His Royal Favorite

by Lilah Pace

  "Realistically I'm most likely to wind up doing something charitable, you know." By now James looked thoughtful. "With UNICEF, or WHO, something like that."

  "The UN means New York City. I've always wanted to give Manhattan a try. And there, even you and I can get lost in the crowd."

  "Take a penthouse flat in some massive high-rise," James suggested. "Go meandering through Central Park."

  Ben grinned. "Think of it, James. Coffee everywhere."

  "Mmmm." Then, just as Ben took a sip of wine, James said, "And if I didn't have the succession to consider--well--I suppose we could at least think about children."

  The wine traveled into areas of Ben's body it was never meant to enter. He sputtered and coughed and barely managed to avoid a spit-take.

  James clapped his hand on Ben's back. "I see the subject isn't exactly welcome."

  "Wait--no--I didn't--wait." Ben had to stare. "Are you serious?"

  "Maybe? I'm not sure. I meant exactly what I said. We could think about it. I've never allowed myself to even go that far before."

  Now that Ben weighed the question for himself--"Why didn't you? These days, with surrogates and egg donors, anything's possible."

  "Anything's possible, but not everything's legal." James sighed as he lifted his wineglass. "If I were still heir to the throne and I created a child with someone who wasn't my wife, as recognized by not only the state but also the Church of England, there would be significant questions as to that child's legitimacy. Even people who would support my reign might have qualms about a potential future heir with an anonymous mother. The fate of any 'extra' embryos would become a very charged issue as well. And what of the surrogate? There's no keeping that secret. She'd have to be known to the world, which of course is asking a great deal more of someone you're already asking quite a lot of. Surrogates in the United Kingdom retain parental rights until after birth, so it would have to be someone in whom we had total trust and confidence. There also would be the question of whether she should be granted a title and precedence, given her relationship to the heir to the throne, which complicates the whole issue further, and . . . well. You can see why I never entertained the idea for very long."

  "I get it now." Every time Ben thought he'd grasped the full complexity of the webs of history and protocol surrounding James, he realized there were whole new dimensions awaiting discovery.

  James took on a wistful look. "Even after I were out of the succession--to make certain everything was on the up and up--if we did have children, it would be better if you were the biological father. Or I suppose we could adopt. That would be lovely, wouldn't it? Just one more option I couldn't have considered as king." He smiled ruefully. "Going too fast again, aren't I?"

  Ben had never for an instant contemplated becoming a father. He'd written gay parenting off as "Wannabe Straight Theatre," along with marriage and even commitment. However, he now knew much of that contempt had been Warner's more than his own. Besides, while he might have no desire for that on his own . . . everything was different with James.

  He covered James's hand with his own. "Too fast," he agreed. "But maybe we can both think about it. For the future. The not-imminent future. All right?"

  "All right," James agreed. "Something for the future, not worrying about it overmuch today."

  "Exactly."

  And with James's incredible ability to compartmentalize, Ben thought, he'd be able to do precisely that.

  Yet the entire time they finished their dinner, James never stopped smiling.

  ***

  It was uniquely liberating, James thought, to do whatever you damn well pleased.

  Over the weekend, both Richard and Queen Louisa had requested an audience to "revisit" the question of Indigo's stay at St. Maur Hall. Instead he'd wrangled them into a conference call. As he put it to them, "It's hardly necessary for us to meet in person if we're only going to repeat the exact same things we said before."

  "You've been very cavalier about this," Richard said. "Not consulting with us, rushing out in the dead of night, not even attempting to preserve Amelia's privacy. Did you even think of that? About how the tabloids would treat her?"

  James resisted the urge to snap at him, realizing that, underneath his ire, Richard was genuinely worried about Indigo. His belief that media exposure was deadlier than mental illness might be misguided, but his concern was sincere.

  "Have you seen the papers?" the queen interjected. "The staff at that hospital have no discretion whatsoever."

