The Royal We

by Heather Cocks

  “I had a lot of guys whispering at me that night,” Lacey added, trying to be helpful.

  “You know this has to stop,” Nick said, barely listening. “This whole Princes and Porters bit is only making the media hungrier, and Father thinks it makes us look sleazy.”

  “Bollocks to Prince Dick,” Freddie said rudely. “Bollocks to all of them.”

  “You know I don’t have that luxury,” Nick said, ice cold. “And now it looks like my alleged girlfriend is running around London angling for attention. I’ve been saying all summer not to give the press anything to feed on, and you have no excuse, Freddie. You of all people.”

  Freddie stood up from his perch on the arm of my sofa.

  “You’re so right, Your Highness,” he said. “I’m just sorry we can’t all live up to your lofty standards of having an alleged girlfriend who doesn’t know the half of it.”

  He retrieved his phone from Lacey’s palm and dropped it into his pocket, then brandished his engraved cigarette case. “Text me later if you come to the club,” he told her. “We can blink in code at each other from across the room.”

  To Nick, he added, “Hope I see you in Hell,” before jamming a defiant cigarette between his lips and slamming the door, leaving the three of us in suffocating tension.

  “Um, I should probably, uh, there’s a…” Lacey began. “You know what, forget it, I’m just going to take a shower so you two can fight in peace.”

  She scurried off and closed her door as quietly as if a sleeping baby were inside. Nick was practically breathless with frustration. Gingerly, I walked over and put my hand on his.

  “Hi,” I said.

  He looked at the floor. “Hi.”

  “Can we talk about this?”

  He finally turned to me. His face was angry and upset and something else, something indefinable. I stood on my tiptoes and kissed him, slowly, softly, letting it last.

  “Let’s start there,” I said. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  “I did a dumb thing,” I acknowledged.

  “For an understandable reason,” he conceded.

  “They were squeezing up around us and I couldn’t breathe, Nick. And one of them grabbed me, and I just sort of…”

  “…snapped,” Nick finished for me, emptily. “You snapped.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “That’s exactly it. And it looks stupid now, but soon enough someone on Strictly Come Dancing will have her septum collapse and everyone will forget that I jumped onto a bus in front of Hamleys.”

  He turned to me. “This is why I never meant to get serious until I was older. Exactly this. It’s too early in our lives to have this much pressure about what we’re doing, or not doing, or whether we look sufficiently happy. The press is always waiting to pounce on any fuckup. They will be vultures about it, and they will destroy you.”

  Somewhere in that speech, he had stopped talking entirely about me. I reached out and grabbed him by the arms, stopping his pacing.

  “What else is going on here?” I asked. “I know you hate the press. Trust me, I know. But I can’t just never go out and hope that fixes everything. I can’t give them that power. I won’t.”

  “It doesn’t matter. They’ll take it anyway,” he said, his voice breaking. “And no matter how many times I tell you that, you don’t seem to want to listen.”

  “I’m listening now,” I said.

  I had seen Nick happy, sad, lustful, loving, bored, irritated. I’d seen him with the flu, running on no sleep at all, enraged with his father, engrossed in a movie. But I’d never seen him look at me the way he did here—as if he was making a judgment—and then as soon as I’d registered it, the whole thing melted at the edges and fell away, and I just saw a little kid, scared.

  “You snapped,” he echoed, sinking into the couch and putting his forehead in his palms.

  “Yes.”

  “She snapped.”

  “Who?”

  “My mum, Bex,” Nick said. “I’m talking about Mum. She’s…she’s mad.”

  “At me? If I could just talk to her—”

  “You can’t talk to her. No one can,” he said, his voice so painfully flat and expressionless. “She’s not angry, Bex. She’s insane.”

  Chapter Five

  The truth about his mother poured out of Nick in a rushed tangle of words and tears, like he was a soda bottle shaken for a quarter century and suddenly uncapped. Until that night, the biggest secret anyone had ever told me was sophomore year at Cornell, when Lacey confessed she had a crush on her physics professor—and that one, she’d recanted a day later after she saw him with food in his beard. I was out of my depth here. So I just lay beside Nick, our fingers twined, and imagined with heartache the scenes he described playing out on the stark white ceiling of my bedroom.

