I nod.
“It must have been chaos,” Ann says. For a moment I wonder if she’s even really talking to me. “They say it was an angry mob, but it wasn’t, you know. In truth it was no more than a dozen people who stormed the palace. At first. Did they come intent on murder? I don’t know. I’ve often wondered, though. Maybe all they wanted was food for their families? Maybe it simply got out of hand? Or did they come up those stairs intending to kill? Does it make me a bad person if I think it was the latter?” She doesn’t really wait for an answer. “Because I do, Grace. I really do. I think they came to kill.”
Ann holds her teacup in her hand, but she doesn’t sip, doesn’t move. It’s almost like she’s frozen, looking back in time.
“Those windows,” she says after a long moment. Then her cup begins to shake. Hurriedly, she places it back on the table. “They hung the bodies from those windows, like trophies. Like a warning. They hung their bodies from those windows,” Princess Ann says, stronger now, “until the fourth night, when the Society came and cut them down.”
I can’t help myself. I look at the windows before me, now tinted and bulletproof and bordered by black silk. There’s no way to see what actually happened, but this room carries the truth inside it still. And maybe it’s just the sadness radiating off of Princess Ann, but I swear I can feel it.
“The Society did that?” I ask.
Princess Ann nods. “They came through a passageway and smuggled the bodies out of the palace. They took them and buried them. I don’t know where. No one knows, and that’s probably for the best. They deserve to rest in peace.”
My tea has gone cold in front of me. I’ve lost all desire to drink it. So I just sit here, thinking about how the king and his family are just people, and for two weeks every year an entire nation celebrates the moment their ancestors died.
“I’m surprised your mother never told you,” Princess Ann says.
Now my teacup is shaking too. “There were a lot of things my mother never told me.”
She must hear the bitterness in my voice. She has no trouble guessing why.
“She never told you about the Society?”
“She never told me about anything.”
“You mustn’t blame your mother, Grace. She loved you so. She just wanted to protect you.”
“From what?” I snap. Ann is not the princess of Adria now. She is my mother’s first and best friend.
She is someone who might have answers.
“Tell me,” I demand.
Ann smiles. I suppose very few people ever make demands of princesses. “Tell you what, Grace?”
“Tell me everything. About the Society. And the treasure. And your other friend — my friend Alexei’s mother. Do you know what happened to her? Why did someone want my mother to die?”
Ann stands. “We found out when we were about your age, I suppose. Your grandmother had passed away, but one day Ms. Chancellor and my mother came to us. Caroline and I had always been friends, but when we learned that we were descended from the daughters of the founders … when we learned we had that in common — that in that way we were more like sisters than friends — then we became much, much closer. I suppose you might even say we grew obsessed.”
“With the Society?” I ask.
Slowly, Ann shakes her head. “With history.”
It’s such a strange response it takes me a moment to truly hear it.
“What did she find? Why did someone want her dead?”
“Grace —”
“Don’t deny it!” I stand too, unable to sit corralled inside some fancy chair. “I know she was obsessed with something.”
At last, Ann looks surprised. “You do?”
“Was it the treasure the Society smuggled out of the palace the night of the coup? Was it something else? Did she find it? Is that why they tried to kill her?”
I watch Princess Ann’s brown eyes, wait for her to carefully word her denial. But the denial doesn’t come.
“Oh, Grace,” Ann says instead. “Your mother loved antiques, and she loved secrets. I think perhaps she did find … something. But I don’t know what.”
“What was she working on?”
“You have to understand, your mother and I hadn’t been truly close in years. When I married, it was difficult to maintain ties to my old life — my life before this.” She gestures at the palace and all its trappings, but also its loneliness. It feels like we must be the only people here.
“But you know she was still looking for it, don’t you? You know about the treasure.”
I’m deadly serious, but Princess Ann almost laughs. “The treasure, if you want to call it that, disappeared two centuries ago. It won’t be found now. When we were girls we thought it exciting and fanciful. It was our own little adventure. But we grew up, Grace.”
“I know you got together as grown-ups. I know you were still looking after Jamie was born.”
“After Jamie was born we would get together as friends.”