Battle Royal

by Lucy Parker

  She picked up the photo album she’d taken from a shelf and set it in front of Sylvie, who looked down at a large studio portrait of Jessica. Once again, a camera had managed to capture the lively spark in her eyes, suppressed laughter in every line of her face.

  “She looks . . . joyful.” It was the only word.

  Kathleen nodded. “That’s exactly what I associate with her memory. Joy. Pure joy in life, in people, in her hopes for the future. In her love.” She shook her head. “She was a human being; of course she had moods and moments. But if she lost her temper, it never lasted long and she’d apologize very solemnly, and hug you tight, and you’d be laughing again in minutes. I miss her,” she said. “As much now as I did in the days after her death. Over a quarter of a century, and I never stop hoping she’ll walk through the door. This is still her house, really. She always called it Petunia Park. In the summer, the field out the back is just a sea of petunias. She liked to curl up amongst them at night and look up at the stars. I can still feel her presence out there so strongly.” Her voice turned thoughtful, abstracted. “I suppose that’s why I moved here. Why I’ve stayed so long. I can’t leave her.”

  She’ll be alone. I don’t want to leave her alone.

  Blinking away a sudden burn at the back of her eyes, Sylvie cleared her throat. “According to Rosie, Jessica decided she couldn’t live the life of a royal, that she wouldn’t be able to bear it.”

  “She tormented herself over it.” Kathleen was still clutching Sylvie’s phone tightly. “She came to see me one night, in tears. I’d never seen her like that. I think she had to talk to someone, and there was nobody else she could trust. She’d seen how the press treated his previous girlfriends, you see. How the public tore their lives wide open. Eyes always on you. Scrutinizing every gesture, every outfit, every word. How many marriages in that family have survived with any love and happiness left intact? She’d walked away from him that day, and it was like part of her had died. The light in her eyes just . . . gone.”

  They were all very quiet. Instinctively, Sylvie slipped her hand sideways and back into Dominic’s. She sensed him look at her, before his fingers tightened around hers.

  “She didn’t sleep a wink that night. She barely slept at all for four days,” Kathleen went on. “Finally, five nights after she’d left him, I came here with her to Primrose Cottage, as it was then, and we lay out in the petunia field until dawn. I think she needed to be here, where she’d always found solace. And where she’d been happy with him.” She exhaled shakily again, running her fingers over the image of her sister’s face. “I remember dozing, waking on and off, and seeing her looking up at the sky. At some point, she stopped crying, and this look came over her face. I could hear her voice, just a breath in the breeze. We can do it. That was all she said.”

  She lifted her head and looked at them. “She would have been brilliant. Whatever situation life threw her into. And she adored him. I knew from the moment she turned up on the doorstep that she’d never be able to go through with it. She always would have chosen him, in the end.”

  It took a second for that to register, and Sylvie saw Dominic’s own head lift.

  Pet had been sitting quietly, one hand tucked against her cheek as she listened, but she pushed forward in her chair now. “You mean she changed her mind? She went back to him?”

  “She was going back to him. That day.” Kathleen’s jaw worked. Her voice had the hoarseness of one who still, even after all this time, didn’t quite believe the reality of loss. “Once she’d made the decision, it was like she’d . . . ignited. She was Jessie again, so excited and determined to see him right away. She packed a bag and left. I still remember her grabbing my face and kissing me, laughing.” Her fingers flexed on the phone. “She was forty minutes outside of London when a truck slid out of control in an intersection. The cab smashed into the driver’s-side door. She died before they could cut her from the wreckage.”

  There were tears on Pet’s cheeks, and Sylvie felt the wetness under her own lashes. Dominic covered their linked fingers with his other hand.

  “I tried to get in touch with Patrick, but I didn’t have any direct way to contact him.” Kathleen took a creased hankie from a voluminous pocket and scrubbed over her eyes. “If Jessie ever wrote down his number, I never found it, and obviously you can’t just call the palace and ask to speak to the prince. We’d already had the funeral before I finally managed to speak to a royal aide, who—” Her voice cracked. “Who passed on the palace’s deepest condolences and proceeded to politely fob me off. First, he wouldn’t believe that Jessie had even known Patrick, and then when I wouldn’t give up, he—he made it sound as if there were other women, that Patrick had any number of casual relationships on the go. I was only eighteen, and he was so . . . matter-of-fact about it.”

