“Nick is special” is what I decided to tell Eleanor. “I can’t imagine my life without him.”
Her face brightened. “He is special. Even if he cannot complete a cryptic crossword to save his life,” she said. “He has a heart as big as the crown he’ll wear one day. You’ll do well to remember that.” She paused. “Both the heart and the crown.”
Eleanor’s almost transactional satisfaction with my nod made me wonder what precise promise—beyond love and loyalty—my assent had just made, as she walked to the half-dozen twinkling witnesses to the deal.
“In my time, a woman never wore a tiara before her wedding day, because it represented the crowning moment of committing oneself to another,” she said. “Traditionally, the bride wears one from her own family that day and then one from her husband’s thereafter, to signify her transference. But…” She twitched her hands slightly, as if to say, No such luck here. “It is also custom for the Queen to provide something borrowed, so without an ancestral diadem of your own, that is what I shall offer. Sit down at my dressing table and we’ll see which flatters you best. If none of them suits…”
Her voice trailed off, implying that if none of them suited, I would damn well sit there until one of them did. But there was no fear of that. These tiaras sparkled in the light of that cloudy London day, glorious even to a girl who once called her Cubs hat her crown.
“I’m extremely touched, Your Majesty,” I said, my hand fluttering to my heart in a way that actually did feel a little Scarlett O’Hara. Young Bex would’ve punched me in the arm if I could have gone back in time and told her she’d one day let the Queen plonk tiaras onto her half-fake hair, at a brass-and-glass dressing table next to a brush with a hairball brewing that was as majestic as its source.
“This one is called the Cambridge Lover’s Knot,” Eleanor said as she set one on my head. It was a stunning array of nineteen diamond arches, each bearing a swinging oblong pearl, and it was oppressively heavy. “I earmarked it for Emma, but it gave her an awful headache and it’s terribly noisy, so she only ever wore it in her official portrait.”
“Oxford might be ticked off if I’m endorsing anything named Cambridge,” I said, intending it as joke.
Eleanor frowned. “Quite right,” she said. “And with you wearing her ring, I suspect that might be too much Emma, don’t you agree?”
I certainly did (although I suspect it wouldn’t have mattered either way). No bride wants to glide toward her beloved dressed as his mother.
The second option was called the Surrey Fringe, a narrow piece of scrollwork more commonly turned upside down and worn as a necklace—and rightly, because we quickly assessed that it made my head looked like one end of a Christmas cracker. The third was an art deco jeweled floral wreath, best worn across the forehead, but which made me look like an unhinged Great Gatsby mega-fan, and the fourth barely stayed on my head for five seconds. It was the Girls of the Isles tiara—first given to Georgina Lyons-Bowes by a national women’s group—and it was Eleanor’s personal favorite.
“I would never actually let you wear this one,” Eleanor said, replacing it on the bed with 60 percent more care than she showed the others. “I just thought you’d find it amusing to look like our money for a moment.”
Number five was a princessy circlet of tall diamond curlicues. “This belonged to my sister,” Eleanor said. “It fell off and got stuck in the loo at my coronation. They had to use forceps to retrieve it.” I must have looked startled, because she added, “I believe we’ve had it cleaned.”
The Loo Tiara was too large on me (and, I privately feared, tempting fate). The Queen removed it gently and replaced it with the simplest of the six.
“I suspect I’ve saved the best for last,” she said.
This one was still chock full of diamonds, but more subtly—very streamlined, no dangling bits, nothing imposing about its height. If a tiara may be deemed sporty, this was the sportiest, and like the dress I’d chosen, it suited me to a tee.
The Queen smiled, but slowly, which was her way—like she wanted you on tenterhooks for as long as humanly possible.
“I shall inform Marj,” she said.
Instead, she picked up her brush, hairball included, and began fussing with my extensions. Sometimes I wish that I could reassure my hair’s original owner that it’s being well looked after, and, in fact, getting the royal treatment in every way.
“It must be so challenging for you to have one foot here and one foot in America,” the Queen said. “The United Kingdom and the United States have been brilliant allies, of course. I have visited five times, and met five different presidents. You’re such an ebullient people.”
“Thank you,” I carefully replied, despite feeling she didn’t wholly mean it as a compliment. “Both countries have been wonderful homes to me.”
“One rarely ends up with one’s first love, does one?” she mused. “We grow up, we change, we mature. We find new love.” She fluffed my hair. “And sometimes one must make sacrifices for such love. Nicholas loves his country, and he will give himself up to it someday entirely, as I have. And you, of course, are giving yourself to him. Imagine how meaningful it might be to give yourself to his kingdom as well.”
“You mean, by becoming a British citizen?” Every conversation with Eleanor was like an oral examination.
“I was simply ruminating on the complexities of the situation,” Eleanor said, with a tug of the brush that verged on scary. “If you were marrying Freddie, a dual citizenship would be the cleanest approach. But Freddie does not share Nicholas’s destiny. It is a conundrum.”
It dawned on me right then what she meant.
“I have to give up my American citizenship,” I said slowly.
“What an interesting suggestion,” Eleanor said. She set down her brush and put her hands on my shoulders. “It would make a lovely wedding gift to Nicholas and Great Britain. I will be long gone when the time comes for you to be his queen consort, but indubitably I would rest easy in my grave if there were no confusion about where your loyalties lie.”
I was flummoxed. Nick had never said a word to me about whether my Americanness was a stumbling block, but maybe the reason it wasn’t a stumbling block that was he knew his grandmother would bulldoze it out of the way.
Eleanor snatched the tiara from my head and reached for a folder I hadn’t noticed.
“I happen to have the paperwork here,” she said. “I’m very touched you should want to consider such a momentous decision, but you must think it through. We wouldn’t want you to rush into anything, would we?”
“No, we would not,” I said, sounding hollow even to my own ears.