The Royal We (2 page)

“As in, the
actual
font,” Joss piped up. “His grandfather invented it.”

“He’s mad as pants. Won’t even read anything in sans serif,” Gaz said. “Couldn’t he have invented something cooler to be named after? Like Garamond the Time-Traveling Motorbike, or Garamond the Lady-Killing Love Tonic?”

“I thought
you
were Garamond the Lady-Killing Love Tonic,” Cilla cracked.

“Well, as long as we’re talking stupid names,” he said irritably, “somebody tell me why we bother with
Steve
if none of you uses it.”

Nick rubbed the top of his head absently. “It’s not really supposed to fool anyone,” he said. “It’s more for if I’m caught in trouble or doing anything embarrassing.”

I met his eyes. “Embarrassing, like joking to a prince that all his relatives have an STD?”

“Exactly,” he said. “Although no one in polite society would actually do that.”

We smiled at each other.

Clive turned to me and pretended to study me deeply, as if my eyelashes were tea leaves he could read. “And you are…Rebecca Porter, almost twenty, from Iowa, father invented a sofa that employs a mini-fridge as a base—”

“Can you get us one?” Gaz interjected.

“…and you once got arrested for public indecency and trespassing because you accidentally tore off your trousers while climbing a barbed-wire fence,” Clive finished.

“I maintain it tried to climb me,” I quipped. “What else does my dossier say? Or do you just have ESP?”

“Of course there’s a dossier,” Gaz said, clapping a hand on Nick’s shoulder. “The Firm has to know who’s living twenty feet from the future of the bloodline.”

Nick’s discomfort was clear (one of his tells is that the tops of his ears start to vibrate—it’s the strangest thing). He drained the last of his pint. “While you lot are busy frightening Bex, I need to go say hello to some people.”

“Yes, right. Back to the grind.” Clive grinned, nodding toward a giggling, coquettish cluster of blondes across the way.

“There are probably worse fates,” Nick said. “I hear syphilis is a beast.”

He slipped off into the room, but didn’t make it far before he was waylaid by a cranky-looking patrician brunette in a high-collared blouse, who pulled him over to whisper in his ear.

Clive whacked Gaz on the arm. “You know he’s sensitive about the king stuff.”

“But it’s exciting!” Gaz argued. “Big intrigue. I’m very respectful.”

Cilla looked doubtful as Joss checked her cell phone. “I’m meeting Tank at the new punk bar over by the Ashmolean,” she said. “Anybody want to come?”

I glanced around for guidance. Cilla shook her head.

“Suit yourselves,” Joss said, leaving behind a quarter of a pint.

“Don’t mind if I do,” Gaz said brightly, reaching over and swigging it.

“Really, Gaz,” Cilla nagged. “You’ll be sweating lager next. My great-grandmother’s great-uncle Algernon had that happen when he was courting the Spanish infanta and—”

“Ah, yes, here we go again,” grunted Gaz.

“Cilla has more stories than Nick has stalkers,” Clive told me. “I’ve no clue if any of it’s true, but it’s bloody entertaining.”

“…and
then
of course she broke it off with him by trying to thrust a letter opener into his ear at her brother’s coronation,” Cilla was saying.

To better bark at him, Cilla clambered into the empty chair next to Gaz. Clive responded by settling into her old spot, smashed up next to me, our thighs touching. It wasn’t unpleasant. He was the Hollywood archetype of a sensitive yet smoldering Brit—wavy jet-black hair, strong jaw, and a voice that was smooth and husky all at once.

“So, Bex, what are you reading?”

“Reading?”

“Studying,” he clarified.

“It’s not in my file?”

Clive smiled. “We only got the juicy bits,” he said, sipping his drink and then licking the froth off his lip in a way that suggested he enjoyed my watching him do it.

“Well, theoretically I’m reading British history, toward my degree at home, but what I really want to do over here is draw,” I said. “I mostly work in pencils, and so much of the architecture here lends itself to dramatic gray and black areas. The arches, the carvings, the gargoyles…”

“Did I hear you say
gargoyles
?” Gaz interrupted. “That reminds me.” He pointed at the stern brunette. “That is our other floor-mate, Lady Beatrix Larchmont-Kent-Smythe. Otherwise known as Lady Bollocks, because of her initials, and also, she can be a bloody load of it.”

