The garden door banged open hard enough to rattle the iron boot-scraper beside it, and Beauchamp came through it at a pace Vidal had not, in nearly a fortnight of close acquaintance, seen the man use for anything other than the pursuit of his fugitive charge through Mayfair.
Beauchamp wasn’t in his usual suit. He was in dark jeans that fitted him properly, a soft grey Henley with the sleeves shoved to the elbow, and a pair of trainers. His hair had not been combed into its usual tamed state, and a day’s worth of stubble was coming in across his jaw.
Beauchamp’s eyes found Connor on the grass and gave him a short nod. Connor, who had pushed himself up to sitting on his heels with his towel bunched in one hand, returned it.
“Your Serene Highness.” Beauchamp’s head dipped into his customary bow. “We need to return to the flat.”
Vidal didn’t stand. He let one silk-clad ankle drift a fraction higher across the other and looked at Beauchamp down the length of his own nose. “Beauchamp. It is a beautiful morning. I have been given a dressing down by my father, I have been attempting to recover my equilibrium in the company ofa friend, and you are standing before me, looking as though someone has set your car on fire. Would you care to explain yourself before you begin issuing directives?”
“Come inside, sir. Please.”
“Am I a prisoner now, Major?” His accent was thickening the edges of his consonants. He could hear it, and he didn’t care. “Is that where we are this morning? I’m to be confined to my quarters because I have made a joke about a politician’s facial hair? I had understood that in this country one was permitted to sit in one’s own garden — ”
“Sir.”
“ — and enjoy what passes here for sunlight, without an armed escortloiteringon the flagstones like —”
“Vidal.” The sound of his name, flat and unsoftened, cut him clean off.
Beauchamp had never used it before. Not once in any of their ordinary exchanges over the past eleven days. He had always beensirorYour Serene Highnessin Beauchamp’s mouth, and the careful career-military hierarchy of that had become, somewhere between the Bentley and the vet’s, a sort of private joke they were both in on.
But Beauchamp wasn’t joking around now.
“I got a call this morning, sir. From my commanding officer. I’m on detached duty. It means the Household has formally placed me in a posting that doesn’t exist on any organisational chart, so that I can devote myself, without distraction, to the single task of settling you safely in the United Kingdom. That is theentire brief. And I am, as of this morning, failing it in every measurable way.”
His voice had gone quieter and flatter. Vidal, listening to it, understood for the first time how Beauchamp had made Major. You would follow a voice like that into battle without thinking to ask why.
“You lied to me, sir, and so I filmed you. I was behind the tripod. I moved the angle of the camera when you told me to. My commanding officer’s been gracious enough to accept that I wasn’t briefed on the content, and to attribute the lapse to my unfamiliarity with you rather than dereliction of duty. So right now, I would very much like to have a small win by getting you back inside the building while we figure out how to move forward from this.”
Connor, on the grass, had gone very still. Vidal didn’t look at him.
He wanted to say several things at once to Beauchamp. First that he was sorry, and then that his father had already said all of this moments ago and he didn’t need to hear a rehash from the man he’d spent the last couple of weeks gently coaxing, inch by inch, out from behind his parade-ground manners.
Instead, Vidal slid down off the wall without another word. He bent and scooped Mercè up, tucked her against his ribs, and walked past Beauchamp towards the door.
He didn’t look back at either of the men behind him. He took the stairs two at a time in his slippers and shut the flat door behind him with considerably more force than the hinges had been designed to absorb.
Chapter Ten
Vidalwent up the garden steps at a clip that sent the hem of his robe snapping behind him. Beauchamp watched him go without moving to follow.
He was in no hurry at all to catch up. His temper had been sitting low and unpleasant in his chest since the call with his commanding officer at ten, and the prince’s flounce had not improved it. He wasn’t sorry he’d raised his voice, or that he’d used the prince’s first name. Vidal needed pulling out of the clouds and setting down on the pavement with the rest of them, and if the landing had bruised his dignity, well. Dignity healed. Beauchamp’s career might not.
“Go easy on him.”
Beauchamp’s eyes cut sideways. Connor was still on the grass, balanced on his heels with his towel looped round his neck. They’d known each other for less than two weeks, and Connor was already telling him how to handle his principal.
Every resident in the building had been run through a background check before the Fitznorman-Bicester people hadhanded over the keys, and Connor Evans’s screening had run to fourteen pages.
The man had betting shops across three East London boroughs, a chain of thriving pawnbrokers, and an older brother whose name appeared in connection with a Serious Crime Directorate inquiry that had been quietly shelved in 2019. Connor himself came up clean. He paid his taxes, declared his considerable income, and kept his books in the sort of order that suggested he knew precisely where the line was and had made a professional study of skating right on it.
What the screening couldn’t explain was why a passing acquaintance of Vidal’s was now telling Beauchamp how to handle him.
Beauchamp held his gaze, then turned and followed Vidal up the steps.
By the time he reached the top of the stairs, the click of Vidal’s bedroom lock had already carried down the corridor to meet him. He let himself into the flat, set his keys on the console table, and stood there a moment in a residence he’d been in and out of over the last few days, and had never once heard go quiet.
He got to work.