Chapter Two

JAMES, YOUR GRANDMOTHER wants to see you,” my father said the moment he stepped into the room. No matter that I hadn’t seen him in a week, he didn’t even offer a ‘hello, how are you? I missed you terribly’ first.

My older brother and several younger cousins simultaneously cried, “Ooh, James is in trouble.” In terrible sing-song voices to boot, because they were arseholes.

“Hello, Dad. Good to see you. Missed you terribly,” I replied to a unanimous response of stunned silence. We weren’t that family. We didn’t joke around; we weren’t playful.

Sighing, I shuffled from the room, straightening my tie as I went. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment my life began teetering on unbearable. If anybody knew I felt that way, they’d no doubt call me a spoiled sod, and they’d have a point. It just didn’t seem fair that there’d been a social movement encouraging people—indeed flat-out ordering them in many cases—to live their authentic lives. Be who you are. Don’t let anybody tell you how to live or that you’re somehow wrong for being you. Those were the cries to arms these days.

From where I stood, it applied to everybody but me—and my family, to be fair. But they all seemed quite happy with who they were and how their lives were progressing. What did we have to complain about? We lived in an actual palace and were waited on hand and foot. We had everything a person could need, but we didn’t have freedom.

“James, dear. Come in, come in,” Gran greeted me as I entered her office.

Smiling, I took the armchair across from Gran while trying to avoid the piercing glare of Simon de Montfort—no relation, as he likes to remind people—as if everybody knows about the thirteenth-century nobleman who led a revolt against a tosser king but turned out to be an even bigger tosser himself.

“Good afternoon, James,” Simon said once I’d settled into my chair.

“Simon.” I nodded, quickly returning my attention to Gran. “Everything okay, Gran?”

“Yes, dear. Yes, of course. I wanted to revise the plans for Saturday with you.” Gran glanced up at me briefly as she spoke, but her gaze returned to the notes in her lap. Splendidly spry for eighty-one, Gran knew more about upcoming engagements than anybody else in the family. Perhaps Simon could give her a run for her money, but he’d be the only one.

“I’m to sit at table three,” I replied, searching my mind for the plans we’d gone over just yesterday. Come Saturday, I had no doubt my lifetime of training would kick in, and I’d know exactly where to sit and to whom to talk.

“Right, quite right,” Gran muttered, her attention increasingly held by whatever fascinating titbits were in those notes. As usual, she could hardly give a moment of time for her second oldest grandson and spare to the throne no less.

“Your table,” Simon broke in, “consists of several people Her Majesty has met over the years who became quite popular with the media and the people at the time. There is no one of great importance at the table, but having them there should make for some good press coverage.”

Simon might be no relation to that de Montfort, but he was a complete tosser just the same. I sometimes wondered if he even realised that we were, in fact, in the twenty-first century, and royalty wasn’t quite what it was back in the heyday. We couldn’t walk around randomly beheading our subjects anymore. An increasing number of citizens would be happy to turf us out of our palaces on our posh arses.

“I suspect those people are of great importance to someone.” Especially given that one was a previously popular Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Not even that appeared to warrant a label of importance in Simon’s mind.

Simon eyed me coldly, his mouth twisted and ready should this turn into another one of my frequent reminders to him that we are no better than anybody else simply because of the family we’d been born into. Most of my family were relatively caring and did good work for charities, but on this point, I stood alone. They definitely thought themselves top of the social ladder.

“Well, of course, James, dear,” Gran intervened with her uncanny ability to know precisely when to step in to calm the choppy waters. “Simon simply means there are no heads of state at your table, no current ones anyway.” Gran smiled, and I smiled back.

She was the queen, but she was also my gran, and I loved her. “You know I didn’t mean what happened last month, Gran.”

Gran eyed me speculatively over the rim of her glasses. I’d been hauled over the coals by my father and palace courtiers over the unfortunate incident with the Russian president, but Gran had smiled, patted my hand and told me she doubted we’d be going to war over it. “I know, James. I think President Petrov would be much happier if he could learn to laugh at himself just a little. And Chef really should have explained that you did not need to toss the chocolate bomb quite so hard.”

Photos of President Petrov with his face covered in custard and edible glitter splashed across the papers the next day, with some wondering if I’d purposely hurled dessert at a foreign leader as a statement against the treatment of Russian citizens by his increasingly totalitarian regime.

Gran did her best to stifle a grin while Simon glowered at me. “In fairness,” I added, “Mrs Musa from Nigeria wound up with strawberries in her hair, and she was seated at George’s table.”

