“Could be. Could be bonito. Could be yuzu and anchovy. The Japanese don’t follow the same rules as us when it comes to confectionery. They’re operating on a level we can’t comprehend.”
Lee was chewing hers with a grimace. Obi had quietly deposited his into the sleeve of his tracksuit top when he thought nobody was looking. Barnaby had swallowed his without any visible change in expression, because Barnaby treated unexpected flavour profiles the way he treated unexpected social situations: with absolute, immovable composure and a refusal to let his face betray him.
The interviewer took a long sip of water and pointed at Barnaby. “How are you not reacting to that? That tasted like the sea died in my mouth.”
“He’s broken,” Lex said. “I’ve been trying to find his limit for two weeks. It doesn’t exist.”
“Four out of five lip smacks,” Barnaby said.
The interviewer laughed properly. She set her cards down on her knee. “Right. Last question for all of you. What’s the best thing you’re taking away from this Olympics?”
Lee said the medal. Obi said the experience. Both reasonable, expected, true.
Lex said, “Second gold, yeah? Nothing tops that. Standing up there with the anthem going and that weight round your neck. Best feeling in the world.”
Then the interviewer turned to Barnaby, sitting at his end of the sofa with his hands folded and his spine ruler-straight.
“And you, Barnaby? What’s the best thing to come out of Tokyo for you?”
He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t glance at Lex. He looked directly at the camera, and said, “The friendships I’m coming away with.”
The interviewer smiled and thanked them. The crew started adjusting for the next group.
Lex stayed on the sofa for a beat longer than he needed to, looking at the side of Barnaby’s face. Barnaby was straightening his cuffs, one then the other, his jaw set in that particular line that meant he knew exactly what he’d said and was not going to acknowledge it further.
Lex bumped his knee against Barnaby’s thigh, stood up, and walked away before his face could do anything stupid.
Chapter Twelve
Barnabywas in the morning room on the first floor of the Fitznorman-Bicester’s London house with his feet tucked beneath him on the sofa. This was a liberty he only took when his mother wasn’t in residence. Elizabeth, the Duchess of Chatham, had views about feet on upholstery that she’d communicated once, at volume, when Barnaby was eleven, and the memory still carried serious force behind it.
Florence was asleep on the rug in front of the unlit fireplace. She’d been overjoyed when he’d walked through the door from Tokyo, delirious with the full-body wriggling that Irish Setters deployed when their person returned, and had spent the first twenty minutes trying to climb into his lap despite weighing thirty kilograms. Now she was flat on her side, one ear folded inside out, twitching as she chased something in her sleep.
The post had arrived at nine. Mrs Gregson had sorted it onto the hall table in the usual formation: bills to the left, correspondence to the right, junk in the bin before it could contaminate the Carrara marble. Barnaby had carried his stackupstairs with a cup of tea and worked through it without much interest. There was a card from his aunt in Wiltshire congratulating him on the gold. A reminder about the Chatham estate tenants’ luncheon. An invitation to a charity auction that he would attend, bid on something his mother had pre-selected, and leave before the pudding course.
Then, at the bottom of the stack, the envelope.
It was cream, and of a thick paper stock. His name was written across the front in calligraphy so precise it looked like a printed font. He knew that it wasn’t; the Palace employed a full-time calligrapher who had been writing these things by hand since the reign of James’s grandfather.
The Lord Chamberlain is commanded by His Majesty The King to invite The Most Honourable The Marquess of Ashworth to a Reception at Buckingham Palace to celebrate the achievements of Great Britain’s Olympic and Paralympic athletes.
Barnaby set the invitation on the arm of the sofa and reached for the second item that had been inside the envelope. It was a photograph, printed on standard A4 paper, folded in thirds.
It was a screenshot of a meme.
The image was from the Team GB Media Day interview: Barnaby and Lex on the sofa, mid-conversation. Lex was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, grinning, one hand gesturing toward Barnaby. Barnaby was sitting with his legs crossed and his hands folded, his expression caught in the precise moment between composure and a smile he was failing to suppress. Someone in the wilds of the internet had captioned it in large white block letters:
THEY ARE IN LOVE AND I WILL NOT BE TAKING QUESTIONS
Beneath the meme, in a scrawl that Barnaby would have recognised anywhere, James had written:
Looking forward to seeing BLEX in action. Do not bring snacks; there will be canapés provided by the Palace kitchen.
The meme was bad enough. The scrawl beneath it was worse. James had sat in whatever room in Kensington Palace he occupied at the time, printed out a screenshot of his best friend and a professional boxer captioned THEY ARE IN LOVE AND I WILL NOT BE TAKING QUESTIONS, referenced a portmanteau the internet had coined, and sealed the whole lot into a Buckingham Palace envelope with his own hand.
BLEX was everywhere, a fact Barnaby was aware of only because Vidal had sent him fourteen separate screenshots of BLEX fan edits set to Hozier songs, each one accompanied by crying-laughing emojis and no further commentary.
Barnaby picked up his mobile to begin composing the message that James richly deserved in response. It was going to be several paragraphs long and open with a detailed inventory of every constitutional mechanism available to a hereditary peer wishing to formally censure his sovereign. Then his phone buzzed in his hand.
