The Royal We

by Heather Cocks

  “Do you think they’ll be in suits, or their uniforms?”

  “Suits,” I said. “The uniforms are too obvious.”

  “I bet you a cocktail it’s uniforms,” she said. “For the full impact.”

  We were both right: The hour-long special opened with Freddie and Nick on the job—Lacey sighed audibly when Freddie landed a rescue copter with extreme panache, although I privately thought shooting finger guns at the camera was a bit much—before transitioning into a sit-down interview in which they wore elegant but not ostentatious jackets and ties. Nick was in high spirits (when asked why he hadn’t pursued being a pilot, he cracked, “I can’t fly with a peg leg”) and Freddie was, well, Freddie.

  “Think of me as the court jester,” he’d said with a twinkle, when asked about his bad-boy image. “Nick and my father have a heavy responsibility in their futures, and they handle it with care. My job is to get into enough trouble for both of them, to balance the ledger.”

  “He makes out like he’s such a gigolo,” Lacey said, crunching through another cracker.

  “That’s because he is,” I said.

  “Sure, but he’ll come around,” she said. “I think he wants more than just some flavor of the month. Their phones stop ringing eventually. Mine hasn’t.”

  I turned to look at her, but she studiously did not meet my gaze.

  On TV, the fiftysomething Katie Kenneth asked Nick about Emma—he’d lied, with that long-practiced façade of calm, that she was helping them choose charities for their patronage—before segueing into a line of questioning that I was surprised had been approved.

  “You’ve been linked with Gemma Sands, Ceres Whitehall de Villency, and even American Rebecca Porter,” Katie said, frowning as if this were as vital as a conversation about genocide. “We’re all hungering for a royal wedding. Are you game?”

  “Ugh,” I said to the TV.

  But Nick simply laughed charmingly. “Are you proposing to me, Katie?”

  “Please. Everyone knows I’m the real catch,” Freddie said.

  “You know I don’t usually comment on this,” Nick said pleasantly. “But I will say that I can’t simply decide I want a wedding and plug in the first bride that appears. I take my military duties seriously. I take my royal duties seriously. And I take commitment to another person seriously, as she’d be my partner for life and beside me at the helm of the country someday. I want to make the right choice, and that cannot be rushed.”

  “That was well done,” Lacey said.

  “Beats ‘ask me in a decade.’” I couldn’t pretend that didn’t still sting.

  “And I know it’s tempting to speculate, and to track and trace the movements of the women who are important to me,” Nick continued. “But I would like to ask the public and the press to show them some mercy. I accept what comes with my birthright for myself, but I don’t have to accept it for them. I cannot brook with a person being made to feel unsafe simply for having cared about me.”

  As he looked full into the camera at the end, I swear I felt his eyes on me, and in a flash, mine were wet.

  “He’s a class act, that one,” Lacey said, then heaved a comical sigh. “I wish he would have given them the all-clear to hound me, though. I have much cuter clothes than I used to, and, like, hi, give some love to a girl who puts on heels to go to Tesco.”

  She stood and brushed cracker crumbs onto my carpet. “Come on, we officially owe each other a drink.”

  I shook my head. “I have an early staff meeting tomorrow. And I still don’t think I’m fully detoxed from the first year of being single.”

  Lacey eyed me suspiciously. “You never did tell me what made you decide to dry out.”

  Our psychic twin abilities had dissipated a bit lately, but she still knew I was withholding something, and she didn’t like it. But Paris was too dangerously juicy. Clive and I had only even discussed it to reassert that we would never discuss it. I certainly didn’t want to relive it, and he needed to keep Davinia loyal, given that her entire life was one long roster of connections he still hoped to leverage for his own column at the Recorder (although so far he’d produced only biased profiles, buried in the middle of the paper, of her father’s rich friends and their self-indulgent charity efforts, like a benefit for something called the British Association for the Proliferation of Philanthropic Events—M. C. Escher fecklessly reinterpreted). No, the truth of Paris was nonnegotiable, even with Lacey. Maybe especially with her. Because I couldn’t swear she wouldn’t whisper it to Freddie, and that was like telling the town crier.

