Royal Pain

by Megan Mulry

  Bronte finally came back to herself from a few minutes of half laughing, half crying.

  “Whatever, Lionel,” she said with a dismissiveness that only a petulant seventeen-year-old girl could muster. She loved how much he hated that she called him by his first name. “Are you going to put me on a leash and walk me over to campus? Sit next to me in my freshman English class and watch as I take notes on Chaucer? Correct my grammar? You know what Lionel? Fuck you.”

  “Bronte!” her mother screamed.

  “Mom, seriously. This is totally between him and me.” Bronte avoided referring to her father directly whenever possible. “He doesn’t give a crap about me or who I am or what I like—”

  “The Royal Family and fashion magazines and shoes you can’t afford, Bronte? Are those aspirations?” He spoke as if she were bringing home the neighbors’ pets and dissecting them in the basement.

  “No, they are not aspirations, Lionel. But they’re not despicable either! You are so lofty in your worldview, aren’t you? So far above the rest of us. Discussing Gilles Deleuze and the Lake Poets, the Bloomsbury Group and the Baroque. But you know what, Lionel? Those people had lives! They left their homes and did something, made something, had something to show for themselves. Other than a split-level ranch in New Jersey and a wife who did every fucking thing for them.”

  “We will not pay for you to go anywhere but Princeton. Am I making myself clear?”

  “Who’s ‘we’? You?” She laughed in disgust. “You haven’t earned a fucking penny in years.” She looked at her mother for confirmation, but Cathy was in some sort of shock, shaking her head and crying softly.

  “I am going to get as far away from here as possible. I have three months left of high school, and if you want me to move out, I am sure Aunt Patty would take me in. Otherwise, back the fuck off.”

  “Bronte”—his voice was just this side of rage, but perfectly controlled, as he moved across the small room and put one arm protectively around his wife’s shoulders—“you will devastate your mother if you turn down this opportunity.”

  “Really?! How do you figure? The way I see it, the one who will be devastated is you! All that transference! All those aspirations!” She nearly spit the words at him. “Those are your aspirations, Lionel. Not mine! I love it down here with the television-watching, gum-chewing masses.”

  She wished she could have controlled the volume of her voice, but she was nearly shrieking. She hated how he seemed to make her loss of temper his small victory.

  Cathy was sobbing outright by that point.

  Lionel had a strange, detached, bitter grimace playing across his face.

  Bronte forced herself to calm down and decided to retreat from emotions and continue in the easier realm of practicalities.

  “It’s better this way. I will defer my enrollment at Cal for a year.”

  Her mother looked momentarily optimistic, then defeated as Bronte continued.

  “I’ll find an apartment share and go live in San Francisco and wait tables for a year to establish California residency. Then I’ll go to Cal as an in-state student, so I can afford it without bankrupting you. And it will be mine. My education. Mine to use or squander.”

  Lionel shook his head in disapproval.

  “What?!” Bronte fumed. “It’s not as if the University of California hasn’t produced its fair share of academic excellence. You are the worst kind of snob. You disgust me.”

  With that, Bronte turned sideways to walk past her father without having to actually touch him.

  She went up to her room, grabbed her backpack, threw in a couple of T-shirts and a pair of jeans, went into the bathroom to get her toothbrush and hairbrush, and walked back downstairs. She stood near the front door, watching across the living room as her parents spoke quietly in the kitchen, her father in the highly unusual role of comforter, gently stroking her mother’s arms.

  “Mom. I’m going into the city for a couple of nights with Janice. I’ll be back for dinner Sunday night.”

  She wasn’t waiting for her mother to give her permission—if Bronte was going to be this new independent, kick-ass woman of the world, she figured she had to start now—but she had hoped her mom would at least look up and nod that she had heard. Instead, Lionel turned to look at Bronte as her mother buried her face into the front of his shirt. His threat was no longer veiled.

  “Be home by five o’clock on Sunday, Bronte. Or not at all.”

