“They stood on ceremony back then,” I said. “Imagine taking the time every day to write pages and pages to someone about how wonderful they are. Now people just send texts with half the right letters missing.”
Clive turned me toward him. “I solemnly swear never to use abbreviations when I text you sweet nothings,” he said, “if you will do me the honor of going to get a cocktail with me.”
He looked so eager, so sincere. Inexplicably, a memory of India Bolingbroke and Nick together at the party popped into my head. I pulled Clive toward me by the tie and kissed him.
“Let’s go. These shoes are killing me,” I said. “But just one drink. I was up late.”
As usual, one drink became three. But when fatigue set in at around eleven, I extracted myself from The Bird so I could go home and get a little work done before crashing. Clive walked me to a cab, clearly hoping I would tell him to get in after me. I sincerely needed to do some reading, but I was feeling extra warmly toward him—he’d entertained us with the latest rugby news of the brother he called Thick Trevor; rubbed my feet, swollen from being shoved under duress into borrowed stilettos; and told a great story about the time Freddie shot Nick in the butt with a BB gun—so I told him to knock on my door when he got home. With Nick, I had Night Bex, and with Clive it was Beer Bex. Everything seemed grand after a few pints.
When I got back to Pembroke, I found a new DVD of Devour from Lacey in my mail slot. This time, the enclosed note read only, !!!!!! The very sight of it sent Night Bex into a lusty tizzy. Beer Bex tapped out and she tapped in; I ripped off my heels and tore up the stairs. Nick’s door was ever so slightly ajar.
I burst through it waving the DVD in the air. “Ten pounds says the Minotaur tramples one of those judgmental panthers.”
“—completely unacceptable. I have made my decision. Respect it!” Richard was bellowing, his face an unsightly shade of purple. Spittle shot like darts onto the floor.
This was the first time I’d ever even seen inside Nick’s room. It didn’t look bulletproof, but now I know that appearances are deceiving—those old windows were actually full of special glass (and obviously soundproofed, given that I hadn’t heard Richard yelling until I’d stumbled inside). In fact, it looked mostly like mine, except Nick’s comforter was tartan, and there was a bobblehead of Queen Eleanor on the desk that I later found out was a gift. From her. That was all I could take in, though, because both Nick and Richard whipped around to face me, and I briefly went blind from nerves.
“What are you doing in here?” Richard snapped.
“Father,” Nick said in a low voice. “She’s a friend.”
“My apologies,” Richard said, not sounding apologetic at all. “I was having a private conversation with my son and you caught us by surprise. I don’t believe we’ve met.”
I immediately felt completely sober. We could eliminate drunk driving altogether if Prince Richard would just be willing to stand outside of pubs at closing time and indiscriminately yell at people.
“I’m Bex, er, Rebecca, Your…sir…Highness,” I stammered, resisting an urge to curtsy.
“Ah, yes, the American,” Richard said, studying me. “And is disrespect for protocol so ingrained that you’re in the habit of barging in on an heir to the throne?”
“I’m so sorry. No disrespect intended,” I said, trying to sound very composed. “I was just returning some, er, study aids.”
“Father, this is un—”
Richard held up a hand mere inches from Nick’s face, without even glancing at his way.
“I’m sure you can return your study aid at a more convenient occasion,” Richard said to me, his tone dipping several degrees below zero. “Nicholas and I are enjoying some father-son bonding time. I’m sure you understand.”
I peeked at Nick’s face. He was red-eyed, and not just in a tired way, although he looked that, too. Right there, as in most future interactions with Richard, I decided it was probably wisest to toe the line and escape as quickly as possible.
“Oh, and my dear,” Richard added. “I know that nobody will ever hear anything about any trifling family disagreements you may have thought you overheard.”
His voice was now bordering on pleasant, but his eyes most definitely were not.
I gulped. “Sure,” I said, feeling and sounding incredibly American in that one short word. “See you later, Nick.”
