by Kate Johnson
In love. He might as well admit it now, if only to himself. He didn’t want to scare Clodagh, who he sensed was a little overwhelmed at the idea of publicity. On the one hand, this was great, because it meant she wasn’t in it just for the fame, and it also lent a rather piquant secrecy to the whole affair; but on the other it really sucked because he wanted to tell the world how amazing it was to be in love with such a wonderful woman.
They’d kept it secret for weeks now. Outside the house, their relationship went no further than barmaid and patron. Sure, some of the guys had teased him about fancying her a bit, and he’d overheard Oz referring to Jamie as Clodagh’s friend, but no more than that. Khan was still keeping an eye on her, which meant most people assumed he was seeing her. This was fine by Jamie in a wider sense but also made him want to leap across the table and scream, “She’s mine, you fucker,” about four times a day.
This was something he had, so far, restrained himself from doing.
For Valentine’s Day, he bought champagne and cooked her a meal to be eaten by candlelight at the parquet table in the dining room. He lit a fire in the huge inglenook and for once was glad they hadn’t gone out for a meal like normal people, because it would have meant waiting to get home instead of making love to her in the middle of dinner. They ended up eating off plates on the hearthrug, half-dressed and smug with satisfaction.
In March, Annemarie gave birth to a baby boy and Jamie was summoned for various photocalls with the family.
“You will be his godfather?” Annemarie said from the sofa at Kensington Palace, cradling the small bundle.
“Of course. Delighted to.”
“Good, because we’re naming him after you,” said Edward. “Well, middle name. We thought Henry, after Grandpa, then James for you and Willem for Annemarie’s uncle.”
“I’m touched,” said Jamie, and meant it. Of course, they’d named their eldest for the Queen and Prince of Wales, so his was very much a second-tier name, but it was still a nice thought.
He was less touched when his father called him aside and said, “I’ve been speaking to the Duke of Allendale about Lady Olivia.”
Jamie kept his face politely disinterested. “Yes?”
“Yes. He says both of you are adamant you’re not getting married.”
“Yes?”
Prince Frederick gave his son a knowing look. “We all know what that means.”
“Yes, it means we’re adamant we’re not getting married,” said Jamie. “Give it up, Dad. You always told me I didn’t have to marry for duty and I should wait until I found someone I truly loved.”
“And you don’t love Olivia?”
“No more than I love Victoria.”
“Victoria is your sister—”
“Yes, exactly.”
That, of course, put the idea in his head. He loved Clodagh. He lived with her already, he was sleeping with her and he couldn’t wait to get home to see her every minute of the day. He wanted to wake up with her tomorrow, and the day after, and all the tomorrows after that.
He wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.
He was halfway down the stairs when the thought hit him like a lightning bolt. I want to marry Clodagh.
It felt right, as right as it had felt to kiss her and to wake up with her beside him, as right as it had felt to hold her hand that morning by the river. He’d waited, and he’d found someone he truly loved, just like his parents had told him to.
Of course, they’d only been together a few weeks, so suddenly declaring his intentions might come across as a little, well, terrifying. He decided to play it as cool as he could.
“How’s the baby?” she asked, looking up from her Latin primer as he walked in that evening.
“Baby James, you mean?” He scrolled through his photos to show her. “That’s his middle name but you know it’s what I’ll be calling him. My nephew.”
“Your own personal nephew?”
“Yep.” He flopped down on the sofa beside her, and she made appropriate noises at the photos. “You should’ve been there,” he added casually. “I know you’re great with kids.”
She’d gone still, and now she narrowed her eyes at him. “That’s not funny. You know, since they announced it was a boy my sister Kylie has been moping because she thought it should be a girl so her son could grow up and marry her. Now she’s trying to convince herself that every ultrasound she had was wrong and it’s a girl after all.”
“Is that likely?”
“No. And besides, like a kid from that estate is ever going to meet royalty, let alone marry it,” she said.
Jamie’s heart leapt. Ask her now. That’s your cue.