Simon cleared his throat because he was a dick and hated anybody exceeding the time he’d allotted them to spend with the queen. “Yes. Well, the point is, James, that I have sent you an email detailing the guests at your table with photographs attached and a brief history. I certainly hope you’ll use this so that you can converse with these people.”

First of all, I wanted to say but knew it’d be a waste of time, he should be addressing me by my title, which he does for every other member of my family. And secondly, I’d been conversing with people from all walks of life, including world leaders, since I was a toddler. Talking to people wasn’t my problem, at least if it wasn’t a large group.

On the other hand, talking to them as just James rather than His Royal Highness, Prince James Henry Philip George, the spare of the heir, was a massive problem. I didn’t know who just James was.

“Simon?” Gran said in her voice that four hundred years ago would have meant heads were about to roll. “Could you give James and me a moment, please?”

Always indefatigably polite, Gran also knew that Simon, of all people, would never argue with her. He rose stiffly, clearly not accustomed to being dismissed and certainly not for my benefit. He nodded, shot me a glare and backed out of the room as if waiting to be recalled after discovering being kicked out had been an enormous misunderstanding.

As soon as the door closed behind him, Gran said, “James, are you quite all right?”

There was no doubt in my mind that it had not been her intention to make me feel guilty, but I did, nonetheless. Here was an eighty-one-year-old woman who’d been on the throne for sixty years. Sixty years filled with public service and putting everything before her needs or wants. And here I was at twenty-one, already complaining about having to give so much of myself to a role I didn’t choose or—and this was the crux of the matter—want.

“I’m splendid, Gran,” I tried, knowing from her tilted head and oh, come on expression that she did not believe me in the slightest. “It’s just…well, crowds and the like… They’re not actually my thing.” I went with my trusted excuse for not relishing my role. I’d had coaching to help me feel more at home speaking to an audience. Nobody understood, though, that this was not the life I wanted for myself.

My fault really because I hadn’t said a word about it to anyone.

Gran nodded, stood, teetered for a moment as many older people, I expect, do, and then came to sit in the chair at my side. She reached for my hand, gently threading our fingers together before pressing a kiss to the back of my hand. “I know you do not enjoy being the centre of attention, James, and public speaking gives you quite the horrors, but the more you do it, the easier it becomes.”

I nodded. I knew she was right, and I had to get used to it… But what if I wanted to be a doctor, drive a bus, or be cabin crew for British Airways? Why did everyone else get to choose their life but not me? “It’s a good thing George came first, really,” I said. “It wouldn’t do for the king to flush beet red and stumble over his words when all eyes were upon him.”

“Perhaps we should consider a few more engagements for you, dear. Get stuck into it, as it were. Fake it till you make it, I believe they say.” Gran smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. I wondered how she truly felt, right down deep, about essentially forcing her grandchild into doing something he really did not enjoy.

“Maybe, Gran.” I kissed the back of her hand and stood. “I better get reading about my dinner companions before Simon has a fit.”

“Good boy.” Gran patted my hand before releasing me. By the time I reached the door and turned back to smile at her, the queen was back in her seat, focusing intently once more on the pile of notes on her lap.

Deciding to avoid my brother and cousins, I went directly to my room, booted up the computer, and opened Simon’s email.

Saturday’s event was really a relatively small affair: twelve tables, each with ten people apiece. Most consisted of one or two members of my extended family and eight or nine visitors, who were either relevant now or had made an impression on Gran over the years.

I’d be alone at my table, given I had no partner to speak of. I browsed the names of those sharing my table—Colin and Regina Bishop with their three children, Braxton, Miles and Giselle. I knew the family reasonably well.

Regina had been Prime Minister for twelve years when I was a schoolboy, and for a time, she’d been more popular than Gran. Then there’d been a terrible scandal. Photographs had appeared, taken by a very long lens through a very small gap in their curtains, showing Regina and Colin with a cucumber being used somewhat unseemly. The beginning of the end of poor Regina’s career began that day. On the other hand, Colin’s career seemed to take off after the publication of the photos.

We had a long way still to go as a society.

The remaining four people were Howard Leigh, Penelope Jones, Prestidigitation Jones and Astrid Rhys-Bomalier. I reread the third name several times, but it always came back as Prestidigitation. Who in the hell named their child that?

Intrigued, I read the short bio which Simon had provided about him. Aged twenty, his claim to fame and reason for attendance had been that he’d had the blind luck, or perhaps misfortune, to have been born in front of Gran at a reception for thousands, including Olympic athletes, their families, and the media.

Simon had attached a photo.

