The Royal We

by Heather Cocks

  “How did you get past the paparazzi?” I asked.

  “PPO Popeye,” she said. “He dropped Mom at her hotel and started to take me home, but there were so many people waiting outside. I hid under a blanket like you used to do and he took me here. I snuck in the back.” She bit her lip. “I couldn’t make myself walk past them.”

  “Maybe you should have thought of that before you flipped off one of them.” I rubbed my eyes. “I can’t believe you stayed mixed up with that asshole Tony.”

  “I was just a passenger. How was I supposed to know what Tony was up to?”

  “Maybe from years of us talking about it?” I said. “Did you not think? About any of it? This makes us look so trashy, Lace.”

  “I should have known the only thing you’d care about would be how you look,” Lacey snapped. “Nobody got hurt. They weren’t even his. He was holding the drugs for a friend.”

  “I cannot believe you are trying to feed me that old line,” I said, cringing. “Why are you even defending him? It was a crime, Lacey. There were enough drugs in that car to light up half of London. You got arrested.” I took a hot, impatient breath. “Have you even thanked anyone? Marj had to massage the US Embassy to get you out. But you’ll have to go back and testify.”

  “Can’t Marj call in a favor or something?” Lacey chewed on her thumbnail.

  “The US Embassy was the favor,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “Then Nick, maybe?” Lacey wheedled.

  I said nothing.

  “This is so unfair,” she said. “I’m getting blamed for someone else’s mistake! If it were you, they’d move mountains.”

  “If it were me, I wouldn’t have been in Tricky Tony’s car,” I said. “But I’m also the one engaged to Nick, so yeah, they would have to do more.”

  “But I’m your sister! It’s so selfish of them!” she insisted. “And of you. After everything I’ve done for you, I can’t believe you won’t make this go away.”

  I felt all the blood in my body rush to my face. “I think you need to leave.”

  She reacted as if I had slapped her. “You’re not serious.”

  Lacey looked around as if she expected someone to back her up, but the only company she had was on my dresser: a framed photo of our seventh birthday, me giving her rabbit ears, her missing a tooth, both of us sitting behind a vanilla sheet cake with rainbow frosting. She’d thrown a tantrum when I asked for chocolate, and I gave in because the histrionics weren’t worth it. Cake was cake.

  “You can’t throw me out. I need you,” she pleaded.

  “Yeah, when you can use me,” I said. “I take your calls. You never take mine.”

  “That’s because you spend all your time talking about Nick,” Lacey spat.

  “That’s funny, because I could tell you the last six places you ate dinner, but you didn’t even know that Nick deployed again,” I countered. “And Nick was not a problem for you two minutes ago when you wanted him to do you a solid with the French police, and he wasn’t a problem when he was getting you into clubs, and he absolutely wasn’t a problem when you wanted to meet Freddie.”

  “Nick was the entire problem with Freddie,” she said with vitriol. “Have you completely forgotten how hysterical he was that we not date in case it made you look bad? I put what I wanted on hold to get you through years of dating and not dating Nick, and now you won’t even do me the smallest favor, because you’re saintly Princess Rebecca, with her perfect fake hair and her perfect life.”

  “You know that’s not how it is!” I said, worked up enough that I threw off the covers and stood up. “You of all people know how weird and hard this has been.”

  Lacey rolled her eyes. “Yeah, poor you. Dad paid for your flat so you could land a guy. I gave up med school to be with you and you gave up…what, art classes? And all you got out of it was, hmm, let me think…everything. I feel so sorry for you.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I actually stomped my foot; nobody brought out my juvenile side like Lacey. “You gave up med school so you could sleep with Freddie. I am just the excuse you used to pull it off.”

  “You ditched me at Cornell!” she accused.

  “I did not!” I protested. “I did something for myself.”

  “No, you ran off and left me in your dust,” she said. “And I think you like it that way.”

  “Our lives aren’t some kind of race, Lacey!”

  “Then why do I always feel like I’m losing?” she said, almost crying now.

  We had, without realizing it, moved toward each other so that we were yelling in each other’s faces—our gravitational pull in its worst iteration. Abruptly she turned and stomped out, smacking the doorframe with her hand, then stomped back in again and set her jaw.

