by Kate Johnson
“Uh, just coffee,” he said, and Eliza gave him a suspicious look but set about making some in a French press.
“When we stayed in DC there were pancakes on the menu,” she said, fiddling with the grounds. “With syrup and bacon. Drina had some and pretended she liked it.”
“What’s wrong with maple syrup and bacon?”
Eliza made a gruesome face over her shoulder. “It sounds like the weirdest pregnancy craving,” she said, apparently without thinking, and then went rigid.
“Hey,” he said, but she seemed to shake herself and prattled on determinedly.
“Or there were waffles, I think, sweet ones which confused Mummy, she likes potato waffles. Divided by a common language, aren’t we? Would you like me to see if I can make some pancake batter? I’m sure if I Google it won’t be hard, or maybe Cook has a recipe but I don’t want to—”
He touched her arm. She was stiff and trembling a little. Xavier thought about all the people he’d seen around the house and realised they’d never be able to talk without being overheard.
“Coffee is fine,” he said gently. “Go sit down. I’ll make myself some eggs.”
She did, toying with her juice glass and not looking at him.
“Hey, maybe you could show me around the house,” he said as he inspected some eggs, sitting inside a hen-shaped wire basket. They were speckled and brown, and one still had a feather stuck to it. He wondered if there were chickens kept amongst the horses and hounds.
“Are these, uh,” he began, wanting to ask why they weren’t a sanitary white and refrigerated, and if Eliza and her unborn child were at risk of salmonella, without trying to sound rude. “Are they organic?”
“I suppose so, they came from the Home Farm. Why, Detective, are you on a health kick?”
“Uh, no. They’re just…” brown.
“Oh, of course, eggs are white in America, aren’t they? The salmonella thing? I didn’t know about this until Daddy hosted a trade delegation a while ago. We don’t have salmonella. The chickens are vaccinated. The eggs are perfectly safe.”
Xavier glanced at Eliza who gave him an encouraging smile.
“I’ll eat one if you like?” she said.
“No, sure, I believe you.” He cracked one, and the yolk was huge and yellow. It looked fine. It looked better than fine.
“We don’t have rabies either. Benefits of an island nation, I suppose.”
No salmonella, no rabies, no guns. Xavier could hear Perez’s voice in his head telling him he’d be bored to death here.
“Now, what were we talking about?” She seemed to need to keep up a stream of chatter, a habit she thankfully hadn’t had on the island. But then again, there had been no staff listening in on the island, wondering what they might be getting up to in the silences. “Oh yes, you wanted a tour of the house?”
Xavier lifted the lid of a small Victorian-looking dish with ‘butter’ printed on it, and found a creamy pat of the stuff, probably also from the Home Farm. He sliced some into the pan. “At least, the parts of it not off-limits to visitors.”
“That would be Mummy’s offices.” Eliza waved a hand vaguely off to her left. “She’s patron of over two hundred charities. It’s the most endless round of paperwork.” She tapped her nails on the table. “We could go for a walk in the grounds. Go and see the horses. Oh, I meant to ask, are you allergic?”
“Only to strawberries.”
“Not to cats or dogs or horses? Oh good. Place is full of them.”
She was doing that thing he’d noticed her mother and sister doing last night, talking without opening her mouth much. It made her accent even plummier. He wondered if it was a Royal thing, so they didn’t have to breathe in the germs of the proletariat.
He ate his eggs, while Eliza talked nervously about nothing at all, and fiddled with her juice glass. “Aren’t you hungry?”
She shook her head, lips tight, looking a bit nauseous. Right. “I’ve already eaten,” she said, which was probably a lie.
She perked up when the food had been dispensed with, and showed him around the house, which was bigger than he’d even realised. Three floors, plus cellars no one really seemed to know what to do with. One of them was filled with dusty bottles of wine, “which no one will ever drink, they’re too valuable.”
“The house is Elizabethan, or at least the bulk of it is. The style is called a prodigy house. It was built to show off, basically, and attract the patronage of the Queen…”
There were day rooms and morning rooms but no evening rooms, a blue room that was actually yellow, a drawing room in which no one drew, a conservatory that could have housed a cathedral, and endless sculptures and paintings.