“So here’s a thing, anyway,” she said, reaching for her cup of tea. “I was reading that the Romans liked to basically name their kids with numbers. So if your dad was Julius, you’d be Julius Primus, Julius Secundus, and the girls would be Julia Prima, Julia Secunda and so on. Isn’t that nuts? To just give your kids numbers?”
“It’d make things a damn sight simpler,” Jamie said, letting the opportunity fade away. It wasn’t the right time yet. “I could just have been called Quartus when I was born. Mind you they’d have to keep changing it. I’d be Septimus by now.”
“Like Snape. No, he was Severus.”
“Oh please, I’m a clear Ravenclaw.”
She smiled and snuggled against him. Jamie wondered if she knew how much that filled his heart with love. “What am I?”
“Gryffindor,” he said straight away. “You can do the Pottermore test but I’m pretty sure you’re a solid Gryffindor.”
“Ooh, we’re like Romeo and Juliet.”
“They didn’t end all that well.”
“No.” Clodagh’s hand rested on his chest, her fingers fiddling with his shirt pocket. Eventually she said, “If I’d been Roman what would they have called me?”
“You’re the oldest, aren’t you? What’s your dad’s name?” He realised he’d never asked her. But then neither had she ever mentioned him.
Clodagh chewed her lip, and then she said, “I have no idea.”
Ah. So that was why. Her mother, her sisters and brothers and all the neiflings, sure, but her father? Jamie realised he’d assumed her parents were separated, but this was… well actually, it made sense now he thought about it.
She glanced up at him. “Shocked?”
“No, that is…” He considered what to say. “You’ve never mentioned him.”
“That’s because I have no idea who he is.” She sighed and laid her head back down on his shoulder. “Mum met him at a party. She thinks it was at this party. She said she hadn’t been with a black feller before then. That’s how she knows who it was, by the way. If I’d been born white there’d be half a dozen candidates, apparently.”
Jamie wasn’t sure what to say to that. “She’s… is she in touch with him?”
Clodagh snorted. “Of course not. Apparently he’d told her he was going back to Jamaica the next day. You know, like GIs used to tell girls they were shipping out in the morning, I guess. She fell for it. And here I am.”
“You’ve never tried to find him?”
“How? I don’t even know his name. Mum couldn’t remember. Apparently there were quite a lot of illegal substances at the party. It’s a miracle she could even remember sleeping with him in the first place, she used to tell me.”
“Christ.”
Clodagh laughed hollowly. “No, not him. If my nan was here she’d tell you only God does immaculate conceptions. Wages of sin and all that.” She was silent for a while. “Anyway. While the whole country can name your entire family, I don’t even know my dad’s name.”
Jamie put both his arms around her and hugged her close. He wanted to tell her he’d be her family, but he couldn’t find a way to do it without sounding weird. Besides…
What would his family say if he told them that instead of the impeccably bred Lady Olivia, he wanted to marry a mixed-race girl from a council estate
who didn’t know who her father was?
Perhaps if he sort of drip-fed the information. Let them get to know her first. Let them like her and accept her and then casually mention where she was from…
“At least the others do, although in Tony’s case it was only after a DNA test.” Clodagh’s voice came from the region of his chest. “Do you know, I used to be well envious of the twins. They knew their dad. I mean, we lived with him. And they’d always got each other anyway.”
“You had a stepdad?”
“Yeah. Well, they weren’t married, but we lived with him. He was nice.” She hesitated. “Might as well tell you. Duke was Roma. For three years we lived in a traveller camp.”
She waited as if expecting a reaction. Jamie pictured the rundown caravan sites he’d seen on the news, usually with some angry local resident trying to hide their racism. He knew what people called them. He expected Clodagh had suffered more than her fair share of it.
“Must’ve been different.”
She snorted. “Yeah. Different is one word. You know how everyone hates gyppos? Well, imagine being the kid who really stands out in the gyppo camp. Duke was really good to me, but he couldn’t stop what people said. He told me to ignore it.”
Jamie held her a bit tighter. “Did you?”
