The giggles subsided, but I still felt their residual cheer. Without hesitation I spoke my first words to be heard by the world at large.
“He opened the door for me the day I arrived at Oxford,” I said. “In fact, he might’ve been the first person in England that I spoke to, except for my taxi driver.”
“And I owe him a debt of gratitude,” Nick said. “If he had been gallant enough to walk Rebecca’s luggage up the road to the door on a rainy afternoon, she might not have been as impressed by my brute strength when I brought them to her room.”
“You carried her suitcases?” Katie asked delightedly.
“Well, one of them was very small,” I teased. “More of a glorified purse.”
“One humble servant can only do so much,” Nick said. “Although I’m still waiting for my tip.”
This proved an outstanding jumping-off point, because it allowed us to slide into our natural rapport, and because it had the benefit of being true—which the answer to the next query, “When did you know it was love,” was not. We couldn’t very well discuss Devour, nor Nick’s karaoke binge, nor the time I dropped tampons on him. Nick kept it vague but charming, claiming it swept us up so quickly that he couldn’t remember not loving me, and blamed our years apart on his having some growing up to do. He also elicited more laughs when he revealed he’d proposed via Cracker Jack (Marj had hoped to recast this with He carved my name into a glacier, but Nick refused to tell a new lie right before unraveling the old one), and I was careful to chime in only when appropriate, so that I didn’t look pushy. Katie called on me largely to ask about my passions for my adopted country, and steered clear of my parade of bikinis. It was lovely—a well-executed preamble to the moment she’d been instructed to open Pandora’s box.
“Rebecca,” she said, her rich alto as smooth as double cream. “It must be bittersweet for you to experience this without your father.”
Nick and I each reached for the other’s hand. It wasn’t planned; he took mine because he always did that when my father came up, and I took his because I knew what was coming.
“It’s the only shadow on the day. My father loved Nick…olas.” I kept forgetting to use his full name. “Part of me still can’t believe Dad won’t walk in here in five minutes and tease him about whether he properly asked for permission,” I added, my eyes prickling. “But the Royal Family has been so welcoming. Nicholas even made sure Mom was here when he proposed. We feel very, very embraced.”
Katie turned to Nick. “And Nicholas, all of Britain misses your mother. Hers was our last iconic wedding. Will she emerge for yours?”
“We hope so,” Nick said. “But that depends on something I must say to the British people. The sad facts of my mother’s condition are not what they have been led to believe, and I hope very much they’ll understand the secrecy.”
I can still feel how airless that room became, as everyone braced for a quarter-century’s worth of spin to be unwound. And then Nick just let it all out, sincerely, emotionally, wholly. He begged forgiveness for what he called a well-meaning but still misguided deception, spoke eloquently about Emma’s confusing non-diagnosis and making mental illness a personal cause of his, and promised the people that their beloved Princess of Wales was safe, cared for, and still loved, even if she was no longer the vibrant woman they once knew.
“You’ve kept this secret nearly your entire life, with no one the wiser,” Katie Kenneth said. “Why reveal it now?”
“Because of this,” Nick said, lifting my ring hand. “Because I still believe a piece of my mum is there, however deep it might be buried, and that piece of her needs to see that she raised someone who can love another person as completely as she loved us. And to be warmed with joy and hope, which might be our only weapons left against the darkness that took her from us.”
He sucked on his lip briefly. “And because I miss my mum,” he said frankly, his voice threatening to break. “I’m getting married, and it would break my heart on its happiest day not to see her face in that church.”
Nearby, Marj shone with pride. Past the glare of the TV lights, I spied Freddie, red-cheeked, staring at a fixed point on the floor. And then I caught Richard rubbing at his eyes, and I realized he was fighting crying, too. With dawning horror, I felt my own tear ducts flood.
The next clip played over and over again on news channels all over the world. Katie handed me a Kleenex as Nick spontaneously kissed my hand and murmured, “Oh, love, don’t cry. Everything’s going to come out all right.”
I blotted my eyes as delicately as possible. “I’m sorry,” I said to Katie, with an awkward smile. “I haven’t gotten my stiff upper lip yet.”
Cut and print.
*
The interview left us with an hour before church to dry our tears and eat. I still hadn’t met the Queen—the suspense would have killed me if I hadn’t been too busy to die—so I was kicked upstairs to the junior dining room, meaning I took my meal in a fluffy bathrobe at a less-favored centuries-old mahogany table (Eleanor has a furniture hierarchy, to go along with her other rules) next to Lady Elizabeth feeding Henry in his high chair. Agatha’s son Nigel sat at the other end, legally an adult, old enough to buy the nudie magazine he was crudely leafing through over breakfast, yet still unwelcome at the proper table.
“Because nothing says Happy Christmas like the newest issue of Escort,” Elizabeth sang, as Nigel thoughtfully unfurled a vertical centerfold.
I love Elizabeth. She is a beam of sunshine even when sarcastic—my mother’s bubbly gossipy streak shot through with Freddie’s sense of mischief. Once married, she and Edwin became the Duke and Duchess of Cleveland, reviving his late father’s dukedom, but the press still calls her Elizabeth or Lady Liz; she likes it that way, claiming hanging onto your name is like keeping a piece of home. (I love this theory, knowing I will be Bex to the world for longer than I hold any other title.) And as improbable as it seems, she deliriously adores Edwin. On this Christmas, the two of them sported matching five-months pregnant bellies—his a food baby; hers, another real one—and I’d twice caught them sucking face in the hallway like turbo Hoovers.