  At that, James had to stifle a groan. He had granted himself a respite from the reporting on Indigo's hospitalization. This morning he'd scanned a bit of one story--from the Times, not even one of the rags--and they appeared to have rather intimate details of that night's events, including the moment when he'd nearly wept and Ben had comforted him. Instead of reading in-depth, James had pushed the paper aside. Of course he'd counted on a breach, because the press coverage was Indigo's insurance. He hadn't realized the breach would be so revealing, though. "The hospital already called to apologize. The employee who disclosed that information was new and has already been sacked. I don't see what else we can ask of them, beyond caring for Indigo to the best of their ability."

  The queen said, "When your staff next rings the hospital, be certain to pass along our extreme disapproval. And discuss what other arrangements might be made. If professional help is indeed unavoidable, could such a person not make visits to Kensington Palace? Surely Amelia would prefer to handle this sort of thing at home."

  "First of all, I'm not ringing the hospital. I'm going back to St. Maur Hall in person, to visit Indigo and discuss her care."

  Richard cut in, "Then you should at least have someone else from the family with you. You ought to have had someone with you that night, as I feel sure you knew."

  "Ben came with us, and that's all the support I needed."

  "Your boyfriend?" Richard said. "What has he to do with this?"

  The queen said, "Mr. Dahan is a very sensible man, Richard. I feel certain he behaved appropriately."

  James stared at the phone receiver. Since when had she decided Ben was "sensible"?

  She continued, "Nothing like this has ever been done before, James. Surely you can see that this opens the family up to greater ridicule. We are ceasing to be rulers and becoming mere . . . celebrities."

  "Grandmother, I'm afraid culture is doing that for us without any help from me." James managed not to sigh. "I'm not ashamed of my sister. She's sick, that's all. We wouldn't refuse to send her to hospital if she had pneumonia, would we? Or a broken leg?"

  "This is not the same," Richard said. "People will forever regard her differently after this. Even you cannot be so blind as not to see that."

  "When I broke my leg in 1972, the doctor came to me," the queen insisted. "It was entirely convenient."

  Enough of this. "Listen to me. What's done is done. Indigo is in hospital, which is where she both needs and wants to be. If there is any chance this can help her, then it must be tried. I have already made all necessary security and financial arrangements. It is within my power as Prince Regent to do so, and I have that power until two o'clock Monday afternoon."

  "Not even two full days." Richard's voice was low and dangerous. "The king is on the verge of regaining power, and he may have very different thoughts."

  "I don't give a damn if he does." James leaned forward over his desk, stabbing at it with his finger as though they could see him all the way from the House. "If you think the nation's making a stir about Indigo's being in hospital, you haven't seen anything compared to the scandal if you try to pull her out against her will. Every single person in Great Britain will know that you're taking a mentally ill girl and shutting her up without access to proper care, and in so doing endangering her life. I don't care if I have to ring up the papers myself and give each and every one a personal interview. They'll all know it, and you will be hated for it. Do you understand me?"

  "No one want
s to endanger Indigo's life," Richard said. His anger was, unfortunately, justified; James had always known Richard at least meant well when it came to Indigo, and he shouldn't have suggested otherwise.

  Before he could apologize, however, the queen's voice went icy. "There's no need to be crude. These emotional displays do little to advance your cause."

  "Nothing seems to advance my cause but bullying, so here we are." After a couple of deliberately slow breaths, James added, "Now if you'll excuse me, my car should be waiting."

  Still, Richard couldn't let it go. "I'll see you Monday afternoon, then. At 2 p.m."

  "Actually, I shall be attending Mr. Hartley's funeral. Please have the appropriate paperwork forwarded to my office." James hung up without waiting for a reply.

  ***

  At St. Maur Hall that Saturday afternoon, James first met with Dr. Colin McKay.

  "I'm a fully licensed doctor and psychiatrist," he said, "but in the interests of full disclosure, I should tell you that I only began practicing four months ago. Yet as attending physician the night of Amelia's admission, I'm automatically on her counseling team."

