White wine was poured into the appropriate glasses, the starter of dressed crab with an accompanying crab timbale, crayfish and prawns was brought out by the army of serving staff, and the banquet began.
‘Is your grandfather not attending?’ Amalie whispered before taking a sip of her wine.
‘He is unwell.’
‘Nothing serious, I hope?’ she asked with concern.
He forced a smile. ‘A touch of flu, that’s all.’
‘It must be a worry for you,’ she said, clearly seeing through his brevity.
‘My grandfather is eighty-seven and as tough as a horse,’ he deflected artfully.
She laughed. ‘My English grandfather is eighty-five and tough as a horse too. They’ll outlive the lot of us!’
How he wished that was the case, he thought, his heart turning to lead as he envisaged a life without his grandfather, a steady if often aloof presence, but someone who had always been there.
For the first time he felt the compulsion to confide, to tell the truth of his grandfather’s condition. It was there, right on the tip of his tongue. And he was the man who confided in no one. Not even his brothers.
The thought was unsettling.
Talos had learned the art of self-containment at the age of seven. The only person able to give him enough comfort to sleep when the nightmares had become too much to bear had died five years ago.
Yet for all the solace his grandmother had given him she’d never been able to give him peace. No one could give him that. He would sit stiffly in her arms, refusing to return the physical comfort she gave him. It had been a battle of wills with himself, something he could control and that no one could ever take away.
He’d been wise not to return the affection. How much greater would his pain have been if he had? He’d loved his mother with the whole of his heart. Her death had come close to destroying him.
The pain of his grandmother’s death had still hit him like one of the punches he received in the boxing ring, but it had been survivable. If he’d allowed himself to love her the way he’d loved his mother, he didn’t like to think how he would have reacted. Would the control he’d spent most of his lifetime perfecting have snapped? Would he have returned to those awful adolescent days when his fists had lashed out so many times he’d been on the verge of expulsion?
He was saved from having to respond by a young waiter asking if he would like his wine topped up.
If Amalie noticed his changed demeanour she gave no sign of it, craning her neck to follow their wine server’s progress out of the room. ‘Doesn’t that boy work at your gym?’
He was impressed that she’d recognised him. Workout gear was markedly different from the fitted black-and-white waiter’s uniform, with the purple ribbon stitched into the sides of the trousers.
‘And she’s from your gym too,’ Amalie whispered, nodding at a young girl in the far corner.
‘Most of the kids who work at the gym are working here tonight—it’s extra money for them and good experience.’
He had to admit to feeling an inordinate amount of pride, watching them performing their jobs so well. He’d fought the protocol battle a number of years ago, to allow ‘his’ kids to work at the palace whenever the opportunity arose.
‘Do you make a point of employing teenagers?’
‘It was one of the reasons I decided to build my own gym—I wanted to employ disaffected teenagers and make them feel a sense of worth in themselves. The kids who work there are free to spar and train whenever they’re off duty for no charge.’
‘These kids are allowed to box?’
‘You disapprove?’
‘It’s one thing for a fully grown adult to choose to get into a boxing ring and have his face battered, but quite another when it’s a developing teenager.’
‘Teenagers are full of hormones they have to navigate their way through. It’s a minefield for many of them.’
‘I agree, but...’
‘Agon is a wealthy island, but that doesn’t mean it’s problem-free,’ he said, wanting her to understand. ‘Our teenagers have the same problems as other Western teenagers. We give jobs and training to the ones living on the edge—the ones in danger of dropping out of society, the ones who, for whatever reason, have a problem controlling their anger. Boxing teaches them to control and channel that anger.’
Hadn’t he said something similar to her just the day before, in her cottage? Amalie wondered, thinking hard about the conversation they’d shared. The problem was her own hormones and fear had played such havoc that much of their conversation was blurred in her memory.
‘Is that why you got into boxing?’
His jaw clenched for the beat of a moment before relaxing. ‘I had anger issues. My way of coping with life was using my fists.’
‘Was that because of your parents?’ she asked carefully, aware she was treading on dangerous ground.
He jerked a nod. ‘Things came to a head when I was fourteen and punched my roommate at my English boarding school. I shattered his cheekbone. I would have been expelled if the Head of Sport hadn’t intervened.’
‘They wanted to expel you? But you’re a prince.’
His eyes met hers, a troubled look in them. ‘Expulsion was a rare event at my school—who wants to be the one to tell a member of a royal family or the president of a country that their child is to be permanently excluded? But it wasn’t a first offence—I’d been fighting my way through school since I was eight. The incident with my roommate was the final straw.’
He couldn’t read what was in her eyes, but thought he detected some kind of pity—or was it empathy?
She tilted her head, elongating the swan of her neck. ‘How did your Head of Sport get them to change their mind?’
‘Mr Sherman said he would personally take me under his wing and asked for three months to prove he could tame my nature.’
‘He did that through boxing?’ Now she thought about it, Amalie could see the sense in it. Hadn’t the kickboxing workouts Talos had forced her into doing created a new equilibrium within her? Already she knew that when she returned to Paris she would join a gym that gave the same classes and carry on with it.
‘At my school you had to be sixteen to join the boxing team, but he persuaded them—with the consent of my grandparents—to allow me to join.’ He laughed, his face relaxing as he did so. ‘Apart from my brothers, I was the biggest boy in the school. There was a lot of power behind my punches, which was what had got me into so much trouble in the first place. Mr Sherman taught me everything we now teach the kids who use our gym—the most important being how to channel and control my anger.’
‘Did it work?’
‘I haven’t thrown a punch in anger since.’
‘That is really something.’
Self-awareness nagged at her—an acknowledgement that while Talos had handled his rage through using his fists, she’d retreated from her own fears and buried them. But while he’d confronted and tamed his demons she’d continued hiding away, building a faux life for herself that was nothing like her early childhood dreams—those early days when she’d wanted to be a virtuoso on the violin, just like her father.
She’d been five years old when she’d watched old footage of him at Carnegie Hall—the same night he’d played on stage with Talos’s grandmother—and she’d said,