Lying on the ground, umbilical cord still attached, and covered in things I didn’t care to think too intently on, was a newborn baby. His face scrunched in his first howl of displeasure at being thus dumped into the world. A set of feet, similarly covered in whatever goo I was still determinedly ignoring, rested nearby. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I recognised the feet, but I did recall hearing this story many years ago, so I knew them to be Gran’s feet. No photograph of an adult Prestidigitation had been supplied.

As I read the other biographies, I discovered that Prestidigitation was to be accompanied by his mother, her boyfriend and his friend Astrid. They were flying in from Australia. Actually, they’d be in the air right now. They resided in some place called Kincumber. Which I really thought had to be a bad joke, given they would be seated with the Bishops and the spectre of their cucumber fiasco.

A quick internet search presented Kincumber as quite a small little locale to the north of Sydney in an area described as the Central Coast. There were other wonderfully named neighbouring places, such as Woy Woy and the rather delightful, Watanobbi. I’d always found those Australians to be quite an unusual lot. Forever shortening words. Case in point, an Australian lad I went to school with insisted he call me Jimmy because James was too much of a mouthful. No matter how often I pointed out the two names had the exact same number of letters, he wouldn’t have it. He was a kind chap, though, so I’d let him—and only him—call me Jimmy, occasionally Jim.

Back to Prestidigitation and Co. His mother, Penelope, worked at a pawnbroker called Fosters’ Pawn Stars. That alone had to have been sufficient to give Simon de Montfort palpitations. I wondered how hard he’d tried to get the Kincumberians uninvited.

Howard, as an optometrist, might have raised their perceived respectability, but I believe—in Simon’s eyes—the group would have sunk again when he discovered Prestidigitation worked part-time as a paper towel sniffer—whatever the hell that involved—to put himself through his studies in a science degree majoring in ethnobotany. Swinging the pendulum back to more social acceptability, Astrid was studying animal psychology.

At the very least, they seemed an interesting bunch. I wondered how they’d get on with the stiflingly boring—with the exception of the cucumber incident—Bishops.

A knock on my door dragged my attention from the Australians as George entered without waiting for me to invite him in. “How’d it go, old boy?” he asked, sounding more and more like our father every day.

“Fine. They just wanted to go over Saturday’s arrangements with me.”

George looked… Well, he looked like a perfect blend between our father and mother: mother’s colouring and large, deep blue eyes, father’s sharp features and broad shoulders. I, on the other hand, didn’t. Gran often says she can see our ancestors in me, but to be honest, I’m somewhat surprised nobody from the media has suggested I’m a changeling or the result of an affair. I look about as much like I’m related to the rest of my family as I do to the Imperial Family of China—if they still had one, that is.

“Are you certain you don’t want Cordy to come along as your plus one?” George rather nervously asked. We’d had versions of this conversation many times.

“Quite certain. It’s not fair to her, George. I’m not interested in her like that, and the more the press sees her with me, the greater the speculation over when an announcement will be made.” The perfectly lovely Cordelia Southwark, the twenty-year-old daughter of the Earl of Derby, had been my date at a handful of engagements. She had top-notch manners, regularly socialised with the elite of society and had a lovely, elfin appearance. She held no interest for me other than as a friend.

“You know Mother and Father are pushing for you to find someone to at least date for a lengthy period. Tabloids are already speculating that you must be a womaniser because you’ve never had the same lady on your arm for more than two engagements at a time.” His tone suggested George was practising his I-am-the-king tone that he hopefully—at least I thought so—wouldn’t need to use for a considerable time yet.

“I’m twenty-one, George. I don’t want to settle down—”

“Yes, but you aren’t even playing the field, James. There hasn’t been a single shot of you stumbling from a nightclub with your face pressed into some unsuitable girl’s barely concealed cleavage.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“It’s a bloody unusual thing, James.” George pinched the bridge of his nose as if I was exasperating him. He’d be decidedly less vexed if he kept his nose out of my life as I did for him. “There’s already talk—”

“Of what?” How could there be talk when I did precisely nothing to talk about?

“That there’s something wrong. That you aren’t…well, normal. Most young men are at least dating a woman, sometimes many, but you…”

“I’ve dated,” I said defensively.

“Attending a pop-up artistic display entitled ‘Saucepans’ with one of the artists does not count.”

This conversation, as all I have with my brother, would do nothing but circle and circle until we were both angry, frustrated, and had completely forgotten what we’d initially begun speaking about.

Tonight, I was too tired. “Look, George. It really is too late to add someone to the invite list at this stage, but I promise I will endeavour to get a date for the jubilee day parade. Deal?”

George looked me up and down with that glimmer of disapproval so familiar to me. “Deal.”

Apparently satisfied with our talk, George left.

People may well call me a spoiled sod for being increasingly disgruntled with my life, but they weren’t the ones walking in my shoes.