I was pleased to see that Keira looked quietly impressed. “Do you know who it’s by?”
“No one does,” I replied. “Or who it’s of, in fact. The style suggests a Dutch artist and I know some people see a similarity in technique between this and the portrait of Henry the Seventh in the National Portrait Gallery—also by an unknown Dutch artist—which would date it to the early sixteenth century.”
This time Keira looked outright surprised. “Since when do you know anything about art?”
Since yesterday was the honest answer. I’d been planning this little excursion, and like any boy trying to impress the girl he loves, I’d gone out of my way to find out as much as I could about the paintings.
“I’m full of surprises,” I said in the most mysterious tone I could muster up.
Keira cocked her head and grinned. “True or false—if I were to go to your room now, I would find a big stack of art history books.”
“False,” I replied. “I put them back in the library.”
She laughed. “Did you at least enjoy them?”
“I did, actually,” I said, and I meant it. “It’s funny the things that you avoid learning about because your parents are interested in it and it’s ‘boring’, and then when you take the trouble to learn a bit for yourself, you find that it was interesting all along.”
I wasn’t sure if Keira liked the fact that I’d developed an interest in her pet subject—something we could now talk about together—or if she liked the fact that I’d gone to this trouble on her account, but either way she was smiling, and that was all that mattered.
She pulled out a larger canvas. “Tell me about this one.”
The next few hours seemed to fly by, and I wondered if I’d ever said this many words to a woman without my final intention being to get her into bed. There was no woman in the world I found as attractive as Keira, and yet I was just as happy talking to her as I was doing anything else with her. I wished this afternoon could’ve lasted forever, but time passed and the light from the windows soon began to fade.
“I guess we’d better be going,” Keira said reluctantly.
“One more thing.” I crossed to a darkened corner of the room where a large object was shrouded by a dust-covered sheet. With a flourish, I pulled the sheet aside and revealed the item beneath.
“What is that?” Keira asked. It was clearly a chair—ornately carved in wood so dark as to be almost black—and yet something about it suggested more.
“It’s the old throne,” I replied.
Contrary to what everyone, and especially everyone in other countries, wanted to believe, there was no such thing as the royal throne except as an idea. A royal heir accedes to ‘the throne’, but that just means they become monarch—the actual item doesn’t exist, because real life is not like a George R. R. Martin novel. There were several thrones scattered through royal properties, most famously the one on which the Queen would sit during the state opening of Parliament, but there was no ‘real’ throne as there was in fairytales and people’s imaginations. At one time there had been, but not now.
“I think this was the last time we had a throne that was like a proper Throne,” I said, pronouncing the capital well. “Maybe not. But I think so.”
“What’s it doing up here?”
“Being safe,” I said. “Like all this stuff. The funny thing is, if you put all your valuables in a strong box then everyone knows where they are, and you’re just waiting for the right thief. But who the hell would look up here for this stuff? Not even the mice come up here. Nothing to eat.”
Keira ran a hand over the carved wood. She was touching history, and the look on her face suggested that she knew it but couldn’t quite believe it.
“It’s incredible.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I’d have thought it would be…I don’t know; covered with gold, studded with jewels. All that royal bling.”
I nodded. “I think it was made at a more practical time.” I caressed the woodwork, feeling the hard grain beneath my fingers. “I remember when my father brought me up here to see it. Wasn’t long before he died.”
“I’m sorry,” Keira said. “I know you don’t talk about that very much.”
She was right. It’d been hard when my father died, and I’d never really spoken about it all that much to anyone, but I somehow found it easy to talk to Keira about anything, especially family matters, seeing as we were having our own family soon.
“It’s okay. This is a happy memory,” I replied. “Anyway, he brought us up here to look at it. I don’t think Michael was that impressed, but I…something about it just clicked with me. To be honest—and this is maybe going to make the whole story seem a bit dumb—I think it might have been because I’d recently seen the Indiana Jones films for the first time.”