by Avery Wilde
I knew exactly what that nature was: we were in love. And, though I might once have questioned Andrew’s feelings for me, I was now convinced beyond a shadow of doubt that he felt the same way. The problem was that I was sure the rest of the royal family thought I was just a fling; some girl whom Andrew had taken a temporary liking to, but would be out of the picture soon. He’d told them otherwise, but given his past behavior, they weren’t exactly keen on believing a single word that came out of his mouth in regards to women.
Hopefully that’d change soon.
Also, as Andrew had just stated, there was still the baby to consider. At some point my condition would become obvious, the identity of the father would be equally obvious, and keeping the news out of the papers would become difficult, if not impossible. We had to do something before that point was reached; we had to get ahead of the story and control it before it got out of our control. The first step had to be telling the Queen, but there was a problem with that…
I was completely and utterly terrified of how she might react.
On the other hand, Andrew was all in favor of doing it now, and he looked at me expectantly, waiting for my answer. “I just don’t think the time is right,” I replied, nervously chewing on a fingernail.
“Do you think it’s going to get any righter?” he asked. “We need to tell her, Keira.”
“I know, but I think the more time we spend together, the more likely it is she’ll accept that we’re actually serious about each other,” I replied. “Maybe then it’ll be easier to tell her.”
“You don’t think the fact that you’re pregnant will indicate our seriousness?”
“There are more than enough accidental babies born every year to counter that,” I said. “It doesn’t show that we’re serious. It just shows that we weren’t careful enough.”
Andrew sighed. “I get the impression that you’re not giving me the whole story here.”
“I just worry.”
“About what?”
“About everything!” I exclaimed. “About tabloid headlines like, ‘Playboy Prince Has Knocked Up His Maid!’. That’s no way for a baby to be brought into the world, with that kind of crap surrounding him or her.”
“You’re not just a maid.”
“I am a maid. It’s literally my job right now.”
“Yes, but you know what I mean,” said Andrew. “This isn’t some sordid, backstairs thing—we love each other.”
“And I’m sure that’s how the press will report it...”
“It’s the truth.”
“Since when does that matter to the tabloids? I think Mark Twain once said ‘don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story’.”
“True. Well,” Andrew tried another tack, “telling my mother doesn’t mean telling the press. Once we tell her, we can take it from there.”
I still wasn’t sure. Honestly, I just wanted to pack up and sneak off to hide somewhere in outer Mongolia.
“What’s wrong?” Andrew asked, squeezing my hand.
“I like your mother,” I said truthfully. “But she…she has certain expectations for you. She isn’t looking to have a commoner as a daughter-in-law and mother of her grandchild.”
“Well, it’s damn well happening whether we tell her or not. And don’t call yourself a commoner.”
I shook my head. “All those things she said to Princess Alexandra about God and decency—how’s she’s going to feel about her grandchild being illegitimate? And as for Michael…I can just imagine him referring to the baby as ‘the bastard’ for all eternity.”
He grinned. “Well, our baby’s father is a big old bastard too,” he said, winking and indicating himself.
“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” I said, shaking my head despite the smile that was quirking my lips up.
Andrew shrugged. “There’s a great tradition of illegitimate children in the royal family. Look at Ewan the Great.”
“I think some things have changed in the last thousand years.”
Andrew snorted. “Not in my family they haven’t. Look, the fact is, my mother likes you.”
“She’s had enough bad headlines in the press over the last year, she’s trying to hold the dignity of the royal family together with both hands, and whichever way you cut it, her son’s affair with a maid ending in the heir to throne being conceived out of wedlock isn’t going to help.”
Andrew smiled patiently. “Keira, what exactly do you want to do?”
Put on the spot, I was silent. He was right, of course; it didn’t matter when we told the Queen. The situation was what it was, and waiting for it to change wasn’t going to help. And yet I still felt that now wasn’t the right time, and that a right time might yet present itself. I knew the belief wasn’t logical, but it was there nonetheless.
I suppose I could blame the pregnancy hormones for my irrational moments for now…
“Let’s wait just a little bit longer. We’ve still got time before I start to show, and if nothing changes, then we’ll speak to her and take the consequences.”
Andrew kissed me. “Your wish is my command.”
***
It was the following day that Andrew came to me, just as my shift was finishing, and asked me to go with him.
“You’re not going to try and change my mind again, are you? About speaking to your mother.”
“No,” he said. “I just…you know what? Wait and see.”
“Should I be blindfolded?”
“Probably, but there’s a lot of steps to climb so I wouldn’t recommend it.”
Andrew led the way through the Castle’s familiar corridors to an oak door with a huge iron fastening that looked to be as old as the castle itself. He got an impressive sized key out of his pocket.
“You’ve never been through here before, have you?”
“No.”
“You’re already excited, right?”
I shrugged. “Eh….maybe.”
