His Royal Secret (24 page)

“That’s borderline political,” Roberto said. “Huh. Wonder if he’s going to be a bit of a loose cannon.”

“At least the royals would be interesting for a change,” Fiona said.

Ben wondered whether James felt proud to stand up for another gay man, or whether he felt hypocritical. Once he wouldn’t have hesitated to condemn James for playing straight while praising gay rights; now he knew how much more complex everything was. How much more complicated James was as a man. Nothing was simple. Nothing was straightforward. And yet James had to keep going on as though he never felt a moment’s doubt.

“It is my prayer this holiday season that we will all reach out to those who are suffering and give them our support and our love. In this way we can help them find their courage, and perhaps find our own.” James smiled. “I wish you all a very happy Christmas.”

Then everyone went back to talking and drinking wine as
Doctor Who
came on. Ben heard Roberto asking, “Hey, was that live? He was pretty solid if that was live TV.”

“It’s recorded,” Ben said as he rose to refill his wine goblet. “They do it a week or two before the holiday.”

Fiona gave him an amused look. “You know a lot about the royal family for a recent immigrant.”

Ben smiled, hoping he appeared as casual and comfortable as James had. “I try to stay informed.”

“Guess that means the royals are too busy having their own massive celebration,” Roberto said. “Right now the Prince Regent is probably unwrapping that Maserati somebody put under the tree.”

•   •   •

At that moment, James was sitting on the floor of his sister’s bedroom, hanging on to Indigo, covered in blood. “Please, won’t you give it to me? Please?”

“Don’t take it! You said you wouldn’t take it!”

Mad as it seemed to let her keep the blades and pins she hoarded, he had learned through hard experience that taking them away hurt Indigo terribly. It made her feel even more out of control. “I won’t take it. But if you would just . . . let me have it for a while—”

“I won’t use it again tonight,” she sobbed. Her bleeding legs were wrapped around one of the bedposts; her dress was rumpled, her hair ruined, and mascara streaked on her cheeks. “But I need it here. I need it.”

“Indigo, no.” This wasn’t the way you were supposed to handle these situations, and James knew it, but he’d never, ever seen her damage herself like this. There was so much blood, so much, and she might not mean to kill herself, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen.

“Don’t take it away,” Indigo sounded so broken, so miserable. Her body heaved with each sob, and her flushed skin glowed with the heat of shame and pain. “Please don’t.”

“All right. All right. If you need to keep it, you can keep it until you feel better.”

“It hurts too much.”

By this she didn’t mean the new cuts still bleeding through her dress, smearing blood on her brother and the floor. She meant the anguish she felt inside. Cutting was supposed to help numb that pain, but tonight, apparently, she hadn’t been able to cut deeply enough.

He felt so helpless. It was terrible to love someone and to be unable to do anything to save them from this kind of pain and fear. Was it like this to watch someone drown, or know you couldn’t pull her from a fire?

Gently he smoothed her hair back from her sweat-damp forehead. “What if—what if you simply put it aside? Put it in a drawer or a box right here in your room. Let me clean you up, and I’ll sit here with you for a while. You’ll still have it nearby, I promise. But we just won’t look at it for a bit. Do you think you could do that?”

After a few long moments, Indigo nodded. “If you promise.”

“On my life.”

James let go, and Indigo slowly stood; her entire body shook from adrenaline overload. True to her word, she walked across the room and dropped the box cutter into a drawer. Silently James began planning a shakedown of the entire Kensington Palace staff to find out who had been negligent enough to leave one of these around where she could find it—but what was the use? If his sister ordered steak, they had to bring her a steak knife. There were needles in the maids’ sewing kits. Once Indigo had broken a window to get the shards of glass. He knew by now that if his sister wanted to hurt herself, she could always find a way. No point in firing some hapless soul because they’d accidentally provided her latest method.

The servants, who knew Indigo’s troubles all too well, had set a first-aid kit before the door as usual. Now James used it to clean and bandage her latest cuts as they sat together on the bloodstained carpet. She winced as he sterilized each wound, but maybe that pain too helped stunt the emotional turmoil his sister carried inside. James didn’t truly understand how cutting worked, on a psychological level, and didn’t want to. At the moment he focused only on the cuts, and his relief that none of them looked bad enough to require stitches, though a couple of them came close. Once the bleeding had stopped, he’d be able to use skin glue on the worst of the wounds.