  “My liver begged for mercy,” I said instead. It was close enough.

  “Very funny,” Lacey said. “You’re going to waste your prime years if you don’t get back on the party horse at least a little. Come on. For me? For the Ivy League?”

  “Lace, he just asked the press to lay off,” I said. “I will look like a total jackass if I run right out and tempt them into a chase.”

  Lacey fell back against the couch cushions and crossed her arms over her chest. “I miss my partner in crime,” she said petulantly. “We don’t live together and now we don’t have much of a life together, either.”

  I reached out and poked her with my big toe.

  “Get that thing off me,” she said. So I poked again. “Ew, I’m serious, Bex, you know I hate feet.”

  But she was laughing, and so was I.

  “We can go out next weekend, I promise,” I said, wiggling a cheese-topped cracker in her face, another button I knew I could push.

  “Okay,” she said, but I could tell she was still smarting. “You win. But only for tonight.”

  * * *

  To look at the area around Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the largest public square in London, you’d think you’d stumbled upon a residential neighborhood—which, in fact, it used to be. The three- and four-story brick or stone buildings once housed a variety of highborn folk who must have had a real thrill in 1683 when a would-be assassin of King Charles II was beheaded there. Maybe watching a public murder during afternoon tea is why they all moved west and gave up their real estate to the business world. Queen Eleanor’s lawyers have an office there, as does the Royal College of Surgeons, and at numbers twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, there’s Sir John Soane’s Museum, my professional home and my refuge.

  Sir John was an architect, and an inveterate hoarder, and the space is crammed to the gills with his eclectic souvenirs: almost eight thousand books, sixty or so Greek and Roman vases, three hundred and twenty-three gemstones, a pair of leg irons, and a mummified cat. The byzantine, tight space means the museum only admits eighty people at a time, and it scrupulously bans cell phones, so it could never become dangerously jammed with amateur paparazzi once people figured out I was on staff. This meant I could fill in for a docent without causing much of a stir, and I was grateful not to be treated like a plague (if my notoriety was good for business, the Soane never once exploited that). And in late May, I hit the jackpot. The Soane was so pleased that Paint Britain was a hit—bigger museums were sniffing around about partnerships—that my boss Maud rewarded me with the Picture Room when the regular docent caught a mysterious rash. The Picture Room is a compact space where Soane ingeniously turned the walls into doors as a way of multiplying the amount of art he could display. Every twenty minutes, whoever is assigned to that room opens them to display a layer, sometimes two, of hidden paintings and architectural renderings hiding behind them. All told, there are about a hundred, usually commanding the most experienced historians.

  And the space is snug. So after I gave my second pack of gawkers a moment to appreciate the initial view, I hustled all twelve of them back out and pulled open the south planes to reveal William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress. The eight paintings depict a debauched evening of gambling, drinking, and whoring in an infamous London tavern before the titular rake is imprisoned and then sent to Bedlam, and in Soane’s day it was considered scandalous. As I explained this, an eleven-year-old boy near
the front made bored clicking noises.

  “If it’s so scandalous,” he scoffed, “then where are the sexy bits?”

  “An excellent question,” said a guy in the back in a dark ball cap, a leather jacket, and aviators, whom I hadn’t noticed earlier. “Where are all the sexy bits?”

  And then Freddie took off his sunglasses, grinning, and stuffed them into his pocket.

  “Holy shitballs,” an American girl hissed.

  “Shh, don’t make a stir, or we’ll lose the intimacy of this moment,” Freddie told her. “I love A Rake’s Progress. Also the working title of my autobiography.”

  Everyone tittered, except the cranky octogenarian who’d asked me if this was the Tate.

  “You heard the young man,” Freddie prodded me. “I believe he wanted sexy bits.”

  I glanced at the boy’s mother, but she seemed as interested in where this might lead as the rest of the room, so I pointed to the orgy in the third painting. The kid peered closer.

  “I’ve seen worse on TV,” he said.

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” Freddie said, edging to the front. “You’re right. Hugely disappointing. What I’ve been longing to see, though, are some saucy drawings of buildings.” He rubbed his hands together. “Are there any of those sexy bits around, please, madam?”

