At first, Sinclair kept working, and she did likewise, determined to let him come to her first.
He could, however, have been thinking the same thing, as it was almost an hour before he began to clear his desk, quietly closing his briefcase and walking to the door.
For a moment, she panicked that he was going to leave without saying a word.
And when he glanced around at her, she didn’t have time to look away, pretend she wasn’t watching.
There was a flicker of a smile on his face as he whispered, ‘Are you coming?’
Something in the simplicity of this statement, the coy confidence, made her rise to her feet. Jokingly, she replied, ‘I thought you’d never ask.’
‘I wasn’t sure if you’d be interested,’ he mused while he waited for her to fetch her coat. ‘I wondered if you were only available for meetings trapped inside the minister’s office.’
She laughed as casually as she could. ‘An error on my part. Villiers never gives me the details I need, so I have to creep around and get them myself. I thought I could pop in and out without anyone seeing.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘You could have been in serious trouble if you were caught, especially with the rumours of someone talking to the press.’
Quickly, she averted her eyes. ‘Thank you for keeping quiet in that stupid closet. I’d imagine that special favours like that would be below your rank.’ She tried to laugh it off.
A frown flickered across his features, and she remembered how much he had put on the line, too – his Rome posting would depend on good behaviour.
But then he smiled. ‘It was worth it, just to see you squirm with the fear of being caught. I never thought I’d see you lose your composure, but underneath all that bravado, you’re just as human as the rest of us, aren’t you?’
With a touch of laughter, his eyes met hers, and she followed him to the door.
Sinclair tapped a folder he had tucked under one arm. ‘I have to deliver some papers to one of the state rooms for the morning, if you’d like to come with me?’
Interested to see more of the palace, she agreed, and soon they were slipping into a grand room housing a long, polished mahogany table, gold glinting from ornate coving and gilded furniture.
As Sinclair began to lay documents before each chair, Miranda gazed up at a portrait of the first Queen Elizabeth, looking young yet shrewd as she clasped a golden orb and a sceptre.
‘Do you see the crown she’s wearing?’ Sinclair had joined her. ‘That’s the St Edward’s Crown, used by Edward the Confessor in 1048. They remodelled it in 1661, which will be the one our Queen Elizabeth will wear.’ Then he added as an aside, ‘Although she won’t have it on for long periods; it weighs five pounds.’
‘Ouch,’ Miranda muttered.
‘The queen’s been borrowing it to practise wearing it around the palace. After the service, they’ll change to the Imperial State Crown, a kind of everyday crown at only three pounds.’
‘You don’t think someone might try to steal one of them?’ she asked. A missing crown would make a great headline. ‘It would be worth good money if you melt it down, not to mention the chaos at the coronation. Can you even have a coronation without a crown?’
‘The security is too tight. In any case, it could be replaced with one of the other crowns if need be. The monarchy owns dozens of the things.’
Miranda smiled. ‘You could become a tour guide if you ever lost your diplomatic job.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘I don’t intend to lose my job.’
She hadn’t met anyone before who could manage a conversation so skilfully. Where she was headstrong and opinionated, he was considered and measured. And she realized how little she knew about him, how much he kept hidden.
‘They’ll use the same golden orb and sceptre at the queen’s coronation, too.’ Sinclair pointed at the portrait. ‘They’re hundreds of years old. It’s part of what will make Elizabeth into a real monarch.’
‘But don’t you think it’s ludicrous, giving her a selection of symbolic medieval finery and calling her a queen?’
‘That’s its beauty, that it doesn’t make sense.’ Sinclair smiled. ‘Acentury ago,The Economist’s editor, a man called Bagehot, said that the monarchy’s mystery is what keeps it going.’ Sinclair fixed his eyes on the portrait as he recalled the quotation. ‘He said, “Don’t let in the daylight upon the magic,” meaning that we have to keep up the illusion, use mystical and symbolic objects to make it look like some kind of spiritual ordination from God.’
‘Isn’t that cheating, using tricks to make people believe?’
He shrugged. ‘I suppose so, but the queen has to do a good job these days, too. A century ago it was easy to pull the wool over people’s eyes, but now the monarchy has to work hard and show that it’s worth it.’
‘Or they could face a revolution.’
