The Royal We

by Heather Cocks

  “She may come by, actually,” Clive added. “She’s trying to find a flight so we can ring in our first New Year together.”

  “Well, I can’t wait to meet her,” I offered.

  I was, in fact, very curious about the mysterious virginity-grabbing Gemma Sands, whose very name had the glamorous, smooth finish of an expensive glass of wine, and whose family conservancy in Namibia Nick visited at least once a year. The last time, they’d washed elephants together and helped deliver a baby zebra. A wobbly part of me decided it was in my best interest for her to be romantically occupied.

  “You really think Gem is coming?” Nick asked skeptically.

  “Hope so, hope so,” Clive said, rubbing his hands together. “We’re both so busy, with my work at the paper and hers in Africa. It’d be nice to steal a moment together.” He smiled widely. “Now come downstairs, you two. Cilla and Gaz are fighting over whether one of her ancestors died while inventing the T-bar lift, and Freddie’s Icelandic party planner has lips that seem to vibrate. You must see it.”

  Once Clive was gone, Nick turned to me and rolled his eyes. “He and Gemma are about as meant to be as Penelope Six-Names and my grandfather.”

  “Your grandfather is dead.”

  Nick was in the middle of taking off his sweater to put on another. “Exactly,” he said, through a layer of wool. His head popped out through the top of the crewneck, his hair standing on end like a child’s, and I felt a rush of love for him. “Exactly,” he repeated.

  I did not have a lot of love for his tone.

  * * *

  “A toast. To the woman who is responsible for us all, who is the mother of our beloved kingdom. God save the Queen.”

  Richard raised his glass to the sky in solemnity, and everyone else followed.

  Agatha shot me a reproachful look from down the rectangular table. “She’s not your Queen.”

  “No, but…” I faltered. It had felt weird to glom on to that salute, but it seemed like it would be even weirder if I had ignored it and implied I didn’t think God should help Eleanor out at all.

  “Oh, just let ’er drink,” Awful Julian slurred. His foot found mine under the table. I shifted without changing my facial expression.

  “What if she doesn’t even believe in God? They have all kinds of atheists in America,” said Lady Bollocks, in a way that suggested she was enjoying adding fuel to this fire.

  “They’ve got atheists here, too,” boomed Clive’s brother Martin. “I’m in the running for captain of the national rugby side!”

  “Better hope they don’t give IQ tests,” Clive said under his breath.

  “Perhaps the girl can say, ‘May a higher power of some sort preserve the Queen of this realm,’” offered Agatha, still fretting.

  “For my money, both God and Gran would want us to let it go and tuck into dinner,” Freddie said. “Bex lives in England. She pays VAT. She can jolly well rent the Queen for a while.”

  “Enough!” Richard boomed. “Eat.”

  Our first evening had been relatively tame. It had begun with subtly studying the cheerfully oblivious Fallopia—her lips did vibrate and even seemed to emit a mild hum, as if her last injection had gone bad—and then took a turn for the militant when our chalet was invaded by Clarence House’s best generals. Marjorie Hicks had worked for either Eleanor or Richard for Nick’s entire life, and Nick and Freddie had selected her personally when Eleanor granted their wish for their own dedicated staff. Marj tended toward woolen cardigans with floral buttons, and wore her iron-gray hair in a close-cropped coif that was too long to be a pixie, but too pixie to be a bob; the boys both greeted her with great and genuine affection—as if she, too, were their grandmother, an Eleanor proxy who could do all the constant hugging and reprimanding the Queen’s schedule didn’t allow. Marj’s equivalent on Richard’s staff was a heavy-lidded fiftysomething man called Barnes, who had a coiffure so elaborate it made Donald Trump look like he suffered from alopecia. Barnes had handed Fallopia and me, as the newcomers, a lengthy nondisclosure agreement and cowed us into signing it in about seventeen different places. Then he and Marj had distributed a personalized schedule outlining which social events we were expected to attend at either Richard’s chalet or those of his titled friends, the dress code for each, and when we’d have free time. Nick’s packet ran at least ten pages. Mine was two.