  “But of course,” I said, stifling a laugh as I closed up A Rake’s Progress and opened the opposite planes. I sped through the rest of the spiel, so as not to give Freddie much time to make a spectacle of himself; he did his best PPO Furrow imitation and clapped loudly when I finished.

  “Brilliant,” he said. “Ladies and gentlemen, please head down to whatever terrifying hellhole that rickety staircase takes you to.”

  “That’s the Monk’s Parlour,” I explained. “For the imaginary monk.”

  They stared at me blankly, then clattered down into the basement.

  “This Soane chap really was a nutter, eh?” Freddie said, the floorboards creaking under his feet as he took in the sheer quantity of stuff—no, Stuff—all around us. “I only own one piece of art. It’s a photo of me scoring a goal past Father at a polo match, and it’s priceless.”

  “I hate to break it to you, but I’m pretty sure you own a lot more art than that,” I said. “How did you get in without anyone freaking out?”

  “A lady named Maud let me in the back,” he said. “She’s a firecracker, that one. Told me she’s knitting trivets as a wild change of pace from scarves. If you’re keeping score, that means changing from a rectangle all the way to a square.”

  “That’s our Maud,” I said affectionately.

  “I hope to be a steadying influence on her, in time,” Freddie said. “But first, come have a long lunch and a pint.”

  “I can’t blow off work anymore, Freddie.”

  “Aha, but I told Maud I was on a fact-finding mission about fundraising.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “And if Maud thinks you chucked a potential patron, she’ll never speak to you again about how the bridge tips from the Sunday Times are working.”

  We dined at one of the ancient gentlemen’s clubs to which the monarchy belongs—or, perhaps, which belong to the monarchy. It was a dimly lit cavern full of burnished oak and leather and antique globes no one ever spun, and was staffed solely by cantankerous old men, one of whom seated us with a whiff of mistrust and stepped on my foot as he went.

  “Don’t mind him,” Freddie said. “He’s been making that face ever since Gran forced them to let in women.”

  He ordered a shepherd’s pie and I got a big plate of crispy battered cod and chips; we made small talk until the food arrived, at which point Freddie picked up the table’s bottle of malt vinegar and deluged my fries before taking a few.

  “You’re welcome,” I said dryly.

  “I know,” he said smugly, poking one of the chips into the mashed-potato top of his pie. A belch of steam came out. “I miss giving you a hard time, Killer. Why don’t you ever come out with Lacey and me anymore?”

  “Wait, so first I was partying too hard, and now I’m not partying enough?”

  “A mild over-correction,” he said. “Easily repaired.”

  I took an extra-large bite of fish, to our waiter’s consternation. “I don’t understand why you’re not nearly as paranoid as Nick is about the media,” I said. “We both know why he’s so sensitive, but why aren’t you?”

  Freddie tapped his knife against his plate thoughtfully. “I think I was too young. Nick actually has memories of Mum.” He all but mouthed the word. “I envy him those, sometimes. But then I think maybe his normal memories, of before, make the bad ones that much worse. Maybe having nothing at all is better.” He stared into the distance. “It’s a bit like when you hear about a plane crash, and it’s awful, but it also doesn’t haunt your life. Nick was on the plane when it went down, and I just read about it in the papers. Does that make sense?”

  “Perfect sense.” I let it settle for a second. “It’s hard to explain to Lacey sometimes, though. Not that I mind keeping your confidence, but I feel bad that she’ll never understand the whole story. She’s actually miffed Nick tried to call off the paparazzi. Like she’s being denied her rightful place in the papers.”

  “I doubt it’s that simple,” Freddie said.

  “Says the expert on my twin.”

  “In some areas, I probably am,” he said, and I snorted. “Not those areas,” he chided. “I mean, yes, those too, but what I mean is, Lacey is the only other person I know who understands being the spare.” He swigged his scotch. “It is a peculiar person to be.”

  It was disarmingly, alarmingly, honest, and it hit me so hard that I actually leaned back in my chair with a thump.

