The Royal We

by Heather Cocks

  “Mum,” he said, walking over and kissing her on the cheek. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

  Emma’s eyes flicked up to Nick, expressionless, and then over to me.

  “Nice day for a ride, Agatha,” she said, then turned back to the waves lashing the rocks.

  The last time I’d laid eyes on Emma had been in a photo of her at about twenty-five. Her sandy hair had been short and feathered, a style that was on the way out but which had no easy exit door; she wore it now in a pixie overdue for a trim. She was a year away from fifty, but the look in her eyes belonged to someone much older—and yet her skin seemed ageless, as if the houses that confined her had also preserved her. I’ve always known Nick resembles his mother, but it wasn’t until I saw them in the same room that I realized how strong an echo he is. Every time Richard looked at his son over the years, he surely saw Emma looking back at him.

  I followed Nick’s example and simply chatted with Emma, or really around her. We talked about everything from my sister and mother, to Freddie, to whether Nigel was salvageable as a human being and how lucky Edwin and Elizabeth were to get away with their outrageous preemie lie. Occasionally, Emma would flit about the room, moving a book, playing a note or two on the piano, or jotting down something at the rolltop escritoire. When that happened, Nick would wait patiently, never demanding any more than she could give, and she’d inevitably drift back to him. And that’s where she spent most of the hours we were there: sitting, possibly listening, Nick making sure to squeeze her hand or rub it with his thumbs every five minutes or so. She never said anything else to me; she only absently asked if Nick remembered to feed the cat they didn’t own, and, in a mercurial moment, barked whether “that bitch Pansy Smythe” had been on the phone with the Evening Standard. It was the whole smorgasbord Nick had described.

  I did want them to have some private time, so when Nick took her for a walk by the sea, I ducked into the adjacent sunroom to wait. Three walls were windows, and the fourth was covered with framed family snapshots, as if surrounding Emma with where she came from might bring her back to who she was. There was chubby toddler Nick, holding baby Freddie; a fading Polaroid of teenage Richard and Agatha at what looked like Ascot; Nick and Freddie with Richard on Freddie’s first day at Eton; and a photo that I knew was from Nick’s twentieth birthday trip to Mustique, because I spied a bandaged Gaz lurking in the background (he’d legendarily been bitten by a turtle that he described as “a dynamic half-shark”). There was an entire life on that wall, so much of it stolen from Emma before she could live it.

  “Oh, good, I’ve found you,” Lesley said, poking her head into the room. “Can you have His Highness return this to his father? Usually he makes sure to collect them all but this one had fallen on the floor.”

  She handed me a piece of paper, and then left as fast as she’d come. I turned it around in my hands, in wonderment. It was—or would be, if Richard ever finished it—a stunning watercolor of Emma as she faced out the window, a wisp of a smile playing on her face in a way I’d often seen on Nick’s. She had been rendered more present than she actually was, as if Richard was imagining her in that other life, where she’d made other choices. The detail with which he’d captured the lines of her face and the way she propped up her chin on her palm…there were feelings in every brush stroke. Maybe this was the one way he felt he could express them. When Nick came back from his walk, I wordlessly handed the painting to him.

  “Crikey,” was all he said.

  “This isn’t the work of someone who doesn’t care,” I said. “For whatever that’s worth. But I think it should be worth quite a lot.”

  He put down the paper and slid his hands around my waist. “You are worth quite a lot,” he said. “And now that I’m going to live in the open where you’re concerned, I want to do it with everything. Even Mum. It’s time. It’s decades past time.”

  Just saying that out loud seemed to release him from an invisible grip.

  “I thought I couldn’t face it. But now I know that I was just waiting for the right person to face it with,” he explained. “I always thought the press was her worst enemy, but really, it was a perfect storm of the wrong husband, the wrong support system, the wrong life.”

  He backed away a step. “And I will not be the wrong husband, nor the wrong support system, nor will I give you the wrong life.”

  My head got very light as he dropped to one knee.

  “I always told myself this could wait until I was older,” Nick said with a nervous, crooked smile. “But it’s stupid to pretend for another day that this isn’t it for me. I love you, Bex. My soul married yours that first night at Windsor, and while I’ll be the king of this country someday, every day I will be your servant.”

