Jon and Matthew waited in the corridor while Emeline finished her final goodbyes. The two men – one old, one young, with little in common except the heavy weight of existence – did not meet each other’s gazes. After a few minutes, the sounds of soft crying came from Matthew also, and Jon found it hard not to echo him. But he had to remain steadfast and strong, for those who were left. Unsurprisingly, this made it harder to keep the tears from falling. He wanted to sit down in the hallway, curl into a ball of exhaustion, and never surface. His gut throbbed harder, as if agreeing with that strategy. He couldn’t though – the Royal Family needed him. The King needed him – still alive in spirit if not in form.
What would Jon have said this morning had he known? He had stood here with the King’s toast and the King’s coffee and his own hope for the day. What if he had known that this would be the last toast, the last coffee, the hope all spent? What would have been his last words to an old friend? ‘I’m sorry, Your Majesty. You did not deserve this. You were always good to me, better than all the others. You came along at a time in my life when I didn’t have a home, when I didn’t know who I was. And you gave me that – you gave me a home, you gave me an identity. And for that, I will be forever grateful.’
Was that it? Or would he have said something else? Or even if he’d known – would he have bottled it, and left silent regardless? It was all unspoken anyway – between them. Always unspoken. He knew. They knew. But sometimes, that was not enough.
In that short interim between his mother’s death and leaving for England, Jon had sat with his Gran at their kitchen table, over a crock of some delicious-smelling meal, and finally found some sorrow for his mother. Once he had started crying, he could not stop. Gran must have sat with him for hours as he wept, so much so that he forgot what he was even crying for – his mother, his father, maybe even himself? He found the well of self-pity, which one must always visit but never fall into, and spent the afternoon there. At one point, between wails, he uttered that he wished to feel like he was home, he wished to know why he was on this earth, he wished to be at peace.
Gran shook her head, almost disappointed, and pointed a bony finger at him. ‘Don’t say such a thing, Jonathan Alleyne. What a thing to say!’
Jon was awestruck by this reaction, so much so that he quietened to hear what she said next, words that would stay with him forever.
‘I do not think anyone wants to be at peace. Not really. Peace from grief is lovely in concept, yes, but when you think on it, when you really think on it, what is it? It is to be finished. Peace is to be done. And what then? We shouldn’t be done. We should never, ever be done with this – with what we are feeling right at this moment. Because peace is all-encompassing, peace is to put your other feelings in a box, like memories frozen in photographs, and push them to the back of a shelf, not gone but not there either. And we wouldn’t desire to forget but in time we would. Nothing resolved, nothing gained, no experience or reason. Just a box, on a shelf, with fading photographs of grief. At peace. What a horrible, horrible state to be in.
‘So you hold on to your pain. You hold on fast and tight. You don’t let anyone tell you anything about it. You don’t let them say “I know how you feel” or “I’ve been through it too.” It’s yours – grief is different every time. No one knows how you feel. No one has ever been through exactly what you are going through now. No one should ever be sorry. Because you have something and they don’t. And you keep it as long as you wish, and do what you like with it. But never, ever forget. Never the box. Never wish to be at peace.’
Over time, Jon had thought on her words and seen that, although she was not completely correct (as no one ever was on matters so complex), she spoke words truer than he had known in that moment.
Princess Emeline stepped out of the King’s bedroom wiping her face with a satin handkerchief that she had not long unwrapped. If Jon’s memory served, it was actually a present from the King himself.
Emeline stood there, her bloodshot eyes eventually raising to meet the two men. ‘He is there, but he is not. He is just . . . He is asleep.’
Jon nodded. No words had ever been invented for a situation such as this, and if they had been, they were inadequate.
‘What is happening here?’ sobbed Matthew. ‘I am constantly asking, What next? What next? So we did this, and now this is done, but still the question remains. What next? What do we do now?’
What do we do now? Matthew was correct – the question oppressed everything. It hung there on the walls, lay thick in the air, had gotten trodden into the carpet. Everywhere Jon looked, he was confronted with the hopelessness of their situation. Matthew and Emeline were too.
Emeline went to her nephew and grasped him in a tight embrace, so hard and formal one might have thought she had never done it before. ‘We work it through, as we always do. We continue. The Windsors prevail; that’s just how we were built. There’s nothing but tomorrow.’
‘But tomorrow without him,’ Matthew said.
Emeline assented, her voice cracking, ‘Yes. Without him. We all now have to do this without . . . ’
‘It seems like if we react to this, we have to accept it,’ Matthew said with a renewed sob, shaking himself, evidently to try to collect himself. ‘He’s really gone.’
‘Yes.’ What else was there to say?
‘Jonathan, have you ever seen anything quite like what happened?’
Jon almost forgot he was present. ‘Excuse me, sir?’
‘I suppose I am asking something like: Is there any way that what occurred here was natural? Maybe my grandfather suffered some kind of a heart attack?’ Matthew clearly did not really think this a viable avenue. He was there watching at the time, quite intently, if Jon remembered correctly. Jon had never seen a heart attack in person before, but it quite clearly didn’t look like the King’s fate.
‘No. That was not a heart attack – at least no natural one. Maybe some kind of heart event was brought about by what killed him – which, in my working theory, is something he ingested, almost certainly the whiskey.’
He did not add that his working theory meant that one of the Royal Family killed the King. It was not only that it was not the right time. It was also because he could barely think it, let alone voice it. He had served the Royal Family for over three decades, and although some members were more hospitable than others, he found it hard to compute that any could be capable of murder.
