“Nick dated physically perfect blue bloods before me,” I said. “I am so sure he saw my picture and said, ‘Ooh, push off, India, we’ve got a really average-looking one coming in.’ Frankly, I’d have thought Lacey was more his type.”
“Oh, you hush,” Cilla said. Then she chanced a peek at me. “How is Lacey? Any movement on that front?”
I glanced over my shoulder at Mom, who was covering a yawn with the sleeve of her tweedy Chanel suit, the frequency of her transatlantic flights taking its toll. She knew Lacey and I had exchanged words the night she returned from Paris, but clearly neither of us had confessed that we hadn’t exchanged any at all in the two months since then. Like the rest of England, I now tracked my sister’s comings and goings only in the papers. The press had been merciless to her (and per Mom’s retelling, she’d incurred a fair bit of The Wrath of Lady Porter as well), so Lacey was fighting them with the exact weapon that had been turned on her: the lens. She baited them with shots of her beaming through deliriously respectable lunches with squeaky-clean finance types, guys with important Nordic names like Harald and Uli, and she wore businesslike specs so that she looked supremely respectable when she was photographed walking to her new party-planning job. It was a sign of how much our relationship had deteriorated that I couldn’t tell if she was faking it. With the guys or the glasses.
“No movement. We haven’t talked,” I said. “I think Lacey’s expecting me to budge first, but I’m not going to this time. I don’t think I should have to throw myself on my sword.”
Cilla frowned. “I cannot believe I am about to say this, but I don’t think I have any ancestors who did that literally,” she said. “That seems impossible.”
I loved her for trying to cheer me, but I must still have looked sad, because she made a concerned click and murmured, “I’m sorry, poppet. I know you miss her.”
She squeezed my hand, then clamped down on it so hard I almost yelped. Eleanor had come gliding down the Ministers’ Staircase, in a plaid skirt and cashmere sweater and thick glasses, looking for all the world like she was sneaking down the back stairs in search of her knitting or a lost issue of some pheasant hunting magazine. You are here at the mercy of Her Majesty and me, the cold Prince of Wales had said, but as Eleanor’s gaze fell upon me, I didn’t see anything in her eyes to reflect that—not pity, not resentment, and in fact, not much mercy.
“Rebecca, good afternoon,” the Queen said, her eyes traveling to Cilla, who looked sleekly professional with her wild auburn hair arranged in a knot. They had been in each other’s orbit before, but never introduced, and I assumed the job fell to me now.
“Hello, Your Majesty,” I said. “May I present my dear friend Cilla Sutcliffe.”
We both dropped into a curtsy as Eleanor came down the last steps.
“My father sends his respectful best, Your Majesty,” Cilla said.
“We do miss his skills around here,” Eleanor said. “And if I’m not mistaken, one of the paintings upstairs came to us because your ancestor lost it at the whist table.”
“Indeed, ma’am,” Cilla said. “Something tells me it looks rather nicer here than in her loo.”
Eleanor let out a short bark of a laugh, which I think caught her by surprise as much as it did us. I felt a stab of pride that what my friend lacked in physical stature, she made up for in sheer will. Not even the Queen could make her blink.
Eleanor was still chuckling when she turned to me. “I presume Nicholas emails you, at least, Rebecca. How is he faring?”
I mentally scanned the contents of his emails. Oh bollocks, now what, did not seem like the best sentiment to pass along.
“He’s loving the fish fingers,” I said. “And he’s willing to wear the Irish Guards uniform.”
“But only with the sword,” she intuited. “I thought as much. The men all fancy the blade. Predictable as whiskey.” Then she straightened. “Miss Sutcliffe, I’ll need the pleasure of Rebecca’s company for a moment. She need not remove the curtain she’s wearing.” A smile played at her lips again. “Very Scarlett O’Hara,” she added.
With a flick of a crooked finger, Eleanor commanded me to follow her upstairs. I trudged after her in my preponderance of muslin and makeshift train—like she’d caught me playing dress-up in her lobby and was marching me off for a scolding—and passed deep into parts of Buckingham Palace I had not seen and might never again. A bajillion questions ran through my head: Where is the pool? What’s playing in the movie theater? Have you even seen all seventy-eight bathrooms? Footmen and maids moved seamlessly past, merely part of the décor but for their pauses to venerate Her Majesty. It struck me then, and may haunt me forever, that in the royal world the walls are rarely the only witnesses. Even your alone time can have a cast of hundreds.
The Queen’s private sitting room was surprisingly normal, at least on her spectrum. The ceilings were high, the pale-mint walls adorned with plaster wedding-cake detail, but there was none of the gilt that characterized the rest of the palace, and the furnishings looked forty years old instead of a hundred and forty. It was a comfortingly cluttered mess: stacks of newspapers and magazines, a teacup leaving a stain on some old correspondence, a dog’s chew toys on the carpet. The bedroom we passed into was considerably tidier, like it had been spruced up for company—which perhaps it had, because laid out on a velvet cloth on the Queen’s curtained bed sat six dazzling tiaras, catching the light from the large windows and casting dancing beams onto a nightstand photo of Eleanor’s long-dead husband, the Duke of Cleveland. Nick had his ears.
“I’m impressed that your eyes landed on the picture and not the jewels,” Eleanor said.
“I see Nick in him,” I said.
Eleanor crossed to the photo and picked it up, tapping it thoughtfully. “It’s the ears,” she said. “You know, in my day we had to marry. Henry was a nice man, and he would have been a good partner if he’d lived.” She turned to me. “But I never quite got the fuss. There was a story on the news that Great Britain has more unmarried women over forty than ever before, and I thought, Good for them. You girls have it better today. You can do whatever you like.”
She gave the duke one final look and then replaced the photo on her table carelessly. It fell over and slipped into the crack between the nightstand and the bed. She didn’t notice.
“What did you want to do?” she asked.
“I thought it’d be something to do with art,” I said. “Honestly, when I met Nick, I hadn’t figured it out yet, ma’am. It felt like I had so much time.”
“But I suppose you must want to get married,” she said.
We both do, I remember wanting to say. I didn’t believe Richard’s implication, exactly, but I still kept hearing his words over and over again in my head: There you were, right before the clock ran out.