by Erin McRae
Amelia put her hands over her face and moaned. “Nothing I am about to say is going to make this less weird.”
“So? Spill!”
“Prince Arthur is looking to marry again,” she said, her hands still over her face. “Because of the monarchy. The Commonwealth. The continuation of the kingdom. The Prince of Wales is looking for a wife, and I’m the best candidate he could find.” Amelia finally peeked at her friend from between her fingers.
“What?!”
“Apparently, the peerage isn’t exactly teeming with eligible ladies. It seems I’m the lucky winner.”
“I thought he was just propositioning you to be his next fling.” Priya looked as though that wouldn’t be a bad outcome.
“No. Although Charlie thought the same thing. Prince Arthur wants to marry a girl from the north to unite the country.”
“That’s a really odd angle for him to work,” Priya said.
“He’s really odd. He also said we could make history.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I’d think about it.”
“The gorgeous tragic playboy Prince wants to marry you and that’s all you tell him?”
“I needed to figure out if I was crazier to say yes or crazier to say no.”
“So why are you all sad and mopey today?” Priya gasped. “Tell me you didn’t say no!”
“No,” Amelia said. Though she wondered why she hadn’t. “I’m annoyed. Because pursuing a destiny that will eventually make me the first northerner to sit on the throne since Richard III means coping with the paparazzi,” Amelia said.
“You know Richard was kind of a prick, right?”
Amelia sighed. He had been. But history was complicated and York had so few heroes. “Not to York he wasn’t.”
Chapter 5
PAPS PURSUE POTENTIAL PRINCESS TO PUB
1 February
Year 21 of the Reign of King Henry XII
I am an absolute fool. After I got back from the gym I let Priya talk me into going out to the wine bar two blocks over for a change of scenery and also alcohol. We looked out the windows before we left and didn’t see anyone outside except people going about their own business. We didn’t see anyone as we were walking to the bar either. It was all fine and going to be a good night out, but someone at the bar recognized me and took my picture and put it on Twitter — I know, because I found it online later. When we left, a whole herd of paparazzi were waiting for me outside.
Priya beat them away WITH HER FLIP-FLOPS.
*
Amelia closed her diary — a pretty leather-bound book Nick had given her for her birthday last year — and laid down her pen. On the wall above her desk was hung her calendar through the end of term, with exam days and due dates inked in red. A framed photograph of her family, taken last Easter in the sitting room at Kirkham because the weather had been too appalling to venture outside, sat on the windowsill. In the center of the group stood her parents, smiling but reserved. Charlie and Jo had their arms around each other’s waists. Their son Freddy was making a face at the camera, and their daughter Meg was half-hidden behind the huge clutch of flowers she was holding. Nick had his arm slung over Amelia’s shoulder. She missed them all with a sudden intensity she’d not felt since her first month at university.
Priya, bored with the drama of Amelia’s life when it was not taking the form of photographers shoving themselves into her face, took herself off to her room to do homework while listening to her boy band of the month. Now that Amelia had vented about her evening, she felt calmer about it. At least relatively speaking. At least with strangers no longer waving flashbulbs in her face she wasn’t frightened.
She was, however, furious. Not just at the photographers outside the wine bar and her own lost sense of privacy. At Prince Arthur. He had handed her a bargain to change her life and her country, and then had left her to deal with the ramifications of that alone. Not a word of warning or advice about what was in store. Not even a peep to ask her how she was doing or to even acknowledge her existence.
The sane thing to do right now would be to call it off. To tell the Prince that she wasn’t interested, that she liked her life the way it was, that she did not care for an existence where she was a prop and a model for any curious eye to see and own. It would be easy to do, too. The Prince, however baffling and infuriating he could be, was a gentleman. She was sure of that. He would let her go and never breathe a word more about their brief non-affair to anyone.
But — and this was the thing that made Amelia pause, made her gaze shift from the photograph of her family to the London night outside her window — she didn’t want to. Somewhere out there in the glitter and grime of London, was the Prince. And Amelia wanted to marry him. No matter how many photographers accosted her outside of however many different establishments. Even if Gary hadn’t dumped her. Even if she’d gotten into grad school. She wanted this: Power and destiny and a future making history with a Prince who had keen brown eyes and a mouth too good at making promises.
But she wanted it on better terms than Prince Arthur had so far offered. She needed to know whether he really meant everything he had said. She needed to know if he would keep his word. She reached for her mobile and scrolled through her contacts to her eldest brother.
Charlie answered on the second ring. “What do you need?”
“I need a way to contact Prince Arthur,” she said. “I can’t just wait until he decides he wants to talk to me over tea again. You’re one of his closest friends. You must be able to help.”
*
Two days later Amelia was met at the reception area of Buckingham Palace by the same footman as the first time and led upstairs, not to the reception room she’d been taken to before but to an office. The room was empty, and her escort shut the door after depositing her there, leaving her alone.
