“Certainly, it’s tradition.”
“Very well. Eat some of this. It’s horribly sugary.”
She wound a bit of pink sugary floss around her finger and offered it to him. His mouth closed over her finger and licked it off. A frisson rippled through her at the touch of his tongue.
In a curtained off booth, she sat with her dress unzipped and down around her waist. Eliza, Princess Royal of the United Kingdom, sat in a plastic chair in Chipping Campden in her turquoise bra having a little crown inked onto her skin. Lizzy’s tattoo was small and didn’t take long, only four chapters of Harry Potter. When she took over reading for Phillip to have an acorn inked on his bicep, the tattoo artist asked her to quit after her Professor McGonagall accent made him laugh.
“Go fetch us a coffee.” Phillip said.
“Very well. Be brave and I’ll return.” She said.
Lizzy walked up and down the main road until she found a bakery that had coffees. She ordered a pair and went to retrieve Phillip. She found him having the fill shading completed on his arm so she held both coffees, sipping first from one and then the other.
“Luncheon?” He said.
“This is fine.” She said. “I had rather go back to the lodge actually.”
“Really? Did my acorn tattoo excite you so much?”
“Not at all. I want to have a bath.”
“Perhaps I could be of help.” He said. “Did your crown hurt, when they put it on?”
“Like the very devil. Your acorn?”
“A bit. I thought as I watched that we may have chosen a rather painful spot to put yours in, just below your collarbones.”
“I’m all right. I think they were ever so slightly less finessed than the smart shop we went to in the city.”
“Agreed. But without all troublesome traffic.”
“I’ll have a bath and come see you later.” She said.
She ran steaming water in the copper bathtub, added lemongrass bath salts. She wanted time to sort herself out, away from him. She was distracted by the reflection of the crown tattoo in the mirror. She liked it very much, thinking it looked as if it belonged there. So when Phillip found her, he came upon her standing in her bra and panties, staring at her own reflection.
She caught sight of him in the mirror and smiled sheepishly. Lizzy had meant to say something about how she’d speak with him later, but the sheer physical closeness of Phillip, whom she’d already begun to consider her own, made her mouth go dry.
“Excuse the intrusion. For safety purposes, I thought I should do an inspection. I haven’t had an opportunity to check the accuracy of your new tattoo. I need a closer look.” He said.
“By all means.”
Lizzy stepped closer to him, cocked her head to the right so he had a clear view of the small, neat image of a tiara. Phillip’s palm covered her shoulder and his thumb brushed lightly over the mark. His palms trailed down the length of her arms and he took her hands, setting them on the back of his neck.
“I want you to look at the back of my neck.” Something in his tone made her uneasy. She tried to laugh it off.
“Ew, why? If this is like that boy on Facebook who pulled a centipede out of his own ear, I swear I’ll vomit.”
“Trust me.” He said.
Lizzy dropped her hands and walked reluctantly round him. Phillip bent his head forward and she saw it. Right at the back of his neck, nearly hidden by the dark curls at his hairline, was a tiny design of a crown that matched hers, in black indelible ink, like a brand, like he had carved it on her heart instead of etched it in his own skin. That crown, that symbol that he’d willingly inked there, that crown that meant, irrevocably, her.
“Now I am marked out as Caesar’s.” He said.
“Wow.” She said, breathless, her fingertips brushing across the mark, a lump in her throat.
“Yes, I did have literature at university, despite what you think. Sir Thomas Wyatt made an impression, though not as much as you have.”
“You don’t belong to a king.”
“I belong to a princess.” He said.
Oh shit, oh shit! Is what she thought. Reeling, Lizzy could’ve staggered backward with the impact of it, the permanence of the mark on his skin, the depth of his declaration. This wasn’t some footballer that had a tattoo of every new girlfriend’s name. This was Phillip, who was happening to her.
