She nods.
“Why don’t you get back in bed? I’ll sort tea for us.” Because tea cured every ailment, or so my mother had us believe until we realised her tea came with a dash of whisky.
Blair shakes her head and then her hands reach for my shoulders. My chest expands a little more and I hold her waist, my hands almost spanning round it because she’s tiny, tinier since Lennox died. She presses her forehead towards my chest and I pull her closer, feeling her heat, smelling her hair and the musk that’s wrapped in with her body lotion.
“He left before. When I was seventeen. I didn’t hear from him.” Her words are muffled, her breath warm through my T-shirt.
“Doesn’t mean he’s left again.”
Her eyes when she looks up at me tells me she doesn’t believe that.
“Let’s see if we can find where he’s gone.” I press my lips to her hair and hold her a little longer. “And get breakfast.”
I feel her kiss my chest.
“Happy New Year.”
Her words hang in the air. Wishes with wings.
* * *
The castle is hungover. A skeleton staff quietly tidy up from the night before and more doors are closed than open. The kitchen lacks the usual clanging of pans and the place has a stillness I’m unused to.
I’ve been here many times, as a child and an adolescent and several times as a politician’s advisor, but each time has been for an event, rarely just to stay. For a boy who grew up in a small Cornish cottage, this place was straight out of a story. Stone floors and winding staircases, high ceilings with glittering chandeliers and rooms that were locked, containing secrets that were meant to stay that way. For a boy who grew up on a diet of myths and legends about wizards and knights and his own father, this place was everything.
And nothing.
Because it would never be mine and I accepted that from the start. It was dreams and stories and history and now a woman and a man who had stolen the one thing I’d always kept safe.
Blair walks next to me, dressed in jeans and an oversized sweater that hides her curves and makes her look younger than she is.
Even without any finery or jewellery she looks regal, carrying herself with her shoulders back and back straight, eyes gleaming. She’s make-up free and her hair is loosely tied, my fingers itching to set it free.
My mind itching to work out where Ben is.
Why he left while the moon was still hanging in the sky.
I know the rough layout of the castle, where the banqueting hall is and the guest chambers, where my own room is, although that isn’t where I've slept.
I know where security are based and that’s where we head, because that’s the most likely place for Ben to be. Behind his screen, looking at whatever threat to Blair has headed in.
Blair enters a code in the lock and pushes open the heavy wooden door that’s probably stood there for centuries.
I haven’t been in here before. This is where I enter a different set of loyalties because my country and Blair’s have been at a silent war of wills for the last few decades, trying to reach trade and free movement agreements and untangle centuries of shared laws and rules. A dance where both want to lead and I’m meant to be coaching the English to victory.
“Should I be in here?”
She glances at me, eyes intense. “Should you?”
She’s asking me what threat I pose. Does she need to be afraid of what I would do with the information that I might find in here.
She takes whatever answer she wants, as I don’t give her one. She’s placed her trust that I’ll be a traitor to my own and not her, a trust that she gives too easily.
The man I know as Micky looks up. His face is pock marked and scarred, his hair shaved short and he looks battle worn.
When he looks up at us his eyes are a shade of blue I’ve never seen before, so bright they could be the ocean.
Micky looks from me to Blair and back again.