“That’s the first Earl of Brakefield. He was given the house by Charles II after the Civil War. Ours, not yours. It’s his coat of arms you can see everywhere, with the boars and caltrops. There’s quite a splendid one in one of the guest bathrooms upstairs.”
Sure, why not have a coat of arms in a bathroom? Xavier studied the dark old painting of a man with a ludicrous set of clothes and an even sillier wig. “When was your Civil War?”
“1640s. The king had his head cut off,” she added matter-of-factly.
“One of your ancestors had his head cut off?”
“Well, technically he wasn’t my ancestor, the line died out, but yes, quite a few of them have been murdered in gruesome ways. Henry VIII had a habit of beheading his wives. We won’t go into what was done to the body of Richard III after he died. And there was one king who was reportedly killed by having a red hot poker shoved up his backside.”
“Jesus!”
“Yes. We’ve been quite a bloodthirsty lot,” Eliza said. “Clodagh says that’s how one gained power in the old days. At the point of a sword. You had to be the biggest, meanest bastard there was, and fight off all challengers. I suppose we’ve all calmed down a bit now,” she added vaguely as she meandered on towards another ornately-framed painting.
Calmed down a bit. Yes, here she was in her nice clothes with her pretty hair, but he’d seen her on that island, leaping off into black water, bandaging wounds with leaves and hacking at coconuts with a machete. Those big, mean bastards in her ancestry might have been impressed.
And yet here she was talking about art. “This lady is my favourite,” she added, gazing at a dark oil of a woman in a daringly low-cut dress, her hair in clusters of ringlets like a King Charles Cavalier spaniel. The frame was fully six inches thick with gold.
“Who is she?”
“I don’t know. No one does. We know more about the dress she’s wearing than her, which I suppose is something of a metaphor for feminism these days.” Her fingers reached out to almost touch the surface of the painting. “Some people say it belonged to the daughter of a Cornish nobleman and she would have worn it to court. Some say it was the king’s sister. It’s in the Museum of Fashion in Bath these days, one of the oldest surviving complete dresses from the period. It’s made with real silver in the thread. Look at that neckline.”
“There’s certainly a lot of neckline,” said Xavier, gazing at the expanse of white flesh, and she nudged him. “I mean, yes, it’s a beautiful dress.”
“When I was a little girl I used to think I’d get married in a dress like that,” she said dreamily, then shook herself. “Which is silly, of course.”
“It isn’t,” replied Xavier. Okay, the dress had massive poufy sleeves and the accompanying hairstyle was a nightmare, but he could see how the wide, sweeping neckline and the long pointed bodice would fulfil a little girl’s princess wedding dress dream. Do princesses still dream of being princesses when they get married?
“It’s infuriating,” Eliza was saying now, matter-of-factly, “not knowing the provenance of a painting. But it’s just mentioned in an old inventory as ‘girl in silver tissue dress’ and that’s it.”
“Provenance?” She’d said it in a French way.
“Yes. Oh—it’s my job, or at least it will be i
f I’m ever allowed back to work. Researching the authenticity and provenance of paintings and other artworks. Talking to relatives, curators, experts, scientists…”
“It sounds interesting,” said Xavier politely, as they passed a member of staff who nodded politely. Gee, sure are a lot of people watching everything we do together.
“It really isn’t. I’m honestly not that bothered about History of Art, it was just something… appropriate to study at university. Non-controversial. Not too much reading. And the auction house love to say they have a princess on staff, even if I’m one of the useless ones.”
“Hey. You’re not useless.” She had one hell of a complex about this.
“Please. There’s the heir and the spare,” she said, holding her hand up high as if measuring something, “and then there’s me.” Her hand plummeted. “Even disestablishing primogeniture did nothing to aid my position. I’m the youngest of the youngest, and that’s that.”
“But you’re still fourteenth in line, I mean that’s pretty high,” he said encouragingly.