Lacey later described Bea as looking and acting exactly the way you would expect a Lady Beatrix Larchmont-Kent-Smythe to look and act. Her posture is as impeccable as her tailoring, she never loses her keys nor her cool nor so much as a chip from her manicure, and I believe she intentionally waxes her eyebrows so that she always appears to be raising them at you with deepest skepticism. Clive explained that Lady Bollocks was a lifelong friend of Nick’s family, and in fact, as we alternated pints and gin-filled highballs, he turned out to be full of tidbits: that Cilla’s ancestors lost their money in a lusty
Downton Abbey
–style scandal; that the girl tending bar once had a pop hit called “Fish and Chips” about a memorable weekend with a famous boy band; that two hundred people had money on whether Cilla and Gaz would sleep together or murder each other (he had a hundred pounds on them doing both); and that Joss’s continued enrollment was a mystery to everyone, because she rarely did anything except follow around her boyfriends and make clothes in her room, to the consternation of her pushy father—the Queen’s gynecologist.

“She’s a good enough sort, but we don’t see her much,” Clive said. “Her father requested she be on Nick’s floor, to light a fire under her or some such, and you don’t run afoul of a man who has such, er, sensitive personal information.”

“Keep your friends close, keep the secrets of the Royal Birth Canal closer,” I said.

“Something like that.” His hand brushed my leg again.

“And you’re the person everyone wants to sit next to at a wedding,” I said. “You’d have dirt on everyone in the room and at least two of their relatives.”

“Only two?” Clive feigned shock. “I do want to be a reporter, actually. I like learning about people. My brothers think it’s just an excuse for the fact that I’m afraid of having my ears torn off.” At my quizzical expression, he added, “They play rugby. Professionally. The biggest, thickest clods you’ve ever seen. Cauliflower ears and broken noses and all.”

“So how did
you
end up on Nick’s floor?”

“My dad was mates with Nick’s dad at St. Andrews,” Clive said. “So we’ve known each other since we were born, same as Bea.”

I glanced at Lady Bollocks. An immaculate blonde with a creamy tan was wresting Nick’s arm from her, to the visible chagrin of nearly every woman in the room and a few hopeful men besides.

“India Bolingbroke,” Clive said, with the precision of a spy. “The new girlfriend. Daughter of Prince Richard’s second cousin twice removed.”

“Good luck to her,” I said. “I think the whole room is out for her blood.”

“We tease him about it, but it’s a bit unremitting,” Clive said. “Last year Nick was with Ceres, the girl whose room you’re taking, but she cheated on him with the polo captain. I think everyone hoped it’d be open season again.”

Nick leaned into India as if she were the only one in the room. It was a technique he eventually told me he developed to freeze out the sensation of being devoured by hungry eyes, two of which, that day, belonged to Lady Beatrix Larchmont-Kent-Smythe.

“She’s like a guard dog, that one,” Clive said, tipping his beer at her.

And then her steely gaze found me. I saluted her comically with my gin.

“Well, nobody has anything to fear from me,” I said, downing the dregs of my drink like a pro. “I’m not here for any of that bullshit. I just want to have fun.”

“Bravo to that,” Clive said. “And when poor old Nick is forced to marry one of these squealing aristocrats, promise you’ll sit next to me, just like this”—he made a point of shifting so that I was half on his lap—“so I can whisper secrets to you.”

“Deal,” I said.

He held my gaze. An excited shiver ran up my spine. I wasn’t there to get married, but I was definitely up for a good time.

And that’s the true story of the day I met Nick: I left the bar with another guy.

