“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.”
“One of Bea’s ancestors, I’m guessing,” I said.
“I won’t tell her you said that,” Nick said loftily. “Anyway, that Arthur is considered legend, and for dynastic purposes, they don’t count anyone from before William the Conqueror, anyway. Too bad for poor Sweyn Forkbeard. Perhaps I’ll revive that name with my firstborn.”
“So Arthur the First, then,” I said. “Died of pneumonia, it says.”
“Officially. But Great-Grandmother told me Artie actually drank himself to death because he was in love with his best friend’s wife.” Nick shook his head. “I can’t believe he gets a sculpted marble effigy, and my grandfather, who actually did die of pneumonia, just has a slab with his name on it behind an iron fence.” He pointed just ahead to the right, where a large bust sat atop a comparatively plain rectangular stand. “Even my great-granddad got better. He was Richard the Fourth. Took a boat out on holiday and fell off and drowned because he couldn’t swim, the idiot. What was he even doing on a boat?”
“We’ve all got one,” I said. “My great-uncle died falling off a barstool. In his own bar.”
“My great-great-great-uncle Charles was supposedly obsessed with holistic medicine, so when he got whooping cough he wrapped himself in brandy-soaked bandages as a cure,” Nick said. “Naturally, a servant dropped a candle on him and he went up in flames. Brilliant bloke, that one.”
I laughed. Nick’s dead relatives already seemed more entertaining than his living father.
“The Lyons women have been impressively hardy,” I said. “You’ve got a bunch of incautious men, and then two long-ruling queens.”
Nick tapped absently on the top of Richard’s marble head. “Hardier, or at least cleverer,” he said. “I’m probably destined to trip over an ottoman and die two years in. Just as long as whatever gets me is embarrassing. I have to do my part.”
We strolled past a short exhibit of watercolors and sketches done by the artsy members of the dynasty (I was surprised to learn Prince Richard was a capable landscape painter) and then into the main castle. Because it’s been open to the public for so long, Windsor’s halls have the patina of use about them—frayed carpets, creaky floorboards, stray scuffs and scratches—and it is as easy to imagine that a tourist from Scandinavia nicked the floor with an umbrella as it is to picture George IV taking a chunk out of it during a tantrum. Nick peppered the tour with stories that definitely aren’t on the official audio guide, like how he and Freddie used to stretch out on the floor by the Grand Staircase, snacking on cheese and onion crisps while trying to count every piece of weaponry that was fanned out on the walls and behind display cases; or the time he caught Agatha’s awful husband Julian throwing up in a sixteenth-century enamel box after a long day at Royal Ascot. Before he even got to a reenactment of playing hide-and-seek with Freddie using the old servants’ doors and hidden corridors, the castle had started to look like a home to me, too.
Eventually, we came into a very long rectangular room, with knight statuettes in niches on the walls and an elegant wood-beamed, slanted ceiling. Nick fell quiet and seemed to need a minute to absorb the view before explaining that this was the room dedicated to the highly selective and very ancient Order of the Garter, one of the highest honors in England.
“Those belong to everyone who’s ever been invested,” Nick said, gesturing to the thousand or so colorful shields adorning the ceiling. “The number underneath corresponds to the spot on the wall where the honoree’s name is engraved. I used to spend hours in here, trying to pick out the crest I liked best, imagining what mine would be.” He grinned. “Freddie preferred mooning the guardsmen through that window. Once he even left a mark behind. Imagine, this room dedicated to chivalry, and my brother’s disgusting bum print fogging up the glass.”