The Royal We

by Heather Cocks

  “You’ve kept this secret nearly your entire life, with no one the wiser,” Katie Kenneth said. “Why reveal it now?”

  “Because of this,” Nick said, lifting my ring hand. “Because I still believe a piece of my mum is there, however deep it might be buried, and that piece of her needs to see that she raised someone who can love another person as completely as she loved us. And to be warmed with joy and hope, which might be our only weapons left against the darkness that took her from us.”

  He sucked on his lip briefly. “And because I miss my mum,” he said frankly, his voice threatening to break. “I’m getting married, and it would break my heart on its happiest day not to see her face in that church.”

  Nearby, Marj shone with pride. Past the glare of the TV lights, I spied Freddie, red-cheeked, staring at a fixed point on the floor. And then I caught Richard rubbing at his eyes, and I realized he was fighting crying, too. With dawning horror, I felt my own tear ducts flood.

  The next clip played over and over again on news channels all over the world. Katie handed me a Kleenex as Nick spontaneously kissed my hand and murmured, “Oh, love, don’t cry. Everything’s going to come out all right.”

  I blotted my eyes as delicately as possible. “I’m sorry,” I said to Katie, with an awkward smile. “I haven’t gotten my stiff upper lip yet.”

  Cut and print.

  * * *

  The interview left us with an hour before church to dry our tears and eat. I still hadn’t met the Queen—the suspense would have killed me if I hadn’t been too busy to die—so I was kicked upstairs to the junior dining room, meaning I took my meal in a fluffy bathrobe at a less-favored centuries-old mahogany table (Eleanor has a furniture hierarchy, to go along with her other rules) next to Lady Elizabeth feeding Henry in his high chair. Agatha’s son Nigel sat at the other end, legally an adult, old enough to buy the nudie magazine he was crudely leafing through over breakfast, yet still unwelcome at the proper table.

  “Because nothing says Happy Christmas like the newest issue of Escort,” Elizabeth sang, as Nigel thoughtfully unfurled a vertical centerfold.

  I love Elizabeth. She is a beam of sunshine even when sarcastic—my mother’s bubbly gossipy streak shot through with Freddie’s sense of mischief. Once married, she and Edwin became the Duke and Duchess of Cleveland, reviving his late father’s dukedom, but the press still calls her Elizabeth or Lady Liz; she likes it that way, claiming hanging onto your name is like keeping a piece of home. (I love this theory, knowing I will be Bex to the world for longer than I hold any other title.) And as improbable as it seems, she deliriously adores Edwin. On this Christmas, the two of them sported matching five-months pregnant bellies—his a food baby; hers, another real one—and I’d twice caught them sucking face in the hallway like turbo Hoovers.

  “Don’t be embarrassed, Eddybear,” she’d said. “Bex understands. She still has hormones.”

  While she fed baby Henry, Elizabeth filled me in on the Christmas Eve gift exchange. Nick had talked Freddie out of the cruel gag of giving Richard a World’s Best Dad mug, so instead they got him a Whoopee cushion with Barnes’s face on it. Eleanor had given all the men self-tanner in an abusive shade of bronze, and Elizabeth gave Edwin some men’s bikini-style leopard-silk underpants that promised supernatural strength, luck, and genital potency. The ever-resourceful Freddie had procured for Eleanor a gag positive pregnancy test with a note that said, Whoops. And Nick had found Freddie a book called Celibate? Celebrate!, which apparently prompted an entire routine in which Freddie pretended it might be infectious. Elizabeth also reported that Agatha consumed the better part of a bottle of Burgundy and ate the lesser part of her roast, so that by the post-dinner brandy, she was loudly complaining that she never got any of the good jewels despite being “an actual blood Lyons,” and that her ruby engagement ring was tiny and gauche—at which point Awful Julian called her tiny and gauche and passed out in front of the fire. Queen Mum Marta, ever the firecracker even in her eleventh decade of life, apparently rapped Agatha on the head with a candle snuffer and hissed, “A ruby is not a hardship and neither is a warm body.”

  “Amazing,” I said to Elizabeth, sticking a fat piece of bacon into my mouth. “My family gatherings seem so sedate now. Even with the Easter Sunday arm wrestling.”

