I gulped. “Sure,” I said, feeling and sounding incredibly American in that one short word. “See you later, Nick.”
That was my first brush with just how barren Nick’s family life was. I felt a flash of gratitude for my own parents, who are frustrating sometimes, but who at least don’t issue veiled threats to my friends specifically so they will shit themselves with fear, and have never starved Lacey and me of their love or attention. It’s not entirely Richard’s fault; he didn’t become a tyrant in a vacuum. He was raised by a painfully proper mother and her army of uptight nannies, and barely knew his own long-deceased father—and thus was totally unprepared to be one. He was never comfortable with Nick and Freddie until they were walking and talking and could see reason, and when that day came, it was too late.
Holed up in my room, I felt nauseated thinking about leaving Nick alone to wilt under Richard’s wrath. I had several elaborate fantasies about storming back in and giving him hell on Nick’s behalf, but in the end, I just turned out my lights so I could feign being asleep when Clive’s knock came (which it did, inevitably, with a tapping that became slightly insistent before giving way to his footsteps creaking away). I wasn’t in the mood; Nick’s misery consumed me. I rested only fitfully before finally sneaking into the hallway to go the bathroom—just as Richard was walking out of Nick’s quarters. I dipped back and hid behind my door, but couldn’t resist watching him through the crack. He shot Nick one last look of fury, which for a split second dissolved into something else—regret?—before he put on his public mask of indifference and slipped away down the stairs.
Day Bex wanted me to give it up and go to sleep, like a rational person, but Night Bex never obeys that boring old shrew. So I grabbed a pen and the Devour DVD and crept toward Nick’s door, careful to avoid the squeaky parts of the old floor. Underneath the string of exclamation marks on Lacey’s note, I scribbled, Dear Night Nick: Take two and call me in the morning, then smoothed the Post-it back over the DVD and shoved it all under his door.
The next morning it came back under mine. Day Nick is dead. Long live Night Nick.
Chapter Six
When she was eight, Lady Emma Somers’s dog Yoghurt died, and she wept on the shoulder of her best friend Rupert at the backyard funeral while her brother murdered “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes. Emma told this story herself, back when she was engaged to Richard and the press was keen to learn about the fetching, rosy-cheeked innocent who’d stolen his heart. Shortly after her wedding, Rupert became Emma’s trusted bodyguard, and the fall of my year at Oxford the Sunday Express ran an exposé in which Rupert Caulfield—promoting an upcoming book—insisted he’d fathered at least one of England’s beloved princes. The fallout was swift. The Mirror ran a photo of Emma and Rupert on the beach together as children, juxtaposed with a shot of them laughing cozily a year after her wedding. The Mail got a recent picture of Rupert driving near Trewsbury House—where the reclusive Princess of Wales was known to hole up—at a time when Richard was in London. Reporters scavenged for anecdotes that either refuted an affair or confirmed it; an anonymous maid claimed Rupert had “lain with” Emma one week after her wedding and twice monthly since, whereas Emma’s former butler swore Rupert was just a friend. Reports of DNA tests were combatted by rumors that Rupert and the butler were involved. It was, in short, a hot aristocratic mess.
Nick took a brief sabbatical from Oxford, which Clive confirmed was to hunker down at Clarence House and strategize how to handle the crisis. (Freddie coped by bravely visiting Monte Carlo. This is typical Freddie. He throws parties where a simple tantrum would’ve been sufficient.) I felt terrible for him. Everybody did. Clive made all the academic arrangements Nick needed to stay on track. Joss made him a tie out of motorbike gears, which Nick still doesn’t know because it sliced into Gaz’s thumb when he tested it out, so she scrapped it. Cilla dusted Nick’s room and put flowers in a vase on the desk, then replaced them every time they died before he came home to tend them. And I stockpiled Devour episodes for when Nick needed them—and me.
One morning at the beginning of November, when Nick had been absent for a little more than a week, Cilla, Joss, and I studied the latest papers from a bench at the Oxford bus station. Lacey was coming to visit for our birthday, and she was due to arrive from Heathrow any minute.
Joss let out a low whistle. “This says Emma and Rupert were together during that Ashmolean party she skipped,” she said.
“Oh, please,” Cilla said, grabbing the paper from Joss and examining a shot of Rupert coming out of a Tesco, looking jolly. “As the saying goes, ‘Any Yorkshirewoman worth her birthright can smell a lie,’ and I can tell you that tosser reeks something awful.”
“That is not a saying. Nobody says that.”
“What is the deal with Emma?” I jumped in.
“Nick never talks about it and we never ask,” Cilla said, flipping to the horoscopes. “She backed away from the public eye not too long after Freddie was born and hasn’t been to an event in ages. The official line is that she decided she preferred a private life of philanthropy and reflection, or something.”
“Bollocks,” said Joss.
“Maybe she’s agoraphobic,” I said. “Like the Japanese crown princess.” It was a theory Lacey had advanced on the phone.
“No, I mean, Bollocks,” Joss said, gesturing toward the entrance.
Sure enough, stomping toward us was Bea, in gorgeous brown leather boots and a wool pencil skirt, her olive peacoat pulled tightly around a thick scarf.
“You lot should be ashamed, reading that trash in public,” she said, snatching our papers.
“Oh, blow it out your arse, Bea,” Cilla said. “What are you doing here, anyway? Stalking us? Are you going to report back to the Crown that we’ve been caught reading?”
“I’m looking at a horse at a stable near Swindon. My dressage mount is getting altogether too horny to focus.” She shook her head. “Don’t change the subject.”
“Aren’t we being respectful to Nick by boning up on what not to talk about?” Joss suggested. “See, this one claims that he’s going ring shopping for India Bolingbroke, another one says Davinia Cathcart-Hanson wants him back, and then The Sun thinks he’s gone to Africa to beg Gemma Sands for another shot.”
“Bollocks,” sniffed Lady Bollocks in a wonderful moment of synergy that almost made me laugh right in her face. “India is so stupid it’s a wonder she can still breathe. He’ll never marry any of them.”