That was my first brush with just how barren Nick’s family life was. I felt a flash of gratitude for my own parents, who are frustrating sometimes, but who at least don’t issue veiled threats to my friends specifically so they will shit themselves with fear, and have never starved Lacey and me of their love or attention. It’s not entirely Richard’s fault; he didn’t become a tyrant in a vacuum. He was raised by a painfully proper mother and her army of uptight nannies, and barely knew his own long-deceased father—and thus was totally unprepared to be one. He was never comfortable with Nick and Freddie until they were walking and talking and could see reason, and when that day came, it was too late.
Holed up in my room, I felt nauseated thinking about leaving Nick alone to wilt under Richard’s wrath. I had several elaborate fantasies about storming back in and giving him hell on Nick’s behalf, but in the end, I just turned out my lights so I could feign being asleep when Clive’s knock came (which it did, inevitably, with a tapping that became slightly insistent before giving way to his footsteps creaking away). I wasn’t in the mood; Nick’s misery consumed me. I rested only fitfully before finally sneaking into the hallway to go the bathroom—just as Richard was walking out of Nick’s quarters. I dipped back and hid behind my door, but couldn’t resist watching him through the crack. He shot Nick one last look of fury, which for a split second dissolved into something else—regret?—before he put on his public mask of indifference and slipped away down the stairs.
Day Bex wanted me to give it up and go to sleep, like a rational person, but Night Bex never obeys that boring old shrew. So I grabbed a pen and the Devour DVD and crept toward Nick’s door, careful to avoid the squeaky parts of the old floor. Underneath the string of exclamation marks on Lacey’s note, I scribbled, Dear Night Nick: Take two and call me in the morning, then smoothed the Post-it back over the DVD and shoved it all under his door.
The next morning it came back under mine. Day Nick is dead. Long live Night Nick.
Chapter Six
When she was eight, Lady Emma Somers’s dog Yoghurt died, and she wept on the shoulder of her best friend Rupert at the backyard funeral while her brother murdered “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes. Emma told this story herself, back when she was engaged to Richard and the press was keen to learn about the fetching, rosy-cheeked innocent who’d stolen his heart. Shortly after her wedding, Rupert became Emma’s trusted bodyguard, and the fall of my year at Oxford the Sunday Express ran an exposé in which Rupert Caulfield—promoting an upcoming book—insisted he’d fathered at least one of England’s beloved princes. The fallout was swift. The Mirror ran a photo of Emma and Rupert on the beach together as children, juxtaposed with a shot of them laughing cozily a year after her wedding. The Mail got a recent picture of Rupert driving near Trewsbury House—where the reclusive Princess of Wales was known to hole up—at a time when Richard was in London. Reporters scavenged for anecdotes that either refuted an affair or confirmed it; an anonymous maid claimed Rupert had “lain with” Emma one week after her wedding and twice monthly since, whereas Emma’s former butler swore Rupert was just a friend. Reports of DNA tests were combatted by rumors that Rupert and the butler were involved. It was, in short, a hot aristocratic mess.
Nick took a brief sabbatical from Oxford, which Clive confirmed was to hunker down at Clarence House and strategize how to handle the crisis. (Freddie coped by bravely visiting Monte Carlo. This is typical Freddie. He throws parties where a simple tantrum would’ve been sufficient.) I felt terrible for him. Everybody did. Clive made all the academic arrangements Nick needed to stay on track. Joss
made him a tie out of motorbike gears, which Nick still doesn’t know because it sliced into Gaz’s thumb when he tested it out, so she scrapped it. Cilla dusted Nick’s room and put flowers in a vase on the desk, then replaced them every time they died before he came home to tend them. And I stockpiled Devour episodes for when Nick needed them—and me.
One morning at the beginning of November, when Nick had been absent for a little more than a week, Cilla, Joss, and I studied the latest papers from a bench at the Oxford bus station. Lacey was coming to visit for our birthday, and she was due to arrive from Heathrow any minute.
Joss let out a low whistle. “This says Emma and Rupert were together during that Ashmolean party she skipped,” she said.
“Oh, please,” Cilla said, grabbing the paper from Joss and examining a shot of Rupert coming out of a Tesco, looking jolly. “As the saying goes, ‘Any Yorkshirewoman worth her birthright can smell a lie,’ and I can tell you that tosser reeks something awful.”
