“Can we talk about this?”
He finally turned to me. His face was angry and upset and something else, something indefinable. I stood on my tiptoes and kissed him, slowly, softly, letting it last.
“Let’s start there,” I said. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“I did a dumb thing,” I acknowledged.
“For an understandable reason,” he conceded.
“They were squeezing up around us and I couldn’t breathe, Nick. And one of them grabbed me, and I just sort of…”
“…snapped,” Nick finished for me, emptily. “You snapped.”
“Exactly,” I said. “That’s exactly it. And it looks stupid now, but soon enough someone on Strictly Come Dancing will have her septum collapse and everyone will forget that I jumped onto a bus in front of Hamleys.”
He turned to me. “This is why I never meant to get serious until I was older. Exactly this. It’s too early in our lives to have this much pressure about what we’re doing, or not doing, or whether we look sufficiently happy. The press is always waiting to pounce on any fuckup. They will be vultures about it, and they will destroy you.”
Somewhere in that speech, he had stopped talking entirely about me. I reached out and grabbed him by the arms, stopping his pacing.
“What else is going on here?” I asked. “I know you hate the press. Trust me, I know. But I can’t just never go out and hope that fixes everything. I can’t give them that power. I won’t.”
“It doesn’t matter. They’ll take it anyway,” he said, his voice breaking. “And no matter how many times I tell you that, you don’t seem to want to listen.”
“I’m listening now,” I said.
I had seen Nick happy, sad, lustful, loving, bored, irritated. I’d seen him with the flu, running on no sleep at all, enraged with his father, engrossed in a movie. But I’d never seen him look at me the way he did here—as if he was making a judgment—and then as soon as I’d registered it, the whole thing melted at the edges and fell away, and I just saw a little kid, scared.
“You snapped,” he echoed, sinking into the couch and putting his forehead in his palms.
“Yes.”
“She snapped.”
“Who?”
“My mum, Bex,” Nick said. “I’m talking about Mum. She’s…she’s mad.”
“At me? If I could just talk to her—”
“You can’t talk to her. No one can,” he said, his voice so painfully flat and expressionless. “She’s not angry, Bex. She’s insane.”
Chapter Five
The truth about his mother poured out of Nick in a rushed tangle of words and tears, like he was a soda bottle shaken for a quarter century and suddenly uncapped. Until that night, the biggest secret anyone had ever told me was sophomore year at Cornell, when Lacey confessed she had a crush on her physics professor—and that one, she’d recanted a day later after she saw him with food in his beard. I was out of my depth here. So I just lay beside Nick, our fingers twined, and imagined with heartache the scenes he described playing out on the stark white ceiling of my bedroom.
Lady Emma Somers grew up in a stately home in Wiltshire and spent summers on the Isle of Wight, right near Osborne House, the Royal Family’s retreat at the time. Emma was fascinated by Osborne—the rooms decorated during the imperial rule of India, the crazy trailer-like contraption on the beach that Queen Victoria I had used for private naked swims in the sea—and Richard had been fascinated with her. He was a shy kid, emotional, extremely self-conscious; his father’s death meant Eleanor expected him to act like the man of the house even though he was still a boy, and he did not flourish under those circumstances. Edwin and Agatha were allowed to attend to grubby, childish pursuits, but the heir had to have his hair just so at all times, his socks pulled up high, his clothes immaculate, even during their summer breaks. He never had fun; he simply wasn’t allowed. But rosy-cheeked, blond, blue-eyed Emma embodied fun. She handled the stiff, lonely Richard with the same care and spirit that she used to rescue birds with broken wings and tame local feral cats and even once shoo a fox away from an actual henhouse. And when Richard returned to Osborne the summer of his twenty-seventh birthday, as England’s most eligible yet desperately unattached bachelor, it was the beautiful nineteen-year-old Emma who found him thrown off his horse, Emma who got help, Emma who was permitted to keep him company while he recuperated from a broken leg, and Emma who, two months later, was given an immaculate emerald and the promise of becoming queen.
And so Emma married her broken bird, and then became one. She went from being a civilian to being under a constant microscope: Her clothes were found wanting, her hairstyle too modern, her smile too big or not bright enough. Her confidence dwindled to nil, she became resentful and barbed, and Richard—distant by nature, unused to anyone talking back to him, and never skilled at affection of any stripe—was brusque and judgmental in return. The softness and vulnerability of his convalescence evaporated when his need was no longer so naked, and their union became the very definition of marry in haste and repent at leisure. It seems unfathomable that Nick was conceived at all, other than out of the strictest sense of duty. Freddie came mostly because Emma viewed Nick as her best friend, and she wanted to build a team. But if she hoped delivering the expected heir and spare would also decrease the scrutiny, she learned quickly that it actually made her a bigger target. Demand for photos in the pre-Internet age was so astonishing that a photographer snuck into the hospital on the day of Freddie’s birth, and a nurse cracked him over the head with a bedpan. Emma grew so paranoid that she came across as shifty, and the mounting strangeness of her every public appearance with Richard, as if they were uncomfortable touching or perhaps never truly had, ignited a buzz that never stopped. She clammed up, and then shut down, sunny one moment and a total eclipse the next; provoked shouting matches, jealousies, and accusations, and then welt and wilted under them. She stopped going outside, closing all the windows and curtains in their Kensington Palace apartment and refusing to let in the daylight. By the time Nick turned five, she was lost to them, and then buried under a carefully scripted fiction that the Palace thought was less troublesome than the facts.
“Basically, she doesn’t live in any sort of reality anymore,” Nick explained. “Occasionally she’ll speak, but it’s always about things that only live in her head. Most of the time it’s like she just unplugged. She doesn’t recognize any of us. She doesn’t even seem to know herself anymore.”