Avalon (8 page)

The two men made short work of the meal, eating in companionable silence.

“
Will
she marry me, do you think?” asked Calum, looking up from his empty plate.

“Isobel? Oh, sure,” James told him. “You two can open a wine bar in Aberdeen.”

“Stranger things happen, James, my man,” he pointed out.

“They do indeed.”

A moment later, Isobel came to remove the plates. “Who’s for pudding?” she said, refilling James’ glass with the luscious red. She moved to refill Cal’s glass, and James noticed that she stood much closer to Cal than before.

“You were right,” Cal told her, indicating the wine. “This is very good.”

“I knew you’d like it.” She poured a little extra into his glass. “For pudding we have a really scrummy chocolate torte,” she said, replacing the bottle.

“If it’s anything like its cook,” answered Cal, returning her smile, “I’m sure it’s lovely.”

“Charmer,” she purred and disappeared again.

“I think she likes you,” James said when she had gone. “Charmer.”

Isobel returned with two plates. Placing one before James, she moved to Cal’s side. “Take a bite,” she instructed, resting her hand lightly on Cal’s shoulder, “and tell me what you think.”

Cal dutifully picked up his spoon and took a large bite, rolled it around in his mouth, and grinned. “I was right,” he said. “It is terrific. The best chocolate torte I’ve ever tasted.”

Isobel beamed triumphantly. “I’ll see to the coffees.”

She left them to their desserts, and James dug in. Cal, however, merely stared at his plate. “What’s wrong?” James asked.

“You know I can’t eat chocolate,” Cal sighed. “It always gives me a bruising headache.”

“The things we do for love.”

Nodding forlornly, Cal took a wary bite. At that moment, the door opened and a lean, lanky man with thinning gray hair stepped quickly in. “Here!” he said, almost bounding across the room. His tie was loosened, his suit coat unbuttoned, and he wore a pair of reading glasses on a cord around his neck, giving him the air of an overworked librarian. “Dreadfully sorry to be so late. Don’t let me interrupt. I just wanted to pop in and say hello. I’m Donald.” He held out his hand. “You must be James.”

“Pleased to meet you,” James replied, shaking his hand. “And this is my friend Calum.”

They shook hands. The kitchen door opened and Caroline entered with a pitcher of water. “Donald, You’re home. Come into the kitchen and we’ll get you something to eat.”

“Not hungry in the slightest,” he said. “But I could do with a slice of that torte — if someone insisted.”

“Please, join us,” James offered. “Cal says it’s terrific.”

Lord Rothes did not require urging. Caroline set down the pitcher and went off to fetch him his pudding, while Rothes pulled out a chair and sat down opposite Cal. “I don’t mind telling you it’s been one of those days,” he confided. “Still, we gave as good as we got, I think. Good trip down?”

“A small delay in Crewe, apparently,” James answered, “but otherwise tolerable.”

“Then you won’t have seen the Prime Minister’s speech this afternoon, I suppose?”

“As a matter of fact, we caught it on the news a little while ago.”

“What did you think?”

“About what you’d expect, I guess,” James replied. “No real surprises.”

“Ah!” Donald said, jumping on James’ assessment. “There
was
one small victory snatched from the jaws of defeat.”

He learned forward, his expression growing keen and excited. It was only then that James recognized him as the backbencher who had thrown Parliament into a tizzy with his question about the State funeral for Ready Teddy. It suddenly dawned on him why Caroline had been so unaccountably pleased to hear that the issue had been raised in the broadcast. Then, he had been just another pinstriped politico waving an order paper. Now, however, he looked like a schoolboy who has just found out a dirty secret about his teacher. “One small victory. Know what it was?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the Save Our Monarchy lunatics put him up to this. Those bastards have been a pain in the as from the beginning. I want them squeezed until the pips squeak, understand?” Prime Minister Waring thrust himself back in his chair and glared at the unhappy faces huddled around the oval table.

The PM’s deputy, a carefully coiffed, Armani-suited redoubtable woman named Angela Telford-Sykes, was first to speak. “Calm down, Tom,” she said, trying to smooth her chief’s ruffled feathers. “They’re just a bunch of blue-haired old dears. They make tea and hand out leaflets in shopping centers. Why, in a day or two, I wouldn’t be surprised if —”

Waring’s fist struck the table with such force the empty water jug bounced on its silver tray. “We don’t have a day or two!” he shouted. “Bloody hell! Is everyone braindead around here?”

