometimes people we love get it badly wrong.
Sometimes they deserve a second go. I like the way I am around Tristan enough to want to take that chance. ”
Barnaby stepped out of James’s hold and straightened his cuffs with two precise tugs. “If he hurts you again,” Barnaby said, “I will make his life so socially untenable that he won’t be able to book a table in this city.”
“Noted.”
Vidal stood and came to James with his arms spread wide.
“I, for the record, have ALWAYS believed in love,” he announced, gathering James into an embrace that involved his entire body and much more crotch contact than the situation required.
“Even when it is FOOLISH love. Especially then. The Montcadas built an EMPIRE on foolish love. My great-grandmother married a circus performer, James. He could walk on his hands for a full kilometre.”
“Thank you, Vidal,” James managed, from inside the embrace. “That’s very stirring.”
Vidal released him at last and gripped him by the shoulders.
“And if the worst should come to pass, James, if this American breaks your heart a second time, Barnaby and I will be here. We will ALWAYS be here. We will arrive with wine and fury and whatever Lex has stress-cooked that day. We will reassemble you from whatever pieces Tristan has left behind. And then Lex and Beauchamp will make him disappear. In the most permanent way.”
“Lex once cried at a John Lewis advert. The one with the penguin,” James pointed out, “and Beauchamp won’t even jaywalk.”
“Irrelevant,” Barnaby said with absolute confidence. “Lex is obsessed with me. He’ll do anything I ask.”
James looked at him. Barnaby held his gaze. “He’ll do absolutely anything, James. I cannot overstate this.”
“Then I’ll just have to make sure Tristan knows he needs to stick around, for his own good,” James said, returning to his desk and ringing through for tea.