  Bronte wanted to stomp her feet and smash one of those hideous antique Meissen bird figurines that her grandmother had left to her mother. How did Lionel always end up making her sound like the moody, immature burden, and himself the wise protector?

  Lies.

  Bronte took a deep breath as the desire to break things abated. “I’ll see you Sunday then.” She turned, nearly composed—she congratulated herself—and walked out the front door.

  No slamming.

  Looking back, she thought that “or not at all” may have been the last thing Lionel Talbott had ever said to her directly.

  For what turned out to be the remaining year and a half of his life, her father and Bronte tread a careful dance, avoiding one another across a continent and competing to see who could be kinder and more devoted to Cathy Talbott.

  ***

  Sometime near three in the morning, back in the foggy present, Bronte was so cramped and cold there on the floor that she forced herself to get up and move into bed, pulling the neck of Max’s shirt up around the middle of her face, torturing herself with the intense smell of him.

  She brought the covers over her head and wished for oblivion. When her alarm went off a few hours later, she mused that she now knew how it felt to be hit by a train.

  She went into work armed with a triple-shot, twenty-ounce latte and tried to get her mind around the very sharp, very broken pieces of what the fuck had just happened. Unable to help herself, she decided to spend a little time Googling one Max Heyworth from England. In their frenzied courtship (of sorts), neither of them had given a damn about the “information,” as Max had so eloquently put it that day at the sidewalk café.

  She didn’t care a fig what his family business was; he didn’t care what hip clients she was after. (She did land that new swanky hotel group she had been pursuing when they first met, she reminded herself, and she was on her way to landing a fabulously chic shoe store). But none of that had mattered. They had just wanted each other in the here and now (the here and then, she corrected), with none of the other supposedly pertinent details.

  Now that he was totally AWOL, however, she felt starved for pertinent details. Maybe there would be a grainy black-and-white photo of his rugby team at Oxford. Maybe he had won a prize for the best sheep at the county fair when he was twelve… she would like to see what he looked like when he was twelve, come to think of it. She would like to see baby pictures of Max, come to think of it.

  Oh for fuck’s sake, this was a veritable disaster.

  A Google search on “Max Heyworth Yorkshire” brought up a fish-and-chips shop, an auto mechanic, and a list of self-catering cottages near Castle Heyworth, then a mishmash of everything from Yorkshire pudding recipes to ancestry links. All of a sudden, Bronte remembered the snippets of David’s drunken, incomprehensible recitation of Max’s bona fides. Just for the hell of it, she typed in “Maxwell Heyworth Anne Boleyn Nobel Prize”… and up popped several links to Sophia Heyworth and her second cousin, Anne Boleyn, and then links to a newspaper article about a political spat from a few months ago between one George Heyworth, the current Duke of Northrop, and a Nobel Prize–winning agronomist.

  Farther down, there were seven links to a decade-old obituary of the seventeenth Duke of Northrop. Bronte felt the tingle of anticipation crawl up her spine, then took a fortifying slug of her latte and clicked on the Times of London link.

  “Holy. Mother. Fucker.”

  She had not meant to say that one aloud, but all of her work colleagues were now well acquainted wi
th her guttersnipe vocabulary, so nobody much cared. The seventeenth Duke of Northrop was one major twentieth-century dude. Born during World War I, a major during World War II, he grew up in a large family in Yorkshire, had six brothers and four sisters, and was survived by three sons and four daughters—the eldest of whom, George Conrad Stanley blah-blah (seven middle names later) Fitzwilliam-Heyworth, the eighteenth Duke of Northrop, was fifty-four at the time of writing (ten years ago) and was the father of two sons, Maxwell and Devon, and two daughters, Claire and Abigail.

  Fuck. Fuck-fuck-fuck. Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck.

  Max was a fucking duke? Technically, according to the Times, he was only a marquess—a fallen-away marquess, she remembered with a bittersweet smile—until his father left this world and he took on the title. Bronte recalled one of the acronyms she had committed to memory in the early years of her adolescent fascination with all things royal: DMEVB—duke, marquess, earl, viscount, baron.

