The Royal We (33 page)

Unlike Buckingham Palace, Sandringham is not just a residence; it’s also an immense working estate, encompassing everything from national parkland to a sawmill and an apple juice factory. But its jewel is the redbrick Sandringham House, paradoxically both sprawling and compressed to the eye, all narrow bay windows and vertical lines—like someone carved out a long cluster of row houses from one of London’s ritzier boroughs, popped on pointier roofs, and plopped them in the middle of twenty thousand acres. Approaching it in the eerie predawn dark felt wildly like being the heroine in a Jane Austen novel, headed to Netherfield Park to check on my pneumonia-riddled sister, or dropping by Pemberley for haughty verbal foreplay with Mr. Darcy. But when I arrived, the vibe was more
Upstairs, Downstairs
. The ground level crawled only with people in the Queen’s employ, because the rest were still in bed, presumably trying to stay warm. At the turn of the previous century, Sandringham was ahead of its time in adopting flushing toilets and modern showers, but hasn’t led a technological charge since, including modern heating. Eleanor believes being cold is character-building, and won’t coddle her guests with plush eiderdowns, so everyone ends up sleeping in as many layers as they wear to ski. Freddie once told me that he keeps a bottle of whiskey in bed. He calls it portable fire.

I was ushered with quiet efficiency to a high-ceilinged chamber with a canopy bed smack in the middle, a thin, itchy-looking blanket tucked in with military precision. The door had barely clicked shut before I took a running leap and flopped on that tall mattress. I had to take my unscheduled pleasures where I could get them.

The door opened again sneakily, and there was Nick, bundled up like an arctic explorer. He did an adorable fist-pump with the hand that clutched the ring box.

“You get to keep it this time!” he said, padding over and handing me the emerald. “And look, I had it engraved. It’s a Lyons tradition.”

I peered inside at the century-old gold band. I saw, ever so slightly rubbing out from age, the
VRII
; a much clearer script
M
; an
R
and
E
for Nick’s parents, and an interlocking
N
and
B
, officially making me a link in this chain.

“I went with
B
for Bex so that even when we have to be Nicholas and Rebecca in public, you can look at this and remember who we are at home,” Nick said. “Although Freddie’s suggestion was a pair of
K
s for ‘Knickers’ and ‘Killer.’”

I grinned. “That might have been hard to explain to history.”

Nick slid the ring gracefully onto my finger. “It’s all changing,” he said. “In mere hours, everything will be different.”

I rolled over and welcomed him on the bed next to me. “Any second thoughts?”

“Yes, actually. Be a love and pop the ring back in my sock drawer.”

“No way,” I said. “You do whatever you want, but I will smuggle this sucker back to Iowa if I have to.”

Nick grew serious. “I am certainly not having second thoughts about you,” he said. “As for the rest of it…”

His voice dropped off. Today wasn’t just about us. It was about everything. It was about Emma.

Nick had spent months advocating telling the truth about his mother, but it wasn’t until he realized that our engagement had turned the lie into a time bomb that he got anyone’s attention: While nobody was suspicious now, Nick pointed out,
everyone
would side-eye Emma missing her firstborn’s wedding, especially with her ring winking at them from the bride’s finger. Like magic, the matter appeared on the agenda of our next Team Wales confab at Clarence House. Nick arrived with the jittery relief of someone who’d sealed a big deal but forgotten to ask the price; Richard refused to meet anyone’s eyes, and Freddie seemed tense-jawed and moody.

“Here is how it will work,” Marj announced. “Nicholas and Rebecca will tape a television interview discussing their courtship, which will air a few weeks after the Christmas reveal. During the course of this chat, Nicholas will explain that there is a particular truth he must share to ensure that Emma can be part of his festive day.”

Freddie whistled. “Very tricky, Marjie,” he said. “Burying the lede, as they say.”

“Except it makes
me
look like the liar,” Nick said, his triumph turning to irritation.

“Technically, we all are,” Freddie said. “We went on with Katie Kenneth and made up stuff about Mum just the same as everyone else.”

“It’s not too late to call it off, Your Highnesses,” Barnes intoned. “Once this cat is out of the bag, it’s never going back in.”

“I am not calling it off,” Nick said tightly. “I’m not the one who put the cat
in
the bag.”

“Yes, best watch out for those animal cruelty people you fundraise for,
Richard
,” Freddie said, tapping a staccato on the glossy dining room table. “Once they find out you’ve been shoving cats in bags, they’ll be so put out.”

