American Royals

by Katharine McGee

  On the other side of the door, she heard the bleating pack of courtiers marching toward the throne room. As if by unspoken agreement, she and Teddy held themselves absolutely still, falling ever deeper into the kiss.

  It didn’t matter whether Samantha showed up to the ceremony. No one would notice if she wasn’t there. She was only the Sparrow, after all.

  BEATRICE

  Beatrice kept her eyes shut, reminding herself to breathe.

  Once, during the fitting for the flower-girl dress she’d worn at her uncle’s wedding, she had fidgeted so much that her mom had snapped at her not to move a single muscle. So she hadn’t—not even her lungs. Seven-year-old Beatrice had held her breath with such determination that she actually passed out.

  “Would you look up, Your Royal Highness?” the makeup artist murmured. Beatrice reluctantly lifted her gaze, trying to ignore the eyeliner pencil prodding at her lower lid. It had been easier to keep her anxiety at bay when her eyes were closed.

  She stood at the center of the Brides’ Room, a downstairs sitting room across the hall from the ballroom, named for the generations of royal brides who had used it to change into their wedding gowns. Beatrice had gotten ready here on countless occasions; she often needed to do this sort of quick costume change in the middle of an event. But the room’s name had never before caused her such disquiet.

  If everything went according to her parents’ plan, she would be getting ready here again all too soon.

  The Brides’ Room was the epitome of girliness, its peach wallpaper hand-painted with delicate white flowers. There was very little furniture: just a small love seat and a side table with a bowl of potpourri made from old bridal bouquets. The space was purposefully empty, to leave room for gowns with thirty-foot ceremonial trains.

  A massive trifold mirror stood before her, though Beatrice was doing her best not to look. She remembered how she and Samantha used to sneak in here when they were little, mesmerized by the sight of themselves reflected into infinity. “Look, there are a thousand Beatrices,” Sam would whisper, and Beatrice always wondered with a touch of longing what it might be like—to walk right through the glass and into one of their lives, these other Beatrices in their strange mirror worlds.

  There were times when Beatrice wished she were more like her sister. She’d seen the way Sam flounced into the ballroom earlier, patently unconcerned that she was forty minutes late. But then, Sam had always been one for dramatic entrances and even more dramatic exits. Whereas Beatrice lived in fear of what her mother called causing a scene.

  She stood now on a temporary seamstress’s platform, surrounded by attendants who had helped her out of her first dress of the night and into her new one, a deep blue gown with off-the-shoulder sleeves. They were rapidly transitioning her from cocktail attire into her more formal head-of-state look. Beatrice felt oddly absent from the scene, as if she were Royal Barbie, about to be covered in accessories.

  She remained still as the makeup artist pressed a blotting paper to her nose before dusting it with powder, then reapplied her lipstick. “Finished,” she murmured. Still Beatrice didn’t look at the mirror.

  One of the other attendants looped the sash of the Edwardian Order, America’s highest chivalric honor, over Beatrice’s gown. Then she draped the ermine-trimmed robe of state over the princess’s shoulders. Its weight seemed to press down on Beatrice, heavy and insistent, almost as if it wanted to choke her. Her hands clenched and unclenched at her sides.

  The attendant reached for a gold brooch. But before she could fasten the cloak around Beatrice’s throat, the princess jerked violently back. The attendant’s eyes widened in surprise.

  “I’m sorry, I just … I need a moment alone.” Beatrice felt a bit flustered; she’d never done anything like that before.

  But then, the ceremonial trappings of her position had never before felt so stifling.

  The various attendants and stylists bobbed quick curtsies before filing out. When they were gone, Beatrice forced herself to look up at her reflection.

  The ivory sash was a crisp line against the blue of her gown, catching the cool undertones of her smooth, tanned skin. Various medals and awards glittered in the light, along with her massive pear-shaped earrings and tiered diamond necklace. Her dark hair had been swept into a twist so tight that bobby pins dug angrily into her head. She looked very regal, and slightly older than her twenty-one years.

