“Not here, Joss,” Clive said.
I felt myself turning red. It made sense that they had discussed it—hell, I would have, if one of my best friends had been treading water in her relationship for this long. As much as I appreciated their collective allegiance, though, it hit me that there was more to it than pure protectiveness: They pitied me.
“Where is Nick, anyway?” Lacey asked, rising up on her toes and scanning the room. “I don’t see Freddie, either.”
Suddenly, I felt a hand on my arm. We looked around to see the Queen’s footmen silently, discreetly, arranging the guests in long, parallel receiving lines of sorts that created two aisles in the Picture Gallery.
“Asked and answered,” Clive murmured. “Here they come.”
*
At her coronation, the leading columnist of the day wrote that Eleanor was so beautiful she’d have ended up Queen even if she’d been born a peasant. At seventy-seven, the florid march of love and death had conspired to fold that beauty into something less refined, like taking a gentle eraser to a pencil sketch. But she was still striking, with unmarred bone structure and the same cornflower-blue eyes that she’d passed down to Nick. That day, they glowed as she entered the Picture Gallery in a glorious royal-purple frock, emerald drops in her ears and a glittering tiara perched on her flawless pewter bob. Age had stooped her slightly, but she still walked with the elegance of a younger ruler and the confidence of a woman accustomed to being obeyed.
Richard, Freddie, and Eleanor’s mother Marta entered next, the men in full military dress—Prince Dick, coldly chiseled, and Freddie eliciting an inadvertent intake of breath from Lacey. The guest of honor emerged last. The sight of Nick in his tux melted me, and I was proud of how composed he was even though I knew it killed him that his father and brother had military regalia to wear and he didn’t. Across the way, I caught Lady Bollocks staring at me, her black gown’s bodice as architectural as her features. She gave me a half nod that was as approving as I was ever likely to get, and so brief that she could plausibly deny having done it.
Richard and Freddie strolled up our aisle, Marta on Freddie’s arm, with Eleanor and Nick taking the other. I faced them with my back to the wall, and pretended not to watch as they acknowledged people in the crowd, Nick’s face brightening at the sight of a redheaded girl I recognized with a sinking heart as Gemma Sands—currently on the cover of Tatler in a glowing profile featuring her both as London’s most eligible bachelorette, and in the majestic environs of her father’s wildlife preserve while wearing a fluffy feathered couture. She’d looked fantastic. She did again, in tonight’s sleek blue gown, which irritatingly matched Nick’s eyes.
I tore away my gaze when I sensed Richard approaching. As his eyes swept down our line, he looked for a moment like he was going to speak to me, so I opened my mouth.
He passed right on by.
In the void where his body had been, I saw Eleanor across the room flicking her gaze toward me. I was gripped again with one of those intrusive impulses: to stick out my tongue, or scream, or announce I left a pair of underwear at Windsor Castle—did anyone find them?
Instead, I smiled. She ignored me, too. Bea, in the distance, raised a brow at me as if to say, What did you expect?
Marta and Freddie passed by in a cloud of cigarette smoke (she smokes two packs a day).
“Nice dress, Killer,” he murmured.
At least I had one ally.
We ate in the Ballroom—paradoxically, the formal dancing later would happen in the Throne Room—which is like stepping inside a very fancy music box, right down to the gargantuan early-nineteenth-century pipe organ across the back wall of the room. The chandeliers had been dimmed to give way to the candles on each of the thirty or so round tables, scattered below the long, raised rectangular one where Nick and his family and some carefully selected seatmates were placed. With one noteworthy absence: This time, the official story was that Emma had bronchitis. Prince Dick’s seatmate for the evening was instead Princess Christiane of Greece, a fleshy and foxy middle-aged woman Richard had (per Nick) come very close to marrying thirty years ago. Freddie, wisely forbidden to select his own date, was placed next to the British prime minister’s daughter, to her obvious delight. Lacey did not even look at him when we entered the Ballroom. So far they had done their level bests to steer clear of each other—but Lacey was already on her fourth refill of bubbly, so it was anybody’s guess whether either of their level bests would hold.
Lady Bollocks was stuck at a table nearby with her parents and a variety of poncey-looking middle-aged folks who were carrying on in stage whispers about the relative gaucheness of the fish knives that had been included in the place settings (only among Britain’s upper crust would there be a cutlery scandal). Bea was feigning interest in a hilariously dismissive way, until something at the head table caught her eye. I followed her gaze. The clusters of cream roses in our centerpiece partially obscured Eleanor and Freddie from me, but I had a clear view of Nick, who’d just entered with his dining companion for the evening: one Gemma Sands.
“That’s interesting,” Clive said, reading my mind.
Prince Nicholas in his spit-shined capacity was distant enough from my slovenly, Twinkie-inhaling boyfriend that I could, at first, consider Gemma’s placement with anthropological curiosity. And then the meal began, and I had to sit through six courses of the two of them putting hands on each other’s arms, telling rip-roaring jokes to other members of the table, and being solicitous of each other to the extreme—and I had to do it in a room full of people who read the papers, and thus recognized me and saw that I was plonked in the worst seat in the house. But it was during the salmon course that I felt the Queen’s particular gimlet eye on me once more, and was suddenly quite sure that she was gauging my reaction to her seating chart. In the face of our denied request to become official, giving the nod to Gemma Sands in front of everyone Eleanor cared to impress felt like a chess move. And everyone knows the Queen is the most powerful piece on the board.