“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 underthe 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.
