The Whispering Espresso paint job in Marj’s Clarence House office was still fresh when we returned from Cornwall, faint fumes lingering stubbornly underneath the scent of her Woods of Windsor potpourri. And that’s almost the last we saw of her new walls: In the ensuing months, they slowly vanished behind a garish collage of color-coded notecards, thumbtacked lists of stylists and waxers and trainers and facialists with a reputation for discretion, and a note from Freddie telling her, and I quote, sod it all and go have a shag, which I doubt Marj even noticed, much less did. And at the center of the chaos was a meticulous timeline plotting the days between Nick’s and my private betrothal straight through to a date underlined, starred, and circled in red. To most of the world, it was Christmas. To Marj, it was E-Day.
Every moment leading up to the big announcement—that the United Kingdom’s most eligible bachelor (and Number Two on Vanity Fair’s “World’s Dishiest Nicks” list) was off the market—was choreographed as tightly as a ballet. I had to be slid carefully back into public view, with purpose but not presumption; it was too soon for me to pop up at official events, but neither could Nick haul up from his Naval base just to push a shopping cart with me, nor lie out in Kensington Gardens feeding me cheese. Because Marj was a puppet master par excellence, she found the perfect solution. Polo matches carried the right amount of high-class cachet, while still being an ostensibly platonic place for me to be seen socializing anew with the Brothers Wales. So Nick stocked up on antihistamine, and I loaded up on tweedy blazers and horsy boots.
“Now, Bex, Knickers’ll need nurturing through this,” Freddie said over pints the night before Operation Polo began. “The last time a great hairy hooved beast thundered toward him, he cried.”
“From the dander,” Nick said.
Freddie cupped his ear. “The danger, you say?”
“Well, now that you mention it,” Nick said. “That same day, some bloody great pillock whacked my leg with a polo mallet to see if I felt it. I had a bruise for weeks.”
“Oh, mortal danger, then,” I said.
“He must really love you, Killer,” Freddie said.
“Can’t think why at the moment,” Nick grumbled, but he squeezed my hand.
Marj let Clive print a rumor in the Recorder that I would be attending Nick’s first match, as a thank-you for his discretion regarding Richard and India. Smelling his big break, he broke up with Davinia—“a good investigative reporter must be unencumbered”—broke the story, and broke the proverbial seal. The game was afoot. For three months I was documented as Nick’s loyal yet restrained public supporter. I gave him chaste hellos; I pet his horse, Elton John, so named because he’d lost a bet with Freddie; and I chuckled with Bea and Gemma, helping carefully rebrand the latter as Nick’s unthreatening chum. The gossip kindling piled up all summer, and in the fall, Marj dropped in the match: Nick and I arrived together at the union of recent Strictly Come Dancing runner-up Penelope Six-Names and Maxwell, son of Baron Something-Something.
Ostensibly, we went as old Oxford chums of Penelope’s, but really, it was the only sufficiently upmarket society wedding on the docket. (Six-Names was beside herself; I think she was more excited that Nick was attending her wedding than she was about attending it herself.) I wore a dusty rose suit with my very first fascinator, a soaring pink and gold confection, and it was so hard to wrangle that I kept knocking it asunder on the car door, or inadvertently poking Nick in the face. We had to hustle me out of the car around a hidden corner.
“Fascinators are impossible,” I said, wiggling it back in place before we walked into the paparazzi’s eyeline. “I hope I didn’t scar you for life. Six-Names would never get over it if her wedding ruined your face.”
“That can’t be right,” Nick said.
“It’s true. I think I scratched you.” I checked my reflection in the car’s glossy exterior. “Oh, man. I actually bent it.”
“No. Her name,” he said. “She’s Penelope Eight-Names, now, isn’t she?”
I paused. “I was going to guess Penelope Six-Names Something-Something.”
“We’ll have to consult Gran on what’s more proper,” he said. “I’d hate to get it wrong on our wedding invitations.”
The photo of us laughing together on our walk up the hill to the church was as good as gold. PLACE YOUR BEX, ordered the Mirror; the Mail’s Xandra Deane went with DAMN YANKEE. I’d been allowed to tell my mother, Lacey, and our closest friends that a betrothal was imminent, as much to employ their aid as anything, but I didn’t let on that Nick had already asked and been accepted. With our lives becoming public fodder, I wanted one secret that belonged only to us, and for similar reasons, Nick had insisted that the presentation of a ring—one that didn’t come out of a box of American snack food—should unfurl without first being scripted by Marj. And to that end, he’d been thoroughly irritating. He fished through his pocket during pregnant conversational pauses. He hid things in his clenched fist, only to reveal that they were coins or paper clips or, once, a dead bug. He even pulled a jewelry box from under his pillow one morning, then opened it to reveal his favorite cufflinks with a bemused, “How did those get there?”
By the time my birthday rolled around, Nick had told me very seriously that Marj realized a formal proposal was impractical until after his Navy deployment, and that she had Eleanor’s authorization to push E-Day to the following year. So I thought nothing of it when he presented me with a large rectangular box swathed three times over in a crumply surplus of Thomas the Tank Engine paper. (As with every guy I’ve ever known, including my father, Nick is the worst at wrapping presents.) I ripped off the blue bow and stuck it to my forehead, then tore into the gift and laughed when it turned out to be a dented Cracker Jack box.
“Yes!” I crowed. “I just finished my last one. How did you know?”
I blithely pulled open the top, which I do remember thinking had been glued extra messily by the assembly line, and shared a few handfuls before I fished around for my toy.
“Aha!” I brandished a ring. “Man, it’s heavier than the usual cheap crap.”
Nick’s lip twitched. “I’ll be sure to give Gran your glowing review.”
It was in that second that I actually looked at the ring. I had seen it before. The whole world had, on the finger of a certain prince’s mother, and I nearly dropped it when I realized I was holding something very old, very significant, and very, very not cheap.
“Holy shit” was my regal reaction.