Chapter Twenty-Three
Wallis had been gone for nearly six hours, and Vidal still couldn’t shake the residue of him.
He was sitting at the end of the sofa with a glass of Albarino he’d poured at some point, and Mercè lying warm across his thighs in the position she’d held since he’d come back from showing the man out.
The lamp on the side table was the only source of light in the room.
Beauchamp had gone to bed somewhere after eleven, and the flat had settled into the hush it took on at this hour.
David. Wallis insisted on being called by his first name. The man had arrived in the drawing room at four o’clock that afternoon in a navy suit, and he had spent the next ninety minutes calling Vidal Your Highness and laughing at all of his jokes. He’d agreed with everything Vidal said.
The man was perfectly fine. He was Lympstone-trained and ex-Royal Marines. Beauchamp had supplied a dossier on him an inch thick, every page of it indicating professional competence. Vidal had no reasonable objection to this David. He simply did not want him.
He wanted the Major in the kitchen, scowling at the coffee machine that he had never quite figured out. He wanted to hear Beauchamp’s dry, insubordinate sir rather than David’s clumsy attempts at sticking to royal protocol.
Beauchamp’s sirs came in at least four distinct variations, by Vidal’s count.
There was the sir that meant I hear you and I am choosing not to act on it.
The sir that meant you are being ridiculous and I will not dignify this with a response.
There was the sir that meant I am going to do exactly what you have asked me not to do, and you will thank me later.
Mercè shifted against his thighs, and he ran his thumb along the baldness of her flank.
Vidal’s mobile, face-down on the cushion beside him, lit up. He saw the glow before he heard the buzzing, and he was reaching for it, his heart stuttering in his chest at the unexpected late-night call. It was his father.
He sat up. Mercè protested, was ignored, and resettled herself with a wounded sigh. “Pare.”
“Vidal.” Carlos’s voice came down the line in the tone Vidal had heard only a few times in his adult life. This was the tone he reserved for delivering the news of the deaths of family members, and the night the referendum result had come in. “Are you well?”
“Yes, father.”
“Are you alone?”
“Mercè is here.”
Carlos let out a dry exhalation. “Then I am sorry, my boy, because I have to tell you this now and I cannot soften it for you over the telephone. You must hold Mercè tight.”
Vidal set the wine glass down on the side table with care, grounding himself with this act of domesticity. “Tell me.”
“Ferrer’s people came to Geneva this afternoon. They had a proposal, which I have spent the last seven hours considering with the lawyers, and which I have agreed to within the last hour.”
“And what was this agreement, father?”
“The monarchy is to be formally abolished. There will be a constitutional declaration in the Corts on Tuesday morning. The titles will go with it, of course. We are no longer Their Serene Highnesses, Vidal. None of us. The line ends with this signature.”
Vidal took in a sharp intake of breath, opened his mouth to interject, and found that he had no words to say.
“In return,” Carlos went on, in the same level voice, “the family’s personal accounts are to be released within seven days.
The Sackville trust will be untangled from the sovereign holdings.
Your brothers’ assets, your mother’s, mine, yours.
All of it freed. The Palau and the estate revert to the state, as they were always going to, but the private property comes home to us.
The condition is silence. We do not contest. We do not give interviews.
We do not, in your case, post anything on TikTok.
We accept the outcome with grace, and we get our lives back. ”
“Pare —”
“That is all, Vidal. There is nothing more to it. I have signed for all of us, because the lawyers were clear that the offer expired tonight and there was no time to convene a family vote, and I am sorry for that. But it was the right decision. We are still — at the end of the day — a family. The titles may go, but we remain the Montcadas, my boy.”
The line went quiet. Vidal could hear his father breathing, and the faint sound of Geneva traffic somewhere beyond a window. His tears came without warning. He pressed the heel of his free hand against his mouth to keep quiet.
“That is enough, Pare.”
“Vidal…”
“It’s enough that we remain the Montcadas.”
His father sighed down the phone line, composing himself.
“Come to Geneva, my boy. Tomorrow if you can. I want to hold my children tight. Your mother is coming on Thursday, and so are your brothers and their families. We will sit down together and we will eat, and we will be in the same room. Will you come?”
“Yes, Pare.”
“Good. Good.” Carlos’s voice had thickened. “I love you, my boy. Kiss smelly old Mercè for me. I will ring you again in the morning.”
The call ended.
Vidal sat where he was, with the mobile still pressed against his ear, and listened to the silence on the other end of a line that was no longer connected to anyone.
He only lowered his mobile when Mercè shifted across his thighs and made an inquiring noise into his knee.
His feet found the floor. Mercè, displaced for the second time in an hour, gave him a wounded look from the cushion and burrowed into the warm patch he had left behind.
He went down the corridor in his bare feet without thinking about it, heading for Beauchamp the way he always did now whenever the world tilted on its axis.
He stopped with his hand on the doorframe of Beauchamp’s room.