Telford-Sykes gazed over the top of her glasses, unmoved. A veteran of many campaigns, she was used to taking much worse from the PM. One or two of the other members of Waring’s kitchen cabinet — those few trusted advisors of his inner circle — glanced nervously at the deputy.

“Because of that blasted question,” Waring said, lowering his voice, “we’re being maneuvered into providing a gala State funeral for that reprobate winesop. The whole country heard it, for Crissakes! Any hope we had of sending him off with a quiet private ceremony is ruined.”

“I don’t believe that was ever a realistic option, Tom,” Angela said soothingly. “Perhaps they’ve done us a favor by bringing this out into the open. We can use it.”

“Bloody right we’ll use it,” Waring snapped. “But it will cost an absolute bomb.”

Adrian Burton, Chancellor of the Exchequer, spoke up. “As it happens, I’ve had some figures prepared” — he lifted a sheet of paper from the leather folder before him — “and it looks like something in the region of fifteen million pounds is a reasonable minimum.”

Waring stared daggers at the man. “I was thinking more in terms of the
political
cost, Adrian,” he enunciated coldly. “I don’t give a damn about the money.”

“Quite,” replied Burton. “Yes, quite.”

Waring turned his eyes away from his chancellor. “Hutch has been on the phone all day, doing damage control, but the media smell blood. They are circling. Unless we provide a suitable alternative, gentlemen, this thing could get very painful.”

“Hutch” was Martin Hutchens, his press secretary. His slight stature, cheap suits, and prep-school haircut went a long way towards disguising a fiercely calculating, creatively resourceful adversary. When he stumbled across a journalism course at the Poly years ago, the NHS may have lost a proctologist, but the Government gained a top-flight spin doctor. Ever since the televised House announcement, he had been laboring to deflect the increasingly strident insinuations that the Government had something to hide in the matter of the King’s death.

“This is where it sits at the moment,” Hutchens said. It was time to bring the rest of the inner circle up to speed. “The story is that the King’s suicide — yes, we’re using the ‘S’ word now, to desentimentalize the account and to prevent the opposition from whipping up a froth of false sympathy. Anyway, the suicide, unexpected as it was, has surprised us no less than anyone else. Did
The Times
predict it? Did
The
Guardian
? Was Ladbrokes taking bets? No. All right. A state funeral takes time to organize — you just can’t throw one together overnight. We are sympathetic, of course. We are looking into it — doing all we can. Unfortunately, time is against us — we don’t even have the corpse back yet and there’s half a week gone. Not to put too fine a point on it, Portuguese embalming practices being what they are” — he made a fluttering motion with his hand before his face as if fanning away noxious fumes — “there are likely to be certain complications.”

“For pity’s sake, Martin,” sighed the Home Secretary, a trim and elegant, dark-haired former Oxford Union president named Patricia Shah. “Might we forgo the histrionics, please?”

“Sorry,” he said, moving quickly on. “More important, timing-wise, we host the Pan-European Economic Summit next week. That’s true,” he hastened to point out. “It’s been on the books for months. Everybody knows it. Circumstances may not permit us to do all we would wish for the King’s funeral — limited resources… available manpower… security… et cetera, et cetera.”

“Are they buying it?” asked Dennis Arnold, Chairman of the Special Committee for Royal Devolution. A long-time party workhorse, he had known the Prime Minister since their days of sharing a flat at university.

“Not entirely,” admitted Hutchens. “They’ll probably assume we’re stalling. But it’ll stick until they dig up something else to throw at us.”

“This is why we need to find out who is behind this State funeral scheme,” Waring reiterated. “I want a thorough and speedy workup on Rothes. What’s he up to? What’s his agenda? Just as important: does he have a mistress? A fondness for schoolboys? Get something we can use.”

“What if we can’t find anything?” wondered Burton.

“Invent something, Adrian. Use your head for once.”

“There’s his title, of course,” put in Hutchens. “He’s one of the diehards who still uses it. That’s what I hear, anyway.”

“There,” said Waring, throwing out his hand to Hutchens. “He’s a greedy, aristo-royalist. We can start with that. We’ve got to sideline this bigmouthed smart-ass — put the heat on and keep it on. We’ll keep him so occupied putting out fires that he won’t have time to stir up any more trouble.”

