Chapter Thirty-Four
Back then
The cupcakes had his face printed on them in little white chocolate disc toppers.
The Many Crying Faces of Ben, a sign proclaimed above the pile.
Someone in catering had screen-grabbed six different frames of him crying throughout the series, and the result was a tower of cupcakes charting every stage of Ben’s emotional breakdown, arranged beside the open bar.
He took a photo and fired it off to James.
The reply arrived in under a minute, properly capitalised as always.
You look delicious. Especially the one where you’ve got your mouth open wide.
Tristan pocketed his mobile with a laugh and picked up the cupcake topped with James’s favourite crying face and bit into it.
The venue for the wrap party was a converted warehouse in Bermondsey that the production company had hired for the evening.
The crew had been arriving in clusters since six, shedding their coats and making straight for the bar.
Hair and make-up had claimed one end of it, the camera department the other.
Sparks mingled with grips, and the sound team, who always sat together at these things, had colonised a cluster of sofas near the far wall.
Birrell was at the bar, holding a pint glass that looked like a shot glass in his fist, deep in conversation with Micaela Campbell. She was laughing at something he’d said, her red earrings swinging. Birrell found him in the crowd and raised his pint in a salute.
The executive producer, Martin West, stepped up to a low riser beside the screen and waited until the room quietened. West was a compact man in his fifties with steel-rimmed glasses and a voice that carried.
“I’ll keep this short, because I know you’ve all got drinks and some of you have been eyeing those cupcakes since you walked in.
” There was a ripple of laughter. “What you’ve done over the past three months — what every single person here has contributed to — is something I’m going to be proud of for the rest of my career.
I’ve been doing this for thirty years, and there are very few times when I’ve watched a cut come from post and known in my gut that we’d made something that mattered. This is one of those times.”
The assembled cast and crew had gone still, all conversations abandoned as fifty people collectively sat in their accomplishment.
“We’re going to watch an episode tonight.
My favourite, as it happens, which is episode two.
” West adjusted his glasses. “It’s the one that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I saw the first assembly, and it’s the one I think is going to stop people in their tracks when it airs.
So grab a drink, find a seat, and let’s watch the thing we made. ”
The lights dimmed. Tristan found a spot against the side wall where he could watch the room more than the screen. He already knew every cut and every held beat in the episode.
The crew went quiet inside the first two minutes. By the time Birrell’s voice blared over the speakers, walking Ben through his day in the flattest possible register, dildos and nipple clamps and all, nobody was touching their food.
When the credits rolled, the room erupted. Birrell, who had been watching from a bar stool with his arms folded, got to his feet and was immediately swallowed by a dozen people wanting to shake his hand and slap his back. West found Tristan, pointed at him, then touched his own chest.
Tristan stood there against the wall, with the noise of the party reforming around him. In the second week of filming, Birrell had looked at him after a take and said, quietly, “That scene’s going to win you something.”
For the first time, seeing the reactions of the cast and crew around him, he believed Birrell. He’d done it. The pretty boy who couldn’t get cast in anything that mattered had just given the best performance of his life.
? ? ?
James rang him from the Bentley on the Thursday before the tasting.
“A word of advice about Chatham,” he said.
“The Fitznorman-Bicesters have an extraordinary property portfolio. They aren’t liquid in the way you’d understand it.
They don’t have a Calabasas house and a place in Aspen.
What they have is land. An almost absurd amount of it.
Kent, Suffolk, three thousand acres of Scottish moor that nobody’s visited since the nineties.
” He paused. “And then there’s Chatham itself. ”
“You’re warning me.”
“The house is a lot, Tris. Very old school. Very gilded. Very — there will be an unreasonable quantity of gold leaf, and I want you braced for it. The entrance hall alone took four hundred Italian craftsmen a decade to complete, and all four hundred had a tremendous fondness for cherubs.”
“James. I’ve spent a lot of time in palaces and castles by now. Your palaces and castles, specifically.”
“You have. But the Crown’s palaces are working buildings.
They’ve got offices in them. They’ve been adapted.