  Something in her expression became almost childlike, the confused, grieving teenage girl she’d once been.

  “I believed him,” Kathleen said. All that chilled nothingness fell away, leaving her voice raw with grief. “I thought Patrick had just been a typical playboy prince, leading Jessie on. Making her believe she’d found this great love, when really, he wouldn’t even care that much that she’d—that she’d died. I was so angry for so long. I kept remembering her face that day when she was getting in the car. The weeks before then, when she was literally dancing as she walked. The months on end she spent making a sculpture for him, ignoring all her other work—she was the most incredible artist, did you know? Bronze, stone, glass, ceramic. She could draw the beauty out of anything.”

  She was speaking rapidly, changing course and continuing before anyone could reply. “She said he’d put it in his favorite part of the gardens at St. Giles Palace, the only place he could sit and think and be. It was his petunia field, she said. And after that conversation with the aide, I thought, It’s all a lie. Jessie spent hours and hours making the mold for that bronze, and he probably just threw it in a cupboard. Just another dusty old relic in some dreary abandoned room.”

  The stream of words came to a halt. Kathleen’s callused fingers were shaking as she stroked the sides of Sylvie’s phone, staring down again at that photograph. At the transparent emotion on Patrick’s face, the way his body naturally curved toward Jessica’s.

  “It wasn’t true, was it?” The tears streamed down her face, and Pet got up and went to crouch at her side. She rested her hand on the older woman’s wrist, rubbing gently in comfort. Kathleen lifted her eyes to meet Sylvie’s. “He did love her.”

  “He loved her very much.” Sylvie was squeezing Dominic’s fingers tightly. “There was no one else. Only Jessie, for all of his life.” She hesitated. “He never knew that she’d changed her mind, that she was coming back to him.”

  “Patrick notoriously hated the interference of senior advisors. If the aide you spoke to told him anything of that conversation, and that’s not a given, he may have persuaded Patrick that Jessica’s family wanted nothing to do with him. Perhaps that you blamed him for her state of mind that week,” Dominic put in grimly. “Probably assuming the prince would move on faster if all lingering ties were cut. A clean break. From everything I’ve heard of Patrick, if he was informed of Jessica’s death then, I can’t understand why he wouldn’t have come to see you, unless he believed he was respecting your own wishes.”

  Sylvie was mentally replaying her conversation with Rosie. The princess had spoken of her uncle mourning Jessie all his life. Mourning her loss, her absence in his life. Rosie had never specifically mentioned her death. Slowly, she said, “He may not have known anything about any of it. She’d told him she had to leave, and he’d done the last thing—the only thing—he could do for her. He let her cut contact between them completely, so she could go and live the life that he thought would make her happiest in the end. A bird that was always meant to soar.”

  Kathleen made an audible gulping sound, the fingers of one hand curled against the brooch at her breast. It was a beautiful little bron
ze piece, two entwined hearts. A gift from a very talented, affectionate sister? “Oh God,” she said, and her face crumpled. “That poor man.” With another sudden sob, she clutched Pet’s hand. “But I’m so . . . To know that she did find that sort of love, that she lived in perfect happiness even for a short time, and it was real and true . . .”

  Her smile was shaky—but it, too, was almost identical to Jessica’s.

  “Thank you,” she said, very simply.

  Even Pet was very quiet on the trip back to London. When they were about twenty minutes from St. Giles Palace, Sylvie heard a muffled sniff from the back seat and stretched her arm back.

  Pet’s hand clasped hers. Her fingers were damp. “I wish I could go back in time and tell him,” she said in a fierce, unsteady whisper. “It’s so— It’s awful. That he never knew she’d chosen him. That she was going to fight for them.”

  Sylvie looked at Dominic. His profile was grim and handsome and so very . . . dear. “Maybe he knows now,” she said softly. “I hope he knows now.”