  “I got fired,” she says. “From Whistles. Before Ascot.” At my dumbfounded face, Lacey sneered, “Now who’s the one who doesn’t know anything?”

  “But I asked how work was, and you’d say it was great.”

  “What, and admit they didn’t want me if I didn’t come with you?” she said spitefully. “Once Donna shoved her way in and you stopped shopping in public, my manager decided he didn’t need me anymore. Because everything revolves around you. The book deal fell apart because they only wanted me if it came with you. I don’t get Freddie because of you.” She clenched and unclenched her fists. “You are not the only person your relationship happened to. We all had to rewrite our lives. I had to change how I acted, who I dated, what I wore to work.”

  “I can’t help what Nick’s family is,” I said, frustrated. “And you would have been in deep shit for this no matter who I was marrying. Probably deeper, because you’d still be there.”

  “But the paparazzi wouldn’t have been there,” Lacey countered. “I get all of the crap from Hurricane Posh and Bex, and none of the benefits. We used to be the Porter twins, and now we’re just Rebecca Porter and the other one.” She was crying now, which only added to her anger. “I don’t know who I am now or why I’m even still here, and all anyone wants to ask about is you. Nick and Bex, Nick and Bex, Bex, Bex, Bex. Who. Cares. I’m over it. I’m over you.”

  “Well, then, you made this really easy for me,” I said. “Consider yourself officially relieved of your wedding duties.”

  Lacey’s jaw actually dropped. “What?”

  “You just said you’re over me. I figured you’d be relieved,” I said, but my lips were quivering. Her words had hit me like a physical blow.

  “Great. You’re right. I don’t want to be in your ridiculous wedding,” Lacey said, pivoting and marching into the hallway.

  “Then you did finally get something you wanted,” I called after her, hearing myself on the verge of tears. “Maybe you should get arrested more often.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t even come,” she shouted, punctuating this with a slam of the door.

  “Dammit,” I whispered.

  I should have gone after her. I should have told her we needed to help each other. But instead, I collapsed in tears on the corner of the bed, and felt the invisible tie between us snap.

  Chapter Six

  The details of my wedding gown have been protected like the state secret they are. With eight months to go, Donna, Marj, and I had whittled the list of design candidates to three, each of whom signed confidentiality agreements longer than a novel, and took a circuitous route to our fittings that added forty-five minutes to the trip and required three car changes. One of the interns buzzing around Clarence House politely asked me in passing how it was going, and I’d cracked, “I’m leaning toward something in British racing green.” When it made the papers the next day, the poor trembling girl was dispatched to purgatory (Edwin’s offices) and I was instructed to respond to all queries, even from insiders, with the antiseptic, “It’ll be lovely.”

  Eventually, my opinion was sought—Eleanor was human enough to realize that a bride should get a vote on her own gown—but she strongly expressed a preference for covered shoulde
rs, and luckily, I agreed. Sleeves seemed more regal, despite the ensuing need for armpit Botox. Beyond that, I had no interest in trying to make a fashion statement, and the mere concept of a poufy affair with bows and ruffles and fringe made me itch. I think my missing Disney gene disappointed Fancy Nancy, because she worried several times that all my stipulations would lead to something that wasn’t fairy-tale-princess enough.

  Eventually, I had to remind her, “Neither am I.” Marj guffawed before she could help herself.

  The first designer had barely wrapped one piece of white fabric around me, looking more like a towel than anything, before my mother burst into tears. By the third, she had plowed through an entire tissue box, while I stood there and tried not to feel anything that might cause me to move and make one of the seamstress’s long pins miss its mark. It reminded me of some of the letters between King Albert and his wife, Georgina Lyons-Bowes, from before they were married—specifically, a chunk Nick calls Too Hot for History that did not end up in the Ashmolean, but which he had bound for me as a gift: My dearest, Mother thinks I am entirely too plump, but you must have something to grip onto! These tiresome gown fittings will only be worth it the moment you remove it from me on our wedding night. You cannot imagine how I long for the naughty tickle of your mustache. (The answer: a great deal, judging by the number of creative ways she expressed it.) Comparatively, though I shared with Georgina a waistline being monitored with obsessive fervor, Nick’s sporadic correspondence was harried and rambling, thanks to his habit of typing everything he thought the exact second he thought it. Like, I don’t have much time to write but I can’t believe Lacey would ooooh hurrah, it’s fish fingers for supper, must dash. And this morning’s read, I don’t have much time to write but please tell Marj my top choice is the Navy uniform but if Gran insists then I’ll wear the Irish Guards one IF it includes the sword, because oh bollocks now what? I just cleaned that bloody thing. Hardly museum-worthy.