  “These will be your family gatherings soon enough,” Elizabeth said in that perky voice that sounds delighted even when she’s bitching. “Aggie’s so bitter. You’ll see. About Julian, about the succession laws…” She lowered her voice. “I can’t blame her, but honestly, that old rule saved us from him being the heir.” She nodded toward Nigel, who was using his reflection in the table to squeeze a juicy zit. “We’d have to sink the island and start over.”

  Soon enough, the calm ceded to the storm once more. My TV makeup was chipped off and replaced with something equally spackled but less intense. I carefully buttoned my sumptuous Black Watch tartan Alexander McQueen coat, weighted at the hem so no winter breezes would kick it above my knees. And Kira secured my navy cocktail hat with an elastic band matched to my hair, then styled a soft half updo that hid the evidence while maintaining a little youthful swing. The effect was as seamless as if I’d been baptized at Buckingham Palace myself. When Nick met me at the top of the stairs, he stopped short for a moment, then cleared his throat.

  “Pardon me, have you seen Bex Porter?” he asked. “Tall, ponytail, sporty. Very loud.”

  “She can’t come to the phone right now,” I said, and it felt true, like the girl who used to live inside me was being elbowed aside to make room.

  We’d been told to congregate in the Saloon, which is the largest room in the house but also one of the most informal, with clusters of overstuffed chairs, family photos atop the piano, and a giant jigsaw puzzle on a low baize-covered table. When we appeared at the door, Richard abandoned Edwin mid-sentence and came over to shake Nick’s hand as I curtsied.

  “Well played today,” he said gruffly, almost as if it caused him pain. “Both of you.”

  Then he turned and left. It was polite to the point of being historic, where Richard and I were concerned. I gave Nick a quizzical look.

  “He’s been trying,” Nick said. “I thought it was because of Mum, but actually, I think getting rumbled with India Bolingbroke embarrassed him and he’s grateful I didn’t tell anyone. So he’s being…marginally pleasant, at times.”

  “I’ll take anything I can get from him that isn’t pure cold rage,” I said.

  “Yes, we must aim high,” he agreed. “All right, you, no more stalling.”

  Nick escorted me toward a slight woman with immaculate posture and an unmistakable profile, perched at a refined oak desk. She took a beat to finish writing—Eleanor is the master of finding ways to make sure you know who’s time you’re on—and popped a Polo mint into her mouth before standing.

  “Rebecca, I’d like to present you to Her Majesty the Queen,” Nick said.

  In my periphery, I saw the Queen Mum raise her tumbler.

  “Well, it’s about bloody time, isn’t it?” she toasted us.

  * * *

  The first time I saw Eleanor, so iconic and impressive in her monarchial finest, was from a careful distance. Standing face-to-face was like nosing up to a Seurat and discerning the dots. At nearly eighty, she’d crossed into that age where makeup starts looking like the paint job it is, and her skin was thinner, the lines etched more prominently. Yet this hadn’t robbed her of her elegance, nor entirely of her beauty, and I realized how Agatha must have suffered for inheriting neither.

  The royal physician had already awarded me a clean bill of health—no syphilis, I wanted to blurt—but still Eleanor examined me as keenly as she would a horse at Tattersalls. Her gimlet eye was the same one I felt at Nick’s birthday, only this time I had nowhere to hide. And she did not miss the flag pin proudly displayed on the lapel of my coat—public, too, now that we were.

  “How do you do, Miss Porter,” she finally said.
/>
  “Thank you very much for having me, Your Majesty.”

  She seized my left hand in her cool, papery one, holding it up as carefully as a scientist so the light bounced off every facet of my ring. “It suits you,” she said as she let my hand drop. “Though I daresay that ring can work miracles on any hand.”

  I felt a light whacking at my legs.

  “Sturdy calves. She’ll carry a child nicely,” said Marta, bringing her empty tumbler to the decanter on Eleanor’s desk. “Sprog her up before I die, Nicky boy. I assume you know how.”

  Nick looked like he wanted to die. But before Marta could begin any kind of instruction, the Queen’s equerry, a petite and balding man called Murray—I still am not clear whether this is his first name or his last—informed us that the time had come for us to leave for church. Eleanor paused as she went past me, and laid a hand on my arm.