“I was a kid. What do you think?” She sniffed. “Still he also taught me to throw a punch, so there’s that.” She sighed. “I miss Duke. He died when I was seven. All Mum’s boyfriends after that were dickheads. It’s what made me so angry about Lee and Hanna. I could see it coming, just like I had with those men Mum used to bring home, and I couldn’t stop it then, either.”
I’ll kill him. I want to kill him.
She shifted in his grip. “Hey Jamie, I’m going to need to breathe.”
He forced himself to loosen his hold on her. Thoughts of Lee Cunningham brought out the snarling beast in him. Sometimes, Jamie entertained violent fantasies of beating seven kinds of hell out of him, kicking and punching until he was just a heap of bloody meat.
Sandhurst had trained him in several forms of armed and unarmed combat, after all, and he did have a few friends in the Forces…
“Sorry,” he managed.
Clodagh shrugged. “Don’t be. I grew up tough.”
That wasn’t quite what he’d meant. But she didn’t let him explain, sighing in his arms and saying, “Sorry I brought the mood down. My fucked-up family and me, eh?”
“You didn’t bring the mood down.” The more he learned about her, the more he respected her strength. “Hey, Clodagh?”
“Yeah?”
“I think you’re amazing.”
She looked up at him then, and he couldn’t read her expression. For a moment she looked almost fearful. Then she rolled her eyes and said, “You going soppy on me, Windsor?”
“Can’t a man be soppy with his girlfriend?”
He said it lightly, but Clodagh froze nonetheless. Dammit. Scared her.
“I suppose he can,” she said, and it was only afterwards that he realised her smile didn’t completely meet her eyes.
By April her ankle was as healed as it was going to be, and her heart was near to breaking. The problem was she’d fallen totally in love with Jamie, and he’d made it pretty damn clear he was in love with her.
She’d fallen down the rabbit hole now. She kept furiously researching his family tree to see if there was any sort of precedence to a prince marrying a commoner, but there was precious little to go on. Even the untitled women and men who’d married into the family had been from the very oldest and richest families in the country. None of them were really commoners, not like Clodagh. Not really common.
His great-grandfather, King Edward VIII, had even faced the threat of abdication over his choice of lover: a married woman who’d already been divorced once and had the extra bad taste to be American. Had the family not steered him back towards the widowed Freda Dudley-Ward he’d have been in real trouble. Even Mrs Dudley-Ward had apparently been a risky choice, arriving as she did with two children already in tow, but at least, it had been argued in her favour, this meant she was fertile.
At least Clodagh had never been married, and she was English. Well, half English. Well, a quarter Irish. But she’d been raised in the UK. Had never left it in fact, which wasn’t much of a point in her favour.
But the points against her…
At the pub when it was quiet, at home when Jamie was out, at night when she was trying to fall asleep beside him, she turned the facts over and over in her head. His family might be able to accept a girl with no money and lineage, a girl from a council estate. They might be able to accept a girl with no formal qualifications, because at least she was working to change that. They might be able to accept a girl whose grandmother was Irish by way of the East End, and whose father was Jamaican, and whose skin was decidedly not white. They might allow that her parents hadn’t been married and she was therefore illegitimate.
But not all of those things, not all at the same time. And they would never accept, she knew, the really big, fundamental things. That her parents hadn’t been married because her mother didn’t even know who her father was. And that she used her middle name not because it sounded better or to honour her grandmother, but because she wanted to put Sharday Walsh and her horrible, mortifying, pitiable past behind her.
Because if Jamie’s family ever found out she’d given up a baby for adoption at the age of fifteen and been filmed doing it on that awful TV show, they wouldn’t just keep her away from Jamie, they’d probably have her exiled.
Easter weekend saw Jamie off to Windsor for egg hunts and services in St George’s Chapel. He moped for days about going, and on Maundy Thursday he kissed her goodbye so thoroughly she could barely stand.
“I love you,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve said it before but I do love you.”