  He turned his head and their eyes met for a long moment.

  It wasn’t raining in the city, but the cold air was a sharp bite. Dominic found a parking space a couple of blocks from the palace, and Sylvie huddled inside her coat as they walked the distance to the west grounds. Although it was still a bit mad that she had the private cell number for a senior member of the royal family, she’d contacted Rosie before they’d left Oxfordshire. The princess was on her way to a royal engagement in the Cotswolds, but she’d granted them permission to enter the private part of the park.

  Sounding preoccupied, a definitely tight note underlying her greeting, Rosie had given her concise directions to the location of Patrick’s “thinking spot.”

  “I’ll let security know you’re coming. You might bump into Johnny,” she’d said before hanging up. “He’s needed quite a bit of breathing room in the garden this week.”

  That two-minute call had done nothing to alleviate Sylvie’s growing concerns about this wedding.

  A guard let them through a locked gate, and they followed a winding path through rain-soaked trees. It was lovely—she’d had no idea the gardens were so extensive; it was bizarre that a hop and a skip away were some of the busiest metropolitan roads in Britain. They crossed over a little bridge, Pet peering over the side at a large pond.

  “No fish,” she murmured with obvious disappointment.

  Sylvie knew when they’d found the right place, even without consulting Rosie’s instructions. Under the enveloping branches of an enormous mulberry tree was a small wooden bench, carved from a tree trunk, the legs a whimsical profusion of whittled leaves and flowers. On closer inspection, she saw a small carved mouse peeking around the left side. There were rosebushes everywhere, but arranged far more haphazardly than the precise landscaping elsewhere. In the warmer months, the ground would likely be a carpet of wildflowers.

  There were artworks right throughout the grounds, but Sylvie found the sculpture in a small clearing beyond the tree.

  Jessica’s gift to Patrick was a cast bronze of two kneeling figures, a man and a woman. There were no facial features, merely smooth planes and deliberate mystery. They sat facing one another, knees and foreheads touching. Their hands were extended, the man’s cupped beneath his lover’s. On her upturned palms was an intricate trinity knot.

  The edges of the knot were wrought from delicate ribbons of bronze, and Jessica had filled in the interior with stained glass. Even on an overcast day, when the sky was dull and heavy with rain clouds, the weak light sparkled in the glass, shimmering in a multitude of colors.

  Dominic came to stand at her side, and for long minutes they remained there in silence. Pet had sat down on the bench at the mulberry tree, obviously giving them privacy.

  At last, he said, “I can see why it gave him comfort to come here.”

  She pressed her cheek against his bicep, his wool coat scratchy against her skin.

  He lowered his head to rest against hers.

  They were leaving the peaceful copse with Pet, Sylvie flicking through the photos she’d taken of the sculpture, when she heard the low murmur of voices.

  Frowning, she looked around, but saw no one. There were guards patrolling the park, but she hadn’t seen them for some time.

  “Who . . .” Pet began as they turned the corner, and then Sylvie saw them outside a small stone building.

  Johnny stood in the doorway with a tall blonde woman. Spiral curls were poking out under her woolen hat, and her gloved hands waved for emphasis as she spoke. She was doing most of the talking, Johnny inserting a word here and there, shaking his head.

  The body language on both sides was intense.

  As the sky overhead gave an ominous rumble and the first raindrops began to fall again, the woman moved forward and suddenly they were clutching each other’s arms.

  Johnny fell back a few steps.

  And as they disappeared back into the outbuilding, their mouths slammed together in a fierce kiss.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Sugar Fair

  The bell gave a homey little tinkle as Dominic held open the door to Sugar Fair, and Sylvie slipped past him, looking grim. Pet—also in an unusually subdued incarnation—had headed straight across the street to De Vere’s.

  Inside, he absently noted the number of customers milling around and was satisfied for Sylvie’s sake. Less thrilled about the people trying to take photos of them, and failing in any semblance of subtlety or manners.

  He stared directly at a few of them. Cheeks immediately flushed, phones were flung into bags, and one person hid behind the sugar ice castle.