“Shush,” Richard snapped. “If you can’t be serious, you can be excused.”

“You are the one who pushed for this,” Marj reminded Nick.

“But surely there’s another way.” Nick turned to his brother. “What do you think?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Freddie said. “I’ve been shushed.”

“You’re being treated like a child because you are acting like one,” barked Richard.

“This is Her Majesty’s plan, and I’ll box
everyone’s
ears if you don’t put a plug in it. With all due respect,” Marj added grudgingly. Reflexively, I glanced over her head at a famously unfinished portrait of Eleanor, her gown disappearing into tentative pencil scratchings, and knew why Marj had chosen that seat: to remind us who was really in charge.

“Thank you,” Marj said when everyone fell silent. “Nicholas, you were objecting?”

“It’s far too transparent,” he argued. “And I don’t like dragging Bex into it. I’m supposed to be introducing her to Great Britain, not asking her to smile quietly while I say, ‘Surprise! We all lied, and Mum’s bonkers! But won’t this wedding be a treat?’”

I said nothing. I would’ve reassured Nick I could handle it, but that would be siding with Marj, and I refused to leave him on an island.

“Nick,” Marj said softly. “I should hope you’d know that I am on your team. And this
does
make sense. Taking advantage of the goodwill from your wedding is our best shot at coming out unscathed, but for that to work, the truth must come from you.”

“But why?” he wondered, softening slightly.

“Because they will hate me,” Richard said.

The room fell thickly silent. This sliver of his soul caught us all off guard.

“They will hate me, but they will forgive you,” he continued. “From me all they will hear is the lie, and none of the tragedy. But if it comes from you…” He pursed his lips. “They love you. They simply tolerate me.”

Nick swallowed hard, then walked to the window and banged the wooden sill with the heel of his hand. Across the park, the imperious façade of Buckingham Palace glared back at us, as if to underscore that we could never hide from it or anything else.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

But as Nick and I lay in that freezing Sandringham bedroom, enjoying our last moment of peace before the news cameras and the rest of the world intruded, I could see his innate desire for privacy had him still wrestling with ripping open this wound.

“You made the right choice,” I said, gently touching his cheek. “And you’re not saying anything that isn’t true. These are your feelings. That’s all they need to hear.”

On the mantel, one of Sandringham’s one hundred and eighty-three clocks started to chime six a.m.

“That’s our cue,” I said, kissing his arm and getting a mouthful of parka. “Merry Christmas.”

“
Happy
Christmas,” he said, kissing me back. “Aren’t Marj and Barnes teaching you anything?”

Barnes and Marj had, in fact, spent hours training me to avoid
um
and
uh
, and any déclassé colloquialisms or minor swear words, via an incredibly high-tech system of engaging me in conversation and then poking me if I screwed up. It was primitive, but it was working. So was the teeth-whitening, and the frequent visits from Kira to check on my eyebrows. (I’d gotten tipsy on an uncharacteristically pricey Pinot Noir during the breakup and done some regrettable tweezing, which Kira was trying to fix so gradually that nobody would remember they’d ever looked any other way.) Barnes and Marj constantly reminded me that the real work had not yet begun, but I’d been buffed and styled into enough of a patina of elegance that by the time we found ourselves back downstairs, it had done the work of the armor it kind of was. The real, vulnerable me felt shielded, even from the prospect of international scrutiny.

Nick and I found Agatha lurking outside the room where we’d be blowing open Britain’s best-kept secret, working a groove into the Persian rug, seemingly waiting for us.

“This is so extreme. Are you certain about this, Nicky?” Agatha wondered, as her greeting.

“Leave it out, Ags. You’re always so serious,” said Prince Edwin, bouncing down the stairs. He whacked me on the behind with a rolled-up magazine. “Pleased to meet you, Bexy.”

Agatha’s mouth pursed so tightly it looked like a raisin. “
Well
,” she said, curling her lip at Edwin. “Nicky, if you’re certain, about Emma…I suppose you’re very brave, dear.”

Kira gave my hunter-green V-neck dress a final tug, then clucked approvingly. Nick put his game face on, and I saw, like the tipping of an hourglass, the fatigued and nervous expression of the boy I loved shifting like sand into the friendly public reserve of the prince I was marrying. And then Barnes poked his head through the drawing room door and nodded to us.

“It’s time,” Nick said. “No going back now.”