  And then he fished a ring box out of his pocket.

  A tear slid down my cheek as he opened it to reveal a flamboyantly plastic affair, with a red stone whittled faintly into a heart shape and clamped atop a muted olive-gold band.

  “It’s from the first Cracker Jack box we ate in Oxford,” he said. “Somehow I ended up with it. I thought…I thought your father would approve.”

  “He does,” I said thickly. “Wherever he is.”

  “There would be a real ring eventually, of course,” he said, slipping the cartoonish bauble on my finger. It fit horribly. It was perfect. “But if you’ll kindly agree to marry me, I will drive us home so fast to celebrate that Popeye will have to bribe some policemen. Please, love. Say yes.”

  Nick looked up at me, his eyes wet with more love than I ever thought I would be allotted in this lifetime.

  It was the easiest answer I have ever given.

  He wrapped me in his arms, and time was briefly lost to us as we shared, if not the most passionate kiss of the weekend, undoubtedly the sweetest. And then we joined hands, wordlessly, and walked out into the sun, blithely unaware that there could ever again be darkness.

  Part Four

  Autumn 2013

  “To be a king and wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it than it is pleasant to them that bear it.”

  —Queen Elizabeth, 1601

  Chapter One

  The Whispering Espresso paint job in Marj’s Clarence House office was still fresh when we returned from Cornwall, faint fumes lingering stubbornly underneath the scent of her Woods of Windsor potpourri. And that’s almost the last we saw of her new walls: In the ensuing months, they slowly vanished behind a garish collage of color-coded notecards, thumbtacked lists of stylists and waxers and trainers and facialists with a reputation for discretion, and a note from Freddie telling her, and I quote, sod it all and go have a shag, which I doubt Marj even noticed, much less did. And at the center of the chaos was a meticulous timeline plotting the days between Nick’s and my private betrothal straight through to a date underlined, starred, and circled in red. To most of the world, it was Christmas. To Marj, it was E-Day.

  Every moment leading up to the big announcement—that the United Kingdom’s most eligible bachelor (and Number Two on Vanity Fair’s “World’s Dishiest Nicks” list) was off the market—was choreographed as tightly as a ballet. I had to be slid carefully back into public view, with purpose but not presumption; it was too soon for me to pop up at official events, but neither could Nick haul up from his Naval base just to push a shopping cart with me, nor lie out in Kensington Gardens feeding me cheese. Because Marj was a puppet master par excellence, she found the perfect solution. Polo matches carried the right amount of high-class cachet, while still being an ostensibly platonic place for me to be seen socializing anew with the Brothers Wales. So Nick stocked up on antihistamine, and I loaded up on tweedy blazers and horsy boots.

  “Now, Bex, Knickers’ll need nurturing through this,” Freddie said over pints the night before Operation Polo began. “The last time a great hairy hooved beast thundered toward him, he cried.”

  “From the dander,” Nick said.

  Freddie cupped his ear. “The d
anger, you say?”

  “Well, now that you mention it,” Nick said. “That same day, some bloody great pillock whacked my leg with a polo mallet to see if I felt it. I had a bruise for weeks.”

  “Oh, mortal danger, then,” I said.

  “He must really love you, Killer,” Freddie said.

  “Can’t think why at the moment,” Nick grumbled, but he squeezed my hand.

  Marj let Clive print a rumor in the Recorder that I would be attending Nick’s first match, as a thank-you for his discretion regarding Richard and India. Smelling his big break, he broke up with Davinia—“a good investigative reporter must be unencumbered”—broke the story, and broke the proverbial seal. The game was afoot. For three months I was documented as Nick’s loyal yet restrained public supporter. I gave him chaste hellos; I pet his horse, Elton John, so named because he’d lost a bet with Freddie; and I chuckled with Bea and Gemma, helping carefully rebrand the latter as Nick’s unthreatening chum. The gossip kindling piled up all summer, and in the fall, Marj dropped in the match: Nick and I arrived together at the union of recent Strictly Come Dancing runner-up Penelope Six-Names and Maxwell, son of Baron Something-Something.