‘How long was it from his drink to his passing?’ Matthew mused, checking his watch as though he might have noted the answer there. He instantly seemed slightly better at finding something else to busy himself with. He wiped his eyes and thought aloud. ‘He started his speech, took a drink of whiskey, said some more, and then . . . It was maybe twenty, thirty seconds, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I . . . Yes, I think that probably true, sir.’
‘That is very fast-acting, no?’
‘I have no experience with poisons. But I have seen allergic reactions before. I can only think they work somewhat the same. As soon as something enters the body, if it is incompatible, it can cause a reaction very quickly.’ If Matthew was getting this in depth in his thinking, it would not be long until he stumbled across the cold truth himself. Maybe Jon would not have to voice his suspicion after all; Matthew would do it for him.
That immovable question bore into the back of Jon’s neck. It made the volatile lump in his gut pulse with laughter – it was laughing at him. What now? What now? What now? Clearly, Emeline felt it too, as, maybe out of respect to Matthew, she tried to comfort him with possibilities of safety. ‘We could wait out the blizzard, wait for Tony Speck to return, wait for rescue.’ Emeline stopped, evidently having said ‘wait’ so many times that even she saw the problem in it.
‘If there is someone dangerous in Balmoral, then waiting is not an option.’ Matthew was back to some sense of himself, and he was also correct. ‘Most likely it is an intruder, one we do not know is here – and the bastard is stuck in here with us.’ Matthew was going a different direction with his theory, but then he realised the other route himself. ‘The other option – it was one of us. Both are equally terrifying and require immediate response.’
‘I agree,’ Jon said, and despite some apprehension it was clear that Emeline did also.
They started back towards the drawing room with a renewed sense of purpose, a refreshed sense of worry. With every step, every corner, every stair, Jon expected to run into this phantom poisoner who potentially skulked around Balmoral. It would be an almost fatal shock, but also somewhat of a relief – it would mean that no Royal was capable of murder.
But this intruder theory was impossible. It was favourable, but pointless to wallow in this fantasy. Jon knew that there was no intruder in Balmoral – the new security system would not allow it. Jon had seen himself the screen that showed the little red dots of everyone in the castle – the dots that could only be humans. It was the Royal Family, Speck, and himself. They were the only ones.
Maud would now be creating a timeline of the drawing room that morning. If the whiskey was never alone, then it wouldn’t matter even if there were an intruder. And if any member of the Royal Family was alone with it, then that had to be the answer.
As they made their way back, Emeline strode ahead, her pink evening dress at odds with her almost military march. Jon fell into step with Matthew, who quietly mused, ‘What was that phrase you were using when you were trying to talk to Speck? Something about a bridlepath?’
‘ “The Bridlepath Causeway has flooded.” It’s code. It means the King is dead. Everyone on staff and people in government positions would instantly know what that meant and to act accordingly. It was easier than explaining the details to Speck – exactly what the code was implemented for.’ Jon paused and then added, ‘I don’t know if I could have brought myself to say anything more anyhow.’
Matthew sighed. ‘Everyone around here does like saying anything other than what they actually mean, don’t they? All these codes and not one of the Royal Family knows about them. I often feel they’re speaking a different language. Do I have a code if I suddenly keel over?’
Jon thought twice before telling him, but then he didn’t see how it could hurt. Things would be different after today – almost in every way. The codes were the least of anyone’s worries. ‘The abattoir now sells stamps.’
Matthew snorted. ‘Preposterous. What is my aunt’s?’
Before Jon could say anything, ‘I do not wish to hear mine,’ came from in front of them.
Matthew shrugged and continued, ‘So someone is supposed to say that phrase and all the King’s horses and all the King’s men come running, hmm? Well, I’m afraid it looks like it didn’t work. Not even Speck showed his face.’
‘I don’t even think he heard,’ Jon said. ‘There was nothing on the end of the walkie.’
‘Do you think something might have happened to him?’
They were currently descending the staircase, mere minutes from the drawing room, but this gave them all pause. Matthew stopped in his tracks, straddling two different levels – a man lopsided. Jon, who was on the landing, turned to them – this new possibility finally revealing itself. ‘What?’
‘Could it be possible that whoever killed the King saw to Speck as well?’ Matthew then thought better than to start down that path. Maybe he was reacting to Jon’s shocked face. ‘Let us deal with one thing at a time. Right now, my family is falling apart, and all that matters is that Speck was not here to stop it.’
They caught up to Emeline and started onwards again and none spoke until they were faced with the doors of the drawing room. The sight was incredibly nondescript, especially when juxtaposed with the chaos that had occurred within. Jon couldn’t quite believe that the sights he saw regularly were now turning to something sinister, something foreboding. The drawing room would never be a happy place again, the dining room would always be the place of Eric’s last meal, the kitchens would always be where Jon had prepared that meal. The ’Moral, once his favourite of the King’s residences, would forever have a dark cloud hanging over it, forever be the home of a brutal murder.
Jon reached out to clutch the door handle of the drawing room – bracing himself to unleash the chaos within – but Matthew reached out to catch Jon’s arm before he was able. Jon was slightly confused by the touch. ‘Sir?’
Matthew looked reluctant as he said, ‘I feel I have to say one thing before this goes further . . . ’
However, it was very quickly apparent that that one thing would have to wait, as a tremendous shatter came from beyond the door, followed by a roar of anger. The three unfortunate souls glanced at each other in turn before opening the door.