He’d put the man through quite a week, wielding his own hurt against him like a precise blade, and Beauchamp had absorbed every cut without raising his voice. He had been, by any honest measure, a complete and total professional three weeks before the end of his secondment with Vidal.
Beauchamp’s door was cracked open a few inches. The room beyond was dark. He could just make out Beauchamp under the duvet, turned away from the door, the rise and fall of his shoulder very steady. He didn’t knock. He had no right to after the way he’d treated Beauchamp.
A sniffling sound escaped him. Then he stood in the doorway and waited.
Beauchamp didn’t stir. His chest kept to its slow even rhythm under the duvet. Vidal pressed the back of his wrist against his mouth and waited longer, because if Beauchamp woke now, of his own accord, without being asked, then it would be all right. Then he would be allowed to go to him.
Beauchamp’s chest rose, then fell again.
He stood in the doorway until his bare feet had gone cold against the parquet, and Beauchamp slept on. After a long time Vidal turned and let himself out of the flat.
The staircase was cold under his bare feet.
He registered this as a fact and kept moving, one hand trailing along the banister to keep himself upright on the turn.
The lamp on the second-floor landing was one of the dim ones the residents had voted in last spring on grounds of warmth, and Connor’s door, when he passed it, was a flat black rectangle in the gloom that he didn’t allow himself to look at for more than the half-second it took him to go past.
Out through the front hall. Out through the heavy door, which he didn’t quite close behind him, and then onto the pavement.
The night was cool, and he had no shoes and no coat on, but he kept on walking forward anyway.
Mount Street was quiet at this hour. The windows above the closed shops were lit gold behind their curtains, and a black cab idled outside the Connaught with no fare in the back. The driver looked up as Vidal went past in his pyjamas. Vidal kept walking west towards the Park.
He could hear his father’s voice running underneath everything.
The titles will go. The line ends with this signature.
Vidal had been carrying knowledge of the Montcadas’ eight-hundred-year history in his posture since he was old enough to stand, and his father had signed it away in an office in Geneva for the sake of access to their money and resources.
He had not been consulted. He understood that there had been no time to consult him.
He understood that his father had done the only sensible thing that could be done.
It made no difference at all to the fact that the thing he had been since the day he was born was now going to be stripped away from him.
His vision had blurred somewhere around the top of South Audley Street. He pressed the heel of his hand against his eye and walked on.
The traffic on Park Lane was thinner than it ought to have been, the headlights of the occasional car coming down at him in long bright streaks that smeared sideways through the wetness of his lashes.
He crossed at the lights without registering them, and a courier on a moped slowed to look at him as he passed, before he rode on.
James.
The thought arrived like a coordinate dropped on a map.
James would understand. James was the only one in this country who could possibly understand, because James had been raised inside the same scaffolding of titles and protocols.
Vidal wiped his nose against the back of his wrist and walked faster.
He turned south at Hyde Park Corner. The grass at the edge of the path was wet against his ankles. He had been crying, he realised, for some time now. His tears had tracked down his cheeks and onto the collar of his pyjamas.
I am not His Serene Highness Prince Vidal of Cardona any longer.
He tried the sentence in his head and found that it would not stay still long enough to be examined. It slid sideways every time he reached for it. He tried it again. I am not. He could get as far as the negation, and then the rest of it dissolved in his mind.
The Albert Memorial was a long way off through the trees, gold and ridiculous in the middle distance. He fixed on it as a marker and kept walking.
Somewhere ahead of him, the path crossed a road. He stepped down off the kerb with an unthinking adjustment of his weight that didn’t require his eyes to be open or his brain to be present. His bare foot found the tarmac.
He didn’t see the headlights. There was only a sound like the world drawing in a sharp breath, a horn that came from somewhere outside his line of sight, and then the impact arrived against his hip. The ground was no longer where it had been just a moment ago.
He was airborne for what felt like a very long time. Long enough to think, Beauchamp.
The tarmac came up to meet him. He landed on his right side. Something in his arm gave, with a wet sound he heard from inside his own body, and the pain, when it arrived, was total and all-consuming.
He was looking up at the sky. He could not immediately work out how he had got to this position, with the ground hard against his back.
There were leaves overhead, the black filigree of plane trees against a sky that wasn’t quite black.
Somewhere very far away a woman was shouting, and a car door had opened and closed.
Mercè.
He had left her on the cushion, warm in the dent of the sofa with the lamp on, and now he was on his back in a road near Hyde Park and Mercè was alone in the flat.
A face appeared above him. A young face, female, her mouth open, saying something he couldn’t make out.
He tried to lift his head to answer her and found that his head would not lift.
He tried to move his right arm and discovered that his right arm was not, in any meaningful sense, available to him.
“Pare,” he said, or thought he said. The word came out very small.
The face above him was speaking into a mobile.
He could hear the rhythm of the words but not the meaning of them.
The sky behind her had begun to soften at the edges, the leaves running together into one dark wash, and he thought, with the last bit of clarity he had, that he ought to tell her about Mercè. Someone needed to know about Mercè.
He opened his mouth to say it.
The dark came up underneath him like water and closed over his head.