  Ostensibly, we went as old Oxford chums of Penelope’s, but really, it was the only sufficiently upmarket society wedding on the docket. (Six-Names was beside herself; I think she was more excited that Nick was attending her wedding than she was about attending it herself.) I wore a dusty rose suit with my very first fascinator, a soaring pink and gold confection, and it was so hard to wrangle that I kept knocking it asunder on the car door, or inadvertently poking Nick in the face. We had to hustle me out of the car around a hidden corner.

  “Fascinators are impossible,” I said, wiggling it back in place before we walked into the paparazzi’s eyeline. “I hope I didn’t scar you for life. Six-Names would never get over it if her wedding ruined your face.”

  “That can’t be right,” Nick said.

  “It’s true. I think I scratched you.” I checked my reflection in the car’s glossy exterior. “Oh, man. I actually bent it.”

  “No. Her name,” he said. “She’s Penelope Eight-Names, now, isn’t she?”

  I paused. “I was going to guess Penelope Six-Names Something-Something.”

  “We’ll have to consult Gran on what’s more proper,” he said. “I’d hate to get it wrong on our wedding invitations.”

  The photo of us laughing together on our walk up the hill to the church was as good as gold. PLACE YOUR BEX, ordered the Mirror; the Mail’s Xandra Deane went with DAMN YANKEE. I’d been allowed to tell my mother, Lacey, and our closest friends that a betrothal was imminent, as much to employ their aid as anything, but I didn’t let on that Nick had already asked and been accepted. With our lives becoming public fodder, I wanted one secret that belonged only to us, and for similar reasons, Nick had insisted that the presentation of a ring—one that didn’t come out of a box of American snack food—should unfurl without first being scripted by Marj. And to that end, he’d been thoroughly irritating. He fished through his pocket during pregnant conversational pauses. He hid things in his clenched fist, only to reveal that they were coins or paper clips or, once, a dead bug. He even pulled a jewelry box from under his pillow one morning, then opened it to reveal his favorite cufflinks with a bemused, “How did those get there?”

  By the time my birthday rolled around, Nick had told me very seriously that Marj realized a formal proposal was impractical until after his Navy deployment, and that she had Eleanor’s authorization to push E-Day to the following year. So I thought nothing of it when he presented me with a large rectangular box swathed three times over in a crumply surplus of Thomas the Tank Engine paper. (As with every guy I’ve ever known, including my father, Nick is the worst at wrapping presents.) I ripped off the blue bow and stuck it to my forehead, then tore into the gift and laughed when it turned out to be a dented Cracker Jack box.

  “Yes!” I crowed. “I just finished my last one. How did you know?”

  I blithely pulled open the top, which I do remember thinking had been glued extra messily by the assembly line, and shared a few handfuls before I fished around for my toy.

  “Aha!” I brandished a ring. “Man, it’s heavier than the usual cheap crap.”

  Nick’s lip twitched. “I’ll be sure to give Gran your glowing review.”

  It was in that second that I actually looked at the ring. I had seen it before. The whole world had, on the finger of a certain prince’s mother, and I nearly dropped it when I realized I was holding something very old, very significant, and very, very not cheap.

  “Holy shit” was my regal reaction.

  “Happy birthday,” Nick said proudly.

  The twelve-carat Lyons Emerald was a flawless, classically square stone, ringed twice with tiny diamonds and set in antique Welsh gold. It originally belonged to Queen Victoria II, and when her daughter Princess Mary inherited it, she stuffed it in a drawer because she insisted baubles like that were for shallow, selfish, silly little girls, to which her sister-in-law Marta allegedly retorted, “If you’d been a little sillier and a little more shallow, you might not die a virgin.” (Richard did not fall far from his grandmother’s tree.) This feud frothed until Mary did die at age seventy-two, virginity status unknown, while watching the competitive sheepdog trial show One Man and His Dog—at which point the ring went to Eleanor, who gave it to her son, who slipped it onto the finger of one Lady Emma Somers. I have never been much for jewelry, beyond my flag pin and diamond pendant from Nick, but even I always thought the Lyons Emerald was magnificent. And though I hated to admit it, for fear of sounding like the avaricious Ivy League climber I’d been reputed to be, I loved the sight of it sparkling at the end of my arm.