“That is not a saying. Nobody says that.”
“What is the deal with Emma?” I jumped in.
“Nick never talks about it and we never ask,” Cilla said, flipping to the horoscopes. “She backed away from the public eye not too long after Freddie was born and hasn’t been to an event in ages. The official line is that she decided she preferred a private life of philanthropy and reflection, or something.”
“Bollocks,” said Joss.
“Maybe she’s agoraphobic,” I said. “Like the Japanese crown princess.” It was a theory Lacey had advanced on the phone.
“No, I mean, Bollocks,” Joss said, gesturing toward the entrance.
Sure enough, stomping toward us was Bea, in gorgeous brown leather boots and a wool pencil skirt, her olive peacoat pulled tightly around a thick scarf.
“You lot should be ashamed, reading that trash in public,” she said, snatching our papers.
“Oh, blow it out your arse, Bea,” Cilla said. “What are you doing here, anyway? Stalking us? Are you going to report back to the Crown that we’ve been caught reading?”
“I’m looking at a horse at a stable near Swindon. My dressage mount is getting altogether too horny to focus.” She shook her head. “Don’t change the subject.”
“Aren’t we being respectful to Nick by boning up on what not to talk about?” Joss suggested. “See, this one claims that he’s going ring shopping for India Bolingbroke, another one says Davinia Cathcart-Hanson wants him back, and then The Sun thinks he’s gone to Africa to beg Gemma Sands for another shot.”
“Bollocks,” sniffed Lady Bollocks in a wonderful moment of synergy that almost made me laugh right in her face. “India is so stupid it’s a wonder she can still breathe. He’ll never marry any of them.”
“You sound awfully sure of yourself,” Cilla said.
“I know things,” Bea said loftily. “Besides, who wants to be tied down in university or right after it? Use your brains, ladies.” She poked at the papers. “And be more careful. You know how he feels about gossip.” She narrowed her eyes at me specifically. “Not everyone is so American about letting it all hang out all over the place.”
And with that, she marched right on past us and boarded a waiting bus.
“Do you think she’s really going to Swindon, or she just needed to make an exit?” Joss wondered.
“I think that bus actually goes to Newcastle, so good luck to her either way,” Cilla said.
“She does not like me,” I said.
“Pay her no mind,” Cilla said, waving her hand dismissively. “She’s twitchy when it comes to him. Her mother is Emma’s best friend, so she’s seen a lot of his life firsthand.”
“It probably doesn’t help that you’re juggling Nick and Clive,” Joss added.
“I’m not juggling anyone,” I protested. “Nick and I just hang out sometimes, which I think is specifically because he knows I’m not trying to date him. He’s like…a brother.”
Both girls chortled.
“Anyway, he’s with India!” I protested. “Or whoever. One of these girls.”
“I think he’s mad for Gemma,” Joss said, unwrapping her scarf as if the gossip warmed her up. “Apparently, he proposed to her on her family’s reservation when he was really young, and that’s where he spent his gap year.”
“See? India, Davinia, Gemma, maybe even Bea for all we know,” I counted off the prospects on my gloved hand.
Cilla shot me a knowing look. “I hear you two laughing in your room until the wee hours. You think we don’t notice, but we do.”
“Nick is taken,” I said. “And I don’t want to be.”
Cilla raised a russet brow. “Don’t you?” she said. “You’re with Nick most days, and when you do open your bedroom door, Clive is waiting. Sounds taken to me.”
“Whatever you do, definitely don’t keep seeing Clive.” Joss yawned. “He’s such a slave to the Palace.”
“Says the girl whose father gives Eleanor her mammograms,” Cilla said.
“Clive can’t be that much of a slave to the Palace if he wants to be a reporter,” I said.
Joss shook her head. “The media is an indentured servant. Tank says—”
“Tank is as thick as one,” Cilla scoffed.
“And Clive is lovely,” I said defensively. “You’re friends with him, too, Joss!”
“I’m friends with a lot of people I think are too boring to snog,” Joss said.
“I don’t think anyone ever really wants to end up with a bloke they call ‘lovely,’” Cilla added. “My great-great-aunt married one, and the man made her so potty that eventually she poisoned him, and to get revenge his spirit possessed a garden rabbit that stared at her through the bedroom window for years.”