He was too close all of a sudden, and there was too much of him that she didn’t understand even now. She wanted to be alone, on a boat out on the endless sea, or riding her horse to the edge of the glades and leaping that fence to be free of him. She could not, she knew now, be free of him.
Lizzy took a step back from him and tried to act nonchalant.
“It’s nice. I’ll have my bath now and speak to you in just a mo.” She said.
Lizzy sat in the tub, scared out of her wits. So I’m going to happen to you, Lizzy. That was all he had to say to stop time, to hold her very breath in the balance. She had regained her composure, or so she thought, until he asked her to look at his neck. She felt the full force not only of her vulnerability, but his as well. Scrupulous Phillip who deserved far better than the likes of her.
He rapped on the door.
“May I come in?”
“Not—not just now, please.” She said.
“All right. I’ve had a call and I need to run up to the city for the night. The political strategist I couldn’t get an appointment to see has had a cancellation and has a bit of time today.”
“That’s brilliant. You should go!”
“Are you certain? If it distresses you, I mean, if you think I’m skiving on you, you must know I’ve just had a tattoo that might as well say Lizzy on it. I’m being foolish now. Just tell me stop running on so. I had the strangest terror come over me that you’d think I was leaving you, that it was an excuse.”
Lizzy climbed out of the cold water, wrapped a towel round her. She stood at the door, laid her hand against it. Ah Phillip, she thought, you mustn’t stay here.
“Phillip, do calm down. I want you to be MP and if this strategist can help you, then by all means, you should get in the car.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, right?”
“Course you will.” She said lightly.
“Kiss me goodbye then?” Phillip said.
Lizzy drew a long breath and opened the door enough to lean out and kiss him. Best to have it done with. She had thought to give him a friendly peck and send him on his way but this was Phillip. So she found herself melting in his arms as he kissed her long and slow. It felt like longing and regret and a parting of years or decades with oceans in between. She made herself let go of his sleeve, made herself straighten and even tried to toss her wet hair nonchalantly which was easier said than done.
When he was gone, she found she could choke back the sobs credibly enough to act. Now was not the time to indulge in regret. She had enough regrets for three lifetimes and there would be time to sort them out later. This was a loss, an ache too bottomless to look at directly.
Lizzy sat down at the escritoire and took out the box of stationary she never used, blessing her mother for her old-fashioned habits.
Dear Phillip,
I had a lovely time with you, but you must see it is impossible. Let me explain.
I got carried away, which I am wont to do. I act without thinking, go with whatever I feel and damn the consequences. It’s more than a personality flaw, it’s a disorder of sorts. My brain doesn’t work properly, as Father would phrase it.
Impulsivity, frequently changing lovers, recklessness with no thought for consequences, even my trouble starting toward any kind of real goal like hippo-therapy—all of it is part of my trouble. I’ve been hyperactive for a long time and the medicine numbs me out, so I go through periods where I just can’t stand it and I stop taking the pills. Then I rebound from them and can’t sleep and have weird manic symptoms. Anyhow, after Magnus accused me of being cold to him, I quit my medication
s and that would account for the tattoos and the magazine spread and all manner of impetuous decisions I made, the worst of which was what I chose to do to you. I teased you and flirted with you and messed you about and now I have to explain that this was a one-off. There is no disorder, no medication or lack thereof that could excuse what I did.
When I was a child and did something irresponsible, Pemmy used to say something and I never really knew what it meant until now. I mean, I did realize it meant she was angry at something I’d done but today I feel it. She would say, “For shame, Eliza!” and I didn’t give it much thought until I saw you’d gone and had a tattoo of a crown put on your neck and I felt this great and terrible wash of shame. Never have I once known true regret nor been really sorry until now.