Andrew grinned, and I knew he could see straight through my feigned disinterest. There were a few doors like this one in the castle, usually leading high up or deep down to areas no longer in everyday use. They were off limits to all but the upper echelons of the staff, so how could anyone not be thrilled at the prospect of what lay behind such sealed doors? It was hard not to imagine treasure, secret passages or skeletons hanging from the walls, although I was willing to admit that it was more likely to be old carpets and unwanted wedding presents. Still, the potential possibilities retained their power to excite, and my heart beat faster as I waited to see what lay behind the door.
The key grated uncomfortably in the lock, scraping off years of rust as it turned.
“Ready?” Andrew asked, flashing me a cheeky grin.
“You’re determined to make a meal of this, aren’t you?”
He grinned again and pushed open the door, revealing a cramped spiral staircase. A wash of cold and damp blew in from the open doorway, I shivered.
“Spine-tingling isn’t it?” Andrew said. “Makes you think.”
“About pneumonia, mostly,” I replied, still determined not to seem as excited as she felt.
He smirked. “Come on.”
“Aren’t there lights?”
“Oddly, no,” he said as he led the way. “I can’t believe the Tudors didn’t think to install them.”
“Ha. You’re hilarious,” I said, playfully jabbing him.
For a while we walked up in comparative darkness, until an arrow slit in the wall allowed daylight through.
“We’re above the level of the castle roof now,” Andrew said.
“We’re in a tower?”
“Hence the spiral staircase.”
“Duh,” I said, lightly slapping myself on the forehead. “I totally have that pregnancy brain thing that people always talk about.”
“Oh, I thought you were always this dim…hey, I’m kidding! I’m kidding!” Andrew said as I jabbed him again.
We passed regular arrow sli
ts, casting their narrow illumination, and occasional doors, solid still, even with the passage of time.
“All sorts of crap in these rooms,” Andrew said. “A family like ours never throws anything away, so as fashions change, furniture just sort of migrates its way up here or down to the cellars.”
I didn’t ask why we’d come here or why we continued to climb. I didn’t think I’d even get an answer as Andrew clearly wanted to preserve his surprise, and frankly, I wanted to preserve the surprise as well. My pulse was racing with excitement, although that might also have been because there were an awful lot of stairs.
When we finally reached the top, we were presented with another elderly oaken door, smaller than the rest, seeming like an afterthought at the top of the tower.
“I hope this is the right key,” Andrew muttered to himself as he took out a second, smaller key and inserted it into the lock.
Again the lock grated, but the key turned and produced a succession of unwilling clicks as the rusted mechanism moved.
Andrew looked back at me with a grin on his face, and this time I couldn’t help answering with one of my own. Satisfied that he had my attention, he pushed at the old door with his shoulder. The hinges squealed but moved and the door edged open to reveal a little room beyond.
“After you.”
I peered in, my eyes adjusting to the gloom, alleviated by a hazy light that found its way through the dirty windows.
“Oh my…”
There were paintings stacked by the walls. They were layered with dust, but the darkness of the room had preserved them, and as I carefully wiped away the dust, I saw colors that were as rich and vivid as the day they were painted.
“This is impossible,” I breathed. I knew the artists. I knew their catalogues by heart. But what I was seeing were treasures that had been hidden from the world for centuries. Elsewhere in the royal houses, I’d been privileged to see artworks that had been seen by only a few academics and experts, but now I was seeing pictures that had not been seen by anyone outside of the British royal family. It was a moment of breathtaking wonder, the sort that any serious art-lover would probably kill for.
And yet my thoughts went in a different direction…
I looked at Andrew, who stood by the door, smiling eagerly. “Do you like them?” he asked.
I didn’t reply for a few seconds, and I quickly turned and looked back at the paintings, my mind mired in deep thought about my current situation. Andrew had brought me here for no other reason than to please me; to make me happy and inspire my artistic passions. It was a small gesture on his part, but such a sweet one, and for some reason it was enough to give me the strength and courage I needed for the very near future.
I took a deep breath and finally turned to respond.
“We should speak to your mother and tell her about the baby.”
Chapter 21
Andrew
I gave Keira a bemused smile. “What brought that on?”
She shrugged, smiling. “Maybe I just realized how truly lucky I am.”
I feigned my most arrogant smirk. “You’re only just realizing now?”
“I can be slow on the uptake sometimes.”
I smiled. “I’m pretty lucky too.”
“Well yes, obviously,” she replied with a cheeky wink, returning to the paintings. “We both know that.”
I laughed. I didn’t know what had made her change her mind and step up our plans to announce her pregnancy to my mother, and right now I didn’t care—when Keira was smiling, everything else in the world ceased to matter. It was a curious revelation for me, to be honest. In previous relationships (if that word could even be used to describe my encounters with women) my concern had been almost exclusively for my own pleasure—I wouldn’t have crossed a room to make any of them happy. But now I found that I would move heaven and earth to make Keira happy, and I wanted nothing in return other than to see her smile. She’d made me a better person, and I didn’t miss the one I’d previously been. That other version of me had apparently had more ‘fun’, but he could keep it as far as I was concerned.
