The Royal We

by Heather Cocks

  She gave the duke one final look and then replaced the photo on her table carelessly. It fell over and slipped into the crack between the nightstand and the bed. She didn’t notice.

  “What did you want to do?” she asked.

  “I thought it’d be something to do with art,” I said. “Honestly, when I met Nick, I hadn’t figured it out yet, ma’am. It felt like I had so much time.”

  “But I suppose you must want to get married,” she said.

  We both do, I remember wanting to say. I didn’t believe Richard’s implication, exactly, but I still kept hearing his words over and over again in my head: There you were, right before the clock ran out.

  “Nick is special” is what I decided to tell Eleanor. “I can’t imagine my life without him.”

  Her face brightened. “He is special. Even if he cannot complete a cryptic crossword to save his life,” she said. “He has a heart as big as the crown he’ll wear one day. You’ll do well to remember that.” She paused. “Both the heart and the crown.”

  Eleanor’s almost transactional satisfaction with my nod made me wonder what precise promise—beyond love and loyalty—my assent had just made, as she walked to the half-dozen twinkling witnesses to the deal.

  “In my time, a woman never wore a tiara before her wedding day, because it represented the crowning moment of committing oneself to another,” she said. “Traditionally, the bride wears one from her own family that day and then one from her husband’s thereafter, to signify her transference. But…” She twitched her hands slightly, as if to say, No such luck here. “It is also custom for the Queen to provide something borrowed, so without an ancestral diadem of your own, that is what I shall offer. Sit down at my dressing table and we’ll see which flatters you best. If none of them suits…”

  Her voice trailed off, implying that if none of them suited, I would damn well sit there until one of them did. But there was no fear of that. These tiaras sparkled in the light of that cloudy London day, glorious even to a girl who once called her Cubs hat her crown.

  “I’m extremely touched, Your Majesty,” I said, my hand fluttering to my heart in a way that actually did feel a little Scarlett O’Hara. Young Bex would’ve punched me in the arm if I could have gone back in time and told her she’d one day let the Queen plonk tiaras onto her half-fake hair, at a brass-and-glass dressing table next to a brush with a hairball brewing that was as majestic as its source.

  “This one is called the Cambridge Lover’s Knot,” Eleanor said as she set one on my head. It was a stunning array of nineteen diamond arches, each bearing a swinging oblong pearl, and it was oppressively heavy. “I earmarked it for Emma, but it gave her an awful headache and it’s terribly noisy, so she only ever wore it in her official portrait.”

  “Oxford might be ticked off if I’m endorsing anything named Cambridge,” I said, intending it as joke.

  Eleanor frowned. “Quite right,” she said. “And with you wearing her ring, I suspect that might be too much Emma, don’t you agree?”

  I certainly did (although I suspect it wouldn’t have mattered either way). No bride wants to glide toward her beloved dressed as his mother.

  The second option was called the Surrey Fringe, a narrow piece of scrollwork more commonly turned upside down and worn as a necklace—and rightly, because we quickly assessed that it made my head looked like one end of a Christmas cracker. The third was an art deco jeweled floral wreath, best worn across the forehead, but which made me look like an unhinged Great Gatsby mega-fan, and the fourth barely stayed on my head for five seconds. It was the Girls of the Isles tiara—first given to Georgina Lyons-Bowes by a national women’s group—and it was Eleanor’s personal favorite.

  “I would never actually let you wear this one,” Eleanor said, replacing it on the bed with 60 percent more care than she showed the others. “I just thought you’d find it amusing to look like our money for a moment.”

  Number five was a princessy circlet of tall diamond curlicues. “This belonged to my sister,” Eleanor said. “It fell off and got stuck in the loo at my coronation. They had to use forceps to retrieve it.” I must have looked startled, because she added, “I believe we’ve had it cleaned.”

  The Loo Tiara was too large on me (and, I privately feared, tempting fate). The Queen removed it gently and replaced it with the simplest of the six.

  “I suspect I’ve saved the best for last,” she said.

  This one was still chock full of diamonds, but more subtly—very streamlined, no dangling bits, nothing imposing about its height. If a tiara may be deemed sporty, this was the sportiest, and like the dress I’d chosen, it suited me to a tee.