I think I made you love me, or made you infatuated with me at least. I hope you might know you’re well shot of me and get over it quickly but somehow I doubt that you will. You’ve always been a loyal, kind man, good straight through to the marrow and far past goodness to a fault. Lord knows you’ve forgiven Jamie a time or ten, but what he does is never heartless and callous. Wanting you to love me because I liked how you saw me, because I liked who you thought I was—it is the worst, most selfish thing I’ve ever done and God forgive me because I won’t forgive myself. Every time I kissed you I wanted more. You made me feel good and lovely and brilliant and everything that YOU ARE and I am not. I was, as much as anything, drawn to the way you looked at me and touched me like I was really something. I see that the cruelest thing I could do would be to lead you on even more, to pretend that I was anything worth saving or in any way capable of requiting the affections that you offered me.
Before I started this letter, I did one thing right. I took my medication. I won’t give it up again because it’s too easy for me to hurt people who don’t deserve it at all, just because I’m arrogant enough to think I can handle things on my own.
It was vanity and arrogance and a good bit of lonesomeness and not one damn good reason among them. I wish I could go back to the music benefit and thank you for telling off Magnus and then walk away like an adult, not like a corrupting influence, not like a bad, selfish, feeble girl who never bothered growing up.
I did love you, Phillip. In my own broken way, I did. It was real. It was a very serious mistake on my part and one for which I cannot apologize enough. You’re welcome to stay at Pembroke as long as you like, though I can’t imagine why you would given the terrible time of it you’ve had. Know that I wish you the best, something far better than me. You’re a fine man, Phillip. The best I’ve ever known. And you were never for the likes of me.
With deepest regret,
Eliza Margaret Penelope
She slipped the letter in an envelope and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. Enough of that, she thought. Enough feeling sorry for myself. A positive focus was what she needed. Any focus except for how she could have done things differently and how she might have endeavored to deserve him if she could’ve got her head out of her arse in time. Concentrate, she told herself with disgust. She wished she could make the idea of a hippo-therapy center work, wished she had any confidence that she’d stay with the course to complete it, that she wouldn’t go off the rails with some handsome pop star when she had a paper due or an exam to sit for. The only reason she had to be grateful for her diagnosis of being highly distractible was that surely she wouldn’t have too spectacular a mope over Phillip before someone else caught her eye. Somehow she didn’t quite believe it, though. As poorly as she thought of herself, she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t felt something real for him, for her Pembroke boy.
Chapter Nine
He returned early, drove back to Pembroke—drove home, is how he thought of it—after his meeting. When he came in the door, Mrs. Chambers met him, shaking her head and looking so tearful he half-feared Lizzy had taken a spill off a horse and cracked her back or had—had hurt herself on purpose. He admitted to himself in that moment he thought her capable, thought her sad enough and fragile enough to do herself some injury.
“Is she all right?” He had asked Mrs. Chambers, who shook her head emphatically.
“She’s healthy enough I suppose, but she’s gone is Miss Lizzy. If it had been my place, if I’d been her mother I’d have tied her down to stop her going! You do her good, you do indeed!” Mrs. Chambers said, then pressing a handkerchief to her lips as if she’d said too much.
He took the stairs two at a time until he reached her bedroom. He found her letter with his name scrawled across the envelope. He stared at his name written in her hand and gave a curt nod. He knew what she would say, had known it perhaps all along despite holding out hope.
Phillip had known she would leave him eventually. He could make her stay, could convince her to face whatever she was afraid of. But to do it he would have to bully her, would have to be the equivalent of a bull-hook that breaks a captive animal. He thought of everything she had told him about herself, everything she hadn’t meant to say. If racing stock could never be properly free, they could be put to use, could help others. If an antelope was not fit for return to the wild, at least it might be given an enclosure on a preserve, someplace peaceful and out of the chaos, away from the gawkers. It was not merely compassion she felt for the racehorses, the circus and zoo animals. It had been recognition, kinship.
