Page 55 of The Midnight Princess
“A monarchy has no interest in your shadows and textures.” She joins me at the screen, touching each photo with a different set of priorities. “A monarchy needs you to be tidy, unexceptional, neutral, clean, conservative, professional, businesslike.”
She missed one. I touch the corner of a photo. “This one is God’s literal messenger to a fallen world. Do you want me to be that too?”
“Jacob.” Her eyes close briefly and her long lashes brush the tops of her cheeks. She looks tired. Where is her fiancé to drag her away from babysitting a stubborn prince? “We are not glib about the pope.”
“Alma,” I say, closing the distance between us, feeling the air shiver. “In the life before this one, I worried about workplace safety, bidding for contracts, and making payroll. I’m the only royal here with the experience of starting my own business, therefore,” I hit her with irrefutable logic, “myhair is businesslike.”
She looks up, and I feel a tremor race through my veins. In making my point, I’ve gotten too close.Chol nia, if I were Pietor walking into this room, I’d punch my teeth in.
Her hand starts for my hair, and my stomach tightens.
Her fingers curl into her palm, and she backs away. “This isn’t finished.”
16
Amber Tiara
ALMA
It’s the queen’s birthday. Not the official one in June when half the country waves flags, dances in the streets, and finds a military man to make out with. Mama’s real birthday is at the end of January when the ice on the roads has frozen into hard sheets and only the people who love her best risk the trip to the Summer Palace to take part in the celebration.
Pietor is not one of her loved ones, but nevertheless, he stands in the corner, scrolling through his phone. Photographers are shivering at the gates of the palace, snapping pictures of grand jewels and couture gowns as the guests drive through, hoping to turn such meager crumbs into a story. For the sake of national peace, one of those stories has to be “Pietor and Alma, Together Again”.
Ella and Clara accept this, but they haven’t let him near me all night.
I stand withTanteAnn-Margrethe, taking a flute of champagne for her when Mama’s housekeeper Una passes them around. Clara performs the same service for her godmother, Lady Grete, who looks around in vacant delight before downing the glass in one swallow.
Freja’s absence is like a sinkhole we’re trying to tiptoe around.
Pictures appear in the press—heartbreakingly ordinary pictures of Freja and her husband in an Italian market choosing oranges, of them walking hand in hand with a bunch of flowers. In every photo, she wears vintage Chanel sunglasses and wide palazzo pants. Though she doesn’t perform for strangers or paparazzi, her happiness is tangible. The pair keep reaching for each other, brushing fingertips, shoulders, waists.
She is with us in spirit, she writes, the card propped among the floral tributes on the sideboard. That doesn’t feel true. My sister, no longer revolving around Mama’s sun, has performed a one-woman celestial revolt.
Could I have done the same in her place? When I planned to marry Pietor, it never entered my mind to truly leave Mama. Consider the concerns of Himmelstein? Yes. Learn a new language? Yes. Prioritize anything over my family and the crown? Never.
Caroline rings a small bell, nodding at the footmen to dim the lights, and a video montage is then projected onto a wall, filling the room with pictures and film clips of Mama’s childhood—riding ponies next to her father, being chased around the garden by her mother. The young princess trying—failing—to smash a champagne bottle against a ship, the bank of dignitaries stunned into inaction. The laughter in the room is tinged with nostalgia.
During a brief clip of Mama walking down the aisle on the arm of her Pavian groom, the room falls into silence. Her steps are resolute, and her face is like war as she forces herself to fulfill the terms of the marriage contract signed by two kings—one dead,the other deposed. The sounds of the protests shook the walls of Roslav Cathedral while she made her vows, they say.
The new queen did her duty, though she had no love for her future husband. The young prince had fled his war-torn country with nothing but his title. When I was a girl, I could listen to that story for hours because I knew how it turned out. Happily ever after.
I watch the shadows moving over my mother’s face as she watches the montage. What emerged from Mama’s loyalty to the crown and steadfast defense of the nation was good, the story went. It’s a lesson I hoped to repeat with Pietor but the problem is that it’s all gone to hell. Their marriage has been wrecked by the same duty to the crown that started it off.
When the montage concludes, the lights come on. Père, standing on the opposite end of the room from Mama, raises his glass. “Helena. May your harvest be a good one,” he says, toasting her a happy birthday in the Sondish way.
I catch Clara’s uncompromising expression over the rim of my champagne flute. She gives her head a micro shake. I can all but hear her make a solemn vow.No arranged marriage for me.Never.
TanteAnn-Margrethe tugs on my skirts. “What is it?” I ask, slipping into a chair. My great-aunt smells of cigarette smoke beneath the Dior perfume.
“Are they still being stupid?” she asks, twitching her finger between my parents. “No, don’t bother answering that. I can see they are.”
“Not stupid,” I say, in a rare mood to talk to someone who’s seen seven decades of scandal wash under the bridge. “They’re hurt. Père is still angry that he wasn’t allowed to attend his father’s funeral. He refuses to see that her hands were tied.”
TanteAnn-Margrethe snorts. “Still your mother’s daughter. Don’t cast her in the role of a helpless damsel,elskede. It doesn’tsuit. She’s never been a woman who lacked resources to do what she really wanted to do. Your father knows that, and you’d do well to remember it, too.” She touches my face to soften the sting. “Your mother made a blunder. She ought to own up to it.”
I bristle at the uncompromising judgement. “A number of factors led to—”
TanteAnn-Margrethe cuts me off, adjusting her fur stole. “You can’t turn the people you love into pawns. You can’t run roughshod over their happiness or their suffering. Not if it’s really love.”