  Sylvie’s assistant—“You can call me Mabel”; subtext: You total dickhead—was sitting at her central table, humming classic rock against the background splash of the chocolate waterfall. The diamantés on her skull bracelet glittered under the overhead lights. She looked up briefly from the amezaiku flamingo she was painting a vivid fuchsia pink, surveyed Dominic with cold dislike from head to foot, and ignored them both.

  If it wouldn’t result in Sylvie castrating him with a pastry cutter, he’d offer Mabel a signing incentive to join his staff on the spot.

  “I’ll just be in the office for a while,” Sylvie said, and Mabel grunted.

  As she opened the bookcase of chocolate boxes, which he would vote as hands down the best part of her entire aesthetic here, the other woman spoke without looking away from her rapidly flickering brush. “Don’t do it on the desk. The front left leg is wobbling again. Should the entire thing collapse, I will make sure your headstone says DEAD GIVING HEAD, SHOULD HAVE USED A BED.”

  Sylvie closed the door behind them with a thud. For the first time in hours, humor was a momentary flicker in her eyes. “If you still want her, I may be prepared to negotiate.”

  In the cramped office space, which was really too small for one desk, let alone two, she put her bag down. The room was overheated, and he shrugged off his coat, draping it over the back of a chair.

  Sylvie was still holding her phone, on which were several photos of Johnny and his mystery companion, attached at the lips in every frame.

  While they’d been standing there, Pet had whipped out her own phone and taken some rapid-fire shots. His baby sister would make a frighteningly efficient private investigator. And if he’d vocalized that opinion, she would already be heading out to the shops in search of a trilby and trench coat.

  She’d AirDropped them to Sylvie, leaving it to them to decide what to do.

  “The sculpture was beautiful.” Sylvie’s voice was very flat. Dominic could see exactly what Kathleen had meant about the light dimming in a very bright person, and the sight of her unhappiness was like steel wool on his nerve endings. “I can finish my cake proposal,” she went on in those low tones. “I know the right design now.” She looked at him. “You?”

  “Yes. I’ve got mine, as well.” Usually, he’d already be back in his office, getting it down on paper before
his business meeting this evening, but he wasn’t leaving her while she was blatantly upset. Leaning back against the wall, he tucked his hands into his trouser pockets. Exhaustion was creeping into his bones. He needed a decent night’s sleep or four. “Sylvie—”

  “Materially, socially, in almost every way, Rosie’s an incredibly privileged person,” she said suddenly, pushing up to sit on the edge of her desk as if she, too, felt drained. “She admits as much. But mentally, I think she has very little respite. Johnny isn’t just her lover, her best friend—he’s her sanctuary. She obviously feels completely and utterly safe with him.”

  “With good reason. He would literally take a bullet for her, and there’s no way that was what it looked like. That man doesn’t have an unfaithful bone in his body.”

  Sylvie looked down at a photo of the kiss; exhaling in a noisy gust, she brought the phone to her forehead, pressing the cool screen against her skin.

  “Bone-deep, every instinct in me agrees with you,” she said at last. “But there’s something fucking dodgy going on. That was a private part of the palace, Rosie obviously has no idea he was meeting someone there, and you said it yourself at your flat—there was a shifty look in his eyes at that meeting. He’s not a good actor.” She lowered the phone to shoot it another narrowed look. “Am I right in thinking that woman—”

  “Was last spotted having a massive tantrum outside the royals’ private office?” There was a reciprocally grim note in his response then. He’d strip naked and cartwheel into the Thames if Johnny had willingly partaken of that vicious snog this afternoon, but—yeah. Admittedly, with no pun intended, things were not looking all that rosy for the royal engagement. “I can’t be dead certain. Distance. Poor light.” And increasingly fucked eyes from years of intricate detail work. He was heading for a pair of glasses the next time he saw an optician. He’d casually mentioned that to Sylvie last night, a passing comment that had somehow led to a blow job. Apparently, she was strongly in favor of the specs. So was he, now. “But I think so. Her height, her boots, the ringlets. All a match.”