  Lady Emma Somers grew up in a stately home in Wiltshire and spent summers on the Isle of Wight, right near Osborne House, the Royal Family’s retreat at the time. Emma was fascinated by Osborne—the rooms decorated during the imperial rule of India, the crazy trailer-like contraption on the beach that Queen Victoria I had used for private naked swims in the sea—and Richard had been fascinated with her. He was a shy kid, emotional, extremely self-conscious; his father’s death meant Eleanor expected him to act like the man of the house even though he was still a boy, and he did not flourish under those circumstances. Edwin and Agatha were allowed to attend to grubby, childish pursuits, but the heir had to have his hair just so at all times, his socks pulled up high, his clothes immaculate, even during their summer breaks. He never had fun; he simply wasn’t allowed. But rosy-cheeked, blond, blue-eyed Emma embodied fun. She handled the stiff, lonely Richard with the same care and spirit that she used to rescue birds with broken wings and tame local feral cats and even once shoo a fox away from an actual henhouse. And when Richard returned to Osborne the summer of his twenty-seventh birthday, as England’s most eligible yet desperately unattached bachelor, it was the beautiful nineteen-year-old Emma who found him thrown off his horse, Emma who got help, Emma who was permitted to keep him company while he recuperated from a broken leg, and Emma who, two months later, was given an immaculate emerald and the promise of becoming queen.

  And so Emma married her broken bird, and then became one. She went from being a civilian to being under a constant microscope: Her clothes were found wanting, her hairstyle too modern, her smile too big or not bright enough. Her confidence dwindled to nil, she became resentful and barbed, and Richard—distant by nature, unused to anyone talking back to him, and never skilled at affection of any stripe—was brusque and judgmental in return. The softness and vulnerability of his convalescence evaporated when his need was no longer so naked, and their union became the very definition of marry in haste and repent at leisure. It seems unfathomable that Nick was conceived at all, other than out of the strictest sense of duty. Freddie came mostly because Emma viewed Nick as her best friend, and she wanted to build a team. But if she hoped delivering the expected heir and spare would also decrease the scrutiny, she learned quickly that it actually made her a bigger target. Demand for photos in the pre-Internet age was so astonishing that a photographer snuck into the hospital on the day of Freddie’s birth, and a nurse cracked him over the head with a bedpan. Emma grew so paranoid that she came across as shifty, and the mounting strangeness of her every public appearance with Richard, as if they were uncomfortable touching or perhaps never truly had, ignited a buzz that never stopped. She clammed up, and then shut down, sunny one moment and a total eclipse the next; provoked shouting matches, jealousies, and accusations, and then welt and wilted under them. She stopped going outside, closing all the windows and curtains in their Kensington Palace apartment and refusing to let in the daylight. By the time Nick turned five, she was lost to them, and then buried under a carefully scripted fiction that the Palace thought was less troublesome than the facts.

  “Basically, she doesn’t live in any sort of reality anymore,” Nic
k explained. “Occasionally she’ll speak, but it’s always about things that only live in her head. Most of the time it’s like she just unplugged. She doesn’t recognize any of us. She doesn’t even seem to know herself anymore.”

  “She snapped,” I echoed him.

  “The doctors had a lot of theories,” Nick said. “Anxiety. Some form of rapid-onset dementia. An adjustment disorder. Her brother overdosed when she was eighteen, and her parents died within months of each other when I was two or three, so she may also have slipped into a severe depression. I’m sure she felt terribly alone.”

  I carefully wiped his tear before it dribbled into his ear.

  “It’s all guesswork, though, at this point,” he added. “Nothing anyone’s ever tried has helped, and she certainly can’t tell us herself.” He let out a mirthless laugh. “One day it’ll probably be called Emma Somers Syndrome.”

  “What does Richard think it was?” I asked. “Does he talk about it?”