I’d found something better.
“That one’s a rarity,” I said as Keira reached a particular portrait. “It’s early Tudor. From the time of Henry the Seventh. Very few portraits survive from back then.”
I was pleased to see that Keira looked quietly impressed. “Do you know who it’s by?”
“No one does,” I replied. “Or who it’s of, in fact. The style suggests a Dutch artist and I know some people see a similarity in technique between this and the portrait of Henry the Seventh in the National Portrait Gallery—also by an unknown Dutch artist—which would date it to the early sixteenth century.”
This time Keira looked outright surprised. “Since when do you know anything about art?”
Since yesterday was the honest answer. I’d been planning this little excursion, and like any boy trying to impress the girl he loves, I’d gone out of my way to find out as much as I could about the paintings.
“I’m full of surprises,” I said in the most mysterious tone I could muster up.
Keira cocked her head and grinned. “True or false—if I were to go to your room now, I would find a big stack of art history books.”
“False,” I replied. “I put them back in the library.”
She laughed. “Did you at least enjoy them?”
“I did, actually,” I said, and I meant it. “It’s funny the things that you avoid learning about because your parents are interested in it and it’s ‘boring’, and then when you take the trouble to learn a bit for yourself, you find that it was interesting all along.”
I wasn’t sure if Keira liked the fact that I’d developed an interest in her pet subject—something we could now talk about together—or if she liked the fact that I’d gone to this trouble on her account, but either way she was smiling, and that was all that mattered.
She pulled out a larger canvas. “Tell me about this one.”
The next few hours seemed to fly by, and I wondered if I’d ever said this many words to a woman without my final intention being to get her into bed. There was no woman in the world I found as attractive as Keira, and yet I was just as happy talking to her as I was doing anything else with her. I wished this afternoon could’ve lasted forever, but time passed and the light from the windows soon began to fade.
“I guess we’d better be going,” Keira said reluctantly.
“One more thing.” I crossed to a darkened corner of the room where a large object was shrouded by a dust-covered sheet. With a flourish, I pulled the sheet aside and revealed the item beneath.
“What is that?” Keira asked. It was clearly a chair—ornately carved in wood so dark as to be almost black—and yet something about it suggested more.
“It’s the old throne,” I replied.
Contrary to what everyone, and especially everyone in other countries, wanted to believe, there was no such thing as the royal throne except as an idea. A royal heir accedes to ‘the throne’, but that just means they become monarch—the actual item doesn’t exist, because real life is not like a George R. R. Martin novel. There were several thrones scattered through royal properties, most famously the one on which the Queen would sit during the state opening of Parliament, but there was no ‘real’ throne as there was in fairytales and people’s imaginations. At one time there had been, but not now.
“I think this was the last time we had a throne that was like a proper Throne,” I said, pronouncing the capital well. “Maybe not. But I think so.”
“What’s it doing up here?”
“Being safe,” I said. “Like all this stuff. The funny thing is, if you put all your valuables in a strong box then everyone knows where they are, and you’re just waiting for the right thief. But who the hell would look up here for this stuff? Not even the mice come up here. Nothing to eat.”
Keira ran a hand over the carved wood. She was touching history, and the look on he
r face suggested that she knew it but couldn’t quite believe it.
“It’s incredible.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I’d have thought it would be…I don’t know; covered with gold, studded with jewels. All that royal bling.”
I nodded. “I think it was made at a more practical time.” I caressed the woodwork, feeling the hard grain beneath my fingers. “I remember when my father brought me up here to see it. Wasn’t long before he died.”
“I’m sorry,” Keira said. “I know you don’t talk about that very much.”
She was right. It’d been hard when my father died, and I’d never really spoken about it all that much to anyone, but I somehow found it easy to talk to Keira about anything, especially family matters, seeing as we were having our own family soon.
“It’s okay. This is a happy memory,” I replied. “Anyway, he brought us up here to look at it. I don’t think Michael was that impressed, but I…something about it just clicked with me. To be honest—and this is maybe going to make the whole story seem a bit dumb—I think it might have been because I’d recently seen the Indiana Jones films for the first time.”
Keira laughed. “What?”
“Well, you know that bit at the end of Last Crusade, when they have to pick the real Holy Grail, and there’s all these fancy gold ones, but the real one is just a plain wooden cup? That’s what it made me think of. This isn’t the chair of someone who needed to look like they had power, this is the chair of someone who actually had it.”
“You have chosen wisely,” Keira murmured, quoting the film.
I looked at her. “I certainly have.”
The moment between us was broken by an icy blast of cold air through one of the little windows.