  By October, the Bex Brigade had its dress. Somewhere in our discussions with the Alexander McQueen team about lacework—handmade, intricate, full of custom symbolism—I’d realized that this was inspiring the kind of artistic satisfaction I’d been missing in my daily life. And the design itself just felt right: a simple ivory gown, the long-sleeved bodice rising slightly up the back of my neck and splitting down into a narrow V that would flatter my smaller chest. It would nip at the waist and fall in graceful, clean lines to the floor, the skirt embroidered with microscopic, meaningful surprises—all very romantic and royal and unusually modest, with shades of both Grace Kelly’s and Georgina’s iconic gowns, both of them unexpected princesses themselves (as was Maria from The Sound of Music, in a sense, whose dress this also resembled—Nick gets choked up at that scene every time, so I suspect it will go over well). When I’d thanked the designer for sketching me a masterpiece, Mom had burst into a fresh waterfall of tears.

  We did the fittings at Buckingham Palace, because the halls could best approximate the square footage of Westminster Abbey when considering how my train flowed, and whether Nick could escort me without trampling it. On this particular day, the peanut gallery took notes and whispered while I did laps of the long Marble Hall, kneeling at the statue of Mars and Venus as if it were the altar, with Cilla playing the role of Nick. Marj and Donna had been so impressed with her Bex-wrangling skills after Ascot that they’d fought for, and finally gotten, a salary and benefits to keep her around full-time. It helped my mental state to have an ally on the Bex Brigade who’d known me since the beginning.

  “Remember the night we met, and you didn’t even recognize him?” Cilla asked, reading my mind as we practiced. “Now look where you are.” She grinned. “Nick hardly ever sat in for the porter, actually, because visitors would go all squidgy on him. I’ll wager he saw your photo in the dossier and was after you from the start.”

  I burst out laughing as we straightened. “Let’s tell that to everyone who thinks I came to Oxford to seduce him,” I said.

  “I just might,” Cilla said. “It’s possible!”

  “Nick dated physically perfect blue bloods before me,” I said. “I am so sure he saw my picture and said, ‘Ooh, push off, India, we’ve got a really average-looking one coming in.’ Frankly, I’d have thought Lacey was more his type.”

  “Oh, you hush,” Cilla said. Then she chanced a peek at me. “How is Lacey? Any movement on that front?”

  I glanced over my shoulder at Mom, who was covering a yawn with the sleeve of her tweedy Chanel suit, the frequency of her transatlantic flights taking its toll. She knew Lacey and I had exchanged words the night she returned from Paris, but clearly neither of us had confessed that we hadn’t exchanged any at all in the two months since then. Like the rest of England, I now tracked my sister’s comings and goings only in the papers. The press had been merciless to her (and per Mom’s retelling, she’d incurred a fair bit of The Wrath of Lady Porter as well), so Lacey was fighting them with the exact weapon that had been turned on her: the lens. She baited them with shots of her beaming through deliriously respectable lunches with squeaky-clean finance types, guys with important Nordic names like Harald and Uli, and she wore businesslike specs so that she looked supremely respectable when she was photographed walking to her new party-planning job. It was a sign of how much our relationship had deteriorated that I couldn’t tell if she was faking it. With the guys or the glasses.

  “No movement. We haven’t talked,” I said. “I think Lacey’s expecting me to budge first, but I’m not going to this time. I don’t think I should have to throw myself on my sword.”

  Cilla frowned. “I cannot believe I am about to say this, but I don’t think I have any ancestors who did that literally,” she said. “That seems impossible.”