He could stay at Pembroke and pretend to write his book. Really he would walk the corridors and gardens like Heathcliff pleading for Cathy’s ghost to haunt him. Phillip hadn’t exaggerated when he credited Lizzy with reviving him. For months every day had felt bleak, until he took off his cufflinks to pound Magnus at the charity ball. Suddenly there had been Lizzy and Technicolor had washed across the flat landscape of his days. She was made of stardust, he had thought once, but could stardust illuminate? He shook his head in disgust. He was a realist, a practical man. He was never so fanciful; he had never indulged in hope before. It was worse than the time he’d tried cocaine at university. Then at least that searing streak of euphoria had lasted only an hour. But hope, and particularly hope in the form of Lizzy, had been a rapture that raged for days.
Phillip couldn’t make himself regret any of it. He would take his defeat and not romanticize it. She would come back or she wouldn’t. He couldn’t afford to let himself wish. He would meet with his political advisor and hope that he was wrong about Lizzy, but he knew her well enough by now.
***
Lizzy messaged her father that she was coming home to Kensington and she’d stay in her room under total house arrest. I won’t go in public. No social media. Nothing. Just peace and quiet, like you’ve always said I needed. She messaged. God but she’d made a mess of things! She spent the drive to London cataloging her faults, her most recent sins. Then she cranked the radio up and blasted the air conditioning just to keep awake.
Once she reached the palace, she stumbled up the stairs and lay on her bed. It was silent apart from the creak of the timbers and she could hear her own blood pounding in her ears. She took a sleeping pill, just one, and spooled up in the duvet without bothering to change out of her clothes. When she woke, everything wasn’t better and sunnier as her mother had always promised. Her eyes burned and her throat was dry and she felt like she could sleep another thirty hours for a start. But she got up and drank coffee and had a shower. Her rationale was that before she could become a decent person who did worthwhile things, she had to start behaving like one.
Just once she wanted to do something useful and not completely self-centered. Phillip had believed she could do it. Even if every good thing Phillip believed about her had been wrong, had been his own idealistic construct, perhaps in this one thing, she could prove him right. The adaptive riding plan had to be above reproach before she could present it to their majesties.
She also needed to look into laser tattoo removal. That crown had to go. The vines and roses, too, probably. She’d keep the horseshoe because it meant something to her, symbolized her beloved gran. The others, wel
l, those were boredom and caprice and she didn’t need a visible scar from those. It was a childish rebellion anyhow. It was one more thing she’d done that disgusted her now.
She kept to her rooms, wore her glasses, pulled her hair back in a plait and filled out applications to three physio courses. She had the queasy feeling that anyone processing the online submissions would take one glance at her name, laugh and drag that .pdf straight to the desktop bin. All those years of courting media attention with daring skirts and scandalous men would work against her effort to do anything real.
At times, she would give herself a quarter of an hour to think of him, to torture herself with every single thing she did wrong. She would make herself imagine seeing him at charity events, at Jamie’s birthday each year with a succession of women, cleverer, steadier than she. She stooped once to beans on toast which she ate while working on her equine center objectives. Lizzy itemized and estimated every bit of it and then took to combing the records at Pembroke to see if she could siphon any money off the annual produce there.
She had known Pembroke was self-supporting, but she hadn’t realized the profit it made with the sheep as well as a rotation of winter wheat and spring barley. There was enough money from Pembroke to do the stable expansion and modify the grounds. The salaries, the equipment would have to come from Lizzy’s personal fortune, the one she inherited from Pemmy. She didn’t want to charge fees for the patients. Children with autism, people with multiple sclerosis, wards of the county who had behavioral challenges could learn to work with horses, ride horses in a safe, nurturing environment at no cost. She would look at them the way Pemmy had looked at her, with the expectation that they could do hard things with enough practice.
When her phone rang instead of letting it go straight to voicemail, she answered it. It was Marianna Winchester, one of her married friends. It had been at Marianna’s fateful hen party in St. Barth’s that Lizzy had met Magnus.
The Princess Royal (Royal Romances Book 2) Page 11