The Royal We

by Heather Cocks

  Chapter Seven

  Nick and I broke up ten weeks later.

  As I’d feared, Gemma’s impetuous kiss had made the papers, and the tabloids immediately blared that she was in and I was out. Clarence House didn’t want to make a statement either way—“We can’t discuss them if we never discussed you. Consistency,” had been Marj’s unsatisfying explanation—and Ladbrokes christened Gemma the odds-on favorite for a potential royal bride. I’d been kicked down to twenty-to-one, just inside “Someone He’s Related To” and “A Man.” Nick and I had barely discussed this, beyond Don’t worry and Gem’s just a friend, because he was off at the Britannia Royal Naval College before joining the officers’ ranks. The little he did come home, we had sex in what felt less like insatiable need for each other, and more like an insatiable need to do something other than squabble. And despite what Nick had promised, still there was no movement toward going public. The excuses that piled up were everything short of astrology, reasons and Reasons eventually blurring into nonsense. The longer we weren’t official, the more I officially felt like his dirty little secret.

  Things came to a head during the run-up to Prince Edwin’s wedding to a young dance teacher from Sussex, Lady Elizabeth Bewley. Per the official story, Edwin met Elizabeth at a dinner party and, besotted, carefully wooed her out of the public eye. Per reality, no one had a clue how they’d met, and the Palace was caught totally by surprise.

  “I think he got tired of Gran nagging him, so he bought himself a quickie bride who’d irk her and get him a lot of press,” Freddie said one night over pints in his chambers at Kensington.

  “Sounds familiar,” Nick said dryly, raising an eyebrow at Freddie.

  “What if they don’t like each other?” I asked.

  “He’s fifty-two years old,” Nick had said. “Gran doesn’t care if he likes who he marries, so long as he does it.”

  “That seems so archaic,” I mused. “What if Edwin is gay?”

  “You can’t expect royal obligations to take pesky little things like sexual orientation into account,” Freddie said.

  Edwin randomly announced the engagement himself on the morning chat show Sunrise, just because it is Elizabeth’s favorite (she likes that the weather graphics wear human accessories, like sunglasses and scarves). His press secretary publicly quit in a huff, and Eleanor was in a tizzy—so much so that she actually suggested that Nick bring me to the wedding.

  “Wait. You mean…like a date? A public date?” I’d asked when he told me. We were in my living room, him doing a crossword before his phone rang; me pretending to try one, but actually idly sketching various imaginary cartoon ladies (who all ended up looking rather like Gemma with devil horns).

  “Yes,” Nick said. “It’s all been thrown together so fast that Gran is worried it’s a bit of a shotgun wedding, and she’s keen for a distraction.”

  “So I’m just part of a gambit,” I said, letting out with a sad puff the excited breath I’d held.

  “We don’t have to go, if you’d rather not.” He tugged at his hair, not meeting my eyes. “I agree it’s not ideal.”

  I couldn’t tell what he wanted me to say. But I knew that for me, Job One was getting out of this discomfiting personal purgatory.

  “No, we should do it,” I said. “It’ll be nice. Right?”

  “Right,” he said. Then he did look at me, and warmth crept into his face. “Right,” he repeated, more confidently, and we exchanged smiles that were—if tentative—at least sincere.

  The one definite upside to this wedding: Figuring out who exactly Lady Elizabeth Bewley even was briefly proved more enticing to the public than Nick, or Freddie, or Gemma, or I, and the press dug into her life hungrily. Elizabeth was sweet. Elizabeth taught children how to do pliés and stand in fifth position. Elizabeth had been very popular, but not very academically gifted. Elizabeth raised chickens at her family’s summer home and named them all after great romantic heroes of books she probably hadn’t read. Elizabeth’s blond hair was trimmed every six weeks, and she took a gap year in Chile but then never went to university, so it was hard to say what the gap was technically bridging. But I loved her, even though I hadn’t met her, because all the photographers in front of my house and Greetings & Salutations temporarily decamped to her place.

  I used the break in media attention to sneak my way into a new, hopefully more compelling job working in marketing for Sir John Soane’s Museum, a terrifically bizarre place jam-packed with art and antiquities. I no longer got goose bumps in my own apartment, knowing the windows were being watched, and could actually go outside without the company of a pushy, camera-laden mob. Finally, I felt free again, enough so that I felt comfortable voicing my relief to Joss and Cilla over lunch one day.

