tonight.’
Behind him, the doors of the cathedral swung open. A new king emerged and at his back a wealth of other important people. So handy to have them all gathered here in one place. Leaders she would follow with crows, listening to their every word for hidden cracks in this magnificent city.
It was a raw day with lowering clouds and a cold rain that had ambitions of becoming sleet. Noel tightened Jasper’s scarf, pulled on his gloves and opened his umbrella. ‘Can we wait and watch the King leave?’ Jasper asked. ‘It’s kind of like when I play Dragon Age with all the kings and stuff. I mean, to see one for real is kind of cool.’
Noel scanned the loitering crowd and realized that a lot of people apparently shared his son’s fascination with royalty. And if he was honest, he felt it too. Not for any fanciful sense of brave kings and beautiful princesses but because of what it represented: Magna Carta and Trafalgar and the Battle of Britain and fighting on the beaches. It was that sense of history, permanence and continuity embodied in an institution to which Noel had sworn his allegiance.
He hugged his son. ‘Okay, we’ll wait a bit.’
At the bottom of the stone steps the press and paparazzi lay in wait. Camera lenses stared up at him like dead eyes. There was a growing murmur as Henry and his fiancée emerged, the young woman walking a few steps behind her husband-to-be, which left Noel wondering about that relationship.
‘Answer a few questions, Your Majesty?’ a reporter yelled from the crowd.
‘Certainly.’
Noel noted that the equerry, a man in his fifties with the upright stance of a former military officer, blanched a bit at the response from Henry.
‘So what are your hopes for your reign, sir?’
‘I’d like to bring England back to being England again,’ Henry responded.
‘What does that mean? Exactly, sir’?’ another called.
‘Well, take London. In my youth you heard English spoken everywhere. Now you’d be lucky to hear your own language in amongst all the other gabble.’
Noel thought the equerry was going to have a stroke. The rapid fire of digital cameras was like claws clicking on ice.
‘So you don’t like the fact that London has become a multilingual, multicultural and multi-ethnic city?’ came a third voice out of the crowd.
‘It’s all well and good until it isn’t. If we lose sight of who we are we’ll be done for.’
‘Does that mean white and European, sir?’
Henry gazed down his nose at the questioner, a tall, elegant black man. ‘It means Anglo-Saxon. Make of that what you will.’
‘Damn right, I will,’ the journalist muttered.
Another voice rose out of the crowd. ‘The Pakis are one thing, sir, but what about those freaks down in the East End?’ Noel searched the crowd for the speaker and also for any sign that a riot was about to break out. It proved to be an older white man with a bulging belly hanging over his belt. ‘They’re driving down property values.’
‘It is a problem, but now there is that thing up on the moon.’ Henry waved vaguely skyward. ‘Perhaps they can be encouraged to emigrate. They’ll no doubt be happier among their own kind. Better for all concerned if they leave.’
There were more cheers than Noel liked to hear, and only a few muttered objections, but no one booed. We are so British, Noel thought. Henry was king despite the ignorant words that had just fallen from his mouth and no one was going to be overtly rude. It was at this point that Henry’s people wisely decided to rush him to the waiting car.
People began to disperse. Noel stood watching the motorcade making its way back towards Buckingham Palace and wondered if maybe a removal to his bolt-hole in Paris or even the one in Vienna was called for. Things were likely to become tense in the city after Henry’s performance. But if he left for a foreign capital it might add to the perception that he was merely a kidnapper and not a devoted father.
He also had a performance to prepare and getting sued for cancelling it was not going to aid his effort to seem like a fit parent. It was ironic that he had to keep working. His company Ace in Hand back in New York continued generating income despite him no longer doing the day-to-day management, and he was technically a millionaire because of his share of the money after that ill-fated poker game in Chicago, but he had mentally set those funds aside for Jasper; for his education and to set him up in life.
Jasper tugged at his jacket. ‘Dad?’
He looked down. ‘Hmmm?’
‘Does this mean people don’t like any wild cards? I mean, I’m an ace, but if they don’t like jokers does that mean they don’t like me too?’
You’re far too smart for me to sugar-coat this, Noel thought as he gazed down at his son. ‘We have it easier because people don’t know we’re wild cards, but yes, a lot of people don’t like us.’
‘That’s why you don’t like me to …’ Jasper allowed some sunlight to briefly become a physical golden thread in his hand then quickly released it.
Noel put an arm around Jasper’s shoulders and pulled him tight against his side. ‘Precisely.’
The weather was still shite and Glory was still dead.
Constance plugged the kettle in and started the ritual she and Bobbin had begun decades earlier. Every morning they would get in early – long before their employees – drink tea and share a post-breakfast pastry. Breakfast they ate out. Cooking was forbidden in the atelier. The smell alone ruled it out. No one wanted to buy expensive clothes in a place that smelled of eggs, sausage, beans and bacon.
Normally, they would chat about what was happening with the studio. Constance would tell Bobbin about the designs she’d been working on and how she was planning on fabricating them. Then Bobbin would look dismayed as he mentally ran through the cost of materials.
But today they had the telly on instead and couldn’t stop watching reports of Queen Margaret’s death. It hardly seemed possible to Constance. Losing two people she loved in such a short time was horrid. She had always been inclined to get angry rather than cry. And today she was livid.
Footage of Henry, that bastard, came on and he was saying things about jokers no decent person would, except he’d wrapped it up in that royal verbal deceit. The things he said on the steps of St Paul’s were all too clear for anyone paying attention. She may have clothed his mother, but Constance was damned if she’d ever put so much as a scrap of fabric on his back.
And just as her indignation rose even higher, a vox pop interview began, with the reporter inquiring what their reaction was to what Henry had been saying.
‘The Pakis are one thing,’ said a stout fellow with a florid complexion. He wore a cap and an Army-green
