I Accidentally Slept With My Future Brother In Law novel · Chapter 22 of 32

Chapter 22: The Barge

"I'll prove it," I said. "Majesty, I'll prove it if it's the last cup I ever taste."

"Don't make it the last," said the King. "I've only just started liking tea."

He let go of my hand and sat back, gray and tired.

"Midsummer is nine days off," said Bertrand from the window. "My cousin will have nine days to prepare."

"So will she," said the King. "Now all of you get out. I want to sleep."

The next night was clear and warm, with a fat moon on the river.

The barge was called nothing at all.

It was a squat brown tea barge that had brought my clipper chest upriver, and its bargeman owed the porter a favor from thirty years back.

It lay at the foot of Tanners' Stair with its lamps out.

The porter brought the foreman down on the handcart under sacks.

His wife walked beside it, carrying a bundle.

The little girl walked behind, holding the porter's coat tail.

Alistair lifted the foreman off the cart himself and carried him aboard.

He was in the coachman's coat again, with the hole in the elbow.

"Who's that?" the little girl whispered to me.

"A friend."

"He's very tall for a friend."

"He's very tall for anything," I said.

We put them in the hold on a bed of tea sacks.

The bargeman cast off, and the city slid away behind us, lamp by lamp.

Four hours downriver, the King's old fishing lodge stood on a green bank behind a screen of willows.

Nobody had used it since the Queen died.

Her old housekeeper still lived there with two old dogs and a walking stick she shook at strangers.

She came down to the landing in her nightcap with a lantern, and saw Alistair.

"Oh, my boy," she said, and burst into tears.

He hugged her with one arm and helped the foreman ashore with the other.

The wife cried too, a little, at the lodge door.

The foreman held on to the doorframe and looked back at me.

"You'll have the book when I walk into that hall," he said. "Midsummer. I'll be there."

"Can you walk by then?"

"I'll walk if they have to carry me."

The little girl ran back down to the landing and hugged me around the middle.

Then she ran back up again without a word.

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