Arthur’s public office here at Buckingham Palace, she assumed. It was a dreadfully impersonal place, richly decorated in deep blue velvets and a truly excessive amount of gold braid and gilt paint. She hoped he didn’t spend a lot of time here, both because she couldn’t imagine anyone doing actual work here and because she dreaded that the room had been decorated to his tastes. There was a desk, centuries old by the look of it, facing the windows that looked out onto the drab inner courtyard of the palace. Two armchairs and a sofa were arrayed around a fireplace, and there were somewhat famous and very boring landscape paintings hung on the walls.
Amelia wondered if she were allowed to sit. She wondered, for the hundredth time since she had received the Prince’s invitation the day before, why she had been summoned here. In response to the letter she had sent him, of course. But what would the result of that be? The potential outcome was limited to two eventualities as far as she could tell: The Prince would continue with his scheme to marry her, or the Prince would end it. She had no idea which was about to happen.
She stared at the armchairs, at the fireplace, at the landscape paintings. None of them contained any clue as to her future. Amelia decided she would sit.
She was glad she did. A quarter of an hour passed before Prince Arthur appeared, walking into the room from another door, not the one Amelia had entered through, without knocking or being announced. She bolted to her feet and wondered when, if ever, she would be able to stop curtseying.
“Lady Amelia.” The Prince acknowledged her with a nod. “I apologize for keeping you waiting.”
“It’s no trouble,” Amelia said because she had to. Prince Arthur was holding something; with a jolt Amelia realized it was the letter she had written to him two nights ago.
“Will you sit? Shall I call for some tea?”
Amelia sat when Arthur did; he took the sofa, she took the same chair she’d been in. “No tea, thank you.”
“Are you nervous?” He asked as if he were enquiring about the weather or her journey to the palace.
“Yes.”
“You needn’t be,” he said with a smile that looked more li
ke a grimace. “At least, no more so than I.”
“Are you nervous?” It hardly made any sense. Either that the Prince would be nervous, or that he would be admitting it to her. The confession threatened to make her fond of him, which was either going to be useful or be a problem.
“Of course I am,” Prince Arthur said. He laid Amelia’s letter out on the table between them. “It’s not every day I get a letter like this.”
“Why am I here?” Amelia blurted.
Arthur looked surprised. “You wrote me a letter laying out your very legitimate claims on my time, and then you asked to see me. So, here you are. What do you need?”
Well. In that case. If he was going to ask, Amelia was certainly prepared to answer.
“My picture is in every paper, I can’t sit through a lecture without someone making a disturbance, and a photographer caught me coming out of the gym at school. And then my roommate had to beat paparazzi off with her shoes!”
Prince Arthur blinked rapidly at the mention of Priya’s defense of Amelia, but otherwise didn’t seem particularly moved by the situation. “I’m sorry. People shouldn’t do that.”
Amelia scoffed. “And yet they do. I’m not sure you’ve ever had a normal enough life to know exactly how bizarre this is.”
He inclined his head, a wordless acknowledgement of her point.
“And I haven’t lied to anyone — not even my mother — yet, but I’m going to have to, soon, if things stay uncertain and unresolved.”
“Why haven’t you told anyone what’s going on?” Prince Arthur asked. He sounded genuinely curious.
Amelia stared at him. “Since you are both royalty and a man, I suppose you wouldn’t know,” she said. “So I am going to tell you. If I am the princess-in-waiting, my life is the public’s, not my own. I know that. I understand that, as far as that is possible for someone who was not born to the life you lead and never expected to be a part of it. I am, for some reason, willing to make that choice.”
“York?” he asked.
“York,” she agreed. “But if I tell the world I’m going to marry a prince, and then — for whatever reason — I don’t, for the rest of my life I am the girl who is both a liar and the worst sort of climber. The only life I will ever be able to have will be on reality TV, preferably after a sex tape and an embarrassing episode involving addiction.”
“Have you been talking to George?” the Prince asked.
“Pardon?”
“Princess Georgina. She said something very similar to me recently, about my options if I didn’t marry.”
“Ah.” Amelia wasn’t sure how to respond to that. She’d only ever seen the Princess up close at the garden party and had been gravely unsettled by her at the time. But she had no intention of letting Arthur derail her train of thought.
“I need you to say yes or no. I don’t need a proposal yet. But I do need a plan. I can’t endure the uncertainty of waking up and not knowing if I’m going to be a princess or a grad student. I could bear anything, even the paparazzi outside a wine bar, if it was going to be for the sake of something. But I can’t bear wanting this and not knowing if I’m going to get it. I need our deal closed, or I need it gone.”
“All right.”
“Also,” Amelia said. “I don’t date people who don’t give me their phone numbers, because I shouldn’t have to come here to yell at you. If my irritation with you and the situation we’ve put ourselves in is treason, I want to be able to commit it on the phone.”
“It’s not treason,” Prince Arthur said calmly. “Although I think technically I can still have you executed, as long as it doesn’t actually kill you.”
Amelia stared at him.