  Nick frowned at the ceiling. “He’s not forthcoming, which I’m sure is no surprise,” he said. “I’ve heard more about her as a person from her friends, her butler, even Great-Grandmother, after a bourbon or six.”

  He clasped and unclasped his watch absently. “My own memories of the end are mostly snapshots. I remember a lot of screaming. Her smashing the telephone into a mirror. I remember being scared, and trying to keep Freddie busy so he didn’t hear or see anything, although I suspect I was too young to do a very good job at it.” Another tear snaked down his face. “Finally, one day, Nanny took me and Freddie to Buckingham Palace to get us out of there. We ended up staying for…weeks, I think.”

  I snuggled up to him and kissed his shoulder. “I’m so, so sorry,” I said, feeling the inadequacy of the words.

  “Me too,” he said. “I try so hard to be there for her. That’s what I was doing half the time I left Oxford. Visiting, moving her from place to place. Father acts like it’s a waste, but she’s in there somewhere, even if she’s buried deep. She needs to see life around her if she’s ever going to…”

  He put his hands over his face, letting out a quiet sob. I rolled away and let him have it to himself. I didn’t want to ebb a flow of tears that was clearly a long time in coming.

  “I do remember bits from when she was herself,” Nick eventually said. “There was nobody like her. She could laugh so easily, and she had this way of talking to you, right to you, that made you feel like the most important person in the world.”

  “I’m sure that’s exactly what you were to her,” I said. “And still are. That never goes away, not deep down.”

  Nick shrugged. “I don’t know about that. I do wish we didn’t have to hide it. But Father and Gran made that decision a long time ago. God forbid there be human imperfection in the blessed Royal Family,” he said bitterly. “But every time there’s a story about her, it’s so obviously made up. It’s a transgression of the worst sort and they don’t even know it, and I can’t tell them. Like that thing about her taking up with her bodyguard. We couldn’t very well come out and say it’s impossible because she’s out of her mind and we’ve been lying about it for years.”

  His tone grew frustrated. “And even worse, I catch myself wishing they were all true,” he said brokenly. “Because if she was saying those things, if she did have an affair, it would mean she was capable of it. And that she wasn’t lost to us.”

  “This was all such a weight to put on you,” I said softly. “Have you ever asked them to come clean?”

  “No, Bex. I can’t.”

  “Why not? Wouldn’t it be easier on everyone, not having to explain away her absence?”

  “People would see the liars, not the lie,” he said. “Besides, I don’t want them to have the satisfaction.”

  “The press,” I translated.

  “They hounded her,” he said. “My mother was the biggest celebrity in the world. The Guardian did a special edition about her wedding that still holds the record for the most papers ever purchased in the UK. Two girls in Devon died waiting overnight in winter just to meet her. The press hid in the bushes, tapped the phones. They paid off bodyguards and cooks and one of our nannies. The press was the trigger for all of this, for everything that went wrong for her, and my mother would not want them to know they won.”

  I curled into him, my head on his chest, the way we lay together almost every night. He clasped me tightly.

  “That isn’t going to happen to me, Nick,” I said firmly. “Or to you.”

  “I’m sure my mother would have said the same thing.”

  The hopelessness on his face unsettled me. I had only seen Nick like this from the outside. The place he was showing me now, the one he disappeared to when Emma came up, was so much sadder than I had imagined.

  “So,” Nick said. “Now you know my big family secret.” He paused. “In fact, it is the big family secret. Please don’t tell Lacey, or your parents, or anyone. No one outside the family knows. Well, Bea does, but only because our mums were best friends.”

  “I’m honored that you shared it with me,” I said. “I think you needed to tell someone.”

  “I needed to tell you,” Nick emphasized. “Things are already out of control with the media, and the more you and Lacey feed the beast, the hungrier it gets. We sell papers. The more they sell, the more money they make, the more they come at us. The more they own us.”

  “Only if we let them,” I said gently.

  “I’m sure Mum would’ve said that, too,” he said, picking at a loose button.