  No "princess." No "Her Royal Highness." Thank God, James thought.

  "If you have misgivings about my lack of experience, please know that the other two members of her team are our most senior and respected staff members: Dr. Bassett, who is her personal therapist, and Dr. Janssen, who will be the family therapist."

  James had been so busy mentally rehearsing his assurances of trust in Colin that he almost missed the last. "Family therapist?"

  "Our patients don't exist in a vacuum." Clearly Colin knew he was treading on dangerous ground; one of his fingers tapped, too quickly, against his wooden desk. "If we send our patients back to the exact same circumstances that they found troubling and damaging before, we only set them up to fail. Healing Amelia is only the beginning of the process."

  That made sense, and sounded impossible. "You must realize that the single most problematic part of my sister's life is the one thing no one in her family has the power to change."

  "We can't take her out of the public eye," Colin admitted. "But we can work with those around her to make sure that, from now on, she has the support she needs."

  James leaned back in his chair, weary and uncertain. "Most of the people in the family aren't going to take part in that kind of therapy. They love her, they want good things for her, but this is a leap they can't make. For what it's worth, though, I'll do whatever it takes. So will her cousin, Nicholas. It's a place to begin."

  "You, Nicholas, your partner--that's good. You can be her team."

  It was heartening to hear Colin include Ben among those who would support Indigo, particularly because James knew that meant Indigo had to have mentioned Ben already as someone she trusted.

  Although there were many cozy meeting areas for patients and family members to gather in, James went to see Indigo in her own room. She needed to recover from the last crisis physically as well as mentally, and he was struck by how pale and shaky she remained. When they embraced, she looped her arms around his neck, and he simply held her for a very long time.

  Finally he said, "How do you feel, being here?"

  "I don't know," Indigo confessed, brushing her long hair back from her face. "On one hand--well, it's a mental hospital, James. We call it a treatment center and there are no straitjackets any longer, but still, it's a mental hospital. Just from the few people I've met so far, I know lots of them here are even sicker than me. It seems I belong in a place like this."

  The pain was almost physical, something that seared a loop around James's heart. "Oh, Indigo."

  But she shook her head quickly. "They're kind to me. The conversations I've already had with Dr. Bassett . . . it's the first time in so long that I've known someone really understood what I meant. No one here judges me for being sick. I think I've needed that most of all."

  "Good," James said. "That's excellent."

  Indigo gave him a look, the energy in her dark eyes making her look like her usual self again for a moment. "Did they talk to you about the family therapy?"

  "Yes." They both laughed a little, neither needing to complete the joke. "You know I'll take part, don't you?"

  She nodded. "Look on the bright side. I've got to go to dance therapy. At least you're off the hook for that one."

  James made a face. "Dear Lord."

  "They say it helps. I suppose I'll try it. It couldn't make the situation any worse." For a few moments she gazed into an unseen distance, then said, more abruptly, "If I weren't doing this for Hartley, I don't know if I could stick it out. But I am doing it for him. I can do it, and I will."

  He took her hand. "I want you to do it for yourself too."

  A dozen different expressions flickered over her face as she struggled to know what to say, how to feel, but she seemed to settle on mild amusement. "What I said before, about people here being even sicker than I am?"

  "Are you frightened?"

  "Oh, no. It's not like that. I only meant--in this place, I'm almost normal." She laughed a little. "It makes a nice change."

  James leaned over and kissed her forehead. Amid his deep relief, he also found himself wondering, What would it be like, to be normal?

