Chapter Thirty-Three
Now
Tristan had rules about his mobile. He’d had them since he was nineteen and Brad had caught him reading a comments section after the Disney Channel Christmas special and threatened to flush the thing down the toilet.
There was no scrolling between takes, no Googling himself after nine, no reading below the fold, and absolutely no engagement with anyone whose username contained numbers where letters should be.
Tristan managed to follow these rules about forty per cent of the time.
The problem was the algorithm, which had identified his particular weaknesses.
He’d made the mistake, three weeks ago, of watching a twenty-second clip of James at an engagement in Shropshire.
James was inspecting canals, wearing a hard hat and managing to look absurdly good in it.
Tristan had then lost an hour to the hashtag #SovereignDaddy.
There were pictures of him bending over to speak to children at a school visit, one knee dropped, arse squared to the press pool, captioned with: parliament needs to put THAT on a commemorative stamp.
And one with millions of likes: James at a charity polo match, switching shirts, one hand pushing his hair off his forehead.
i would let this man raise my taxes with those arms! !!
Since then his feed had decided that King James III content was all Tristan had ever wanted.
It served him images of James inspecting a submarine, James crouching to accept a bunch of wildflowers from a four-year-old in Swansea.
There was a ten-minute supercut, set to Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso, of James in sporting situations, which Tristan had watched twice and then cleared from his history as though he were disposing of evidence.
Now he was between setups on the Better Half lot, cross-legged in his fold-out chair, his mobile angled away from the passing crew, doing exactly what he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do.
He’d fallen into a fan account. @jamesian_era, forty thousand followers, posting hourly. The bio read fan account · not affiliated · long live the king and the content was a mixture of event photos, transcribed quotes, and the occasional meme.
He scrolled past a photo of James at a Commonwealth reception, shaking hands with the Jamaican High Commissioner, and then past a screenshot of a Guardian opinion piece with the headline THE QUIET REVOLUTION: HOW JAMES III CHANGED THE MONARCHY.
Tristan’s thumb stopped at a still image from a press pool.
It was a transition shot, one of the dozens photographers burned through between official frames.
James was stepping out of the Bentley, one foot on the pavement, the other still inside the car, his hand extended towards something someone off-camera was holding out to him.
The angle had caught his wrist at a bend, his fingers loose, and whoever had pulled the frame had waited for the exact fraction of a second in which his wrist read as a punchline.
The caption read: Our Queen
Tristan didn’t scroll past it. He should have. He knew the rules. He knew what sat beneath posts like this. He tapped through to the replies anyway.
@dave_norf82 This is what “progress” looks like apparently. Our head of state mincing out of a car like he’s off to get his nails done. Henry VIII would have a field day
@real_british_values Not my King. Never will be. The institution is supposed to represent the BEST of this country and instead we’ve got a man who publicly admitted he thinks about another man’s cock. Disgusting. Abdicate.
@charlotte_m_89 I’m not homophobic at all but there’s a difference between accepting people and having it shoved down your throat every single day. He chose to be a public figure. He chose this life. So maybe act like a King and not like this???
@gaborone_suns Brave King! Don’t listen to the haters.
@keepbritgreat “Brave” Yeah so brave sitting in his palace with his billions while the rest of us can’t afford the heating. He’s not brave. He’s a rich poof with a tiara.
@chelseamumof3 Can we PLEASE just have one week where we’re not forced to celebrate this man’s sexuality?? I don’t CARE who he sleeps with. I just don’t want my kids seeing it everywhere. There’s a place for it and the front pages isn’t it.
@tj_ontherecord The quiet part out loud: half this country’s furious a gay man sits on the throne and the other half’s pretending they aren’t. The photo’s not the problem. YOUR reaction to the photo is the problem.
@steel_britannia Bring back real men in this country. That’s all I’m saying.
@anglo_lion_1066 They’ve turned the monarchy into a circus.
We should have seen where this was headed knowing he’s been fannying about with Lex Murphy’s blond twink since his schooldays?
What the hell do they get up to in Eton?
?? Standards in this country have fallen off a cliff.
Bring back national service and sort this generation out
@shaunR_notsorry He’s the head of the Church of England lads. Head of the CHURCH. Let that sink in. Man of God my arse. Literally.
Tristan closed the app, locked his mobile, and sat with it face-down on his thigh until the second AD called him back to set.
He didn’t look at it again for the rest of the day.