  “Once you walk out that door, you are one of us,” she said. “Ready or not.”

  Nick and I would be last in the procession. The press release about our engagement had been out for almost an hour, with word spreading fast, and everyone else spilling out of Sandringham first was effectively a human drum roll (never let it be said that Eleanor lacks a sense of drama). My hand floated up to my pin and I rubbed it for luck as, one by one, Nick’s family—my family, soon—passed through the door to cheers and the pop of flashbulbs.

  People don’t usually get to take stock of the exact second everything changes; by the time they catch up to it, like a breeze, it has passed. But as we reached the door, the world slowed down so my artist’s mind could engrave upon itself every sight and smell and sound of what I was doing. The light spilling through the open doorway. The roar of the villagers. The clammy, nervous sweat starting to form under my arms. The tie Nick chose, the exact shade of his blue suit, the heaviness of his ring on my finger. For years we’d walked the razor’s edge between public and private, together and apart, and as we stood there on the verge, I was struck hardest by the power of what it felt like to decide. To take an outstretched hand knowing it would lead me on a journey I could not reverse. And when I let out that breath and followed Nick into the glare, I left a part of myself behind.

  Chapter Three

  Practically overnight, I went from being vaguely recognizable outside Great Britain—like an itch you can’t quite scratch—to being very famous. Aggressively famous. The kind of famous where I looked so glossy on the covers of People and OK! and Hello! that I found myself abstractedly intrigued by that shiny celebrity with the friendly face and the well-groomed eyebrows. Vogue featured a lengthy but still only half-accurate piece about my background; lesser magazines dissected The Mysteries of Bex abetted by people I barely knew who crawled out of the woodwork with old yearbooks and apocryphal stories and colorful descriptors like brash and ballsy, and giant raging bitch. SHE WASN’T EVEN QUEEN OF HER PROM, shrieked Xandra Deane, as worked up about our impending matrimony as if I’d been dispatched specifically to seduce Nick and then take down the monarchy as the final and very delayed parting blow of the American Revolution.

  My mother archived all the clippings—good and bad—in alphabetized acid-free boxes. One night she fell asleep with them on Dad’s side of the bed, and told me he’d appeared in her dream to warn her that I shouldn’t wear pink on my wedding weekend. Mom seemed to derive peace from the notion that he’d weighed in from the Beyond (even if we both knew it would’ve been more his style to duck in and leave a message about the Cubs’ bullpen), and having something positive to concentrate on cut through her grief, which in turn cut through mine. When Gaz heard the news, he burst into tears and offered our unborn children free legal counsel for life. Joss surfaced for some excited noises about who might design my wedding dress, and I texted Lady Bollocks a message that said, He WILL. Marry. An American. Her response was simply, Wrong number.

  Clive was tougher. The bombshell interview with Katie Kenneth was picked up worldwide, along with Alistair’s newest photo: Nick and Freddie crouched around Emma, smiling, while she stared dreamily off to the side, a freshly tended pixie cut giving her face a stark vulnerability. It was superb black-and-white portraiture, bathed in light and shadow, capturing the tragedy of the story without wallowing in it. Eleanor had conducted the orchestra flawlessly: After the initial media freak-out, the boys were praised for their silent bravery in the face of Emma’s decay, the news cycle moved toward a discussion of the unnecessary stigma surrounding psychological issues, and then everyone got so distracted by the prospect of Richard wheeling Emma into the Abbey that the whole thing took on the air of an epic, tragic romance. Bonuses came fat and frequent at Clarence House, and Clive, an unofficial staffer in his own mind, felt left out in the cold.

  “Two scoops,” he sputtered. “Two, and no scraps for a friend?”

  “This was over my head, mate,” Nick said, handing him an apologetic lager across the dining table at Kensington.

  “Not even a hint, mate?” he asked. “I thought we were scratching each other’s backs.”

  “Marj gave you the polo bit, though,” Nick said earnestly. “You broke that. Caused a total stir. That had to have helped, yeah?”