“What about the funeral?” asked Dennis Arnold. “What
are
we going to do?”

“I suggest we hold to our original plan,” said the Home Secretary. “A simple, tasteful, but extremely low-key affair.”

“But, I thought Tom just said —”

“I know what I said,” Waring broke in. “But I
will not
be forced into splashing out on a costly public spectacle for that fat bastard — it goes against everything I believe in. I won’t do it.” He glanced around the table at his five chief advisors.

“On the other hand, we wouldn’t want to appear to be unreasonable about this,” Arnold suggested. “The people expect a certain amount of decorum at least. If we’re seen to be doing Teddy boy down, that could cause a sympathetic backlash. The last thing we want is to have everyone feeling sorry for the old rascal.”

Waring bristled, but he knew solid advice when he heard it. He paused, tapping the tips of his fingers together. “All right,” he said at last, leaning forward to deliver his decision. “This is how it will be: we stick to the original plan, but allow a few modifications — heaven forbid we should seem
unreasonable
. The cremation goes ahead, but he can lie in state at Buckingham Palace. There will be a small family ceremony — at the crematorium, not at Westminster or St. Paul’s. Nothing public, got it? Say the family wants it that way, and we’re only respecting their wishes.”

The Prime Minister stood up abruptly. “Meeting adjourned. Reconvene lunchtime tomorrow. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen; you are dismissed.”

As the first of the inner circle of advisors filed out of the office, Leonard DeVries, the PM’s private secretary, put his head around the corner of the door to announce, “Chief Whip is here to see you, sir. Is this a good time?”

“Perfect,” Waring replied. “Send him in.” To Hutchens and the Deputy Prime Minister, he said, “Both of you stay. I want you to hear this. It’ll save repeating it later.”

Nigel Sforza, Chief Whip of the British Republic Party, was a somber man with a pockmarked face and long hands that had a tendency to flap when he became agitated. “I hope I am not intruding, Prime Minister, You did ask me to make my report a first priority.”

“Yes, yes, of course, Nigel. Come right in — we’re finished here. Hutch and Angela will sit in on this in case they have any questions.”

“By all means,” said the Chief Whip, taking the seat Waring offered. Placing his briefcase on the floor, he bent to open it and withdrew a handful of papers.

While he rifled through them, Waring explained, “I asked Nigel for a head count so we would know where we stand.”

“Right,” said Nigel, laying the papers on the table in front of him. “I’d ask you to remember that this was done off the record. If it came to a fight the numbers would probably change — depending on the particular issue in question.”

“Point taken,” said Waring impatiently. “How does it look?”

Sforza extended his index finger and ran it down the page before him. “We currently have a solid payroll vote of two hundred and ninety, which leaves sixty-one floaters.”

Hutchens loosed a low, astonished whistle. “Sixty-one potential renegades.”

Sforza glanced up at him. “Depending on the issue,” he intoned coolly. “It is highly unlikely we would ever face the desertion of all sixty-one. Highly unlikely.”

“But our majority is down to six,” Angela pointed out. “It wouldn’t take all sixty-one. Only six have to side with the opposition, and we’re sunk.”

“It won’t come to that,” said Waring firmly. It irritated him when people pointed out the weakness of their majority. They had come to power twelve years earlier with a comfortable margin of parliamentary seats. The years and bloody battles they had fought as a party had taken their toll, but he nursed fond hopes of building their margin back to its original fighting strength.

“The point is,” suggested Hutchens, “it’s one thing to abolish the monarchy, but quite another to endorse a full presidential republic. That might be a bridge too far for some of our renegades and fence-sitters. We don’t really know how big the potential defection factor might be.”

“There won’t be any defections,” Waring declared firmly.

“Fine. Great.” Hutch shrugged. “Fiddle away, Nero. Personally, I smell smoke. This could be the thing the Opposition has been looking for to unite their own wayward ranks. If they were able to get to some of our renegades, we could lose the presidency vote.”

He was only stating what Waring had told himself a thousand times since he’d learned of Teddy’s suicide. The King’s death could not have come at a worse time. It was, in many ways, the worst thing that could have happened to his government. He would have preferred the monarchy to have been dissolved as planned, thus clearing the way for the Act of Presidency. Everyone knew that, as the leader of the party in power, he fancied himself in the role of Britain’s first chief executive.