  There was no family therapy over the rest of the weekend, so James spent it on what he called housekeeping. He took a final meeting with the prime minister. He pushed through the last bureaucratic duties required of the Prince Regent. Through Kimberley, he managed to broker a nearly unprecedented agreement among the various news media, all of whom pledged to respect Indigo's privacy while she remained at St. Maur Hall. The press had done this before, on occasion--for instance, leaving both James and Indigo alone in the period immediately following their parents' deaths--but he had hardly dared dream of a repetition of such decency. If the press backed off, so would the rest of the royal family. James wasn't sure how long this peace would last, but he thought most of the reporters would respect the agreement for a minimum of a few weeks, which would give her much-needed space to recuperate.

  As for his own recuperation, it mostly took place in Ben's arms, late at night.

  Sunday evening he lay cradled against Ben's chest, neither of them speaking; Ben understood his weariness and worry without having to be told. James found his concerns easing as he remembered the first time Ben had held him for no reason--that wonderful afternoon at the Islington flat. He'd been so newly in love then, so certain this couldn't last, so desperate to hold on to Ben anyway.

  You wished to be rid of the throne back then, James reminded himself. What if this is simply the way your wish comes true?

  However, all the positive thinking in the world didn't help him get through Monday. It was a miserably rainy day, chilly for early May, and Hartley's funeral would have wrenched the soul of a colder man than James. Apparently Hartley had been a widower for the better part of two decades; he and his late wife Sophia had never been able to have children. Yet there were countless nieces and nephews there reminiscing about the guidance and support he'd given them, about how much he used to love a good game of darts, even how he was a sort of Titanic buff who collected books about the shipwreck, and so much more that James had never known about this man who'd played such a huge role in his sister's life.

  His own presence at the funeral was taken as the sign of great respect it was, and yet James knew he also made things more awkward. There was no way the others could be entirely at ease around him. He was like the tombstone: looming large, reminding everyone of what they most wanted to forget, even as they paid him the most attention.

  As he walked out of the service, shoes splashing through puddles as security personnel tried to balance black umbrellas over his head, James heard the clock strike three. The meeting at Buckingham Palace would by now be over. He was no longer Prince Regent. His reign was one more thing swept away by the storm.

  ***

  When James had said he wanted a quiet night, it was n
o more than Ben had expected. The big meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury was tomorrow; he'd spent the day at a funeral; naturally James was tense and a little depressed. Ben didn't see any way to handle it besides making them both some tea and waiting it out.

  But by about 8:30 p.m., he couldn't take it any longer.

  "You look wretched," Ben said.

  "I'm not wretched," James insisted as he scratched Glo behind the ears. "Merely tired."

  "You're wretched."

  James gave him a look. "I just told you, I'm not."

  "You're watching Top Gear without complaining, which you never do. You hardly touched your dinner. You won't talk about anything, and you're wearing that."

  "But I love this." James brushed dog fur from the front of his Slanket. "You gave me this."

  "You only wear it when it's cold or when you're feeling insecure," Ben said, putting down his e-reader. "It's not that cold."

  Beaten, James leaned his head back against the chair. "I keep wondering how I'm going to break this to Indigo. About my removal from the succession. I ought to have spoken this weekend, but this is the last news she needs at the moment. So I decided to wait until it was final before I said anything."

  At first Ben wondered whether they couldn't delay giving her the news a while longer, but he corrected himself immediately. Dishonesty was one of the poisons of Indigo's life; it would be unconscionable to lie to her now. Besides, James's fall from power would be nearly as enormous a story as his coming-out had been. Even within St. Maur Hall, the news would travel quickly.

  So he said, "You'll handle that on Wednesday. For now, let's concentrate on the bright side."

  "Bright side?"

  "All the delightful possibilities for your soon-to-be-wide-open future."

  "The part where we become scientists and world travelers and philanthropists?" James was smiling, but he seemed to be mocking his own hopes. "Or the bit where we conceive identical triplets via IVF?"

  Triplets? God forbid.

  "Think smaller," Ben suggested. "Like--how long has it been since you went to see a movie? In a theater?"

  James folded his arms, the bulky sleeves of the Slanket bunching around him; clearly he had to think about this. "Not counting charity premieres?"