“Well,” said Eliza, “yes, but the only way I’d get any higher is if my relatives suddenly started dying. And we’ve already lost Edward.”
Edward, right. The cousin who’d died in the helicopter crash. Some distant royal from a foreign country, and now—
The Royal Family suddenly weren’t some distant celebrities, irrelevant to daily life. They were real people, and he was pretty intimately involved with one of them.
Xavier wanted to say something, but Eliza was already moving on, dragging him into an overdecorated dining room with the most enormous fireplace he’d ever seen.
“Look, here are my parents’ impaled arms. The overmantel was given as a wedding present from Uncle Frederick.”
Xavier was too busy trying to work out who Uncle Frederick might be for a moment. The Prince of—
He looked up. “Holy crap.”
The overmantel, if that was what she meant by the huge sculptural piece over the fireplace, rising the full twenty feet or so to the ceiling, consisted of a coat of arms of overwhelming complexity. There was a lion wearing a crown, and a shield wearing a crown, and unicorn wearing a crown, and then there were golden feathers and wings and helmets and a hell of a lot of claws. And crowns. Christ, the crowns.
Xavier had to take a few steps back. It was dizzying.
“Wow. That’s… there’s a lot going on there.”
“Yes. Well, that side is Mummy’s. The Royal Standard—that belongs to the monarch, whoever he or she may be, and does not change—differenced with a label, there, see? With the cross of St George? The white collar thing at the top with the red cross and the hearts,” she explained, as Xavier stared, dumbfounded. “On the right is Daddy’s half. The waves, the rising sun—most easterly county, you see—and the scallops, also differenced with a label as he was only the heir at the time of creation. You should see the full version.”
“This isn’t the full version?” he said faintly.
“No, it doesn’t have the full Suffolk arms. There’s a bull with a man’s face.”
“Sure,” Xavier said, looking around the vast room, where a polished dining table sat that would have held his entire family. “Who doesn’t want that watching them while they eat?”
On the right is Daddy’s half. The rising sun and scallops occupied the left hand side of the shield. Xavier noted the mistake, but he didn’t say anything. Eliza had quite the complex about being thought stupid; and besides, for all he knew, the Royal Family had different lefts and rights to everyone else. Why not? She’d given him strange directions last night, too.
“For two pins I think Mummy would have taken it down when the divorce came through, but it is a rather fine piece of work, and besides it’s probably load-bearing.” She peered closer at a bit of flaking gold. “I must tell her the unicorn needs touching up.”
“Why is it chained?”
Eliza shot him a look. “Always the cop,” she said. “Well, at the time heraldry was being developed, people didn’t actually know if unicorns were real. They did know they seemed pretty dangerous—well, they’ve got a ruddy great big horn on them—so they were always shown chained. It’s a funny little tick. Incidentally, those cats on the Royal Standard aren’t actually lions, they’re leopards, but somewhere along the way the spots disappeared.”
“Did those medieval artists know what leopards looked like, either?”
“I don’t expect so. Although I’m sure I recall there once having been an exotic menagerie in the Tower, so who knows? Come on, I’ll show you the rooms that were decorated for the mad king.”
She towed him off to another room, and Xavier noticed another member of staff ‘passing’.
“Look, here it is, the billiards room. It was decorated for Queen Charlotte as her sitting room, can you see the fish and water motifs? It’s nothing to do with gentlemanly pursuits, it’s from her coat of arms.”
Xavier admired the billiards table, which was protected by a cover—he recalled that there had been a fair few cats around the place as they’d toured—and had beautiful carved wooden inlays on the legs. “Is it ever used?”
“Yes, sometimes. Mummy’s quite a good player, actually. She taught me and Drina. Do you play?”
“It’s been a while.” He suddenly pictured the Princess Royal in some dive bar, taking a shot at the black.
“Maybe we could have a match.”
At that point, most of Xavier’s thoughts took a hard left turn and zoomed off in the direction of what Eliza would look like bent over the table, and he had to shake himself out of it as she said, “Come on, let’s go and see the horses. It looks like it might rain later.”