I
f anyone in the White Drawing Room was bitter about sacrificing Christmas to get this scoop, they were professional enough not to let it show. In order to create the illusion of an intimate fireside chat, the place was clogged with producers in headsets, sound guys toting fluffy boom mics, three very caffeinated cameramen, and more empty-handed yet apparently essential technical personnel than I could have imagined you’d need for a three-person interview. The holiday was over; the production had begun.

Nick and I got a quick handshake from our interviewer—Katie Kenneth, whose
On Heir
on Freddie’s birthday had been a raging success—before being hustled into our armchairs. Mine was lower than I expected, so I sat down with an awkward jolt, and then winced when someone turned on a light aimed right at my face. It was at least ten degrees warmer in front of them, and I could feel my nerves frothing again under their heat.

Nick leaned over to me. “Don’t forget to mention the syphilis,” he whispered.

I stifled a laugh as the cameraman counted us in and then pointed right at Katie, who slid on a smile and launched into a smooth, stately introduction before turning her warm gaze on us.

“So how did the fairy tale begin?” she asked with a twinkle. “When did you first meet?”

Somehow she was looking right at both of us. Nick and I simultaneously went to speak, then glanced each other, clamped our mouths shut, and blushed.

“Don’t fret. I spent the last month in Maui eating macadamia nuts and drinking mai tais, so I’ll be well off my game,” Katie said with a wink. Nick and I burst out laughing, and her well-timed self-deprecation cleared whatever fog had set in on us. “We’ll polish it up in the edit. Why don’t you take it, Rebecca?”

The giggles subsided, but I still felt their residual cheer. Without hesitation I spoke my first words to be heard by the world at large.

“He opened the door for me the day I arrived at Oxford,” I said. “In fact, he might’ve been the first person in England that I spoke to, except for my taxi driver.”

“And I owe him a debt of gratitude,” Nick said. “If he had been gallant enough to walk Rebecca’s luggage up the road to the door on a rainy afternoon, she might not have been as impressed by my brute strength when I brought them to her room.”

“You carried her suitcases?” Katie asked delightedly.

“Well, one of them was very small,” I teased. “More of a glorified purse.”

“One humble servant can only do so much,” Nick said. “Although I’m still waiting for my tip.”

This proved an outstanding jumping-off point, because it allowed us to slide into our natural rapport, and because it had the benefit of being true—which the answer to the next query, “When did you know it was love,” was not. We couldn’t very well discuss
Devour
, nor Nick’s karaoke binge, nor the time I dropped tampons on him. Nick kept it vague but charming, claiming it swept us up so quickly that he couldn’t remember
not
loving me, and blamed our years apart on his having some growing up to do. He also elicited more laughs when he revealed he’d proposed via Cracker Jack (Marj had hoped to recast this with
He carved my name into a glacier
, but Nick refused to tell a new lie right before unraveling the old one), and I was careful to chime in only when appropriate, so that I didn’t look pushy. Katie called on me largely to ask about my passions for my adopted country, and steered clear of my parade of bikinis. It was lovely—a well-executed preamble to the moment she’d been instructed to open Pandora’s box.

“Rebecca,” she said, her rich alto as smooth as double cream. “It must be bittersweet for you to experience this without your father.”

Nick and I each reached for the other’s hand. It wasn’t planned; he took mine because he always did that when my father came up, and I took his because I knew what was coming.

“It’s the only shadow on the day. My father loved Nick…olas.” I kept forgetting to use his full name. “Part of me still can’t believe Dad won’t walk in here in five minutes and tease him about whether he properly asked for permission,” I added, my eyes prickling. “But the Royal Family has been so welcoming. Nicholas even made sure Mom was here when he proposed. We feel very, very embraced.”

Katie turned to Nick. “And Nicholas, all of Britain misses your mother. Hers was our last iconic wedding. Will she emerge for yours?”

“We hope so,” Nick said. “But that depends on something I must say to the British people. The sad facts of my mother’s condition are not what they have been led to believe, and I hope very much they’ll understand the secrecy.”

I can still feel how airless that room became, as everyone braced for a quarter-century’s worth of spin to be unwound. And then Nick just let it all out, sincerely, emotionally, wholly. He begged forgiveness for what he called
a well-meaning but still misguided deception
, spoke eloquently about Emma’s confusing non-diagnosis and making mental illness a personal cause of his, and promised the people that their beloved Princess of Wales was safe, cared for, and still loved, even if she was no longer the vibrant woman they once knew.

“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.