“Don’t be embarrassed, Eddybear,” she’d said. “Bex understands. She still has hormones.”
While she fed baby Henry, Elizabeth filled me in on the Christmas Eve gift exchange. Nick had talked Freddie out of the cruel gag of giving Richard a World’s Best Dad mug, so instead they got him a Whoopee cushion with Barnes’s face on it. Eleanor had given all the men self-tanner in an abusive shade of bronze, and Elizabeth gave Edwin some men’s bikini-style leopard-silk underpants that promised supernatural strength, luck, and genital potency. The ever-resourceful Freddie had procured for Eleanor a gag positive pregnancy test with a note that said, Whoops. And Nick had found Freddie a book called Celibate? Celebrate!, which apparently prompted an entire routine in which Freddie pretended it might be infectious. Elizabeth also reported that Agatha consumed the better part of a bottle of Burgundy and ate the lesser part of her roast, so that by the post-dinner brandy, she was loudly complaining that she never got any of the good jewels despite being “an actual blood Lyons,” and that her ruby engagement ring was tiny and gauche—at which point Awful Julian called her tiny and gauche and passed out in front of the fire. Queen Mum Marta, ever the firecracker even in her eleventh decade of life, apparently rapped Agatha on the head with a candle snuffer and hissed, “A ruby is not a hardship and neither is a warm body.”
“Amazing,” I said to Elizabeth, sticking a fat piece of bacon into my mouth. “My family gatherings seem so sedate now. Even with the Easter Sunday arm wrestling.”
“These will be your family gatherings soon enough,” Elizabeth said in that perky voice that sounds delighted even when she’s bitching. “Aggie’s so bitter. You’ll see. About Julian, about the succession laws…” She lowered her voice. “I can’t blame her, but honestly, that old rule saved us from him being the heir.” She nodded toward Nigel, who was using his reflection in the table to squeeze a juicy zit. “We’d have to sink the island and start over.”
Soon enough, the calm ceded to the storm once more. My TV makeup was chipped off and replaced with something equally spackled but less intense. I carefully buttoned my sumptuous Black Watch tartan Alexander McQueen coat, weighted at the hem so no winter breezes would kick it above my knees. And Kira secured my navy cocktail hat with an elastic band matched to my hair, then styled a soft half updo that hid the evidence while maintaining a little youthful swing. The effect was as seamless as if I’d been baptized at Buckingham Palace myself. When Nick met me at the top of the stairs, he stopped short for a moment, then cleared his throat.
“Pardon me, have you seen Bex Porter?” he asked. “Tall, ponytail, sporty. Very loud.”
“She can’t come to the phone right now,” I said, and it felt true, like the girl who used to live inside me was being elbowed aside to make room.
We’d been told to congregate in the Saloon, which is the largest room in the house but also one of the most informal, with clusters of overstuffed chairs, family photos atop the piano, and a giant jigsaw puzzle on a low baize-covered table. When we appeared at the door, Richard abandoned Edwin mid-sentence and came over to shake Nick’s hand as I curtsied.
“Well played today,” he said gruffly, almost as if it caused him pain. “Both of you.”
Then he turned and left. It was polite to the point of being historic, where Richard and I were concerned. I gave Nick a quizzical look.
“He’s been trying,” Nick said. “I thought it was because of Mum, but actually, I think getting rumbled with India Bolingbroke embarrassed him and he’s grateful I didn’t tell anyone. So he’s being…marginally pleasant, at times.”
“I’ll take anything I can get from him that isn’t pure cold rage,” I said.
“Yes, we must aim high,” he agreed. “All right, you, no more stalling.”
Nick escorted me toward a slight woman with immaculate posture and an unmistakable profile, perched at a refined oak desk. She took a beat to finish writing—Eleanor is the master of finding ways to make sure you know who’s time you’re on—and popped a Polo mint into her mouth before standing.
“Rebecca, I’d like to present you to Her Majesty the Queen,” Nick said.
In my periphery, I saw the Queen Mum raise her tumbler.
“Well, it’s about bloody time, isn’t it?” she toasted us.
*
The first time I saw Eleanor, so iconic and impressive in her monarchial finest, was from a careful distance. Standing face-to-face was like nosing up to a Seurat and discerning the dots. At nearly eighty, she’d crossed into that age where makeup starts looking like the paint job it is, and her skin was thinner, the lines etched more prominently. Yet this hadn’t robbed her of her elegance, nor entirely of her beauty, and I realized how Agatha must have suffered for inheriting neither.
The royal physician had already awarded me a clean bill of health—no syphilis, I wanted to blurt—but still Eleanor examined me as keenly as she would a horse at Tattersalls. Her gimlet eye was the same one I felt at Nick’s birthday, only this time I had nowhere to hide. And she did not miss the flag pin proudly displayed on the lapel of my coat—public, too, now that we were.
“How do you do, Miss Porter,” she finally said.
“Thank you very much for having me, Your Majesty.”
She seized my left hand in her cool, papery one, holding it up as carefully as a scientist so the light bounced off every facet of my ring. “It suits you,” she said as she let my hand drop. “Though I daresay that ring can work miracles on any hand.”
I felt a light whacking at my legs.
“Sturdy calves. She’ll carry a child nicely,” said Marta, bringing her empty tumbler to the decanter on Eleanor’s desk. “Sprog her up before I die, Nicky boy. I assume you know how.”
Nick looked like he wanted to die. But before Marta could begin any kind of instruction, the Queen’s equerry, a petite and balding man called Murray—I still am not clear whether this is his first name or his last—informed us that the time had come for us to leave for church. Eleanor paused as she went past me, and laid a hand on my arm.
“Once you walk out that door, you are one of us,” she said. “Ready or not.”