But how long before the skin glue wasn’t enough? How long before they had to bring a nurse into the fold, risk Indigo’s secrets being exposed?

Indigo made a small sound as she saw the smears of red on James’s gray suit. “I ruined your clothes.”

How could she worry about his clothes when she’d just carved gashes into her own legs? But James knew better than to say that out loud. “Savile Row can always make more suits. Besides, I wasn’t really looking forward to yet another performance of the Messiah.”

(This was untrue—James liked classical music—but hours with the queen in the royal box sometimes proved wearying. Nicholas had stepped in to fill the role of “obedient royal grandchild” at the last minute.)

“I just couldn’t pretend anymore.”

There was no point in asking what Indigo meant by that specifically. James knew what it meant in the greater sense. The gap between who he and Indigo were supposed to be and who they really were—sometimes it felt more like a chasm. Sometimes she fell in. “Shhh. It’s all right now.”

She flinched. Clearly she knew it wasn’t all right, not even close. However, she only said, “Could I have something to sleep?”

As always, James wanted to resist giving his sister tranquilizers, but surely tonight she needed them. “Of course.”

Hartley brought the pills and stood by Indigo’s bed, holding one of her hands, while James held the other one. Groggily she said, “I’m sorry I ruined Christmas.”

“You didn’t ruin it.” James squeezed her fingers gently. “And tomorrow’s another day.”

He meant it to be optimistic, but she groaned, as if the prospect of even one more Boxing Day was too much to face.

Within another ten minutes she was so soundly asleep that one of the maids was able to go in and start working on the stains in the carpet. The scent of detergent followed James as he walked downstairs, followed by Hartley. To his surprise, the elderly butler spoke first: “Your Royal Highness, I wished to have a word.”

“Yes, Hartley?”

“Sir—forgive me, sir, but with all due discretion, I obtained these.”

Hartley’s wrinkled hand shook slightly as he held out a few brochures. James took them, at first confused, but understanding dawned as he began to read. The brochures were for inpatient psychiatric facilities, specifically programs that dealt with anxiety disorders and self-harm.

“I know it’s not my place, sir,” Hartley said. “I humbly beg your pardon. But the princess suffers so. If she could be helped, surely—”

“Is the latest episode over?” Richard came striding through the door, not bothering to have himself announced; he was a big believer in protocol when it came to other people but considered it something he could ignore when convenient. “I cannot fathom how she got set off by receiving a ruby bracelet. Was Prince Zale’s Christmas gift still too modest for her liking?”

“She liked it very much,” James said. No wonder: The bracelet was sumptuous, even by Hanoverian standards of gift-giving. But that very display of seriousness on Zale’s part had been enough to spark Indigo’s anxiety. “It’s only that the thought of a more committed relationship is daunting for her. The prospect of intimacy, of changing her life so radically: You can see that it’s frightening on some levels.”

“Indeed I do not. Being well-married would be the best thing for Amelia.”

This was not sexism on Richard’s part . . . at least, not entirely. Somehow, despite his stiff-necked demeanor, Richard had managed to marry a Swedish princess named Alberte who was warm and gracious, and who thankfully had passed her personality on to her son, Nicholas. James couldn’t imagine what the attraction was for her, but he couldn’t deny that Richard and Alberte’s marriage appeared to be an extremely strong one. Probably that was the only wholly genuine relationship in Richard’s life. No wonder he thought marriage solved all problems.

But now Richard’s attention had been caught by something else. He snatched one of the brochures from James’s hands, and his face paled. “Dear God. You can’t be considering anything so outrageous.”

“I don’t know if I’m considering it or not.” James’s temper was beginning to fray. “We should discuss this later.”

“You were given these by a servant?” The stare Richard directed at Hartley was ice-cold. “Hartley, have you utterly forgotten your place?”

Hartley bowed his head. “I humbly apologize, Your Royal Highness.”

James snapped, “Enough of this!”

Now Richard’s ire had gone to an entirely new level, beyond almost anything James had seen from him before. “Have you gone as mad as your sister?”