  I must have given Nick quite a look, because he jumped out of his seat. “Though it pains me to say this, you are going to have to hold that thought,” he said, opening the front door.

  “Goodness, you’re punctual,” said my mother, whom I’d thought was in Iowa, as she breezed inside holding a cake box. “It is Bex we’re talking about here.”

  Lacey ran in after her, squealing and wielding Champagne, and Nick suddenly found himself in the middle of a high-volume group hug as the three of us wept and hugged and cooed over my ring—our joy mixed with regret for the thing that none of us wanted to say out loud, which was the unfairness of Dad not being there to see it, too.

  The Lyons Emerald was only on my finger until the following day, after our official engagement shoot, at which point it went back into safekeeping until E-Day arrived. The photographer, a distinguished sir named Alistair Luddington, had snapped all the royal portraits of recent history, including the famous Richard and Emma photo outside Balmoral in which she delights at his kilt misbehaving in the wind. The theatrically cranky Sir Alistair would have been horrified if he’d realized my mother hovered behind him the entire time he worked, making manic smiley faces as if I were four and we were in the Sears Portrait Studio, and he was prone to byzantine, contradictory advice every time Nick’s pose got as stiff as the breeze that nearly stole Richard’s mystery.

  “If that’s your best move, you have no hope of ever producing an heir,” he sighed as we tried to cuddle naturally in a complicated setup that was, of course, meticulously controlled merely to look natural. “I told you before. Hold her. Really take her. But gently. I want heat. But not sex. Grab her. But not hard. With love. But not lust. It could not be simpler. And for God’s sake, don’t block that ring.”

  “Well, if that’s all,” Nick had said, planting my bejeweled hand firmly on his backside.

  Alistair’s camera clicked. “One for Her Majesty’s pianoforte,” he said.

  My newly hired makeup specialist, a fellow American named Kira with a divine cloud of an afro, insisted on putting a microfiber cloth over my hand so she wouldn’t cloud the ring with powder residue. She’d converted a corner of the Clarence House drawing room into Bex Central, likewise draping the antiques
in towels—one of them had a shark on it, so incongruous with the portrait of Arthur I in plump repose—and pulled me away every ten minutes to thwack my face with a giant brush, spritz my flyaways, and apply another layer of the coat of varnish I have come to realize will now be in place almost all the time.

  During our first break, Lacey wandered over to ogle the array of cosmetics, and reached for a bold orange-red lipstick that must have been there by accident, because Eleanor would cry harlot if it ever touched my mouth (it is all neutral glosses for me now).

  “Hands off, Lacey,” Kira said politely.

  “I wasn’t going to keep it,” Lacey said, chastened. “Your hair is crazy shiny, Bex. Is that the new conditioner I got you?”

  “Hell no,” Kira said. “It’s a mask from Leonor Greyl. She’s in the big leagues now.”

  “Your stuff smells way better,” I whispered when Kira bent over to dig in her massive bag. Lacey grinned, then reached out to flick a lock of hair behind my shoulder.

  “I said no touching,” Kira said, still pleasant, emerging with a handful of Q-tips. “If the Palace doesn’t like my art, then I lose my work visa, and believe me, I do not want to go back to doing teen soaps in Wilmington.”

  Lacey waved off my apologetic face, but she was clearly disappointed. When we’d first come back after Dad’s funeral, we’d done a pretty good job keeping each other almost as close as we had in Iowa. For the first month or two, we’d even slept over at each other’s places a few times. It was strange having the minutiae of our day-to-day lives feel so similar after such a huge catastrophic change—like we had to stop and remind ourselves every day what was missing—and we understood that struggle in each other without having to say it out loud. But then the slow burn of going public had begun. The run-up to E-Day meant Marj was calling me to Clarence House on a moment’s notice, and because she’d told me repeatedly, in her words, rain checks are not on my menu, this had resulted in several incidents of plans being postponed or canceled, until Lacey and I had fallen out of one another’s loops.