I
am one minute older than my twin sister, and she seemed to view that accident of biology as some kind of challenge. If I got As, Lacey got A-pluses. When I hit five foot nine, she was already half an inch taller. She was school president and the head cheerleader, while I was just the softball team’s least-effective relief pitcher (Lacey never understood playing for fun; to her, if you didn’t dominate, it wasn’t worth doing). When our dad had heart problems, we both studied medical textbooks, but she full-on memorized them and decided to go into cardiology—and then, I think, stuck with it mostly because
wants to be a doctor
looked so impressive next to
valedictorian
on our graduation program. So as I stared at the mountain of library books on my desk after just one day of term, I wondered what crossed wire had landed
me
at the very top university in the world when Lacey always had the edge in the Superstar Stakes (even if she was the only one who thought of it that way). My relatively brief settling-in period had ended when the calendar flipped to October, bringing with it the beginning of term—Oxford calls it First Week—and a raft of stern lectures from the academic fellows on the rigors of independent study, a stultifying pile of reading with which I had to be conversant in a hurry, and warnings from Nick’s personal protection officers about acting completely normal yet maintaining constant vigilance. I needed moral support. But Lacey needed dish, and Lacey is good at getting what she wants.

“So how many times
have
you hooked up, exactly?” she pressed.

“It’s barely even an interesting amount,” I hedged.

“You’re the artist,” Lacey said. “Paint me a picture.”

Bedsprings creaked through the phone line. I could picture Lacey the way she talks on the phone: on her stomach, legs bent, covering the receiver with a giggle to repeat what the person on the other end was saying. It was strange
being
that person. Especially because up to now, we’d always dissected our romantic lives over a messy plate of cheese and crackers, and that wasn’t nearly as fun long-distance.

“I don’t know,” I said, pulling open a block of English cheddar. “Three. Ish. Okay, four. Anyway, you should
see
the beard on my history fellow—”

“Four times in like ten days? You must be into him!” Lacey squealed.

“No!” I said, perhaps a bit too loudly. “It’s casual! We’re young. Consequence-free making out is the entire point.”

“You’re such a guy sometimes.”

I could practically hear Lacey roll her eyes. I
did
hear Lacey tapping away on her laptop.

“It’s super frustrating that I can’t find anything but grainy pictures of him on the Internet,” she said. “The whole point of Google is stalking your sister’s foreign hookups.”

“He’s dishy. You’d approve,” I said, lifting up my cheese plate to pull my quilt over my toes. My radiator had one setting: inefficient. “Kind of a Clark Kent type.”

“Ooh, I do approve,” Lacey said. Then her tone turned wistful. “I can’t believe I’m not there. Or that you’re not here. It’s so bizarre. I feel like half my inner monologue went silent.”

Before Oxford, the longest Lacey and I had been apart was eight hours. We picked wildly divergent bedroom décor, yet ended up sleeping in the same room every night rather than retreating to our separate corners. Her school schedule never aligned with mine, but by dinnertime we’d snap back into place like a rubber band. We’d go to the same summer camps, and I’d bring home demerits for skipping sessions to skinny dip in the river, while she’d have an armload of excellence awards and sheaves of phone numbers from excited acolytes she’d immediately forget; it was enough to have secured them. We never deliberately froze anybody out, but it was challenging for other people to get very close. Scientists needed fifty years to split the atom. Our classmates didn’t stand a chance.

Neither had boys. Lacey always dated whatever guy was currently the hottest commodity—our school’s all-state point guard, or the kid who won a ton of cash on high-school
Jeopardy!
—and I’d drift along with whatever plus-one of his she fixed me up with, and inevitably our double dates would turn into them staring awkwardly off into space as Lacey and I monopolized each other’s conversation. In fact, our classmates voted us Cutest Couple, and I don’t think it was a joke. I even dumped my freshman-year boyfriend at Cornell when I overheard him referring to Lacey as The Trojan, because, as he disparagingly told his fraternity brother, she was around so much that she was the world’s most effective birth control.

So I don’t think Lacey quite believed it when I announced my England plans. History had borne out that our gravitational pull was simply too strong. Even as infants, Mom said that she’d set us down two feet apart in our crib, and an hour later we’d somehow be snuggled right up next to each other again, as if we were still in the womb. Nothing had ever come between us before, so it must have seemed highly unlikely that I’d willingly put an ocean there.

“It feels weird that you haven’t met any of these people,” I told her that night. “I keep turning to tell you things, expecting you to be here.”

