Every night Beatrice slipped off that ring the instant she was alone. It was too cold, too heavy, its enormous weight almost too much to bear. It felt like it belonged to someone else and had been given to her by mistake.
“Do you love him?”
Sam’s question caught her so off guard that she almost dropped her ceramic bowl.
“I’m just trying to understand,” Sam persisted. “In your room that day, after you proposed to him, you seemed so unhappy. I keep watching you and Teddy at all your engagement events, waiting for either of you to say I love you, but you never have.”
Beatrice shifted on the counter. Samantha was far more observant than the world gave her credit for.
“I just wish it had been anyone but Teddy. At least if it was someone else …” Sam trailed off before she could finish, but Beatrice knew enough to fill in the blanks.
If Teddy were free of their engagement, then at least one of the Washington sisters might be happy.
Beatrice had assumed that Sam was flirting with Teddy out of spite, or simply because she was bored. She hadn’t realized her sister’s feelings ran so deep.
Beatrice twirled the spoon between her fingers. It was heavy, engraved with fruits and foliage all the way down the handle. “I’m sorry,” she told her sister. “I wish things were different.”
Sam’s eyes blazed. “Then go make them different! Get unengaged to Teddy so you can both move on with your lives!”
“I can’t just get unengaged to him.” Beatrice rolled her eyes at Sam’s made-up word. “Not now. I would be letting everyone down.”
“Who, the PR people and party planners? In case you forgot, they work for you!”
“It’s not just them,” Beatrice said helplessly.
“What is it, then?” Sam’s face went a hot, indignant red. “If you don’t love Teddy, why are you rushing to the altar?” Her temper had always been like this, cruel and lightning quick. Beatrice felt her hold on her emotions starting to fray.
“I know it might seem fast, but I’ve given this a lot of thought, okay? I really am trying to do the right thing for this country.”
“And what reason does the country have for needing you to get married right now?”
Beatrice felt suddenly dizzy. “Stability,” she insisted, “and continuity, and symbolism …”
“You’re just saying a bunch of meaningless words!”
“Because Dad is dying!”
Beatrice hadn’t meant to say that. She wished she could snatch the sentence from the air and swallow it back into her chest, where its razor-sharp wings had been beating furiously for weeks. But it was too late.
“What?” Sam’s hands gripped the edges of the counter so tightly that her knuckles turned white.
“He has cancer,” Beatrice said miserably.
“What?” Sam repeated, with an audible gasp. “What do you—how can—why didn’t he tell us?” she managed at last. A tear trailed down her face and fell into the bowl of macaroni that lay forgotten in her lap.
Then Beatrice was crying too, as the story spilled from her in a jumbled mess: their father’s fatal diagnosis, the reasons he had for keeping it to himself—and what he had asked Beatrice to do.
Samantha set her mac and cheese aside with a jarring clatter and threw her arms fiercely around Beatrice.
It was the first time they had hugged like this in years. Beatrice hadn’t realized, until this moment, how much she’d missed her sister.
“I can’t believe you’ve been dealing with all of this.” Sam reached up to fiddle with her ponytail. “You’ve held it together so well, I never would have realized that you were upset.”
“Sometimes I think I hold it together too well,” Beatrice said softly. She hated that her siblings thought she was cold or unfeeling. Just because she’d been brought up to keep her emotions hidden didn’t mean that she never experienced those emotions.
Sam nodded. Tears still glistened on her cheeks. “I’m glad you told me. No one should have to carry this kind of burden alone.”
“That’s what being the heir to the throne is. Being alone,” Beatrice said automatically. Walking alone, sleeping alone, sitting alone on a solitary throne.
Even once she married Teddy, Beatrice knew, she would still feel alone.
A gentle hum emanated from the refrigerators. The overhead lights fell in wide beams over Samantha’s features.
“Do you ever wish that you were someone else?” Beatrice asked, after a while.
“I always used to wish I was you. Because I’m utterly pointless, while you are literally the point of everything.” Sam tilted her head to look at Beatrice in confusion. “But you shouldn’t feel that way. Why on earth would you want to be someone else?”
Beatrice had never thought that Sam might be jealous of her—that Sam would actually prefer to be the heir.
“Because I didn’t ask for this.” Beatrice heaved a breath. “Trust me, I realize how lucky I am to have been born with this kind of privilege. But I’m still jealous of everyone else in the country, because they get to choose what direction their lives will take. Other kids can dream of being astronauts or firefighters or dancers or doctors,” she said helplessly. “But no one in my life has ever asked me what I want to be when I grow up, because there is only one possible future for me.”
“Beatrice,” Sam asked, her eyes wide. “Do you even want to be queen?”
“Wanting has nothing to do with it,” Beatrice reminded her. “I am a Washington, just like you, and becoming the queen has always been my future. My road is laid out before me, but yours doesn’t have to be. You have options, you have freedom, that I never will.”
They were both quiet at that.
Sam reached for her sister’s hand and gave it a squeeze. “Remember when we were little, and I used to sneak into your closet to steal your clothes?”
“Your favorite was that pale pink Easter dress. The one with the matching shoes,” Beatrice recalled, oddly wistful.