What he meant, of course, was that James seemed to be taking Hartley’s side against Richard’s. By all standards of royal protocol, such an action was unthinkable. And Richard was right about one thing: It really
wasn’t
appropriate for a servant to opine on Indigo’s mental health unless asked. Looking into institutional care, tempting the scandal that would inevitably follow? Anyone else would have been sacked on the spot.

Yet Hartley knew protocol better than anyone. By now he’d served the royal family impeccably for nearly fifty years. He would never have stepped so far out of line had he not been motivated by the deepest concern and love for Indigo. That James could not condemn.

“I shall take this up with Hartley later,” James said to Richard, giving Hartley a firm nod that hopefully could be read as both
I’m going to read him the riot act
by Richard and
For the love of God get out while you can
for Hartley. At any rate, Hartley hurried away and Richard’s wrath cooled—slightly. James added, “If you want to discuss this further, Uncle Richard, let’s go to your suite. Indigo’s only just fallen asleep and she needs to rest.”

“There’s nothing to discuss,” Richard said, not moving, though at least he’d lowered his voice. “Assuming, of course, that you plan to destroy those.”

James looked down at the brochures. He couldn’t imagine sending Indigo off to some sort of home. The prospect would terrify her. Still, rejecting one solution didn’t have to mean rejecting them all. “We have to find a better way of helping her. Managing each situation as it comes isn’t getting us anywhere.”

“First you coddle the girl until she’s an emotional cripple, then you want to toss her into an asylum and humiliate the family. And to you this somehow seems rational.” Richard’s disdain was an almost physical force in the room. “It’s obvious from the way that you live that you have no pride of station. But must you drag the rest of us down with you?”

“Because I keep a small personal staff, you think I have no pride?” James made do with as few servants as possible, given his position, because his mother had taught him to value both self-sufficiency and privacy. Richard had a personal staff of nearly one hundred, who did everything for him, including putting the toothpaste on his toothbrush. But once again, James was letting Richard bait him; he had to catch himself. “I’m not having Indigo institutionalized. So if that’s your concern, you needn’t worry. The conversation’s over.”

Richard couldn’t let it go yet. “The king would never allow such a thing to happen, as you should well know.”

And James took the bait
again.
“The king’s not in charge right now. I am.”

“Not forever,” Richard said, so plainly that James knew the king’s recovery was finally considered assured. The animosity between them had eclipsed their mutual concern for Indigo, turning them both small and mean. “No, not forever. If you think he can’t make changes once he’s back in power, you’re a fool.”

“Some things don’t change, Richard.” Like the laws of succession.

“Some things do.” With that, Richard swept out as imperiously as he had arrived.

James slumped down in the nearest chair. The brochures were still clutched in his hand, just a blur of words like
recovery
and
privacy
and
family
and other things he couldn’t understand. Blood was all over him, shirt and sleeves, trousers and shoes, hair and skin. Above him, his sister slept in a cloud of drugs, the only haven he’d ever been able to supply for her, maybe the only one he ever could. Happy Christmas indeed.

•   •   •

The New Year was always a time to make changes.

Or, in Ben’s case, to redraw the map.

It wasn’t that he didn’t still want to see James. The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced a formal break was unnecessary. James had proved he wasn’t really getting confused, hadn’t he? They just needed to . . . ease back. No more weekend visits. Fewer sleepovers. From now on Ben could say he had early appointments, something like that. Pulling back bit by bit would help reestablish the lines they’d first drawn.

Once they got to that point, if they could dial it back to just great sex, well, maybe they could keep on for a while. Ben wanted to believe that would be possible. Surely, in the long run, James would see their original arrangement was for the best.

A trip
, Ben mused as he walked toward his office, brand-new satchel slung over one shoulder.
I haven’t taken enough advantage of this generous European vacation time, or the cheap air fares.
When he’d been a young man living in Germany, he’d knocked around a bit; Warner had spirited him off for a weekend in Switzerland, once. (It had been a good weekend—maybe the only memory he had of Warner that remained a happy one.) Still, there was so much of the continent remaining to be discovered. Greece, for instance, for a taste of summer warmth here in the heart of winter. When temperatures rose, he could finally visit Scandinavia. Yes, if he were gone a bit more often, that would also help reset boundaries.