  The Queen smiled, but slowly, which was her way—like she wanted you on tenterhooks for as long as humanly possible.

  “I shall inform Marj,” she said.

  Instead, she picked up her brush, hairball included, and began fussing with my extensions. Sometimes I wish that I could reassure my hair’s original owner that it’s being well looked after, and, in fact, getting the royal treatment in every way.

  “It must be so challenging for you to have one foot here and one foot in America,” the Queen said. “The United Kingdom and the United States have been brilliant allies, of course. I have visited five times, and met five different presidents. You’re such an ebullient people.”

  “Thank you,” I carefully replied, despite feeling she didn’t wholly mean it as a compliment. “Both countries have been wonderful homes to me.”

  “One rarely ends up with one’s first love, does one?” she mused. “We grow up, we change, we mature. We find new love.” She fluffed my hair. “And sometimes one must make sacrifices for such love. Nicholas loves his country, and he will give himself up to it someday entirely, as I have. And you, of course, are giving yourself to him. Imagine how meaningful it might be to give yourself to his kingdom as well.”

  “You mean, by becoming a British citizen?” Every conversation with Eleanor was like an oral examination.

  “I was simply ruminating on the complexities of the situation,” Eleanor said, with a tug of the brush that verged on scary. “If you were marrying Freddie, a dual citizenship would be the cleanest approach. But Freddie does not share Nicholas’s destiny. It is a conundrum.”

  It dawned on me right then what she meant.

  “I have to give up my American citizenship,” I said slowly.

  “What an interesting suggestion,” Eleanor said. She set down her brush and put her hands on my shoulders. “It would make a lovely wedding gift to Nicholas and Great Britain. I will be long gone when the time comes for you to be his queen consort, but indubitably I would rest easy in my grave if there were no confusion about where your loyalties lie.”

  I was flummoxed. Nick had never said a word to me about whether my Americanness was a stumbling block, but maybe the reason it wasn’t a stumbling block that was he knew his grandmother would bulldoze it out of the way.

  Eleanor snatched the tiara from my head and reached for a folder I hadn’t noticed.

  “I happen to have the paperwork here,” she said. “I’m very touched you should want to consider such a momentous decision, but you must think it through. We wouldn’t want you to rush into anything, would we?”

  “No, we would not,” I said, sounding hollow even to my own ears.

  “Your clothes will be in the chamber across the hall. Murray will escort you back to your mother when you are dressed,” she said, gesturing for me to leave.

  Dazed, I bobbed into a curtsy, gathered my skirts, and exited the room, at which point Murray—eyes tactfully averted from my strange state of semi-undress—ushered me into another one that was identical except for its paint job and personal effects. When he closed the door, I sat hard into a stuffed peach armchair and gazed at the folder in my hands with blurring eyes. There, alone, the memory of Eleanor’s hands pressing on my shoulders as she told me she could only die happy if I kicked the United States to the curb, I felt like a
pawn lured into checkmate.

  Chapter Seven

  I did not sign anything. Nor did I discuss it with anyone. Instead, the paperwork burned a hole on my table until I buried it under magazines and abandoned cryptic crosswords. I hadn’t lived in the States for years, but renouncing my claim to it—and its claim to me—seemed tantamount to ripping myself in half. This was a test I could not pass: If I gave in, I displayed obedience, but zero mettle. My nationality was the only piece of me the Palace hadn’t reshaped into something else, and I didn’t want to let it go; though I knew Eleanor would not be ignored, I hoped that if I could just stall until Nick came home, he could help me protect myself.

  The rest of the year became a confining, isolating waiting game. Marj gave no indication of when I’d get to come off the bench again, for Paint Britain or anything else. Clive was working long hours, still unable to get much career traction beyond his fluffy role at a paper no one read (I was beginning to suspect he wasn’t very good at his job, but admired that he doggedly pursued it anyway). My mother was mostly in Iowa running Coucherator, Inc., at which she’d turned out to be an extremely dab hand. Joss wanted nothing to do with me. Cilla was trying to get her wedding off the docket before the final run-up to mine, which made me feel so guilty that I refused to lean on her, and in fact made her draw a few lines to protect her private life from her professional one. Gaz, usually religious with the diet-busting baked goods, was taking on extra work to pay for a May honeymoon to Bora Bora, and even Freddie was too busy for a box of wine and Big Brother.