  I loved her for trying to cheer me, but I must still have looked sad, because she made a concerned click and murmured, “I’m sorry, poppet. I know you miss her.”

  She squeezed my hand, then clamped down on it so hard I almost yelped. Eleanor had come gliding down the Ministers’ Staircase, in a plaid skirt and cashmere sweater and thick glasses, looking for all the world like she was sneaking down the back stairs in search of her knitting or a lost issue of some pheasant hunting magazine. You are here at the mercy of Her Majesty and me, the cold Prince of Wales had said, but as Eleanor’s gaze fell upon me, I didn’t see anything in her eyes to reflect that—not pity, not resentment, and in fact, not much mercy.

  “Rebecca, good afternoon,” the Queen said, her eyes traveling to Cilla, who looked sleekly professional with her wild auburn hair arranged in a knot. They had been in each other’s orbit before, but never introduced, and I assumed the job fell to me now.

  “Hello, Your Majesty,” I said. “May I present my dear friend Cilla Sutcliffe.”

  We both dropped into a curtsy as Eleanor came down the last steps.

  “My father sends his respectful best, Your Majesty,” Cilla said.

  “We do miss his skills around here,” Eleanor said. “And if I’m not mistaken, one of the paintings upstairs came to us because your ancestor lost it at the whist table.”

  “Indeed, ma’am,” Cilla said. “Something tells me it looks rather nicer here than in her loo.”

  Eleanor let out a short bark of a laugh, which I think caught her by surprise as much as it did us. I felt a stab of pride that what my friend lacked in physical stature, she made up for in sheer will. Not even the Queen could make her blink.

  Eleanor was still chuckling when she turned to me. “I presume Nicholas emails you, at least, Rebecca. How is he faring?”

  I mentally scanned the contents of his emails. Oh bollocks, now what, did not seem like the best sentiment to pass along.

  “He’s loving the fish fingers,” I said. “And he’s willing to wear the Irish Guards uniform.”

  “But only with the sword,” she intuited. “I thought as much. The men all fancy the blade. Predictable as whiskey.” Then she straightened. “Miss Sutcliffe, I’ll need the ple
asure of Rebecca’s company for a moment. She need not remove the curtain she’s wearing.” A smile played at her lips again. “Very Scarlett O’Hara,” she added.

  With a flick of a crooked finger, Eleanor commanded me to follow her upstairs. I trudged after her in my preponderance of muslin and makeshift train—like she’d caught me playing dress-up in her lobby and was marching me off for a scolding—and passed deep into parts of Buckingham Palace I had not seen and might never again. A bajillion questions ran through my head: Where is the pool? What’s playing in the movie theater? Have you even seen all seventy-eight bathrooms? Footmen and maids moved seamlessly past, merely part of the décor but for their pauses to venerate Her Majesty. It struck me then, and may haunt me forever, that in the royal world the walls are rarely the only witnesses. Even your alone time can have a cast of hundreds.

  The Queen’s private sitting room was surprisingly normal, at least on her spectrum. The ceilings were high, the pale-mint walls adorned with plaster wedding-cake detail, but there was none of the gilt that characterized the rest of the palace, and the furnishings looked forty years old instead of a hundred and forty. It was a comfortingly cluttered mess: stacks of newspapers and magazines, a teacup leaving a stain on some old correspondence, a dog’s chew toys on the carpet. The bedroom we passed into was considerably tidier, like it had been spruced up for company—which perhaps it had, because laid out on a velvet cloth on the Queen’s curtained bed sat six dazzling tiaras, catching the light from the large windows and casting dancing beams onto a nightstand photo of Eleanor’s long-dead husband, the Duke of Cleveland. Nick had his ears.

  “I’m impressed that your eyes landed on the picture and not the jewels,” Eleanor said.

  “I see Nick in him,” I said.

  Eleanor crossed to the photo and picked it up, tapping it thoughtfully. “It’s the ears,” she said. “You know, in my day we had to marry. Henry was a nice man, and he would have been a good partner if he’d lived.” She turned to me. “But I never quite got the fuss. There was a story on the news that Great Britain has more unmarried women over forty than ever before, and I thought, Good for them. You girls have it better today. You can do whatever you like.”