“You guys, I’m right here.” I said. “Look, I will be careful, I promise. No jumping.”
But while being dignified and self-possessed seemed executable at three a.m., now that I was actually at Windsor, I didn’t know how to keep the truth from hurtling out of my mouth—or even stop from jumping him. Before I knew it, I was through the entryway and Nick was loping down to greet me, his hands stuffed in the pockets of a blue hoodie that brought out his eyes. My brain clicked on and reminded me to control myself. To wait for the right time. Cordial, civil, normal, poised. These were my watchwords.
“Hey!” I called out, walking toward him.
“Bex! How are you?” he said, leaning toward me.
I didn’t trust myself to hug him, so I turned away a bit, forcing Nick to stop short. Strike one for normal.
“This is amazing,” I said quickly. “I can’t believe you have a home with an actual moat.”
“I knew you’d love it,” he said. “Lots of history, and today, no tourists. Hope you brought your pencils.” He took my arm lightly to point me in the direction we needed to walk. “I thought you might need something to distract from the big family holiday in America.”
“That’s really nice of you,” I said, touched.
His eyes caught my flag pin, affixed to the collar of my coat. I smiled amiably and said nothing else. The platonic, civil, cordial Bex had to be on guard against random acts of feelings. (Although I did quickly ogle him a little. Unlike the castle around us, I was not made of stone.) We walked in silence uphill toward the castle’s giant circular turret, pausing only to admire the regrettably nonfunctioning moat that had been landscaped into what would, come spring, be a stunning garden.
“I miss Oxford,” Nick said eventually. “I’ve been gone too much. How is everyone?”
“Cilla and Gaz haven’t killed each other yet,” I said. “Joss thinks she has a shot at a design school, so she quit going to her tutorials. And Clive, um, started seeing someone.”
“Oh?” Nick’s voice was even.
“Someone named Cordelia? He said you guys met her your first year?”
“Ah, yes, I know her well,” Nick said.
I snickered before I could stop myself.
He grinned. “Not that well. Here, let me show you the view.”
He led me up to the battlements along the back of the castle, where I found myself staring down an extremely steep hill at an unruly expanse of land.
“William the Conqueror set up a bunch of fortresses within a day’s march from each other, and picked this spot because the high hill made it quite protected from one side,” he said. “And with the Thames as a transport or supply route, the town grew up around it naturally.” He pointed into the distance. “If you squint, you can see Eton.”
I peered across the fields and saw the spires of a cathedral in the distance. Eton was the town across the river, home to the fancy boarding school that had housed nineteen eventual prime ministers, ten iconic writers, and Nick and Freddie.
“I loved it there,” Nick said. “We used to walk around over the bridge in our dress clothes, and we all looked the same. Nobody bothered about who I was. No one even noticed.”
“What were you like then?” I asked.
He leaned against the stone wall. “Much the same, I suppose,” he said. “Scrawnier. Quite sporty. Obsessed with the Wall Game.”
“You are definitely going to have to explain that one,” I said. “It sounds like something you’d play in prison.”
Nick laughed. “I oughtn’t be surprised news of the Wall Game didn’t make it across the pond. It’s only ever played at Eton,” he said. “See, there’s a curved wall running the length of a field that’s five meters wide and—”
“Sorry, hang on, I still don’t speak metric,” I interrupted.
“You nonconformists are so tiresome,” he said. “All right, it’s as wide across as Cornmarket Street, and about the length of an American football field with all the end bits.”
“I spent this whole week learning cricket lingo and the best you can do is end bits?”
“Is that what you get up to when I’m away? That’s not at all what I imagined,” Nick said. “Anyway, the Wall Game is incredibly hard and tactical, and vicious, like rugby. You can’t punch people, but if you’re quite sneaky, you can sort of press really, really hard on their faces with your fist.”
“That is an amazing technicality,” I said. “But what’s the point? I mean, I get that’s fun to push someone’s face into a wall, or whatever, but is there a ball??”
“Indeed there is,” Nick said, warming to his subject in a way that was both boyish and endearing. “Two teams form a scrum against the wall called a bully, and you try to work the ball over to your opponent’s end of the field, but you can’t use your hands, and only your hands and feet can touch the ground. You can’t furk the ball unless you’re in the calx, obviously—”
“Well, yeah,” I said.
“—but when you get into the calx end, you can furk it, and you get a shy if you work the ball up on the wall with your foot and someone else touches it, which earns you one point and the right to try a nine-point goal by throwing the ball at the target, which is either a door or a tree depending on which side of the field you’re on.”
“That is by far the most creatively pointless aggression I have ever heard of,” I said. “It’s actually almost impressive.”
“The Economist called it ‘the world’s dullest game,’” Nick said fondly. “And as I’m saying this out loud I realize it sounds totally bonkers. I will never make fun of baseball again.”
“You’d better not,” I said. “In fact, in exchange for all of that, I’m going to make you listen to me explain the infield fly rule.”
Nick laughed, and I couldn’t help laughing with him, even though most of me just wanted to turn to him and say, Speaking of the infield fly rule, I love you.
Then I saw Nick shiver. “It’s chilly out here,” he said. “Let’s start in the chapel.”
I exhaled. Cordial, civil, normal, poised. I could wait. I think I needed to wait.
St. George’s Chapel is at the bottom of the hill inside the castle walls, and though it is quaint compared to Westminster Abbey, I love it—the spectacular fan vaulting in the ceiling, the surprisingly intimate chapel with its wood-carved stalls, and the graves of at least ten monarchs, including that infamous cad Henry VIII (buried with his third wife, Jane Seymour, his favorite on account of her not living long enough to irritate him). It was stirring and beautiful, and Nick seemed delighted by how much time I wanted to spend lingering over the details.
“Why is he Arthur the First, and not the Second?” I asked of the marble monument to the second Lyons king. “Does Camelot count for nothing?”
“Rebecca, not everything from a Monty Python movie is real,” Nick said. “There is no Camelot, nor a Holy Grail. Although the bit with the killer rabbit is true.”