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“Just give her one of yours. You’ve got stacks of them.”
Nikolas didn’t appear to know quite what expression to make at that suggestion. Finally, he ventured, as if just trying to get it straight in his own head, “You think I’d…what? Give my ex-wife a second-hand paperback as a wedding present to celebrate her marriage to the future King of England?”
“I don’t know! Buy her a new one then. Was it new?”
Being caught wrong-footed was one of Nikolas’s pet hates, and Ben chuckled inwardly at the visible irritation this question raised. Then Nikolas snorted quietly and flicked him a smirk. “Actually, for once, you are quite right, Benjamin Rider-Mikkelsen. Itissecond hand. It is over seven-hundred years second hand.”
Ben mulled this over for a moment. “They didn’t have books then.”
Nikolas’s jaw dropped a little. “They didn’t have…books?”
“Cavemen. No paper then. I don’t know!”
“Cavemen? In England? In 1328?”
“Anyway. Whatever. That’s a horrible present—an old, mouldy book.”
“Uh-huh. I am going to continue my search. Should your annoying friend Professor Timothy I-know-a-lot-about-everything-utterly-useless Watson come over, ask him whether an illuminated prayer book given to thefirstQueen Philipa on her wedding day by her husband in 1328 is a horrible present to give the future second one.”
It was, Ben reflected, just as wellhedidn’t mind being wrong-footed. Nikolas did it to him a lot. However, he conceded they might have had books back then, but they sure as hell couldn’t have had LEDs toilluminatethem. He’d ask Tim.
Another Queen Philipa. Who knew?
Nikolas was still icily calm about the missing present when Sarah brought Molly up to the house for lunch. She’d just returned from her prep school, where she attended the nursery class a couple of mornings a week. Ben had insisted upon it, claiming she needed some normality in her life—and other children.
Nikolas, however, had chosen the actual school.
Elite hardly began to describe it.
But Ben got as much pleasure from her tiny blazer and boater, leather shoes and satchel as Nikolas did, so he didn’t insist on sending her to one slightly more…run of the mill.
The mystery of the missing book was solved over baked beans on toast.
It had been show and tell at school.
Molly had shown and told. No one had been very impressed with the boring thing she’d brought, however. No one could read it, as the writing looked all silly. However, according to Molly, Miss Wilson, her elderly and oft-quoted teacher, had seemed slightly surprised, then extremely anxious when she had spotted the object of the little girls’ derision, and had then wrapped it carefully and put it back in Molly’s satchel. To, she claimed, bereturnedto papa.
Nikolas was at his best, Ben decided, when faced with the greatest trials in his life. He took the parcel and thanked Molly for bringing it back so quickly. He even told her it had once been owned by a queen, and so only fitting it had been shared, for a very short time, by a small princess before being given to a bigger one. Molly then wanted it back because, as she pointed out quite reasonably, everyone would now be impressed with it at the next show and tell.
Nikolas told her she could take Radulf. And tell them about the notches on his collar.
* * *
“You should wear gloves when handling it, Ben.”
Ben quickly put the book back on the desk by the paper Nikolas was about to wrap it in. “How much did it cost?”
Nikolas considered this question then replied, “It is one of those things that cannot be valued in conventional terms.” He smirked, apparently at some private joke, and added slyly, “Like bagpipes and haggis, I suppose.”
“Huh?”
Nikolas brushed his hand over the gilt-etched edges of the parchment leaves before folding one side of the square of paper over them. “Its provenance is so unique, its history so rare, that, like love, it cannot be valued.”
Ben wasn’t sure he liked this answer very much and thought about it for some time. An AK47 bracelet didn’t seem quite so cool now.
“But Philipa makes you rant in Russian every time she calls you, and you’re having him sent to a gulag come your glorious revolution.” Neither of these observations was entirely true, he knew, but it was provocative to claim any such knowledge and might, if Nikolas wasn’t being Nikolas, elicit an honest answer.
“This is not about trivial things such as like or dislike. Philipa and I share a unique history, and I felt this honoured that mutual past. As you once said, it is not everyone who can claim they have slept with the Queen of England.”