“I wanted so badly to be like you, back then.” Sam’s voice was rough. “I wanted to be you. When I realized that was impossible—that only you were the future queen, and I could never be you, no matter how hard I tried—I set out to be everything you’re not.”
“You … what?”
“Why do you think I acted the way I did?” Sam shrugged. “You followed the rules, so I misbehaved; you were disciplined and organized, so I ran wild. I felt left out,” she added softly. “You were constantly off doing important future-queen things.”
Beatrice sat up a little straighter in surprise. “I felt left out, too, Sam. You and Jeff always had that unbreakable twin bond. It made me feel like an outsider.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam whispered. “I didn’t know.”
Beatrice could only nod. She wished they’d had this conversation years ago, instead of waiting until these circumstances forced it upon them.
Sam cleared her throat. “Look, I know you didn’t ask for this life, but I also can’t imagine anyone handling it with as much grace and dignity as you do. You are next in line for the throne, and you’re going to be queen—that’s just the way things are. But that doesn’t mean it has to define you. You are still a person, and this is still your life. We can figure this out. There has to be a way to do the job you were born to do without sacrificing yourself along the way.”
Beatrice was stunned by her sister’s maturity and wisdom. She gave Sam’s hand a grateful squeeze. “Thank you.”
“I’m here for you, Bee,” Sam told her, using the nickname for what must have been the first time in a decade. “After all of this … I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
Beatrice looked again at Samantha’s glassy eyes, remembered the nervous way she’d walked into the kitchen earlier. “What about you?” she demanded. “Are you okay?”
“Not really.” Sam looked down, her lashes casting shadows on her face. “Nina and I had an awful fight. I didn’t feel like I could really unload it o
n Jeff—it’s kind of weird, talking about Nina with him. Mom and Dad never listen to me anyway, and I couldn’t talk to you ….”
“You can talk to me now,” Beatrice assured her. “No more secrets, no more misunderstandings. From here on out, we have each other’s backs.”
Sam managed an uneven smile. “I would like that.”
As Beatrice pulled Samantha in for another hug, the icy lump in her throat seemed to lessen, just a little. Whatever happened, at least now she had her sister on her side.
SAMANTHA
The next morning, Samantha knocked at the heavy wooden doors to her father’s office. “Hey, Dad, are you busy?”
“Sam! Come on in,” he called out in reply.
She didn’t normally show up here uninvited, but after last night’s conversation with Beatrice, Sam needed to talk to their dad herself: to look him in the eye and ask him about his cancer. Maybe there was still some way out, for all of them. Maybe the prognosis wasn’t as bad as Beatrice feared.
Her father was seated behind his desk, sorting through a small leather-bound trunk filled with papers. At Sam’s arrival, he glanced up with a weary smile. “I’m glad you stopped by. There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”
Sam opened her mouth, brimming with questions—How bad is it? Why didn’t you tell us?—but the words faltered and died on her lips. She realized with a sinking feeling that she didn’t need to ask, because she already knew.
Her dad didn’t look good. She wasn’t sure how she’d missed the changes; they must have been gradual and subtle enough that she didn’t notice them on a day-to-day basis. But now that she was looking closely, she saw how thin his skin had become, the purple shadows beneath his eyes. His movements were underscored with an alarming new fatigue.
Sam sank into the chair opposite him, trying desperately to settle her breaths, to arrange her features into some semblance of a normal expression.
Her father didn’t seem to notice her distress. “Have you seen the Box before?” he asked, still organizing papers into various stacks. Something about the way he said the word made Samantha imagine it capitalized.
“I’m not sure.” The Box was the size of a briefcase, lined in embossed leather, with oiled hinges. Sam realized that her dad had unlocked it with a small golden key.
“It contains my business for the day. A lot of this is electronic now, of course.” He gestured to the tablet at his elbow. “But some of it is still printed: Cabinet minutes, reports from various federal agencies, documents that require my signature. My favorite part are the letters,” he added, reaching into the Box to extract an ordinary white envelope.
“Letters?”
“I receive hundreds of letters every day,” her dad informed her. “Every last one of them is answered, mostly by my junior secretaries. But I’ve asked them to pull two letters at random each day, and those letters I answer myself. It’s something your grandfather used to do, too.”
“Really?”
The king nodded. “I find it useful. Like a daily snapshot of what’s on Americans’ minds at any given moment.”
“People DM me. It’s kind of similar,” Sam offered.
“DM?”
“Direct message. You know, on social media.”
“Ah,” the king replied, evidently confused. “Well. It’s important for people to feel like they have a direct line to their monarch. That we are reachable, and sympathetic, and responsive. Especially since they usually write such highly personal things.”
“What kind of things do they write to you?” Samantha asked, curious.
“Everything. They want a pardon for someone imprisoned; they want to change my mind about some new policy proposal. Their local library is failing; their parent is ill; their fourth-grade classroom needs school supplies. And then, of course, there are the letters full of criticism for something I’ve done.”