  “Would she?” I asked. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful. It’s just that we’re all savvier about how these things work now. And she didn’t have you. Not the way I do.”

  “All she had was Prince Dick,” he said. The distaste in his voice was obvious even without the nickname.

  I hugged him tighter.

  “She wasn’t perfect, and I know that, but I miss her like you wouldn’t believe,” he continued, his voice breaking again. “It’s almost worse to miss someone when they’re standing right in front of you.” He shot me a sideways look. “I used to feel that way about you, sometimes. When we were at Oxford and I wanted so badly to reach out and touch you, and I couldn’t because you were with Clive and I was with India. It was like I missed you even though I’d never had you.”

  I kissed his hand, then pressed it to my cheek. Nick looked at me pleadingly.

  “Now you see why it’s so important for you and Lacey to be careful,” he said. “If anything ever…”

  He covered his face, unable to finish. I loved that he worried about me; I believed he was underestimating me. I wished, desperately, that I had known sooner so I could’ve been more careful, and considerably less blithe. I wished the Palace had more faith in the public’s capacity to bear the truth. And, frankly, I wished I could punch Richard for not protecting his sons from carrying this burden alone and in silence. But I said none of that. Instead, I kissed Nick with every feeling I had in me, and when we had sex, it was a sacrament, Nick’s hands reverent on my body, sealing a bond forged through his confession and his tears. But as the heady afterglow of our catharsis ebbed, I felt haunted by something. As if somewhere in our turning point we’d forgotten to make sure we were still going in the same direction.

  * * *

  In the ensuing weeks, my fears were confirmed: While I’d hoped the truth about Emma would unite Nick and me with a newfound bravery and team spirit, it mostly just united him to his pajama bottoms. Fortunately, Richard was finally satisfied that Nick had absorbed enough about British exports and the migration habits of the red-breasted goose, and had approved his entering the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth. I prayed that once Nick had a real, tangible duty he would feel better equipped to make his way in this world, and less like the world was lying in wait for him. Then surely he’d realize that what happened to his mother wouldn’t happen to me, and everything would go back to normal. I wanted to be supportive. I was supportive. I wa
s a good listener, a loving confidant. I tried.

  But we had started arguing. All of our friends were going out to parties, to clubs, to art openings and movies and football matches and music festivals; while Nick never forbade me to go out, it was impossible to ignore that he never did, and I felt guilty ditching him to party with his brother and our friends. Worse, Lacey was clutching ever tighter to Freddie’s arm. Her leave of absence would end when summer did, and with real life looming large once more, she was doubling down on the pleasures only he—and London—could offer. Nick was cross with them both for continuing to bait the press with all their cozy cuddling, and I was loath to get involved, which made him cross with me. We were both touchy and terse, and low on patience.

  The honeymoon was over.

  One Sunday morning over toaster waffles, Nick and I were reading the headlines on our iPads. He always went for hard news first, in case Richard quizzed him on foreign affairs, so I had decided it was my valuable role in this partnership to scan for gossip. The Mail didn’t have much that morning—one of the girls on EastEnders had worn a shirt made of cling film—but when I clicked on the Mirror’s website, a slideshow came up with the headline LACEY THE LYONS TAMER. As far as I’d known, Lacey was in New York, sorting out housing for her return to med school (NYU’s patience, and that of our parents, could logically and logistically only extend so far). She must have come back and gotten a hotel room somewhere. I couldn’t think why, except that it started with an F and ended with an E and was spelled Freddie.

  “Shit,” I murmured.

  “Did you say something?” Nick asked, looking up.

  “Oh. Um.” I had spoken by accident, but I also couldn’t avoid this. “Just, you know, some creepy new restaurant threw this crazy opening party.”

  “The one that went into that old crypt?” Nick asked around a piece of waffle.

  “Yeah. I guess it uses coffins as tables,” I said. “There’s a really funny picture of Lady Cressida Morningstar wearing a giant velvet scrunchie, trying to climb inside one of them with her boyfriend…”