  “Sorry, Killer,” he’d say. “I convinced Prince Dick that Great Ormond Street Hospital would accept me as a weak alternative to Knickers. I have to go snuggle some babies.”

  Or, “Bad luck, Bex, I’m out tonight—the Imperial War Museum asked me to open its RAF exhibit. Father’s jaw dropped so far you could’ve stuffed in a pheasant.” I could hear the grin. “I was tempted.”

  I heard the pride underneath his jokes; I knew how much he wanted to find a place in the Lyons den, as something other than the professional scalawag he’d fashioned himself. But I missed him. I missed the whole gang. Most people would handle that by joining a book club, or playing in a recreational sports league, but that is forbidden to me. So I stayed home and shopped online with the pseudonymous credit card I’d been issued—no one will bat an eyelash if a Ms. Prudence Cattermole orders too much saucy lingerie for her sailor fiancé’s homecoming—and crumbled in private. By day, I had Marj feeding me carrots and water like a prize Thoroughbred; by night, where I once consumed booze to get over missing Nick, I now devoured the Internet. The American’t analyzed my level of clavicle protrusion and the caloric value of my shopping cart, whenever Marj granted me passage to the supermarket. That nasty old crumpet Xandra Deane suggested that the ten pounds I’d shaved off was setting an outrageously poor example for girls all over the world (which was mostly frustrating because I privately agreed, and cheated on my diet at every opportunity), and The Royal Flush alleged I am a lifelong anorexic.

  In fact, The Flush was giving Xandra stiff competition as my most persistently negative coverage. At first it mostly published bits and pieces with a whiff of truth, but as its traffic and reputation grew, so did its vitriol. That distaste swelled slowly, like a balloon, and then burst all over my birthday.

  Lacey’s and my Parting Shot that year consisted not of a midnight toast, but an exchange of obligatory, terse texts. That was bad enough. But the frosty November morning I officially turned twenty-seven, I woke up—still both lonely for my sister and upset with her—to find that The Royal Flush had gift-wrapped me something truly insidious: an investigative piece quoting several of Nick’s alleged conquests from the Dark Period casting what can only politely be called aspersions on the solidity of our love.

  One billionaire mogul’s daughter says that although he knew she was in a relationship at the time, the Prince still begged to rekindle their youthful romance. “He told me every day I was his dream girl, and that he always assumed we’d find our way back to each other,” she says. “But I’ve seen that life, and no, thank you. I don’t want to be a commodity. He was devastated.”

  I’d have bet money the next was Ceres Whitehall de Villency:

  “Nobody wants the job,” agrees another aristocratic blonde, whom Nicholas squired both before and after Porter. “He’s handsome, and he’s nice, and attentive. He’d want to cuddle in bed, and talk about a future with me as his queen. But I couldn’t do it. I want to be free. I’m not a dowdy-heels-and-hemlines girl, and I’m not the kind of doormat he’ll need at his beck and call. If you ask me, he’s not just chosen the safe bet, he’s chosen the only bet.”

  Only India Bolingbroke went on the record, possibly because she was still cranky about losing out on both Nick and whatever she had with Richard.

  “I don’t doubt Nicky thinks he wants to marry her,” says the Prince’s cuckolded ex. “But he’s wanted to marry a lot of us. His father set him an ultimatum, you see, and she’s just the only person who’d say yes. It’s terribly awkward for them, and everyone, really. Perhaps that’s why he’s so committed to the Navy. Being at sea all the time makes it easier to settle.”

  This was The Flush’s splashiest piece yet, and its cruelest. It got a lot of attention, and worse, traction; almost overnight, the website that hated me the most became uncomfortably high-profile. Alone in my flat, I went from dismissing the story as rubbish, to being unnerved that it echoed a sentiment Bea had expressed at Klosters, to complete paranoia. By the time Gaz and Cilla’s wedding arrived, my despair had plumbed new depths, and I was drowning.