“They criticize you?” Sam burst out, leaping to her dad’s defense. “Why aren’t your secretaries filtering out those letters so you don’t see them?” Reading that kind of letter seemed unnecessarily masochistic, like scrolling through the negative comments on social media. Sam had long ago learned to avoid those.
“Because I asked them not to,” her dad replied. “Samantha, criticism is a good thing. It means you’ve fought for something. The only people free from censure are people who’ve never taken a stand.”
She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Sure, but that doesn’t mean you need to read strangers’ attacks on you.”
“On the contrary, I do,” he argued. “Some of our nation’s greatest moments of change were born of our family’s most vocal critics. It was Red Fox James, for instance, whose efforts led to the establishment of the Native American dukedoms. Opposition is crucial to government, like oxygen to fire. And now those voices, those movements, are coming from your generation.” The king’s eyes rested warmly on Sam. “Although, historically, the people who spark change have usually done so from outside the monarchy, not from within.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, confused.
“I’m talking about you, Sam.” A corner of her dad’s mouth lifted. “You’ve never had a problem letting your family know when we’re in the wrong.”
She let out an amused breath. “Are you actually thanking me for being a troublemaker?”
“Let’s say renegade instead,” her dad teased. “It sounds a little better.”
Sam’s smile faded as she glanced at the letter in his hands, still unopened. “How do you answer all the people who write to you?”
“With honesty and respect. If I can help with their request, I usually do—even if it means going around the official policy rules and making a private, personal donation. It’s nice to feel like I made a difference, in some small way. Especially on the days when I feel like I’ve failed to resolve the bigger issues.”
Her father tore open the envelope and smoothed its contents on the desk before him. His next words were softer, almost as if he were talking to himself. “I often wonder how it must feel, to blindly ask for help like that—to just write a letter to the king and await his answer. I wish I had someone I could turn to for guidance. But all I can do is pray.”
Hadn’t Sam been hoping to do exactly what he described—to lay all her troubles on her dad’s shoulders? She wanted him to tell her everything would be all right, the way he used to when she was little. But she knew now that those days were over.
She glanced out the window, her vision blurring. There was a divot in the window’s iron casing that her dad swore was a bullet hole from an assassination attempt on King Andrew. She tried desperately to focus on that, to keep from crying in front of him.
“Sam,” her dad started to say—but before he could finish, he dissolved into a sudden fit of coughing, and reached into his pocket for a handkerchief to place over his mouth. “Sorry,” he said, wheezing through a rueful smile, “got a bit of a dry throat.”
Sam nodded mutely.
He leaned back at last, tucking the handkerchief into his pocket, then pressed his hands over the letter from the citizen, absently smoothing its creases. “I’ve been meaning to thank you. I noticed all the effort you’ve made with Teddy, helping him feel a part of the family. And your mother tells me that you helped pick out his engagement ring for Beatrice.”
“I didn’t do very much.” Guilt gnawed at the inside of Sam’s stomach.
“I know you’ve never been certain what your role should be, moving forward—that you sometimes feel out of place.” Her dad’s eyes lit knowingly on hers. “But Beatrice is going to rely on you when she’s queen, someday.”
Sam noticed that the someday was a little tacked on.
“Rely on me for what?” She shook her head, confused. “I’m not as smart as Beatrice.”
“There are many ways to be smart, Sam. It isn’t just books and memorization. It’s wisdom, and patience, and understanding people, which is something you’ve always been able to
do. Not to mention that Beatrice will be surrounded by courtiers telling her what she wants to hear—which, as we just established, isn’t a problem you suffer from.” He said it lightly, but Sam heard a thread of urgency beneath the words. “Beatrice will count on you for the unvarnished truth. I expect you to give her your support when she’s earned it and your criticism when she deserves it. That’s what siblings are for, after all.”
“You’re right,” Sam said hoarsely. As Beatrice’s sister, Sam should have been her most thoughtful critic, but also her fiercest champion. Instead she’d spent years treating Beatrice as if they were at opposite ends of a battlefield.
Well, that had ended last night.
Her dad managed a smile. “I’ve always felt that you and Beatrice make a great team—that the two of you embody different aspects of the monarchy. You’re sort of like Edward the Black Prince and John of Gaunt.”
“You’re making me John of Gaunt in this analogy?” Sam protested. “He married for money and manipulated his nephew, and didn’t he try to steal the throne of Castile, too?”
The king threw his hands up in surrender. “The early years!” he exclaimed. “When they were teenagers, King Edward III used the Black Prince and John of Gaunt for different political purposes. They were close siblings who clearly trusted each other and were able to divide up the work in a way that made sense. There were a lot of things the Black Prince couldn’t do himself, as heir to the throne, that John of Gaunt was able to take on.”
“Like what, collecting taxes?” Sam teased.
Her father chuckled appreciatively. “That’s not entirely off base. You will sometimes have to serve as a lightning rod: to handle all the negativity and jealousy that people don’t dare show Beatrice. But you already know that.”
Sam blinked. She hadn’t thought of it that way—that some of the criticism she bore might actually be criticism of Beatrice, or of the monarchy more broadly, which funneled to her simply because there was nowhere else it could go.
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