“How am I going to survive organic chemistry without you drawing obscene cartoon molecules on my flash cards?” she complained affectionately.

“Well, we can’t be attached at the hip forever,” I reasoned. “Nobody will let me hang out in the operating room sketching people’s innards while you rebuild their aortas, or whatever.”

“Why not? It’d be like a souvenir,” Lacey said. “But
fine
, don’t worry about me, up here with my face in a cadaver while you’re living with a prince.” She tsked. “I can’t believe you don’t even have any gossip on him. You are the worst.”

“I rarely see him, Lace,” I said. “Half the time he doesn’t socialize with us. He hasn’t even come into town.”

By the sheer happenstance of Ceres Whitehall de Villency inexplicably (to me) opting for a year at Cornell, I’d landed smack in the middle of Nick’s tight social cluster—everyone in our hall was a proven-loyal chum, or the offspring of one—and my own assimilation came largely thanks to Cilla, who didn’t so much take me under her wing as wrestle me there. I think we were mutually grateful that we got along so well: me because Oxford was the first time I’d been without Lacey, my genetically built-in best friend, and Cilla because her proximity to Nick made her suspicious of outside girls’ motivations, and her other choices on our floor were unsatisfying. Lady Bollocks was too aloof and consumed with horsy pursuits, Joss spent all her free time sewing and immersing herself in the essence of whatever oddball she was dating (which accounted for her current insincere punk look), and the mysterious eighth door in our hallway belonged not to a coed, but to Nick’s personal protection officers. We were forbidden to buddy up with this taciturn quartet of ex-military men, so we never knew their names, instead christening them based on their various personal qualities (PPO Stout was as tall as he was wide; PPO Twiggy was svelte but could snap you like one; PPO Popeye occasionally had spinach in his teeth; PPO Furrow was a frowner). None was older than forty, all had wives and children at home, and yet to do their jobs they bunked two at a time in the most inelegant fashion—it must have felt like trying to shove a cat into a mouse hole—which surely put them on the fast track to sainthood.

Nobody said it directly, but I sensed that coming on strong with questions about Nick would raise the hackles of both my new friends and his trained killers, and it wasn’t worth it just to find out if Nick wore boxers or briefs. So I couldn’t tell Lacey much about him that she didn’t already know from
People
. The day I got accepted to Oxford, she dragged her old Royal Family commemorative issue from the dusty archives under her bed, and showed me pictures of three-year old Nick roaming Balmoral’s moors in buckle shoes and a tweedy plaid jacket, or waving from the Buckingham Palace balcony during a state occasion while Freddie waggled his tongue. None of it did much to create an image of an actual person; just a poster boy, a character in a far-off story.

“I did hear a rumor his room is totally bulletproof,” I told Lacey. “But that’s about it.”

“Maybe he’s just not that friendly.”

“Well, but he’s not
un
friendly,” I explained. “He just socializes really sporadically.”

“Shy, maybe?” she wondered. “Like his mom? She’s basically a hermit. Or maybe he takes after Prince Richard. I read that he’s super stiff.” Lacey let out a puff of frustration. “It’s killing me not to
see for myself. Some people swear Nicholas has a wooden leg and that’s why he never plays polo anymore.”

“That’s ridiculous. Are prosthetics even made of wood anymore?”

“You’re missing the point,” Lacey groused, but she was laughing. “I would kill to have a prince three doors down. Take pity on me and go make out with him, please.”

“I can’t, Lace. I already kissed his friend. And don’t you remember? He will never—”

“Marry an American,” we finished in unison.

Lacey let out a girlish giggle. “I still can’t believe she actually said that to you.”

I
had
seen Nick alone once more, on my third day, about thirty seconds before my inaugural conversation with Lady Beatrix Larchmont-Kent-Smythe. I’d forgotten my robe and towels in Iowa, so until I bought new ones—which was, naturally, exactly what I’d been planning to do on the day in question—I’d been wrapping myself in the tiny terrycloth loaner from the college and sprinting to my door. It had worked, until I bumped smack into Nick as he was coming into the bathroom. My bucket of toiletries went flying, including a box of tampons I’d left in there, raining feminine hygiene products all over him. It sounds like a quirky meet-awkward from act one of a romantic comedy, but it was mortifying, and I didn’t have the advantage of being well-lit and cutely dressed. Or dressed, period.

“Sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry.” I frantically tried to pick everything up without flashing him.

“No trouble,” Nick said, gallantly gathering my scattered stuff. He was wearing ratty maroon gym shorts that proved definitively his legs were made of very nice muscle rather than wood. “Tricky business having to bring so much stuff to the shower.”

“Thanks for helping,” I said, feeling like an idiot. “Forecast for today did say ‘sunny with a chance of Tampax.’”

Syphilis and Tampax.
That’s what I’ll call it when I crack and write my own version of
The Bexicon
.

Nick kept his head down, but I saw his cheeks flush. He later told me that he’d never even
said
the word
tampon
, much less had to handle any, which of course made sense: Who sends the eventual leader of the Commonwealth out for lady supplies? Like the pro I would soon realize he is, though, Nick brushed it off, scooping up the last tampons and dropping them in their box before tossing it to me gently and continuing on his way.

As the bathroom door swung shut behind him, I heard a loud throat clearing and turned to face the one and only Lady Bollocks, polished and perfect in riding jodhpurs and a white button-down shirt.

“How trite,” she said. “
Accidentally
running into him wearing a glorified hand towel.”

“You’re Bea, right?” I said, awkwardly rearranging myself so I could clasp closed my towel and still shake her hand. “I’m Bex.”

“I know,” Bea said, making no move to meet the gesture. “And let’s be clear,
Rebecca
. Your little…whatever that was…is a waste of your time. He will never. Marry. An American.”

She punctuated the last sentence with thrusts of a sharply filed nail. I was so flummoxed that, still dripping water onto the centuries-old Persian runner, I simply gaped as she vanished into her room.

If I had actually harbored fantasies of landing myself a prince, I might’ve been deterred by the intensity of the competition outside the cozy confines of Pembroke. Our college-mates, while clearly interested, were at least accustomed to the sight of Nick, and initially that was the only place I saw him. But off campus, so to speak, the curious eyeballs were more intense. Guys jockeyed to get him on weekend sports teams or present themselves as potential confidantes, the better to boost their own profiles; the ladies were eager for a shot at an heir they couldn’t count on running into every day on their way out of the bathroom. They all tried to be subtle about it, and failed spectacularly. It was like dropping a steak into a rabid pack of horndogs.

The first time I witnessed this was about three hours after I’d hung up the phone with Lacey. I’d begun working my way through Oxford’s pubs in my ten days there before school had started, thanks to the guiding hand of Cilla and the others, and that night I found myself outside on a bitingly chilly night, trudging past several warm and inviting ones.

“Where are we going again?” I asked Cilla, shivering as I tried to keep up. Her stride is all business.

“It’s called The Bird,” she tossed at me over her shoulder. “It’s where C. S. Lewis and Tolkien and some other people got together and gave notes on each other’s manuscripts and probably acted totally unbearable.”

We pulled up our parka hoods against the mounting wind until we came to a plain yellow gabled building with its name in iron gothic letters across the front.

“The Eagle and Child,” I read aloud. “I thought you said it was called The Bird.”

“Same thing,” Cilla said. “It got nicknamed The Bird and Baby because of the pictures on the pub sign, and that got shortened to The Bird.”

“So its nickname has its own nickname?”

“If you think that’s off, wait until Gaz busts out the old Cockney rhyming slang,” Cilla said. “As if he’s not indecipherable enough on his own.”

She paused. “I also finally talked Nick into coming out to toast the start of term, so he’ll be here. Just pretend he’s normal.” She stopped. “Not that he
isn’t
, but…
you
know.”

She pushed me inside the pub, where the boisterous, noisy vibe clashed with the unassuming exterior. Fresh paint butted up against original brick and stonework, the walls warped and bulging in some corners. Students sloshed beer over the edges of their pint glasses as they snacked on plates of thick-cut chips, and while the music was loud, the human din was louder. Later on I would flirt with the VIP club scene, but velvet ropes are more Lacey’s speed than mine. I have always preferred a dive.