  “That was ages ago, Nick, and a trifle compared to this,” Clive said. “I’ve done nothing but support you. I buried India sneaking out of Clarence House. I could’ve dined out on that, but I didn’t want to, not at your expense. I’ve never once said any of what I know. About anything. Or anyone.” He gave me a very brief but pointed look. “But no one will take me seriously if they think you lot don’t, and by freezing me out, that’s exactly what you’re suggesting.”

  “I’m so sorry, Clive,” Nick said, distressed. “These were bigger than I am. It comes from the top.”

  “What about going forward? A wedding date, the honeymoon, the dress designer?” Clive asked, his face taking on a desperate sheen.

  Nick spread his hand helplessly. “I can ask, but I can’t promise,” he said. “It’s a delicate balance with the various papers, and there’s a protocol Marj follows. I know it’s my wedding, but it simply isn’t my show.”

  “But someday it will be…?”

  “Right, yeah,” Nick said, and maybe he meant it, but to me it sounded like he wasn’t completely comfortable with this negotiation.

  I fretted about that to Cilla about a week later. We were in the airy dining room of her and Gaz’s rented townhouse and home office, on a picturesque street called Hans Crescent that ran around the back side of Harrods—chosen because Gaz thought it made him look desirable if one could shop for his legal help and a diamond-encrusted nine-iron in the same block.

  “I get worried that Clive is relying on us for big boosts that we can’t give him, you know?” I said as Cilla bustled around her kitchen.

  “Clive will get over it,” Cilla promised, setting down a plate of tea sandwiches, the crusts neatly cut off. “The Fitzwilliams have been loyal friends to Nick’s family longer than Clive’s been alive.” She slid me a cup of tea and a sugar dish. “How are you?”

  “I’m not sure,” I told her honestly. “Ever since Nick and I got back together it’s been this rush of happiness and activity, but as soon as I slow down I get sad again. About Dad, about Emma…” I looked down at my ring. “I know she’s still here, but not the way Nick wishes she was.”

  “I can’t believe he kept that to himself for so long,” Cilla said. “When did he finally tell you?”

  “A few years ago,” I said. “I don’t think he’d ever said it out loud before. He went so pale.”

  “No wonder he was always so sensitive.” Cilla sighed, dropping a sugar cube into her tea.

  “He is a lot lighter now,” I said. “I wish they’d done it years ago.”

  The film of sadness that covered Nick might never wholly disappear, but it did diminish. He talked about Emma more. His insomnia had ebbed. And, perhaps because he was finally rested, he even relaxed about the press. And then just as quickly as the tide turned in him, h
e rode it out of town: His Navy frigate, HMS Cleveland, deployed that January just two weeks after the Emma interview did. It was hard not having him around in those euphoric days when all we wanted was to be privately obnoxious about calling ourselves affianced, and it meant that I was left alone to find my footing.

  I was telling a very sympathetic Cilla this when Joss blew into the flat like a tornado. She’d missed two buttons on her shirt, and mascara had run all over her face.

  “It’s over,” she wailed, flinging herself into a chair with such force that Cilla’s tea spilled. “The store. It’s gone. It’s all gone.”

  The bigger surprise was that Soj had lasted this long. But as foolhardy an enterprise as it seemed, Joss never saw it as a passing fad. In fact, her design aspirations may have been the only real constant in her life, especially because her impatient parents—whom she saw as faithless—had essentially closed her out of theirs.

  “I knew we were losing money, but I didn’t realize it was that bad.” She sniffled. “I told Hunt we could still get a shirt on Bex, but—”

  “I think your style is too edgy for Bex’s new position,” Cilla said tactfully.

  “Doesn’t have to be,” Joss said. “People change. Hunt changed. Turned me out on the street and crawled back to his wife.” She sniffled savagely. “Good luck having two hours of sex with a man who thinks he’s so bloody innovative just because he likes nipple clamps. That’s so three years ago, you stodgy old bastard. God, Viagra is the worst.”

  By the time Lacey joined us, looking elegant in a gray and black L.K.Bennett dress that I realized with a jolt was one of the finalists for my engagement shoot, the three of us had hammered out a plan for Joss to stay with me until her subletters moved out, and run Soj from her maisonette.