Planning the Wedding of the Century only exacerbated my unsteadiness, even though all the ingredients were there for it to be a giddy delight: financial carte blanche and the heft of a royal decree. Church closed for cleaning? Finish it early. A groom at sea? Recall the ship. But I myself had very little say. The date was chosen because late April fit Eleanor’s calendar. It had been Marj who’d made the list of designers who could bid for my wedding dress, and selected meaningful flowers for my bouquet. I was told to pick an organist, and flower girls and pages from distantly related blue-blood families I’d never met, and even to pare down the existing guest list to make room for our friends. All of which I did, dutifully, before learning they were perfunctory offers, and Eleanor had already made all those decisions.
Even the autonomy I thought I had was illusory. The Palace didn’t want me photographed anywhere unauthorized, which meant Stout had to phone in a request any time I wanted to so much as pop out for an ice cream cone, which was such a pain that I stopped going anywhere at all. Shopping, if you could call it that, now took place in a converted room at Clarence House, where I was expected to stand still and silent so that everyone else’s opinions could be heard. Donna and her team bustled around me, dissecting my body with scientific detachment as they whipped outfits on and off my frame, before bagging and tagging clothes with color-coded notes marking what should be mixed and matched, reworn or archived, auctioned or donated. It was busywork, but busywork that required my presence and attention, even though nobody there ever paused to acknowledge that I was me and not just a mannequin. As the months stretched on, I used all my energies to look sparkling during those fifteen-second windows when I was publicly visible, and the rest of the time I diligently obeyed my schedule and studied trivia about our potential guests and jogged on the treadmill Marj sent to my flat (along with an industrial-strength juicer that was louder than my dishwasher). I felt like little more than a prop in a very complicated play—as if I could be anyone, and events would still roll on unchanged.
Unfortunately, the longer I went without another major public appearance, the more screeds Xandra Deane fired off painting me as an unemployed drain on the taxpayers, shirking my official duties in favor of staying home and polishing the Lyons Emerald. Like Nick in his first years out of Oxford, I couldn’t defend myself—there is nothing less sympathetic than blubbering that your self-care regimen has made it impossible to hold down an outside job—so the rumors picked up steam. I understood it. I would have believed them, too. Because even I’d lost sight of myself.
So I did something about it.
I’m not sure why I didn’t act sooner. I think that when the daily grind of my duchess training began, it had provided a welcome distraction from the loss of my dad, and then kept me occupied in Nick’s absence. And because failure at it was not an option, I let it consume me without realizing that occupied and satisfied are not the same thing. In the end, oddly, it was Prince Edwin who galvanized me (albeit indirectly). One random Thursday in August, I was sitting in Marj’s office, preparing for our regular confab, when two things happened at once: I heard Barnes spitting nails at Edwin’s new press secretary because Edwin went on Sunrise to announce he was starting his own experimental theater company—against Eleanor’s specific wishes—and I got an email from Maud at the Soane. The two things started to coalesce in my mind, along with the memory of my dad sending me back here long ago to go be Bex. I wondered if he was watching from his Coucherator in the sky, sad that I’d found myself in a situation where me being Bex was considered a hindrance. By the time Marj returned from bullying the old Xerox machine, my spine had returned to me and I had a speech ready. Sort of.
“Right,” Marj said, sweeping in and dropping an iPod in my lap. “In there you’ll find preapproved music for which you are allowed to express a public affinity. Some classical, some pop, some dance, and nobody who’s ever eaten meat in front of Paul McCartney.” She sighed. “That ruled out rather a lot of them.”
I scrolled through it. “Oh, good, I get the Spice Girls?”
“Eleanor enjoys the frightening one,” Marj said. “Now, about your—”
“Excuse me, Marj, if I may,” I said. “I have something for the agenda. I mean, to put on my schedule.” I showed her Maud’s message. “My old boss Maud runs Paint Britain now, and she offered me a spot on the board, and wants to seal it with an event. I’m going to do it.”
“Are you?” Marj fastidiously removed her glasses and placed them, folded, on the desk.
“I am.” I hoped she didn’t catch the waver in my voice. “I think I’ve been a pretty good pupil over the last several months, and I appreciate the time and care everyone is putting into me, but I’m starting to lose my mind a little. I need to produce something other than myself. And I need to show people what I bring to this family other than reformed hair and well-chosen coats. If Edwin can go off-book and mount some weird interpretive Shakespeare in Hay-on-Wye, or whatever Barnes was yelling about, then I think I should be allowed to take on some public philanthropy. Especially for a charity I started, of which Richard is a patron. It would be good for everyone.”
Marj stared at me for a full minute.
“We will finalize the details,” she said simply.
Adrenaline shot though me. “And I’d like our friend Joss to pitch a dress for me to wear,” I blurted. Marj raised an eyebrow. “Please. Donna was just saying we should try to boost some smaller British designers. If it’s a mess, I promise I won’t ask again.”
Marj closed her eyes, as if praying for deliverance.
“Have her sketches to me tomorrow,” she said, and then handed me a folder about the history of indoor cycling in Britain.
I opened my mouth.
“Do not press your luck,” Marj said. “Now, velodromes. Let’s begin.”
The Paint Britain event coincided with Nick’s twenty-eighth birthday (Marj loves a mushy PR spin), which he was spending on the waters of Someplace, presumably looking sexy doing whatever he did with weapons. Paint Britain had been my refuge from missing Nick before, and the prospect of a day doing what I loved bolstered my spirits again. Unfortunately, it was not as giddy an occasion for my old friend. A confident Joss had presented Marj with a sketch for a white dress in a cheerful paint-splatter pattern. It was lively, if a bit on the nose, but Donna instantly recognized it as a copy of a year-old dress from a high street store, which itself was questionably similar to a Chanel. If we had trumpeted plagiarism as a custom original, the press and the blogs would have had a field day—especially Bex-a-Porter, which noticed if I so much as repeated a bracelet.
“Please let me try again,” Joss had begged me, tears running down her face.
“Maybe this is a sign you need a break,” I said as kindly as I could. “We’ve all been there, where the pressure and stress makes your eyes cross.”
“Right, like you know stress,” she sobbed. “My father’s jammed too far up the Royal Family’s privates to support my company. The only cash I have coming in is from my subletters, so I can’t tell them to leave. One word from you and I could have a dress that sells out all over the world, and you won’t help me.”