  And yet somehow Nick and I still managed to be late for Richard’s dinner party. We’d had a long day on the mountain, where his attempts to teach me to disembark from the believably deadly T-bar ski lifts were hampered by the fact that we couldn’t stop laughing, and I’d healed my bruises in the hot tub and then passed out on the bed. We didn’t wake up until five minutes before dinner, which is why I’d arrived at Richard’s chalet out of breath, with my hair shoved up into a bun because it was only nearly dry and thoroughly frizzy.

  “The schedule said your cocktail finest,” Barnes growled, unimpressed by the black long-sleeved dress Lacey had helped me buy. “And you are three minutes late.”

  I wilted a little under his stare. I hate being late. But I’ve also never mastered the art of estimating how long it takes me to get anywhere or do anything. Now all my official schedules are done in BST—Bex Standard Time—which is elaborately coded and changes every day in case I accidentally crack it. If only we’d thought to invent it sooner.

  “My fault,” Nick covered smoothly. “I could only find one sock.”

  “I hope Frederick’s excuse is as compelling,” Marj said tartly. “His Royal Highness is also tardy.”

  Nick squinted at the floor-to-ceiling glass window, into the pitch-black night.

  “Is that him out in the snow, Marj?” he asked. “He’s not wearing a jacket.”

  Marj tsked and bustled to the window. “That boy. He’ll catch his death. It’s below zero.”

  She knocked on the glass and began to call out Freddie’s name, when a thunderous thwack sounded, followed a split second later by Marj’s scream, and gales of laughter. A giant snowball, easily half ice, had hit the window right where her face had been.

  “NICHOLAS!” she thundered. He was doubled over, gasping with mirth. “I NEVER.”

  “Wasn’t me…don’t know what you mean…”

  “You were in it as much as your no-good brother and you know it,” Marj panted, fanning herself. “That rapscallion, I ought to—”

  “Ought to what, Marjie?” Freddie asked innocently, walking in and whistling under his breath. “Gosh, have you had a fright?”

  “You’re as good a liar as you are a person,” Marj scoffed at him. “Conspiring to give heart failure to an innocent old woman. I ought to staple you to the table.”

  “That’s my Marj,” Freddie said, looping an arm around her neck. “It’s just not the holidays until I’m victimized by her bloodlust.”

  Freddie was my salvation that night. With Nick on the other side of the elaborately carved dining room, Freddie kept me talking, deftly drowned out his seventeen-year-old cousin Nigel’s announcement that I held my utensils in the wrong hands, and now had stuck up for me during the inane argument about how, or whether, I should pledge my allegiance to the monarch of the country that was allowing me to live and work in it.

  Gaz had been right about the people-watching, at least. Clive’s divorced father was arguing boisterously with Agatha about Western-style riding, and Clive’s brothers’ limitations had indeed proved distinguishable: Martin was boomingly stupid, confident he was always right even though he never was, while Thick Trevor came off like his brain was working very hard yet going nowhere (it made me sad the one called Dim Tim hadn’t come, just for the comparison). Bea’s parents were her clones, patrician and perfect with chins like upside-down Gothic arches. Conversely, her sister Pudge was the apple that fell so far from the tree that it rolled into a ditch and landed in a pile of snortable substances. Alarmingly gaunt, with a haircut she might have given herself with safety scissors, she’d disappeared to the bathroom s
ix times already that night, and seemed to view everything with a deep, miserable hatred. Even from three seats down I’d caught her blitz of f-bombs about the food, the company, even the butter dish, though everyone pretended not to hear.

  And after three long hours of this dysfunctional family dinner writ large, the menfolk—Richard’s exact word—excused themselves for brandy and cigars (and presumably talk of topics too weighty for our tiny ladybrains). On my way out the front door, I found Bea trying to lug a clearly queasy and spaghetti-legged Pudge out of the bathroom, a spot of vomit on her shirt and an indiscreet smattering of powder under her left nostril.

  “Come on, Pads,” she was saying, as gentle as I’d ever heard her. “Let’s get you home.”

  “Can I help?”

  She looked up at me, startled, and then a flash of embarrassment flickered across her face. It wasn’t an emotion I generally associated with Lady Bollocks. But she was in a pickle, and she knew it, so she nodded and let me drape Pudge’s arm around my shoulder.

