“Happy birthday,” Nick said proudly.
The twelve-carat Lyons Emerald was a flawless, classically square stone, ringed twice with tiny diamonds and set in antique Welsh gold. It originally belonged to Queen Victoria II, and when her daughter Princess Mary inherited it, she stuffed it in a drawer because she insisted baubles like that were for shallow, selfish, silly little girls, to which her sister-in-law Marta allegedly retorted, “If you’d been a little sillier and a little more shallow, you might not die a virgin.” (Richard did not fall far from his grandmother’s tree.) This feud frothed until Mary did die at age seventy-two, virginity status unknown, while watching the competitive sheepdog trial show One Man and His Dog—at which point the ring went to Eleanor, who gave it to her son, who slipped it onto the finger of one Lady Emma Somers. I have never been much for jewelry, beyond my flag pin and diamond pendant from Nick, but even I always thought the Lyons Emerald was magnificent. And though I hated to admit it, for fear of sounding like the avaricious Ivy League climber I’d been reputed to be, I loved the sight of it sparkling at the end of my arm.
I must have given Nick quite a look, because he jumped out of his seat. “Though it pains me to say this, you are going to have to hold that thought,” he said, opening the front door.
“Goodness, you’re punctual,” said my mother, whom I’d thought was in Iowa, as she breezed inside holding a cake box. “It is Bex we’re talking about here.”
Lacey ran in after her, squealing and wielding Champagne, and Nick suddenly found himself in the middle of a high-volume group hug as the three of us wept and hugged and cooed over my ring—our joy mixed with regret for the thing that none of us wanted to say out loud, which was the unfairness of Dad not being there to see it, too.
The Lyons Emerald was only on my finger until the following day, after our official engagement shoot, at which point it went back into safekeeping until E-Day arrived. The photographer, a distinguished sir named Alistair Luddington, had snapped all the royal portraits of recent history, including the famous Richard and Emma photo outside Balmoral in which she delights at his kilt misbehaving in the wind. The theatrically cranky Sir Alistair would have been horrified if he’d realized my mother hovered behind him the entire time he worked, making manic smiley faces as if I were four and we were in the Sears Portrait Studio, and he was prone to byzantine, contradictory advice every time Nick’s pose got as stiff as the breeze that nearly stole Richard’s mystery.
“If that’s your best move, you have no hope of ever producing an heir,” he sighed as we tried to cuddle naturally in a complicated setup that was, of course, meticulously controlled merely to look natural. “I told you before. Hold her. Really take her. But gently. I want heat. But not sex. Grab her. But not hard. With love. But not lust. It could not be simpler. And for God’s sake, don’t block that ring.”
“Well, if that’s all,” Nick had said, planting my bejeweled hand firmly on his backside.
Alistair’s camera clicked. “One for Her Majesty’s pianoforte,” he said.
My newly hired makeup specialist, a fellow American named Kira with a divine cloud of an afro, insisted on putting a microfiber cloth over my hand so she wouldn’t cloud the ring with powder residue. She’d converted a corner of the Clarence House drawing room into Bex Central, likewise draping the antiques in towels—one of them had a shark on it, so incongruous with the portrait of Arthur I in plump repose—and pulled me away every ten minutes to thwack my face with a giant brush, spritz my flyaways, and apply another layer of the coat of varnish I have come to realize will now be in place almost all the time.
During our first break, Lacey wandered over to ogle the array of cosmetics, and reached for a bold orange-red lipstick that must have been there by accident, because Eleanor would cry harlot if it ever touched my mouth (it is all neutral glosses for me now).
“Hands off, Lacey,” Kira said politely.
“I wasn’t going to keep it,” Lacey said, chastened. “Your hair is crazy shiny, Bex. Is that the new conditioner I got you?”
“Hell no,” Kira said. “It’s a mask from Leonor Greyl. She’s in the big leagues now.”
“Your stuff smells way better,” I whispered when Kira bent over to dig in her massive bag. Lacey grinned, then reached out to flick a lock of hair behind my shoulder.
“I said no touching,” Kira said, still pleasant, emerging with a handful of Q-tips. “If the Palace doesn’t like my art, then I lose my work visa, and believe me, I do not want to go back to doing teen soaps in Wilmington.”
Lacey waved off my apologetic face, but she was clearly disappointed. When we’d first come back after Dad’s funeral, we’d done a pretty good job keeping each other almost as close as we had in Iowa. For the first month or two, we’d even slept over at each other’s places a few times. It was strange having the minutiae of our day-to-day lives feel so similar after such a huge catastrophic change—like we had to stop and remind ourselves every day what was missing—and we understood that struggle in each other without having to say it out loud. But then the slow burn of going public had begun. The run-up to E-Day meant Marj was calling me to Clarence House on a moment’s notice, and because she’d told me repeatedly, in her words, rain checks are not on my menu, this had resulted in several incidents of plans being postponed or canceled, until Lacey and I had fallen out of one another’s loops.
“How’s Freddie?” I asked. “I haven’t seen him since Elton John tried to kick me.”
“Me neither.” She pouted. “The last time we, um, saw each other”—she glanced at Kira, who was doing a heroic job pretending not to listen—“we made a date to go to Tony’s new club. But he canceled and hasn’t called me back.”
“Maybe he’s just busy,” I said, losing some consonants as I spoke through Kira’s lip-gloss wand. “Navy stuff.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Lacey said distantly, looking everywhere but at me. In the opposite corner of the drawing room, our mother and Agatha were studying a display of dueling pistols. I’m not sure which Lyons I thought was the most likely candidate to bond with my mother, but it wasn’t Agatha, who, in terms of approachability, was Mom’s polar opposite. But Mom had admired Agatha’s fur-trimmed gloves that morning when we bumped into her in the foyer, and because praise-deprived Agatha soaks up compliments like a sponge, they now were nattering like old chums.
“Hope Agatha doesn’t get too attached,” Lacey said. “That family is only allowed to love one Porter at a time.”