Page 14 of The Heir Apparent
“They rip off her dress and tie it to the window sill, then they shimmy down and run for the moors,” Mum would say.
“But no one could survive a night on the moors in just their pants,” I insisted.
I wrapped the dolls up in the veil like a burial shroud and placed them back in the turret where they belonged. I was out of time. I needed to go to the drawing room or I’d be late.Outside my door, the girl from the plane was standing with her fist poised to knock. We both startled at the sight of each other.
“I’m sorry, Your Royal Highness,” she said. “I was sent to fetch you for the meeting.”
“I’m running a bit behind. It’s Mary, right?”
She smiled, seeming heartened. “Yes ma’am.”
We walked down the narrow hallway, and I could see that she expected us to make the journey in silence. She led me out of the private apartment with her mousy ponytail bouncing behind her.
“Whose office do you work in, Mary?”
“I’m at Wolseley House, ma’am. I run Prince Frederick and Duchess Annabelle’s social media presence. Orranit, I suppose.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Did you know my father well?”
She shook her head. “No, ma’am, not well. But he was very nice on the few occasions we did meet.”
He probably never bothered to learn her name, but likely erupted in her general direction when he didn’t approve of the exact temperature on the office thermostat. I looked sideways at her. “Was he really?”
She glanced at me over her glasses and gave me an impish grin. I decided I liked her.
“I couldn’t possibly comment, except to say he was nicer than your stepmother.”
I refused to follow Annabelle’s Instagram account, though I would sometimes look at it when I was feeling particularly self-destructive. I had noticed a drastic improvement in her grid in recent months. I wondered if that was Mary’s influence.
“Annabelle hates you? Welcome to the club. We should get jackets or something.”
She laughed, then covered her mouth, remembering that we were supposed to be in mourning. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure no one was behind us and leaned in.
“All I can say is everyone at Wolseley is looking forward to working for you instead of her.”
Before I had a chance to respond, we’d arrived at the door of the drawing room. She knocked, waited a moment and then let us in.
“Her Royal Highness Princess Alexandrina, Your Majesty,” she said as she commenced a slow descent. Her curtsy had impressive depth.
Granny sat on a great gold brocade couch with Amira perched at the other end. The sheer size of it dwarfed them both. I had forgotten what it was like to be in rooms like this, cavernous and gilded and stuffed with mirrors and chandeliers. Everywhere you looked, faces lurked. There were lions carved into the mouldings, cherubs in the chair legs, disapproving ancestors in the paintings. As a child, I had felt as though a thousand eyes watched me constantly in these rooms. A cluster of aides including Stewart and Mary stood by a marble column and waited while we dispensed with family pleasantries.
I dropped into a curtsy and smiled. “So sorry I’m late, just a bit jet-lagged.”
“Quite alright, dear girl,” Granny said.
“Lexi’s always loved a sleep-in, hasn’t she?” a booming voice said behind me.
I turned to see my father’s brother standing there, picking at a lavish spread of pastries and fruit laid out on the table. Richard was in a flawlessly cut Savile Row suit, though there was nothing a skilled tailor could do about the cascade of neck skin over the collar of his £500 Tom Ford shirt. The “Villiers droop” was an affliction no man in the family could avoid, no matter how handsome they had once been.
When he and Papa were young, Richard was the beautiful one. He was blond and dashing, where Papa was dark and shy. He got the magazine covers and the polo cup trophies and all the girls. In his twenties, Richard briefly worked as a search and rescue pilot in the Royal Air Force, once finding a little girl who had been missing on the North York Moors for over a week. The photos of him walking with the child gathered up in hisbiceps to return her to her weeping parents had earned him a lifetime of good will from a grateful kingdom.
But there was a public Richard and a private Richard. His pale eyes were as cold as ever, and I recalled that once, on a hunt, he had pushed my face into damp heather and hissed at me to be bloody quiet when I accidentally sneezed and disturbed the grouse.
“Uncle Richard,” I said.
He came towards me with his laden plate held aloft and kissed me on both cheeks. “My poor little niece, what a tragedy. Gosh, you look more like Isla every day, don’t you? Though better fed than your poor old mum, I suppose.”
He breezed past me to the chair next to Granny’s elbow. Amira, clutching a teacup on her knee, barely contained her disdain. In the old days Richard and Papa would fight over this prime position by their mother’s side, as if they were still boys and not middle-aged men.