  “Freddie,” I said. “Nobody thinks of either of you that way. ‘The heir and the spare’ is just a jokey expression.”

  “Perhaps to you,” Freddie said. “Truthfully, I think Knickers would rather be that than the heir sometimes. I’m sure he thinks it looks easier, and in some ways it is, but…” He shrugged. “Everyone had expectations of Nick, or for Nick. Nobody ever had any of me. And after a while they didn’t have much interest in me, either.”

  I bit my thumbnail, unsure of what to say.

  “But Nick might have it worse,” he continued. “My biggest problem is feeling pointless, and his biggest problem is that he basically is the point, and that consumes his whole life. So if I can muck about with outrageous people and give Dick something else to fume about, I’ll do it.”

  “Only you could get away with turning serial dating into a selfless act,” I teased. “But I hate that you feel so superfluous. Does Lacey honestly feel that way, too? Do I treat her like that?”

  “No,” Freddie said firmly. “Sometimes it’s hard not to feel like the other one, that’s all. But I probably shouldn’t be speaking for her. Just give her time to find her own footing.”

  “Well, since we are speaking for her,” I said, gesturing at him with my fork, “she’d kill me for saying this, but I think she feels a connection that may not be there for you, and if it’s not, I’m scared she’s going to get really hurt.”

  “I know. I don’t want that,” he said sheepishly. “I’ve been selfish about it, because she’s hard to give up. She’s clever, and she’s fun. Even if her sister is a bit of an ogress.” He drummed his fingers. “Perhaps in another life, she’d be it for me, but in this one it’s not very realistic.”

  “It could be,” I said. “Your roadblock is gone, remember.”

  “Aha, but I think we both know that even if you’re not quite in Nick’s life, you’re never actually gone from it, either,” Freddie said.

  We lapsed into our thoughts, filling the air with the clattering of our silverware. I felt guilty for talking about Lacey with him, but I couldn’t keep turning a blind eye to how much she hoped for more and how little Freddie thought he could give it.

  “This lunch took a somber turn,” he said. “I
thought we were going to trade juicy personal gossip.”

  “That would have been a lot more interesting for you six months ago.”

  “Still, let’s give it a whack,” he said. “I’ll go first. Nigel got chucked out of St. Andrews. He had cocaine in his room.”

  “Damn. Awful Julian must be so proud,” I said. “My turn. Gaz and Cilla hooked up the night he punched Nick.”

  “Finally!” Freddie crowed. “Nick didn’t bloody tell me, the bastard. I wonder if I won the pool. Right, let’s see. Barnes had a girlfriend for about twenty minutes and it made him into an entirely different and wonderful person.”

  “I can’t imagine a pleasant Barnes,” I said.

  “He sang a lot of show tunes,” Freddie said. “He’s quite a good Sally Bowles, it turns out. You’re up. With one about you this time, please.”

  “Yours weren’t about you, either!”

  Freddie frowned. “If I must. Persimmon slept with Tony after I wouldn’t let her plan a birthday party for me,” he said.

  “My last boyfriend had a third nipple.”

  “My new girlfriend’s name is Santa.”

  I cackled so loudly that our ancient waiter had to sit down and collect himself at a nearby table—which already had three diners at it.

  “You made that up!” I accused him.

  “It’s deadly true.” He grinned smugly. “She has a large bag of toys.”

  “Well, Third Nip and I broke up because he found it erotic to suck on—”

  “No! My virgin ears!” Freddie laughed, grabbing them.

  “—my chin,” I finished. “It’s rough out there, Freddie. This is why I’m all nights in and quiet country house parties now. It’s all I can take.”

  Freddie polished off his pie. “Shows how much you know. I’ve gotten into more trouble at country house parties than anywhere else,” he said. “I take it you’re going to Cilla’s do?”

  Cilla’s sister owned a home in the countryside of Berkshire, which differed from her home in the countryside of Yorkshire by about two thousand square feet and a swimming pool. Apparently she’d refused to leave the family birthplace, so her rich husband bought them a mansion they could remodel, in the hopes of making her fall in love with it and want to live there permanently. Cilla had permission to throw a weekender there before they knocked it to rubble.