Chatham has not been adapted. It’s precisely as the fourth Duke left it in 1794, except that someone eventually put in plumbing.
You walk in and you can feel every century of it pressing down on you.
” He softened. “Just don’t comment on the house.
That’s the rule. Bash grew up in it. To him it’s simply where he lays his head on his pillow. ”
The car that came for Tristan on Saturday morning took him an hour and a half south-east from London into Kent, past villages with Norman churches and hedgerows that looked as though they’d been there since the Domesday Book.
The driver turned off the main road onto a private lane, and then through a set of iron gates so weathered that the crest worked into them had gone almost smooth with age.
Half a mile of gravel drive later, Chatham House came into view beyond a stretch of manicured parkland.
James had undersold it.
Tristan climbed out of the car. The house was done up in the Baroque style, composed of pale stone, and built around a central block flanked by two curved colonnades that swept out towards matching pavilions on either side.
Countless windows faced the front over three storeys, each one the height of a man.
A wide flight of shallow steps led up to the entrance, where a pair of columns framed a portico large enough to stable a horse in.
A housekeeper met him at the door and steered him into the entrance hall, which was everything James had promised.
The ceiling rose three storeys to a painted dome where gods in various states of undress frolicked amid clouds and thunderbolts.
The walls were encrusted with the work of those four hundred Italians: gilded garlands, gilded pilasters, gilded cherubs in every available niche, each one plumper and more self-satisfied than the last. A marble floor in black and white chequers stretched away in all directions, and a double staircase curved upward.
The kitchen, by contrast, was aggressively modern.
Someone had gutted whatever the original room had been and replaced it with a workspace that would have held its own in any restaurant kitchen.
Marble worktops ran the full length of the far wall beneath a bank of windows overlooking the south lawn.
A six-burner range sat in the alcove of what had once been an enormous fireplace, its chimney breast still intact above it, carved in stone.
Industrial pendant lights hung in a line over a central island where the tasting had been laid out.
The spread covered every inch of the island in a display so meticulously arranged that Tristan half expected a producer to step out from behind a pillar and call action.
Each dish sat on its own white porcelain plate, numbered with a small gilt-edged card propped against a miniature easel.
The cards were handwritten in copperplate.
There were twelve plates, grouped in fours: starters, mains, desserts.
Garnishes were positioned to the millimetre and portions sized for just a few considered mouthfuls.
A slender woman in her fifties with a clipboard and a silk scarf knotted precisely at the throat was adjusting plate seven’s garnish when Tristan walked in. Beside her, a chef in immaculate whites stood with his arms behind his back, waiting.
Barnaby was already at the island, studying plate three closely. He’d dressed down for the occasion in a pale blue open-collared shirt, his sleeves rolled to his elbows. The Duchess stood at his shoulder.
James arrived two minutes behind Tristan, and took the usual round of bows and curtsies that met him wherever he went.
“Mrs Mercier.” Barnaby addressed the wedding planner, his eyes still on plate three. “Tell us about the menu.”
Mrs Mercier clicked her pen and consulted her clipboard.
“Certainly, Lord Ashworth. Plates one to four are the proposed first course options. You’ll find a heritage beetroot tartare with horseradish cream, a twice-baked Gruyère soufflé, a pressing of confit duck with a plum and ginger chutney, and a ceviche of hand-dived Orkney scallop with yuzu and shiso. ”
“And these are all scalable to five hundred covers?” Barnaby asked.
“Five hundred and twenty, my lord, as per your revised guest list.”
Barnaby noted it on a small leather-bound pad that Tristan was fairly certain had been monogrammed. “Chef Iver, how do you propose to maintain structural integrity on the soufflé at that volume?”
“A relay system, Lord Ashworth. Four ovens, two-minute stagger, direct to table within ninety seconds of clearing the ramekin. We’ve stress-tested it at three hundred and held ninety-four per cent rise. At five hundred and twenty I would guarantee eighty-eight, which I consider acceptable.”
“I consider eighty-eight acceptable as well,” Barnaby said. His lip curled. “You can serve my fiancé one of the flat ones.”