“Sorry, constitutional monarchy humor,” he said with a shrug. Amelia couldn’t help but laugh — not so much at the joke, which was dreadful and not in the best taste — but at him, herself, and the absurdity of the situation they were now in. He caught her eye and grinned, a boyish look that made Amelia’s heart speed up even as the rest of her relaxed.
Amelia had wondered, from the time she’d dropped the letter in the postbox right up to this moment, how Prince Arthur would react to her demands. She’d prepared herself, or at least tried to, for anger or rejection or even cold indifference. She was not expecting the way the Prince met her eye, nodded solemnly, and took her completely seriously. As if this were something they were really in together. As if, unequal as their stations were, he accepted her as a comrade in this mutual venture.
He held out his hand. “Give me your mobile,” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Please?” he added. “I’m going to give you my number,” he said, when she didn’t move.
“We haven’t agreed to anything yet.”
“But we’re going to. And if nothing else, you deserve to have my number so you can yell at me, or my voicemail, whenever you need to.”
Amelia dug her mobile out of her purse, typed in her password, and handed it carefully across the table to the Prince with only the briefest stab of fear that he would find something embarrassing open on it.
He navigated to her contacts menu. “Now. Would you prefer I list it under ‘Secret Royal Boyfriend’ or ‘Secret Royal Business Partner’?”
“How about secret royal codename? That way, if I lose my mobile, everything doesn’t get worse.” She didn’t understand how a prince could be so bad at this.
“How’s this?” Prince Arthur asked and slid the mobile back across the table at her.
Amelia glanced down at the entry he’d added: Your Humble Servant. That was workable, at least. And even sweet, if slightly inappropriate. “That will do,” she said.
“Surely. At some point, we’ll have to get you a more secure mobile. Also, I’ll need your number, so I can make sure any calls you make actually go through to me.”
“Don’t you have it already? Somewhere in my file with my university address and my family tree and my now surely defunct career plans and everything else you found out without me telling you. Which is creepy, by the way.”
“I do,” he said. “But a prince should be a gentleman, and a gentleman asks.”
“Next time a gentleman should ask first,” Amelia said.
“Noted. Now. I don’t want to rescind my offer to you. Do you wish to decline it?”
Amelia shook her head.
“Good. Shall we discuss terms?”
Amelia had the sudden thought that, someday in the probably not too distant future, she was going to have to go to bed with this man of the long fingers, infuriating habits, and impeccable posture. It would be a duty, perhaps, but not an onerous one. Not if he kept looking at her like this, with an intensity Amelia had never known.
She did her best to put the thought — and the accompanying thoughts as to what the rest of the Prince might look like under his gorgeous suits — out of her head as they worked their way through a shockingly comprehensive list of bullet points. Amelia wished she had brought something to take notes with, but the Prince didn’t seem to need anything. If he was capable of keeping track of it all in his head, so was she. She wondered if there was going to be a formal marriage contract. Surely someone, somewhere, was already drawing up a prenup.
“If you’re willing, we’ll begin seeing each other,” Prince Arthur said, “to ensure that we can stand each other in public — and that we don’t hate each other in private — although I don’t expect that will be an issue. We can both opt out at any time, but you should know that calling off our arrangement would come with its own costs, both for my family and for the north. And for you, as you noted.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It's reality. Those costs increase the longer we wait. Think carefully before you agree. If you do, by this time next year — at the absolute latest — we both need to make a firm commitment to either go forward or call it off. It is my intent to be married within the next two years."
Amelia barely restrained herself from asking if this w
hole quest to get married was Prince Arthur’s midlife crisis. But then, he was the Prince. He’d probably been having midlife crises of one sort or another since he was eighteen.
She was jolted out of that train of thought when he started talking about affairs. Specifically, he began talking about how they could and would each conduct them. And not affairs of state, either. Extramarital affairs.
“Excuse me?” Amelia said.
“A man has needs,” the Prince said calmly. “And I don’t want to assume you’ll want to do more than your duty. Don’t misunderstand me,” he said. “You’re lovely and I find you pleasing to look at. I’m sure we’ll enjoy each other. But I hardly expect that we’ll be the centers of each other’s emotional and physical lives.”
“Oh no. No no no. No,” Amelia said firmly. “I know you haven’t been celibate for the entire decade since Princess Imogene died. You’ve had affairs. I’m sure you have a mistress right now. Maybe more than one. But please don’t sleep with other women while we’re courting. Or engaged. Among other things, I found the stories about your affairs in the papers distasteful even before we barged into each other’s lives.”
“Why?” Prince Arthur was all curiosity. “You’re a modern woman, surely you don’t judge me for having sex out of wedlock.”
“Hardly. What’s distasteful is that the papers covered the matter at all. But your so-generous offer aside, there is a long and storied history of royal mistresses who are tolerated and even expected, and a much shorter list of scandals involving the flings of princesses and queens, which are not. My viable options are limited to you, and I’m giving up a lot for you to try me on. You can deal with not getting laid for a year.”
He laughed, just a little, and Amelia was near certain it was at her expense. But because he didn’t argue with her, she didn’t care. She could accept that it might take time for a prince to understand she was the smarter of the two of them.