  * * *

  Cilla had always wanted an outdoor wedding, so she made it happen even in December in England—partly through sheer force of will, but also aided by Lady Bollocks, who lent them her family’s sprawling seven-million-pound Richmond estate and helped procure a surfeit of heat lamps and outdoor fireplaces. I think I smiled my first genuine grin in weeks when I saw them blazing merrily in the back garden.

  “I watched you get out of that car,” Lady Bollocks said, coming from behind me and handing me a ginger-infused cocktail. “Full marks.”

  My Lady Training was also paying off in other ways. Donna had been coaching me on styling myself occasionally, and it finally clicked for me when I started to think about it like costuming a character. Here, I wasn’t Bex; I was Rebecca, Artfully Uncontroversial Royal Fiancée Attending the Wedding of Old Friends. Donna had signed off proudly when I’d selected a delicately patterned silver day dress, with a neatly belted dove-gray wool coat, and—in an effort to be a real grown-up—four-inch heels.

  “Thank you, but we have got to talk about the British and their sloped gravel driveways,” I said. “It’s like a trap. It was all I could do not to wipe out in these suckers.”

  “We like a challenge,” Bea said airily. “Besides, it’s marvelous for your calves.”

  I half snorted—I’m working on it—and then spotted Gemma, already seated on the bride’s side of the aisle.

  “I assume we’re sitting over there?” I asked.

  “Yes, and I have no further comment on that subject,” Bea said.

  “Bea, we’re in modern times now,” I said. “People will be happy for you two.”

  She just harrumphed, which is not something I’d ever heard before, and which sounds exactly like it is spelled.

  “Bex! At last, you’ve come out of hiding,” Clive said, strolling up with Paddington on his arm. “How is the wedding planning, or is it all terribly top secret?”

  “What wedding?” I joked, rather than come up with a smoothly varnished lie.

  “Isn’t this the most glorious occasion?” Paddington said, spreading her arms wide and flashing an inordinate amount of side-boob in her slouchy tank dress. “The sacred union of two perfectly matched souls is just so fucking moving.”

  “Pudge,” Bea hissed. “Language. This is a wedding. There is a minister here.”

  “Word
s only have the power we give them, Beatrix,” Pudge said. “Open your spirit.”

  I could tell Bea wanted to inform Pudge exactly where she could stick her spirit, but the ushers began nudging us to our seats. Paddington glided with Clive over toward Joss, who clearly had not taken my advice to give herself a mental break. She was clad in a blue chiffon monstrosity with I do scribbled over and over, like a pattern, and her long, black, sleek hair evoked Pudge’s.

  “We’re well shot of Joss, I think,” Bea murmured, narrowing her eyes. “They make such a peculiar threesome.”

  The din settled into an excited thrum as Gaz took his place at the altar under a thatched canopy bedecked in holly and ivy and poinsettias. Freddie stood in for Nick as best man, both of them dapper in suits and ties (Gaz nixed morning dress because he believes top hats don’t flatter his neck). Penelope Eight-Names, clutching Maxwell Something-Something’s hand, caught my eye and pointed to her massively pregnant belly as if to say, ta-da. I smiled politely back at her, then turned back in time to see Freddie pretending to look stern and mouthing, Pay attention, Killer.

  Cilla wore her grandmother’s gown and a family-heirloom veil pinned to her glorious auburn hair, and looked so transcendent she might as well have been six feet tall. Gaz started weeping the moment she came out, and did not stop—not when the officiant asked if anyone objected and Freddie raised his hand, not even when they got to the bit Gaz himself put in the vows as a joke (“in sickness and in health, in serif and in sans”). They could not stop looking at each other, love and joy written on their faces like words on the pages of a book. When Cilla’s I will and Gaz’s Too bloody right I will rang out clear and pure, Gaz pulled her into an elated if rather salty kiss, and we all teared up, even Lady Bollocks. I knew I’d been lucky to witness their contentiously adoring courtship, not to mention their proposal, and now the beginning of their future. As much as I thought I could not live without Nick, Cilla and Gaz were irreplaceable family to me, too. I poured as much of this nostalgia as possible into the hug I gave Cilla after the ceremony.