  “I know it seems weird to feel safer when a street is empty,” I told them. “But it had gotten crazy. Nick has trained assassins looking after him. I’m on my own.”

  And of course, the next day a story ran under the headline LET’S TALK ABOUT BEX, BABY: Nick’s Nosh Begs for Bodyguard, swearing I’d demanded security from the Palace at great taxpayer expense. (A blazingly mean sidebar titled ME ME ME implied I felt overshadowed by Elizabeth, and was furious that I hadn’t gotten a ring when this English rose had snagged one in thirty seconds flat, even though her prince was kind of a frog.) Barnes telephoned specifically to share how unimpressed Clarence House was—“Last I checked, Miss Porter, you are not a member of the Royal Family”—and I’d cursed myself for talking about it at all, much less in public.

  Two weeks before the blessed event, I was hat shopping after work with Bea and Joss at a private room in Stephen Jones Millinery in Covent Garden. Joss was pitching me on a hat she’d made herself in which the various flowers on the brim actually spelled out hat, which appealed to my limited budget because it would be free. I refused to ask my parents for any more money.

  “Come on, Bex,” Joss pleaded. “It could be a big deal for me.”

  “I do actually like this hat,” I said, studying Joss’s drawing. “Is that weird?”

  “Yes,” Bea said, ripping it out of my hand. “We are not at home to DIY projects. Not for this.”

  Joss looked so crushed that I said, “I’ll find another occasion, Joss, I promise.”

  “We’ll see,” muttered Bea, plopping a spiked fascinator on my head. I looked like a cactus.

  Joss brightened, despite Bea’s side eye. “Hunt would be ever so chuffed.”

  “Please tell me you are not referring to Tom Huntington-Jones,” Bea said.

  “That’s what he tells me to call him,” Joss said. “Philippa’s dad,” she explained to me. “My investor. He says I’m an exciting emerging talent.”

  “That’s great, Joss,” I said warmly.

  “I assume ‘investing in emerging talent’ is not a euphemism,” Bea said, crossing her arms over her silk-clad chest.

  “Ew,” Joss said. “I mean, I think he fancies me, but he’s not my type.”

  This was a compliment, to Hunt. Joss’s last boyfriend had been a guy who wore a large stud in his left ear with a chain attached to it that turned out to be the leash for a hefty white rat called Bob, which prowled around his shoulder and neck. Eventually, Joss dumped him for refusing to take off Bob while they had sex, and we’d been glad to see the back of him before any of us caught rat-bite fever.

  My phone rang. “It’s probably Gaz,” I said, digging in my purse. “Penelope Six-Names wants to take him to her tarot reader. I think he’s over it.”

  I wish it had been Gaz.

  “Bex,” Nick said. “Have you bought a hat yet?”

  “No,” I said. “What do you think, tasteful beige, or a potted plant?”

  “Um,” he said.

  My face fell so fast that I’m pretty sure it made a sound. Quickly, I got up and walked over to the window; a banal-looking grill across the street was packed with theatergoers overpaying for a meal before curtain at the Starlight Express revival running around the
corner.

  “What’s up?” I asked, trying to sound unconcerned.

  “It’s off,” Nick said bluntly. “With your public opinion ratings so low after the PPO thing—”

  “I have public opinion ratings now?”

  “It’s not—”

  “And you care about them?” I hadn’t wanted to fight, not with Nick all the way at the southwestern tip of England and out of my physical reach. And yet. “What other data should I know about? Did Marj decide she prefers the odds on ‘Nick Gets a Fellow Officer Pregnant’?”

  “I’m sorry,” Nick said impatiently, but not without sincerity. “It’s been decreed. It isn’t a good time.”

  “It never is,” I said. “And I’m starting to think it never will be.”

  And I hung up, barely getting the words out before a sob escaped my throat.