He followed her outside. She talked nonstop, mostly about the house and how this feature had been changed for that, and who designed the gardens, and how old the office wing was where Mummy had a cast of staff who assisted her with the apparently endless task of being a proper princess. “And that’s my swimming pool,” she said airily, waving at a barn conversion. Right. They probably had a pool each.
The youngest of the youngest. She’d mentioned more than once how she was a ‘useless’ princess, and he recalled that after the kidnapping story had broken, most news outlets had to keep reminding people who she was. He sure as hell hadn’t recognised her.
Would it really make so much of a difference if she married him?
And, when it came down to it, did he want to marry her?
He watched her fussing the horses in their stalls, saying hello to the staff, stooping to pet a ginger cat. Sure, he was attracted to her, but that wasn’t exactly a guarantee of lifelong happiness. He liked her, she was fun to be with and she was smart and practical. That was a much better list of qualities for a future life partner. And they’d made a baby together. That had to mean something. Didn’t it?
He remembered Marisol bitterly crying that biology wasn’t everything.
“Come and say hello to Jupiter,” Eliza said, and he obediently went forward to offer the horse the handful of hay she passed him. “He’s going to win the dressage next week, aren’t you, boy?”
Jupiter looked supremely disinterested in winning anything.
“I’ve been thinking,” Eliza said casually after dinner that evening. “How would you like to visit Cambridge?”
“Uh, sure?” said Xavier, who wondered if this was the name of another horse, or a cousin, or actually the place.
“It’s a lovely city. Some of the University buildings are spectacular. And my cousin is a student there so we could probably go in and have a look.”
“Oh. Sure.” Her cousin. So many names had been mentioned he had no idea if this one was supposed to be important or not.
“Perhaps tomorrow. I have a doctor’s appointment but we could be on our way after that.”
His gaze flew to hers, and she gave the minutest shake of her head. “A check-up to see how the scars are healing,” she added breezily. “And then perhaps a night
in Cambridge? I’ll look into hotels.”
“I’m sure you could stay with Jamie,” said the Princess Royal. “He has two guest rooms, I believe?”
Well, that was pretty pointed. “Sounds great,” said Xavier.
“Yes, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy meeting Clodagh,” said Drina. “She’s new to the family too.”
Eliza glared at her, and changed the subject. What the hell was that supposed to mean?
After he was alone in bed—Eliza having made quite the point of retiring early, and alone—he looked up this cousin Jamie online.
Ah yes. The one who’d just got married. The younger son of the Prince of Wales. Even undercover cops in South American jungles had heard about this. The bride, the one Eliza had been pictured congratulating when she wore that terrible hat, had attracted some attention for being a ‘commoner’, and not just that but a mixed-race single mother, too.
No wait. He read a bit further. She wasn’t a single mother, she’d given up a baby for adoption as a teenager. She’d also once starred in a reality TV show, and when she met Prince Jamie she’d been working as a barmaid. For Christ’s sake! And Eliza was worried her family wouldn’t accept him?
Xavier put down his laptop and rubbed his face. Eliza still doesn’t know about Marisol. When she did, it could change everything.
Chapter Ten
When Eliza was a small child, and could still pull off a flouncy dress with bows in her hair, she’d been a cute little bridesmaid at several Royal and Society weddings. She remembered gazing in awe at the brides, gliding down the aisles like beautiful swans, and as she’d grown older and paid more attention, she’d seen how the process of turning a human woman into a Royal bride came about.
The hair extensions, the subtle tans, the dieticians and personal trainers, the elocution lessons and media training. The endless cycle of smoothing and glossing over, until no flaws were visible and all that could be seen was the serenely gliding swan, with no sign of the frantic paddling going on beneath. A shining example to the nation.
It was in this vein that all Royal brides were expected to follow. Eliza—when she used to fantasize about her fairytale wedding, before she’d met Xavier—had always aimed for the same level of sophistication and elegance. Despite the best efforts of her mother and a bevy of ladies-in-waiting, she usually fell short by some distance.