I love you too, Clodagh wanted to say, but her throat closed over with tears and she just nodded instead. She watched him leave across the lawn of the Master’s Garden, already aching for him.
The pub was empty of students but saw plenty of tourists come in, especially as word seemed to have got around that Prince Jamie drank here. Clodagh was surprised by a face that seemed familiar, if a little out of context.
“Oh my God, Clodagh? It is Clodagh isn’t it?” The girl pushed back her sleeve to show Clodagh a scar on her arm. “Becca, remember? From that party? You took me to the hospital.”
“Yes, of course.” Clodagh peered at the scar, which wasn’t half as bad as the gruesome wound had suggested. “How are you?”
“Great!” She turned to the girl beside her. “Julia, remember that time I came home all covered in blood? Clodagh was my knight in shining armour that night. She looked after me so well. Let me buy you a drink, Clodagh!”
Clodagh accepted the tip but not the drink, as was usual, and poured the girls their wines. Becca chattered on, explaining that Julia was her flatmate who was leaving to live with her boyfriend, and did Clodagh know anyone who was looking for a room?
And Clodagh heard herself say, “Yes. Me.”
Jamie came home on Easter Monday eager to see Clodagh, but she wasn’t in. “Are you at work?” he texted, because her Bank Holiday schedule could be up in the air, but he got no reply. Probably she was at work, and unable to text back, but… come to think of it she’d been quiet all weekend.
He popped down to the gatehouse, where everyone suddenly found an interesting screen to look at, and unease crept over Jamie.
“Hey. Is Clodagh at work?”
No one spoke. Then Geraint said, “I couldn’t say, sir,”
The unease grew worse. “What do you mean, you couldn’t say?”
Geraint exchanged a look with Khan, which made Jamie’s stomach go hollow.
“Tell me,” he said.
“She left you a note, sir,” Geraint said, and passed him a few sheets of sheets of printer paper, folded over with his name on the outside.
It wa
s her handwriting, the rounded loops of a girl whose education had stalled in her teens. Jamie read the first couple of paragraphs twice, unable to believe it.
“Is this a joke?”
“It wasn’t a joke when I helped her move her things out,” said Khan.
“Where?”
“She asked me not to say.”
Jamie stared at him, appalled. “I order you to.”
“I’m sorry, sir.” Khan was implacable. “She’s a private citizen.”
Jamie moved forward, fist in the air. “Tell me—”
Geraint stepped calmly in front of him. Khan hadn’t even flinched.
“It’s for the best, sir. She said the letter would explain.”
Jamie’s hands shook. The letter quivered. “Have you read it?”
Their blank faces told him nothing.
“Do you know,” he said, thinking of that dossier he’d been too bloody courteous to read, “what she’s going to tell me?”
They said nothing, which in itself said everything. Jamie turned and ran back to the house, the big empty silent house. Clodagh’s walking boot stood where she’d left it these last few weeks, by the front door. The sight of it burned his eyes.
He slid to the floor and forced himself to read her letter.
Dear Jamie,
I have to end this thing between you and me, and it’s breaking my heart but it can’t go on. We can’t have a future together. There’s no world in which it’s possible.
I’m sorry. I really am. I’m taking the coward’s way out but believe me it’s better in the long run. I don’t want you coming after me. Please don’t ask the PPOs where I’ve gone. And it’s probably best if you don’t come to the pub for a while.
You see, Clodagh isn’t my real name. That is to say, it’s my middle name. I started using it when I left Harlow, so no one would know who I was. Because my real name is Sharday Walsh; the one thing my mum can remember about the night I was conceived was that Smooth Operator by Sade was playing. But she can’t spell, so. Sharday.
Google Sharday Walsh. Go on, do it. I know you were too bloody chivalrous to read the dossier on me, because it would have told you all this. You didn’t run screaming when I told you I didn’t know my real dad or that my stepdad was a gypsy—and if you’re making a face at me using the G word then just imagine what the tabloids and the twittersphere will call him—but there’s something else you don’t know and I was too much of a coward to tell you.