  * * *

  Nick and I didn’t correspond the next two weeks, beyond quick apologies. It was the longest we’d gone without speaking. I was full of contradictory upset: I didn’t want to talk to him, because I didn’t want another argument, yet I hated that he hadn’t tried to talk to me. Lacey did everything she could to jolly me out of it—American snacks, Socialite Darts (in which we threw things at the faces of our enemies, tacked onto a corkboard behind my bedroom door), and in a moment of desperation, a DVD of Great Moments in Chicago Cubs History that ended up only enhancing my depression due to how short it was.

  The day of the wedding also happened to be my birthday. Tony had invited us to the soft launch of a Club Theme pop-up that was so new he hadn’t even released the name, just the address; Nick was supposed to meet us there after the reception, and I was on edge about seeing him. My wonderful friends rallied to my side, planning a casual dinner for me and Lacey before our night out, so that if I was wobbling, I could find strength in numbers. Gaz volunteered to do the food.

  “I plan to dazzle Cilla with my secret weapons,” he confided, wiggling his hands. “These can do magical things to a chicken.”

  “That’s a very alluring selling point,” I said, giving him a side squeeze.

  Gaz hosted us in his ancient flat in a mews near the Victoria and Albert Museum. His place looked like a turn-of-the-century time capsule of masculinity: Everything was tartan or leather, there was a deer’s head mounted on a wood-paneled wall over the fireplace, and an actual divot in the chair rail in the dining room that Gaz swore was thanks to an errant piece of shrapnel during the Blitz.

  “What is he making in there?” Lacey asked, sniffing the air from her perch on his plaid couch. “It smells like…burnt shoes.”

  “That’ll be the Chex Mix, or whatever that stuff is that you love so much, Bex,” Cilla grunted. “He’s been practicing all week and he still forgets to check it.”

  “I’ll go help,” I said.

  “No, let me,” Cilla said, getting up. “I am excellent when Gaz is in crisis.”

  “So there is one piece of good news. I’ve finally left Top News,” Clive said. He was almost vibrating with excitement. “I’m now at the Recorder. It’s not very established yet, but at least it’s a paper that people pay actual money to get.”

  “Shut up, that’s awesome!” I said, hoping my sincere happiness showed through my bad mood. “I knew things would work out for you.”

  “Yes, well, technically the job is as a nighttime copy editor, but when I’m not editing, I can volunteer for writing assignments,” he said. “It’ll be society stuff, mostly, but when you think about it, gossip is the part of the paper that people really read. Perhaps there is no better way to communicate.”

  “Seriously?” Bea asked, dripping with derision as she poured herself a martini.

  “The society pages are high-profile,” Clive argued, defensively. “This is a great stepping-stone for my career. A bloke can’t go straight from Top News to the Daily Mail.”

  Bea nearly coughed up her olive. “If you think Nick is going to associate with someone working for the Daily Mail…”

  “Not this again,” Clive groaned.

  “Nick knows Clive is a reporter,” I said. “It’s not new. He would deal with it.”

  “Yes, because dealing with things is his strong suit,” Lacey said protectively.

  I snorted. Clive chuckled. Even Joss smiled, although she looked exhausted; she’d been fighting a lot with her father, who’d wanted her to work in reception at his gynecological practice instead of, as he’d phrased it, letting some leering toff bankroll her fancies. (Apparently I wasn’t the only one in need of distraction that night.) Bea started to speak, but was interrupted by the buzzing of her phone. She did a double take at it, then frowned at me.

  “It would seem,” Bea said, “that you are not going to have a very happy birthday.”

  She handed me the phone. Among the news photos trickling in from Prince Edwin’s wedding was a beautifully cinematic shot of Nick and Gemma Sands arriving at the church together through the mist, his elbow proffered, her hand curled around its crook. He was looking back at her, beaming, and she glowed up at him.

  “No. No.” I tried calm breathing. I tried fast breathing. I tried a combination of the two. Nothing worked. As if on strings, I shot to my feet, my arm in the air. “MOTHERFU—”

  “My phone,” Bea yelped, lunging at me just as Clive grabbed my wrist before I could hurl the phone at the wall.

  “Calm down,” he said, rescuing the device. “Calm down,” he repeated softly.

  “Is everything all right?” Cilla said breathlessly, coming out of the kitchen holding a carving knife that had a piece of chicken impaled on the end. Gaz followed her with a bowl of Chex Mix that smelled shockingly correct.