? ? ?
Benton met him at the mews entrance to Kensington Palace at seven thirty, holding an umbrella against a thin, persistent rain.
“Mr Whitlock.” Benton stepped aside to let him through the narrow gate and into the private courtyard at the rear of James’s apartments. “His Majesty is on a call with the New Zealand High Commissioner, which has overrun. I’ve prepared the sitting room for you.”
“Thanks, Benton.”
“Not at all.”
It was all perfectly civil. Benton held doors open, took his coat, and indicated the way through as though Tristan hadn’t been in and out of these rooms a hundred times before.
But there had been a time, not so long ago, when Benton would have called him Tristan. Tristan didn’t follow Benton towards the sitting room. Instead, he stopped in the corridor, beside a mahogany side table holding a lamp and a small bronze of a horse.
“Benton.”
Benton paused mid-stride and turned, his hands finding each other behind his back.
“Can I talk to you for a minute? Before James is done with his call.”
“Of course.” He didn’t suggest they sit down, a sign that he wanted to keep things brief.
Tristan looked at the bronze horse. “I know things are different now. Between us. And I get it. I do. You don’t have to pretend that you’re happy I’m back in the building.”
Benton’s expression didn’t change.
“When I left,” Tristan said, “you’d been six months into your exit plan.
The CarTon thing. You and Caroline had a working timeline.
Then I blew up my thing with James, and suddenly the last thing anyone needed was you leaving him.
” He met Benton’s eye. “So you stayed. You scrapped the plan and you stayed, because James needed you and because you actually give a shit about him, not just the job. I just wanted to say thank you for that, Benton. Because you made that call yourself, and it’s made things complicated for you. I’m sorry for my part in it.”
Tristan could have ended the discussion there, but the comments section he’d read through was still lodged in his chest, those posts with their laughing emojis and their not my King tagline.
“I want to know what he’s up against for real, Benton. I don’t want to hear about the seventy-three per cent approval line that Marina puts out for the press. We all know how she magics those stats up.”
“The polling is broadly supportive,” Benton said.
“That much is genuine. The under-forties are overwhelmingly favourable, and the institutional response from the Church, the Armed Forces and the Commonwealth leadership has been more constructive than our contingency planning anticipated.” He paused.
“Give it to me, Benton.”
“The opposition is consolidating.” Benton’s voice remained level, but he’d shifted his weight forward onto his toes.
“It began as scattered commentary online, the sort of bile that attaches itself to any public figure. It has since acquired organisational structure. There are now three separate campaigns with formal petitions before Parliament, two of which cite the Act of Settlement, one of which is pursuing abdication on the grounds of moral incompatibility with the role of Supreme Governor of the Church of England. None of them will succeed. But they don’t need to succeed to cause damage to His Majesty.
They need only exist loudly enough that the news cycle is obliged to cover them, and that is precisely what is happening.
“His Majesty is aware of all of this,” Benton went on.
“He reads his briefings, as he has always done, and he doesn’t shy away from the unfavourable material.
He has made a deliberate choice not to suppress the dissenters, not to retreat, and not to modify his public schedule in any way that might suggest he considers his sexuality a liability.
” Benton adjusted his cuffs. “He is managing well. But he is managing under a degree of sustained personal strain that I’ve not observed in him since the death of his father, and I have known His Majesty for nine years. He won’t tell you that.”
Tristan heard the accusation in what Benton left unsaid. That James would spend the whole ordeal careful not to hand him a reason to leave again. Tristan had gone once already, back when things were good and no one was watching.
“I’ll let His Majesty know you’ve arrived.” Benton turned and walked off towards James’s study.
Tristan went into the sitting room and sat on the sofa where James would find him.
James came in a few minutes later, still wearing the call in the stiffness of his shoulders.
They went through the de-roling routine the way they always did, shaking the day off, then the grounding, James naming each thing that placed him in his private sanctuary until his shoulders came down and it was Jams standing in front of Tristan.
At the end of it Tristan stayed close, lifted his hand, and ran his thumb over the deep lines between James’s brows. The strain Benton had described was right there under his thumb. The lines didn’t smooth away, but James’s eyes fell shut all the same.
“Are you feeling like Jams now?” Tristan asked.
James didn’t open his eyes. “I’ll get the rest of the way there in a bit.”
Tristan didn’t push it. Instead, he tucked himself in under James’s arm and steered him into the kitchen.