The hallway didn’t quite provide the air that Jon craved. He would have liked to take a brisk walk outside, but that was impossible – and not only because of the raging blizzard. It would have taken him five minutes to get to a door that led outside, and he would not have liked to open a window in this weather. This thick, viscous air was the closest he was going to get to fresh.
How could events spin so quickly out of control? The King was dead, the Royals were at each other’s throats, and now Jon was being elected for a position that he did not even stand for. He could not be an investigator, a detective. He had forever been a chef and a chef alone – never desiring to step outside of his lane. Now the day was calling for him to take a leap.
He paced down the corridor and back, repeating the action over and over. Almost on impulse, he reached for the walkie-talkie on his belt. It was hopeless, but he was in a hopeless kind of corner. ‘Come in, Speck. Come in.’ That static again. ‘Please, Speck. This is your damn job, not mine. You are security. I should be tucked up in the servants’ quarters about now, not doing your work. The Bridlepath Causeway has flooded, do you hear me? Do you hear me?’ He released the button and the resulting hiss indicated that Speck did not hear him at all. ‘Where the hell are you, Speck?’
He dropped the walkie-talkie to his side and clipped it back on his belt. There was no point even having it, really – a fundamentally redundant thing.
He paced a little more. He noticed that the grandfather clock at the end of the hall had stopped. Maybe it needed to be rewound. He stepped towards it, having seen how to do it once before, but then stopped. Instinct had kicked in – he was neither the chef nor a servant right now. A stopped clock could wait.
He didn’t want to be the investigator. But what else could he do? Everyone else in that room was a suspect. The Princesses who championed him; the spouse who would echo anything said; the old guard, who both had showed varying degrees of contempt for everyone else, not to mention impaired, alcohol-soaked judgements; and (although it seemed the most unlikely) the two young Royals, who stood to inherit the most.
All he could think of then was how not one of them could do such a terrible thing. Even David, who had jumped back and forth across the line of the law as though he were playing skipping rope in a playground, and Marjorie, who had grown vile and twisted in her elder years, had no place in his mind as possible murderers.
This was the Royal Family. The Windsors. Suspects in a murder.
The pain in Jon’s gut was becoming too much to bear, so he stopped pacing. Suddenly, he had the undeniable sense that someone was watching him – that feeling of eyes boring into him, privacy gone. He looked up and down the halls, but there was no one there – he found them as decadently empty as they had been since the previous night. The feeling of being watched was one that took some getting used to at the King’s residences, because it was a common occurrence. It was something to do with the size of the spaces, the high ceilings, the dark corners – even the smaller, pokier corridors felt as though they held centuries of secrets. There were many places for someone to squirrel themselves away. It was always important to remember that it was just a feeling though – an overactive sensory reaction.
Jon found his eyes raising to the walls, following his newfound intuition. Eric Windsor smiled down at him in watercolour, framed by a gold prison. Eric hadn’t liked the painting – in fact, he had always joked of doing a ‘Winston Churchill’ and burning the blighter at the bottom of the garden – but Jon had always found it endearing. It was slightly more alive than any of the other paintings of the King, painted by a relatively young artist for some event or other. The thick brushstrokes in places and the deliberately light ones in others created a motion that showed how Eric never stayed still, the playful colours showing Eric’s vibrant personality, the youth that lingered in his face although he was already of an advanced age when he’d posed for the portrait. There was a magic to it – just as there was a magic to Eric Windsor.
Jon’s eyes threatened to water again, but instead he stood to attention. The King gazed down at him with his frozen smile. Jon had lost sight of what this was all for. ‘Of course, Your Majesty. I will do it for you.’ Jon didn’t add that everything always had been for him.
How could Jon abandon the King now – his legacy – in his time of greatest need? Jon was not one for vengeance – even thinking of it made him feel queasy – but he was one for justice, and maybe that meant he could actually do what needed to be done.
This new conviction, along with the newfound intuition, fueled him. He paced some more, but this time it was for a more tangible purpose. With one final look back at the kinetic King, Jon went to the drawing room doors and stepped inside.
In the drawing room, it appeared as though nothing had changed, in a very literal sense. They were all waiting like they were part of a play, and when Jon had walked offstage, everyone was left confused, as he had the next line. That was indeed the case.
Jon cleared his throat, although he had their attention already. ‘I accept the role. For the King and for the Crown.’