  “Easy, Paddington, we’ll get you,” I said, trying to use her full name out of politeness, although frankly I’m not sure it was much better.

  Pudge’s head lolled on her shoulders until she jerked it in my direction. “Your hair smells like violets.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Violets fucking stink,” Pudge snapped.

  We trudged outside, saying nothing but stopping three times to let Pudge decorate a variety of bushes with the contents of her stomach. Bea’s resentment about depending on me for help fairly radiated off her. Once we got inside our chalet, Bea and I hustled Pudge to the room they were sharing, I brought her water and a puke receptacle, and we spent a wordless period putting them alternately to her lips until she passed out on her bed.

  “Thank you,” Bea said grudgingly.

  “Sure,” I said. “This can’t be easy, and—”

  “I don’t actually want to discuss it. I am simply being polite,” Bea said sharply.

  Then her phone beeped, and she pulled it out to check a text message. “Ceres,” she said. “She’s on her way over.”

  I said nothing.

  “Yes, Nick’s ex is in town.” Lady Bollocks’s radar for other people’s insecurities is as precisely groomed as she is. “And his other ex could be dropping in at any minute. Are you jealous?”

  “No,” I said, mostly honestly, although I was starting to feel intimidated. And outnumbered.

  “I doubt they want the job,” she said. “Or else they’d already have it.”

  “Nick isn’t a job.”

  “You’ll soon see,” Bea said, tapping the air with a stiff, well-manicured pointer. “Those hungry mobs at Oxford were just sycophants and desperate, disgraced blue bloods. The real catches don’t want any part of this.”

  “So you’re saying I’m here by default.”

  “Those are your words, not mine,” Bea said.

  “Well, I don’t believe them.”

  “Suit yourself,” Bea said. “But someone should inform you that being Nick’s partner isn’t actually a partnership at all. It’s accepting a position. You’re on display, and on trial.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked. “To help, or to pretend to help until I run away screaming on my own? Because we all know you don’t want me and Nick to end up together.”

  “That’s neither here nor there,” she said. “You’re who we’re stuck with at the moment, and Nick is my friend, and I don’t want him going any further with someone naïve or unsuitable, or weak. He doesn’t need it, and honestly, if you are the spineless sort, neither do you. So if you do not think you can handle it, step aside before it ends badly for both of you.”

  No one has ever accused Lady Beatrix Larchmont-Kent-Smythe of mincing her words.

  “You know, for someone who says she’s Nick’s friend, you are really bad at being friendly, Bea.”

  “Someday you might disagree,” Bea said. “Cheerio, Rebecca. Enjoy your prince.”

  And with that, she sailed out of the room, leaving me unsettled as Pudge snored softly.

  * * *

  “How’s the snow looking, sir?”

  The BBC News photographer got off the first question over the rustling and clacking of the rest of the press corps. Richard and his staff at Clarence House arranged this photo op for the royals in attendance every year, in the exact same spot—atop one of the gentler slopes, the Alps cresting behind them—in exchange for total privacy the rest of the week. It was a deal not unlike the one that had kept Nick protected at Oxford, and which everyone observed, again, because both sides essentially needed each other more than anyone cared to admit.

  “The snow is as perfect as my lovely wife,” Richard said, his attempt at a romantic tone contrasting with his villainous black ski suit and polarized wraparound shades. “She wishes she could have been here, but she is no longer so partial to sport.”

  He laughed lightly, at odds with the actual sentiment he’d expressed. It made me think of the most famous of the Klosters photos over the years: Svelte in a red ski suit even though she’d had Freddie only six months earlier, Emma had two-year-old chubby, cheeky Nick standing on his stubby skis between her own, giggling as she kissed him. Even Richard had been smiling. It was one of the last family photos on record.

  “Freddie! There have been reports that you’ve brought former glamour model Fallopia Jones as your personal guest,” a reporter shouted. “Can you confirm?”

  “I believe she has been sighted on the slopes,” Freddie replied with a cheeky grin.

  “What a coincidence,” Richard said, jaw clenched.

  “Perhaps, but we are extremely good friends. Allegedly.” Freddie winked broadly, which got a laugh.