  “Bex almost destroyed my mobile, which I haven’t had a chance to back up in weeks,” said good old Lady Bollocks, irritably.

  “And, not to bury the lede or anything, but Nick went to the wedding with Gemma,” Clive reported. “I’m sorry, Bex. I can’t believe my sources didn’t tell me first.”

  “Oh, get off it, Clive,” Cilla said, handing the knife to Gaz and helping Lacey pull me over to the couch.

  “It might not mean anything,” Lacey began.

  “It looks bad,” Bea said.

  “It could be accidental,” Gaz offered, cradling the Chex Mix like a baby.

  “It’s a slap in the face,” Cilla barked.

  I internalized all this, mutely, furiously, and then I started giggling. The giggles turned into a laugh when I saw how alarmed my friends were at my reaction. The laugh turned into a guffaw interrupted only when the tears ran into my mouth.

  “Oh, come on, guys, it’s funny,” I said, wiping my eyes, sounding hysterical even to my own ears. “Today of all days. It was supposed to be me. And instead he’s with her. Happy birthday to me!”

  Gaz shook his head. “She’s barmy. She needs a drink.”

  “You are right on one count,” I said. “I do need a drink. It’s my goddamn birthday and I am going to go out and have the best time anyone has ever had.”

  Joss brightened. “I have a shirt you could borrow,” she said. “It’s mostly black lace but there are two patches over the boobs. For modesty.”

  “No,” said Cilla, Bea, and Lacey in unison.

  “Yes,” I said. “Nick would hate it. So yes. Give me that shirt.”

  “…Thanks? Whatever, I’ll take it,” Joss said.

  “Eat first, at least, Bex,” Lacey said, throwing Cilla a concerned expression. “If you’re going out with a vengeance, at least get your base going.”

  “That’s the only thing I learnt at Oxford,” Gaz said melodramatically.

  I wiped my eyes and smiled, and felt the emotions I usually funneled into Nick break free and flow at all of them.

  “Group hug,” I said, signaling for them to come to me. Maybe I was barmy.

  “Absolutely not,” Bea said as everyone else reached around me.

  “I love you guys. Thank you so much for being here with me even if…well, whatever happens with Nic
k.”

  “We love you, too,” Cilla said. “Bea, get your bony arse over here and engage.”

  “This is not one of Pudge’s interventions,” Bea sniffed, but she walked over and gave me a crisp pat on the shoulder just the same.

  * * *

  Tony’s latest project turned out to be called Misery, an aptness that seemed less funny once we got there and saw it was in an abandoned, recently condemned building on the South Bank that looked like the kind of place you’d visit if you were angling to catch hepatitis. There was yellow caution tape stretched across the front, broken glass from the ruined windows, and floors intentionally (or still?) littered with trash and assorted debris. The drinks were deliberately bad, and the music was the worst nightclub mix you could imagine, from morose Tracy Chapman to endless Gregorian chants. All the artsy, desperate hipsters lined up around the block were proclaiming it Tony’s most ingeniously subversive effort yet.

  Two good things came out of that night. One was that Cilla dumped Tony for being a pretentious ass who’d tricked me and Lacey into spending our birthday at a potential hotbed for suicide. (“The rudest comedown from Gaz’s lovely dinner,” she’d rebuked him, and she’d been right in every way.) The other was that even in my emotionally reckless state, I couldn’t choke down more than a quarter of one poorly made bottom-shelf cocktail. So there was no false liquid courage when Nick showed up—I was stone-cold sober—and no drunken regrets when the end finally came.

  I had actually texted Nick and told him not to bother, and that we’d speak in a day or so. He’d obviously picked up on my vibe, or been self-aware enough to know that this would be coming, because he ignored me and showed up anyway. The second I saw him, I wanted to pretend everything was fine, because…well, he was fine: His muscles were more sculpted after his military drilling, and because he’d borrowed Twiggy’s motorbike—as he always did whenever he wanted to travel quickly and anonymously—he’d also purloined his PPO’s snug, weathered leather jacket. The whole effect was very Top Gun. Nick seemed relieved when he saw that I was alive and whole in this den of scuzz, but as he walked toward me, my resolve steeled.