  Well, she probably needed to look mature at tonight’s reception, since she was presumably meeting the man she was going to marry. Whoever he was.

  I am Beatrice Georgina Fredericka Louise of the House of Washington, future Queen of America, and I have a duty to uphold. It was the same thing Beatrice always recited to herself, every time she started to feel this sense of panic—as if her life were slipping through her fingers like sand, and no matter how hard she tried to clutch at it, she couldn’t regain control.

  A knock sounded on the door to the Brides’ Room. “Ten minutes. You almost ready?”

  Relief bloomed in Beatrice’s chest. Here was one person she did want to see. “You can come in, Connor,” she called out.

  It would have been inadequate to think of Connor as Beatrice’s bodyguard. Bodyguard failed to encapsulate the honor it was to be a member of the Revere Guard: the years of discipline and brutal training it required, the incredible self-sacrifice. The Guard was far more elite than any group of the armed forces. There were thousands of Marines, and hundreds of Navy SEALs, but the Revere Guard comprised only a few dozen men.

  Founded after the assassination of King George II during the War of 1812, the Revere Guard—named for the Revolutionary War hero Paul Revere—answered directly to the Crown. Its men often served the monarch on covert missions abroad, protecting American allies, or rescuing Americans who had been captured. But members of the Guard always rotated home eventually, to serve their original purpose: ensuring the safety of the royal family. It was such a demanding and high-stakes job, with so much travel and uncertainty, that many members of the Revere Guard didn’t settle down or get married until they retired.

  “You look nice, Bee,” Connor said, forgoing formality since they were alone. He’d been using that nickname ever since she admitted that it was what Samantha used to call her.

  Of course, it had been a long time since Beatrice and her sister were on nickname terms.

  She smiled, warmed by his compliment. “You don’t look bad yourself.”

  He was wearing the Guards’ dress uniform, a double-breasted navy blazer. It was devoid of any braid or insignia save the traditional gold lantern pin: in memory of the two lanterns of Paul Revere, the warning signal against the British invasion. At Connor’s waist hung a gold ceremonial sword. It might have looked ridiculous and outdated if Beatrice didn’t suspect that he knew precisely how to use it.

  Connor had been assigned to her last autumn, at the start of her final year at Harvard. Beatrice would never forget that morning: when Ari, her protection officer for the previous two years, showed up to walk Beatrice to her lecture, accompanied by a tall stranger in a charcoal-colored hoodie. He looked a year or two older than Beatrice.

  “Your Royal Highness, this is Connor Markham. He’ll be taking over your security upon my departure tomorrow,” Ari had explained.

  Beatrice nodded. She tried not to stare at the young man, but he was hard to look away from, with arresting blue-gray eyes and fair skin. His light brown hair was cut short, emphasizing the strong, clean lines of his face.

  Connor inclined his head in a bow so shallow that it bordered on impertinence. The neck of his sweatshirt dipped lower, revealing a line of black ink. A tattoo.

  Beatrice found herself wondering about that tattoo, how far it snaked over Connor’s chest, his broad shoulders, his torso. Her face grew hot, and she looked up. Connor met her gaze—and didn’t look away.

  His expression was blank, yet Beatrice couldn’t help thinking that Connor had suspected the wayward direction of her
thoughts.

  She and her new Guard said little to each other, those first couple of months. Not that Beatrice was in the habit of constantly chatting with her security detail. But Connor was especially taciturn, almost … brooding. He never volunteered any information about himself, never made small talk. He was just a tall, silent figure at Beatrice’s side, accompanying her to lectures or to the dining hall, wearing a backpack and a crimson sweater. Unlike most of her security officers, who’d been in their thirties at least, Connor could have passed for a student. Except that by now, everyone on campus was aware of Beatrice’s “incognito” Guards.

  Beatrice knew from the beginning that Connor was frustrated with his assignment. Maybe he’d assumed he would be on her father’s detail, in the palace and at the center of the action, instead of babysitting her on a college campus. He was too much of a professional to say anything, but sometimes—when Beatrice was in a study group or grabbing a late-night pizza with friends—she saw the bored amusement tugging at his features. He clearly felt that Guarding her was beneath his capabilities. Well, Beatrice reminded herself, this wasn’t her fault. She certainly hadn’t requested that Connor be here.