  I glanced at Fallopia, obliviously drawing faces on the fogged-up glass of the medical cabin where we’d been stashed to watch and wait for the press conference to end. She had probably, whether she knew it or not, just served her last purpose. Freddie’s frowned-upon girlfriends arrived on a schedule as regular as the crosstown bus and were just as interchangeable, and Fallopia had just left the station.

  “Nick!” called the royals reporter from the Daily Express. “We’re also hearing rumors that you’ve got a new girlfriend. Care to comment?”

  “Uh-oh,” Cilla muttered, next to me.

  “Come on, Annalisa. You know I’ve no comment on my personal life,” Nick said, his expression hardening subtly from Perfectly Pleasant into Aggressively Pleasant.

  Freddie must have noticed this, too, because then he chimed in: “One minute it’s girlfriends, the next you’ll be wanting our inseams, eh?” he chirped. “Although personally, I’m always delighted when you lot do us the favor of believing that my brother has any game at all. I mean, look at him. You’d have to be—”

  “And that will do it,” Barnes interjected. “Thank you, everyone. Enjoy the slopes.”

  Nick, Freddie, and Richard shooshed swiftly away, giving off the convincing air of resuming a jovial family adventure, even though Nick had actually spent the morning popping Nurofen between sips of the darkest coffee he could make. (Our chalet—still minus Gemma, who never left Africa, to Clive’s dismay—had only even woken up forty-five minutes ago after a long night of compensating for the lack of nightclubs by inventing drinking games, like the instant classic, Take Three Sips If Anyone Does Anything. That any of us has a working liver left is a miracle of body chemistry.) But as Gaz, Cilla, Clive, and I huddled around our ski maps to figure out where to meet later—and in my case, what runs I could take without breaking my face—my mind wandered to what mood Nick would be in when he reappeared. Because the Daily Express was onto something, somehow. I knew our sneaking around was on borrowed time, but I hated that it might’ve run out when I was stuck in an enclosed space with his less-than-welcoming relatives.

  “He’s with which one?” I heard Agatha hiss as she and Awful Julian tumbled inside after kicking off their skis.

  “The one in that terr
ible sweater,” Nigel rang out.

  I suddenly felt several eyes in the cabin turn to me.

  “The American?” Agatha breathed, in the same tone of voice as you’d expect from someone saying, The Satanist? “I thought she was just some fancy of Clive’s, or I wouldn’t have been so kind to her at dinner.”

  I nearly spat out my coffee. Agatha seemed to approach the world as if people she didn’t care to acknowledge therefore automatically did not have the privilege of hearing her.

  “Her sweater looks like vomit, Mummy,” Nigel prodded. “It hurts my eyes.”

  “He’s a wonderful argument for birth control,” Gaz muttered.

  I looked down at my sweater. “Is it seriously that bad?” I asked. It was a thank-you gift from Joss for being her fit model for her latest fashion school project, and I was trying to be supportive.

  “It is a bit…scribbly,” Cilla allowed, gesturing to the neon scrawls knitted into it.

  “Nicky! Nicky! You’re not really seeing the American in the terrible sweater?” Agatha wailed.

  I looked up to see Nick, Freddie, and Richard shaking snow off their boots inside the cabin. Nick and I made eye contact, but for once, his face was inscrutable to me. I plastered an expression on my face that I hoped looked confident rather than arrogant or smug. Jumping into this wouldn’t help anything, but I also wasn’t going to let them shame me into staring at the floorboards so they could add poor posture to my list of obvious faults.

  “I can assure you my son is not seeing anyone seriously,” Richard said, with a pointed look at Nick. “And certainly not the American in the terrible sweater.”

  “Told you it was horrible,” Nigel singsonged.

  “Bit saucy, American girls, eh?” Awful Julian said, wiggling his eyebrows at Nick.

  “Nick can see anyone he wants to,” Freddie insisted. “It’s not like Bex is going to topple the dynasty.”

  “You will not engage me on this here,” Richard said.

  “Just leave it, Freddie,” Nick hissed.

  “Why should I let him be such a prick about it?” Freddie asked. “Why do you always—”