  She thought over all the stupid, offhand comments she had made to Max about how she loved when he went all royal on her. Or—oh God—all the times she had been flipping through Hello!, ranting about how idiotic all those women were who fawned over William and Harry. Oh dear God. Or how she wouldn’t want to be Kate in a million years. She had probably insulted some member of his immediate family. And now that she allowed herself to sink into the full depths of her shame, she realized she had interrupted him numerous times when he was probably on the verge of telling her that very fact.

  She sank lower into her chair and began clicking on the copious photographs of Max that had appeared in the press over the years. At least her postbreakup stalking wouldn’t be relegated to a few grainy shots of a twelve-year-old boy and a blue-ribboned steer.

  He was fucking everywhere.

  She clicked on a photo of him—looking quite dashing, she hated to admit—at the Henley Royal Regatta. She pulled her chair closer to her desk and hunkered down. Formal shots at Ascot. Buckingham Palace. Sandringham. Hunting in Scotland. Tabloid shots on holiday in Spain. At a corporate event at the National Gallery. A formal family photo—Max’s father looked really nice, thought Bronte, and now he was sick and Max was on his way back to them… and away from her.

  Bronte was overcome with a mix of sheer glee (look how gorgeous he is, and he loves me) and sheer horror (look how gorgeous he is, and I totally screwed up).

  “Hello?” she barked rudely into the incessantly ringing telephone on her desk.

  “Hi, Bronte, it’s Sarah James. Is this a bad time?”

  Sarah James was the überglamorous, pretty young thing who had started the hottest new line of shoes since Louboutin. Her family was a reigning member of the Chicago old-school elite, and she was the sparkly little gadfly in their ointment. Despite all of that, or because of it, she was a savvy, no-nonsense businesswoman and she admired Bronte’s efficiency, not to mention her swearing.

  “Hey, Sarah. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be such a churl. Just a little hiccup on the romance front. End of the affair and all that. Nothing that will prevent me from making every person in the free world adore every delectable creation that comes out of your atelier.” Bronte shut her Internet session down and focused on her potential client.

  “Well, that’s why I’m calling really. I have been putting off making a final decision on the ad agency for the big launch because I think I want to move to New York and really be there full time to get this off the ground.”

  “Classic. Chicago is going to be the death of me, I swear it. Good luck in New York without me. I totally understand your reasons for not choosing BCA.” It wasn’t that BCA didn’t have lots of national and international clients, but Sarah had made it very clear that she wanted to work hand in hand with whichever agency she finally chose. If she was moving to New York, Bronte simply assumed Sarah was going to hire a New York agency.

  “No, Bron, listen. Would you want to go?”

  “What?”

  “Do you want to move back to New York? I don’t care how you swing it: if you ask your partners here if they want to open a New York office-of-one, or if you want to start your own agency, or if you want to go in-house with Sarah James—though I doubt that would be the best long-term solution for you—”

  “Sarah, this has been twenty-four hours from Mars… I don’t even know where to begin…”

  “Your British ship has sailed, I take it?”

  “Mm-hmm.” More like the fucking royal yacht Britannia, Bronte thought as she absently twisted a long strand of her brown hair and swiveled her chair around to look out onto the summer treetops and across the park to the facade of the Newberry Library. “You know what, Sarah? I think a victory march back to New York City is very much in order. My landlord is going to kill me—I have only been in my apartment for six months—but fuck it. This city has always been a holding pattern for me. Let me talk to Brian and Cecily about how they want to do it. I do not want them to see me as poaching, so it is probably best if I stick with them and open a BCA office in New York. Let me go talk to Cecily and figure out what’s the best way to move forward. Want to meet for lunch at Le Colonial at noon? I will need a glass of wine by then for sure.”

  “Sounds great… are you humming?”

  “Yes, hard to believe given my lovelorn state, but I really think we are going to take Manhattan, Sarah. See you at lunch.”