  One night in November, Beatrice headed to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, accompanied, as always, by Connor. She was taking an art history class, a requirement for her American Studies major, and the professor had assigned an essay on one of the paintings in this collection. The other students had all come this afternoon, but Beatrice hadn’t wanted to join them. It would have caused such a scene—all those people gawking at her, snapping covert pictures on their phones, whispering and elbowing each other. She felt much more comfortable asking the curator if she could stop by after hours.

  Her steps echoed through the empty museum as she searched for the painting. She’d been certain all the Whistler portraits were downstairs, but she didn’t see it. She kept rechecking the room numbers, wishing she hadn’t been in too much of a hurry to pick up a map.

  “We need to go upstairs. This hallway only holds art through 1875, and the portrait you’re looking for was done in 1882.”

  Beatrice blinked. “You remember that?”

  “I was in all the same lectures as you, Princess,” Connor said laconically. That was another annoying habit of his: to call her Princess instead of Your Royal Highness. Beatrice would have corrected him, except that she suspected he wasn’t doing it out of confusion. He was perfectly aware of the protocol, and was trying, subtly, to goad her.

  “I thought …” She cut herself off before saying she’d assumed he hadn’t been listening to any of those lectures. But she had been taking notes, and she still didn’t remember the year of that painting off the top of her head.

  Connor began to lead her up the stairs. “Eidetic memory is something we worked on in training,” he offered by way of explanation.

  Sure enough, he led her straight to the painting she needed: Sir James Whistler’s portrait of Lady Charlotte Eaton, Duchess of Boston.

  Beatrice perched on the bench and pulled out her laptop. She jotted down a quick series of thoughts about the painting, biting her lower lip in concentration. The room felt very quiet and still.

  Finally she shut her laptop with a satisfied click and glanced up. Connor said nothing, just nodded in the direction of the exit.

  Beatrice picked up her pace when they reached the room full of Picasso and other postmodernists. “I never really liked these. Especially the ones with two eyes on the same side of the face,” she said, if only to break the silence. “They always make me feel a little drunk.”

  “That’s the point,” Connor said drily. “Well, really it’s to make you feel like you’re high on acid. But drunk is close enough.”

  Beatrice was startled into laughing. Connor glanced over at her with something akin to surprise.

  Perhaps it was because of that laugh that he slowed his steps and paused to examine a series of graphic art prints: the ones from the fifties that looked like pages ripped straight from a comic book.

  Beatrice came to stand next to him. “You’re a comics guy?”

  She saw Connor debate how much of himself to reveal. “My mom is,” he said at last. “When I was growing up, she worked as a graphic artist. She did sketches for some of the major superhero comics: Poison Rose, the Ranger, Captain Storm.”

  “I bet you loved getting free comics,” Beatrice ventured.

  He glanced back at one of the prints, lined in electric-blue ink. “She used to sketch me a comic strip of my own whenever she had the time. The Adventures of Connor. I had a different superpower each week—flying, invisibility, high-tech battle suits. She’s the reason I wanted to apply for the Guard. I thought it was as close as I could get to being a real-life superhero. Not just the physical stuff, but also the sense of … honor, I guess.” He shrugged, as if unsure why he’d admitted all of that.

  “That makes sense,” Beatrice said quietly. Even if she hadn’t seen all the comic-book movies, she knew that superheroes operated according to a code of morality that felt almost archaic in the modern world. They protected the weak, served something much greater than themselves. No wonder Connor had felt called to the Revere Guard.

  “Your mom sounds really special,” she went on.

  Connor nodded. “She would like you.” It was a casual enough statement, but there was something else folded into it: a promise, or at least a possibility.