“Why didn’t she just poison it, too?” Joss asked.
Cilla looked at her as if she were crazy. “It wasn’t the rabbit’s fault.” She then turned to me. “My point, Rebecca my love, is that it’s hard to be free and clear for whatever comes along when you’re not making any room for anything to come along.”
This profundity was interrupted by the halting growls of a bus carefully turning into the station’s tight entrance. Within twenty seconds of the doors opening, Lacey hurtled out of it and threw herself right at me. We shrieked and hugged for five full minutes, as startled-looking passengers waited by the luggage hold for their bags.
“This is amazing!” Lacey crowed. “The scenery is amazing. This bus station is amazing. That chocolate bar I bought at Heathrow was amazing.” She looked at Joss, who was wearing crookedly stitched pleather leggings with homemade knee socks over them that read Welcome to Soxford in cross-stitch. “Those socks are amazing. England is fucking amazing.”
“Oh, I like you,” Joss said.
“It’s so good to have you here,” I said, squeezing Lacey again. “Come on, let’s get back. I think Gaz is hoping you’ll want to party away your jet lag.”
“Great! I can’t wait to meet Gaz,” Lacey said. “And…everyone.”
“You mean Clive?” Cilla asked innocently, as we began to head to the parking lot. “If you haven’t heard, he’s lovely.”
Lacey turned to me. “So you’re officially not into him.”
“Told you!” Cilla was triumphant. “She’s clearly the smart one.”
“Great. I already regret introducing the two of you. Maybe I should send Lacey back,” I said, but I didn’t let go of my sister the whole walk to the car.
* * *
I showed Oxford off as proudly as if I’d discovered it myself, and Lacey was a satisfying audience. She loved the juxtaposition of Oxford’s old architecture with its zebra-striped crosswalks and drugstores and Starbucks and McDonald’s. She loved the slim alleys that opened into unseen pubs, their patios and flower boxes and famous meat pies kept secret from the streets. She loved the small piece of the Bodleian Library that she could see, and the archaic rule that new students and visiting researchers had to recite a vow of good behavior just to venture into th
e parts she couldn’t. She loved the beef-flavored potato chips, and the shrimp-flavored potato chips, and the chicken-flavored potato chips. She even loved Clive. Our first night unfurled in a pleasant whirl of introductions and jokes and pints. Gaz proposed, Cilla smacked him for being lecherous, and Clive was chivalrous to a fault, even carrying Lacey to my door when she joked she was afraid she’d fall asleep walking up the stairs.
“I can’t figure out why you’re not in love with him,” Lacey said fuzzily.
“Because he’s lovely, I guess,” I said, mostly to myself.
As usual, Lacey was a rock star. Where I’d originally been the one who piqued everybody’s curiosity, I was old news now, and she’d packed her A-game for this trip, dazzling everyone with the infectious fizzy energy she always pulled out whenever she wanted people to fall in love with her. It was a trick I could never help but to admire, like a spectator, and it worked in Oxford the way it had always done. Joss proclaimed her a genius after a lengthy three-hour discussion of fashion. Cilla liked her because they shared a tendency to shoot straight with me (which translated to a lot of ribbing about Clive). And Bea ignored her except to note that she had better taste in shoes than I. It pleased me, how much everyone liked Lacey—I felt like the person who’d brought the most popular dish to the potluck—but there was also the smallest sense that I’d lost something that had been wholly mine.
“You do sort of look alike,” Clive mused. “Lacey’s teeth are straighter.”
“Different noses. Lacey’s ends in that little ski-jump bit,” Gaz narrated.
“And Bex is more angular. Everywhere,” Clive said.
“That can’t be good,” I said, and it did sort of prickle.
“I wonder if you’d look more the same if you went blond, Bex. Have you ever considered it?” Gaz sounded hopeful.
“Bex is perfect just the way she is,” Lacey said loyally. “Besides, both sides of the same coin can’t be exactly alike.” She winked flirtatiously. “Otherwise no one would flip it.”
The Royal We Page 7