  Brian Coleman and Cecily Bartholomew were the dynamic pair that started BCA in the late nineties and turned it into one of the hottest, hippest advertising agencies in the Midwest. They left Quaker Oats and McDonald’s accounts at the big firms to branch out with their own special brand of intimate customer attention and creative, unique, glamorous ads. Brian was the visual genius and Cecily was the brass-tacks negotiator.

  Their business partnership spread seamlessly to their personal partnership in a way that Bronte could only wonder at. They had gotten married a year after they met at Ogilvy. All that time together seemed admirable, if inconceivable, to Bronte’s jaundiced eye.

  On the other hand, spending every minute of her life with the future Duke of Northrop at Dunlear Castle seemed perfectly conceivable. She shook herself and knocked on Cecily’s door.

  Bronte sat across from her boss, looking over the immaculate etched-glass tabletop balanced on polished chrome struts and the lone Apple wireless keyboard and mouse that made up the entire contents of her work surface. Bronte had a complete déjà vu moment from that day in Carol Dieppe’s office in New York almost a year ago.

  “Hey, kiddo, what’s up?” Bronte loved how Cecily called her kiddo, somehow infusing it with filial respect rather than patronizing dismissal.

  “So here’s the deal, Cecily. You know I’ve been working on Sarah James for months now, and I think I’ve snagged her.”

  “Fabulous. That has been your baby all the way. You sought her out; you pursued the account. Congratulations. So why do I get the feeling this might not have a happy ending?”

  “Well, you’re kind to compliment me on my perseverance, but you of all people know she wouldn’t have even taken my call, much less listened to my pitch, if it didn’t come on BCA letterhead, with your strength behind me.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Cecily started to swivel slowly back and forth in her chair, kind of like a leisurely shark, Bronte thought, then shook her head again to dismiss the predatory image.

  “So… fuck…” Bronte grabbed her long hair into a tail and shoved it behind her back. “Sarah wants to move to New York; she wants to move me to New York and have me focus all my attention on the launch. She offered me anything I want… in-house, BCA New York office, my own office… oh and by the way, Max flew back to England yesterday.”

  Cecily’s chair stopped moving and she rested her forearms on her desk, meticulously setting aside the keyboard and mouse, as if they represented a world of clutter in her otherwise pristine existence.

  “You don’t seem like the backstabbing, poaching kind, Bron, and I can see you are trying to
do the right thing here. But what is really going on?”

  Bronte covered her face with her hands, then rubbed her eyes. She didn’t even feel like crying. She was so far beyond tears at the moment. She was just exhausted all of a sudden. Utterly and completely depleted.

  “I want to go home. I want to get back to New York.”

  “Oh, Bron. I need to talk to Brian, but I am 99 percent certain that he and I will be in complete agreement on this. I would love for you to open the BCA office in New York, and if you can get that talented bitch Carol Dieppe to jump ship and join you, we will pay you a hefty bonus. Go for a walk. Go shop. Go have a fancy lunch. Get out of the office for a couple of hours and then meet me back here at four.”

  “Cecily, you are the fucking bomb. Why don’t we all move to New York?”

  “Thanks for the invite, friend, but if I wanted to live in that rat-infested stink hole, I would. In the meantime, I will take my townhouse on Astor Place over your bedsit in the West Village any time. Now get the hell out of here.”

  Bronte went back to her desk, grabbed her bag, and headed out of the building. A good dose of retail therapy on Oak Street was just the thing. She checked her cell phone to see if she had missed any calls while she was in with Cecily and saw there was a call from her mother. Ugh, she would return that later.

  She made up her mind to call Max’s cell phone, just to make sure he had arrived in one piece, she told herself rationally. She pressed the preset and listened to the line click and crackle as it connected to a foreign trunk line. The long beep of the European ring made her heart skip a beat. Once, twice. Then a polite recorded British voice informed her with clipped formality that the call could not be connected; please try again later.

  He’d pretty much told her she had totally let him down; she wondered if maybe she should let him be. On the other hand, even her supposedly hard heart could not bear the memory of his sweet innocent expectation that she would, of course, head back to England with him to help him during his difficult time. If only for a week or so.