“Your clothes will be in the chamber across the hall. Murray will escort you back to your mother when you are dressed,” she said, gesturing for me to leave.
Dazed, I bobbed into a curtsy, gathered my skirts, and exited the room, at which point Murray—eyes tactfully averted from my strange state of semi-undress—ushered me into another one that was identical except for its paint job and personal effects. When he closed the door, I sat hard into a stuffed peach armchair and gazed at the folder in my hands with blurring eyes. There, alone, the memory of Eleanor’s hands pressing on my shoulders as she told me she could only die happy if I kicked the United States to the curb, I felt like a pawn lured into checkmate.
Chapter Seven
I did not sign anything. Nor did I discuss it with anyone. Instead, the paperwork burned a hole on my table until I buried it under magazines and abandoned cryptic crosswords. I hadn’t lived in the States for years, but renouncing my claim to it—and its claim to me—seemed tantamount to ripping myself in half. This was a test I could not pass: If I gave in, I displayed obedience, but zero mettle. My nationality was the only piece of me the Palace hadn’t reshaped into something else, and I didn’t want to let it go; though I knew Eleanor would not be ignored, I hoped that if I could just stall until Nick came home, he could help me protect myself.
The rest of the year became a confining, isolating waiting game. Marj gave no indication of when I’d get to come off the bench again, for Paint Britain or anything else. Clive was working long hours, still unable to get much career traction beyond his fluffy role at a paper no one read (I was beginning to suspect he wasn’t very good at his job, but admired that he doggedly pursued it anyway). My mother was mostly in Iowa running Coucherator, Inc., at which she’d turned out to be an extremely dab hand. Joss wanted nothing to do with me. Cilla was trying to get her wedding off the docket before the final run-up to mine, which made me feel so guilty that I refused to lean on her, and in fact made her draw a few lines to protect her private life from her professional one. Gaz, usually religious with the diet-busting baked goods, was taking on extra work to pay for a May honeymoon to Bora Bora, and even Freddie was too busy for a box of wine and Big Brother.
“Sorry, Killer,” he’d say. “I convinced Prince Dick that Great Ormond Street Hospital would accept me as a weak alternative to Knickers. I have to go snuggle some babies.”
Or, “Bad luck, Bex, I’m out tonight—the Imperial War Museum asked me to open its RAF exhibit. Father’s jaw dropped so far you could’ve stuffed in a pheasant.” I could hear the grin. “I was tempted.”
I heard the pride underneath his jokes; I knew how much he wanted to find a place in the Lyons den, as something other than the professional scalawag he’d fashioned himself. But I missed him. I missed the whole gang. Most people would handle that by joining a book club, or playing in a recreational sports league, but that is forbidden to me. So I stayed home and shopped online with the pseudonymous credit card I’d been issued—no one will bat an eyelash if a Ms. Prudence Cattermole orders too much saucy lingerie for her sailor fiancé’s homecoming—and crumbled in private. By day, I had Marj feeding me carrots and water like a prize Thoroughbred; by night, where I once consumed booze to get over missing Nick, I now devoured the Internet. The American’t analyzed my level of clavicle protrusion and the caloric value of my shopping cart, whenever Marj granted me passage to the supermarket. That nasty old crumpet Xandra Deane suggested that the ten pounds I’d shaved off was setting an outrageously poor example for girls all over the world (which was mostly frustrating because I privately agreed, and cheated on my diet at every opportunity), and The Royal Flush alleged I am a lifelong anorexic.
In fact, The Flush was giving Xandra stiff competition as my most persistently negative coverage. At first it mostly published bits and pieces with a whiff of truth, but as its traffic and reputation grew, so did its vitriol. That distaste swelled slowly, like a balloon, and then burst all over my birthday.
Lacey’s and my Parting Shot that year consisted not of a midnight toast, but an exchange of obligatory, terse texts. That was bad enough. But the frosty November morning I officially turned twenty-seven, I woke up—still both lonely for my sister and upset with her—to find that The Royal Flush had gift-wrapped me something truly insidious: an investigative piece quoting several of Nick’s alleged conquests from the Dark Period casting what can only politely be called aspersions on the solidity of our love.
One billionaire mogul’s daughter says that although he knew she was in a relationship at the time, the Prince still begged to rekindle their youthful romance. “He told me every day I was his dream girl, and that he always assumed we’d find our way back to each other,” she says. “But I’ve seen that life, and no, thank you. I don’t want to be a commodity. He was devastated.”
I’d have bet money the next was Ceres Whitehall de Villency:
“Nobody wants the job,” agrees another aristocratic blonde, whom Nicholas squired both before and after Porter. “He’s handsome, and he’s nice, and attentive. He’d want to cuddle in bed, and talk about a future with me as his queen. But I couldn’t do it. I want to be free. I’m not a dowdy-heels-and-hemlines girl, and I’m not the kind of doormat he’ll need at his beck and call. If you ask me, he’s not just chosen the safe bet, he’s chosen the only bet.”
Only India Bolingbroke went on the record, possibly because she was still cranky about losing out on both Nick and whatever she had with Richard.
“I don’t doubt Nicky thinks he wants to marry her,” says the Prince’s cuckolded ex. “But he’s wanted to marry a lot of us. His father set him an ultimatum, you see, and she’s just the only person who’d say yes. It’s terribly awkward for them, and everyone, really. Perhaps that’s why he’s so committed to the Navy. Being at sea all the time makes it easier to settle.”
This was The Flush’s splashiest piece yet, and its cruelest. It got a lot of attention, and worse, traction; almost overnight, the website that hated me the most became uncomfortably high-profile. Alone in my flat, I went from dismissing the story as rubbish, to being unnerved that it echoed a sentiment Bea had expressed at Klosters, to complete paranoia. By the time Gaz and Cilla’s wedding arrived, my despair had plumbed new depths, and I was drowning.
*