  Things between them shifted after that—slowly, but they shifted all the same. Connor began sitting next to Beatrice during her lectures, instead of in the row behind her, then debated the course material with her on the walk back to her dorm. They traded books. He had a wicked sense of humor, and did impressions of her professors or classmates that made her laugh so hard she cried. Sometimes, in unguarded moments—when they were running along the Charles River and he challenged her to a race, or when Beatrice insisted that they go to the frozen-yogurt shop and he dared her to try every flavor—he seemed almost playful.

  And when he accompanied her to royal functions, Connor no longer stood stone-faced to one side. Now he caught Beatrice’s eye whenever someone made a bad joke or an outlandish remark, forcing her to look away lest she burst out laughing. They even developed a silent system, using her purse as a signaling device. If she slid it back and forth from one forearm to another, it meant she wanted to leave, at which point Connor would walk over with a fabricated excuse and help her escape.

  As time went on, Beatrice slowly pieced together Connor’s story. He’d grown up in West Texas, in a town called El Real—“How typically Texan to call a town real, as if the rest of the world is just made up,” Connor had joked. His dad worked as a post office clerk, and his younger sister, Kaela, had just started college.

  The more she learned about Connor, the more Beatrice revealed about herself: her opinions of people, her frustrations. She attempted jokes. As strange and unexpected as it might be, she’d begun to think of Connor as her friend.

  And Beatrice had never had a close friend, not the way that Sam had Nina or Jefferson had Ethan. Even in elementary school, she’d struggled to form connections with her classmates. Half the time she had no idea what they were talking about—their references to TV shows or Disneyland were completely lost on her, as if they were speaking a bewildering foreign language. The other girls were unerringly polite, but always held themselves at a distance. It was as though they could smell her inherent otherness, like wild cats.

  Eventually Beatrice had given up on trying to make friends. It was just easier to keep to herself, to seek the approbation of adults rather than that of her peers.

  Until Connor, she hadn’t realized what a relief it was, having someone who knew her so well. Someone she could simply talk to, without having to weigh every last word before she spoke.

  It had been jarring when she graduated, and they left the informality of Harvard to come back to court, with all its etiquette and expectations. Beatrice had secretly feared that things between her
and Connor might change. But while he did start calling her Your Royal Highness in public, in private they slipped right back into their easy camaraderie.

  “You’re so quiet,” Connor said now, interrupting the princess’s thoughts. His eyes met hers in the mirror. “What’s going on, Bee?”

  “My parents want me to interview potential husbands tonight.”

  The words rattled out violently into the room, like the discharge of musketry during the annual Presentation of the Troops.

  Beatrice wasn’t sure what had possessed her to say it so bluntly. She hadn’t wanted to talk about this with Connor at all. Which was foolish, really, given that he knew practically everything else about her: that she hated bananas, and called her grandmother every Sunday, and had dreams of her teeth falling out whenever she got stressed.

  Why did it feel so strange, then, to tell Connor that her parents wanted her to start thinking about marriage?

  Maybe her subconscious had made her say it, hoping to gauge his reaction—to elicit a flare of jealousy.

  Connor stared at her with a curious expression, tinged with something that might have been disbelief. “Let me get this straight,” he said slowly. “You’re going to meet some guys that your parents have picked out and then marry one of them?”

  “That sums it up pretty accurately.” Beatrice had seen a couple of the young men across the room during the cocktail hour. She’d managed to avoid them thus far, but she knew she would have to face them after the ceremony.

  “How many … potential suitors are there?” Connor went on, clearly uncertain what to call them.

  “Why do you care?” Beatrice meant it to sound flippant, but it came out slightly defensive.

  “Just trying to do my job.”

  Of course. It didn’t matter whether they were friends. At the end of the day, Beatrice was still his job.

  When she didn’t answer, Connor shrugged. “They need you back outside. Are you almost ready?”

  Beatrice reached for a flat velvet box on the side table and unhooked its clasp. Nestled inside was the Winslow Tiara, made over a century ago and worn ever since by the Princess Royal, the oldest daughter of the reigning monarch. It was breathtaking, the whorls of its lacelike pattern covered in several hundred small diamonds.