By Royal Command by Charlie Higson

her arms. Once she realised that James spoke German she bombarded him with questions as she busied herself about the place.
    There were more questions over supper and James felt finally that he was thawing. It was as if he’d been turned into a solid block of ice and was only now beginning to melt. He felt his tight muscles relax, his breathing slow and deepen, the knotted tension in his spine work loose.
    He found himself opening up to these kind, honest people more than he had opened up to anyone since his parents had died. He wondered if it was because he was using a different language; it was almost like being a different person. He talked about his life, his Aunt Charmian, his friends, his problems at school, the fact that all his trousers were getting too short for him, how nice the food was – all the ordinary little things that he normally never bothered with.
    This must be what it’s like , he thought. This must be what it’s like to have a mother and father. He had to force himself not to cry. It wasn’t the sad things that made him emotional, or the hurtful, and it certainly wasn’t fear… it was simple kindness. It was the decency in the hearts of ordinary people.
    After supper they played cards and chatted until James felt his eyelids growing heavy.
    Helga showed him up to his room, which was at the back of the house, tucked up under the roof. It reminded him of his room at Eton, which also had a sloping ceiling. But this was much more welcoming.
    He smiled as he slipped under the fresh clean sheets. He was going to like it here.
    As he drifted into sleep however, a voice came back to him, crying in the darkness…
    ‘ Schneeblind! Sie werden meinen Vetter Jürgen töten… ’
    Snow-blind! They are trying to kill my cousin Jürgen…
    The rest of the week passed without incident. There was skiing during the days and supper and cards with the Oberhausers, or a meal in town with the boys, in the evenings. In a way James preferred the calmness and solitude at the Oberhausers. They never pried or probed too deeply if they felt that James didn’t want to talk about something. With the boys it was different. All they wanted to discuss was James’s escapade with Miles.
    James was miserly with his responses. He would rather forget all about it. He hated being the centre of attention and felt, in a way, that he had failed. He wasn’t a hero.
    Far from it.
    The truth was that they had got lost, Miles had broken his leg and James had failed to get him safely down off the mountain.
    One night the boys were sitting in a coffee house on the Hinterstadt in Kitzbühel, once again discussing what had happened. They were drinking creamy hot chocolate and all shouting at once and laughing noisily.
    ‘You should have left mouthy Miles up there,’ said Teddy Mackereth. ‘It’s been blessedly, blissfully, beautifully quiet since he’s been in hospital.’
    Miles was still in the clinic. His leg had been very badly broken, and his parents would be arriving the next day to take him home to England.
    ‘You should have broken his other leg,’ said Gordon Latimer.
    ‘He’s not so bad,’ said James, forced to defend the boy, even though he, too, had found him intensely irritating.
    ‘He thinks he knows it all, but he didn’t know enough to come the right way down the mountain,’ said Teddy. ‘ We all managed to get down in one piece, why couldn’t he?’
    ‘Keep it under your hat,’ said James, lowering his voice to a stage whisper. ‘But he was drunk.’
    ‘No?’
    ‘Yes.’
    The boys all burst out laughing, and their noise grew noticeably louder.
    The events were already fading into a bad memory and James could see the funny side. He hadn’t mentioned Miles’s drinking to anyone else before. He reckoned the poor boy had enough on his plate. Obviously his two cronies knew what had happened – they had shared the schnapps after all – but until now James had thought it best not to say anything about it. He