“Breath of Life” - Florence the Machine
The corridors bustle with activity as I head to my office.
Preston has agreed to meet Henry and me there in five minutes.
The argument with my husband has thrown me off my game, and I nearly walk into one of the cleaning staff, who is attempting to assemble a ladder to reach the upper cornices on the wall.
“I’m so sorry, Your Majesty,” she says while trying to bob a curtsy and hold a long feather duster at the same time.
“Please,” I say. “The fault is all mine.”
God, how could I have let Henry get under my skin like that? I’ve become so good at keeping him at a distance over the past year. We may feel like strangers these days, but we are terrific at waltzing around each other and all of our issues. It’s a shame to let that go.
When he proposed two and a half years ago, I thought my heart couldn’t possibly hold any more joy than it did in that moment. I loved him so much I thought I would die from it. My feelings had grown so much bigger and more complex than when I innocently professed my love to him at fifteen.
It had endured multiple betrayals and countless arguments. There were times I didn’t think I could stand being around him for another minute, but as soon as he was gone, I missed him. I was as desperate for him as a junkie is for another hit.
I don’t feel that way anymore. I still love him, sure, but it’s cooled with time.
We go our separate ways in the morning, but I always know I’ll see him again that evening, and that he’ll throw his dirty socks on the floor in the corner of the bedroom even though we have wicker laundry hampers for them, and that he’ll pour himself a glass of whiskey without asking if I want anything, then proceed to drink it in bed while scrolling on his phone like I’m not even in the room.
Everyone says that happens in all marriages, but I thought ours would be the exception.
Naive little me thought we’d keep the romance alive for more than a year, considering how driven we were in our need for each other.
But even the sex has cooled to something we do when my fake ovulation chart says it’s time.
My body still responds to him in the same way, getting all hot and bothered by the sight of him in his workout clothes or those glasses that are sex-on-a-desk enticing.
But to cross the invisible lines we’ve drawn and confess how I feel would be like climbing a snow-covered mountain I’m not willing to try scaling.
So we’ll continue arguing over breakfast for the next fifty years, or until one of us gets tired enough to say we’re done.
Of course, if Bea hadn’t decided to share that article with the table, that confrontation would never have happened, and Henry probably would be none the wiser. My little sister needs to learn when to keep her mouth shut.
As if conjured by my thoughts, she pops out of an alcove in the corridor ahead of me.
She must have been leaning against the wall, waiting for me.
Her face is flushed, and her mascara, normally so flawless, is in smudged steaks on her cheekbones.
Her blonde waves hang limply around her shoulders as though she’s been running her hands through it.
“Bea? What’s wrong?” I ask, concern obliterating my previous train of thought.
“Can I talk to you?” Her voice sounds as broken as the rest of her looks.
“Sure. I’m on my way to a meeting, but come to my office in an hour, okay?”
She shakes her head and wipes her nose with the balled-up tissue in her hand. “Can we do it right now? I really need to talk to you.”
I take a bracing breath and glance down at my watch. Preston and Henry will be expecting me any minute. “Bea, I need to go. Can’t it wait?”
Tears spring to her already wet eyes. “Please?” she says. “I don’t know what to do, Celia, and I’m so scared.”
Bea is a master at manipulation. Even as a child, she found ways to control others’ emotions by threatening to harm herself or refusing to eat until we gave her whatever it was she wanted.
She’s a modern-day Scarlett O’Hara with her sob stories and her tears.
But something in her face tells me this isn’t a “boyfriend won’t text me back” issue.
The last time I put Bea off when she needed me, she ended up in Henry’s arms. Despite how conflicted my feelings for him are at the moment, I will do whatever is necessary to keep that from happening again.
“Fine.” I yank open the closest door and nod toward it. “In here. But I only have a second.”
Bea slips through the door, and I pull it shut behind her.
I wasn’t sure which room this was, but now that I’m inside, I recognize it as the 1901 Room, named so for the visit from US President McKinley three months before his assassination in 1901.
Large oil paintings cover the walls, commemorating important people from the past, both Wesbournians as well as ones of other nationalities.
My favorite is of Wesbourne’s Princess Elizabeth, painted when she was seven years old.
She should have been crowned queen upon the death of her father, but as everyone knows by now, she was bypassed for what turned out to be her half-brother.
I turn my attention to Bea, who is knotting her fingers together in front of her and biting her lip so hard I’m afraid she’ll draw blood.
“Bea, what is it?” A small trace of exasperation slips past my shields and into my voice.
She releases her lip, and it springs back, plump and glistening again. “Please don’t get mad.”
“I won’t,” I say. “What’s going on?”
“Before I tell you, I want you to know that I never meant for it to happen. It was an accident.”
My heart freezes in my chest, coming to a screeching halt like tires on asphalt. There is something in her voice, a warning maybe, that whatever she’s going to say is the last thing on earth I want to hear.
I know I shouldn’t jump to conclusions. I know I shouldn’t write the narrative ahead of time. I know I shouldn’t assume I have the facts. But knowing that doesn’t stop me from filling in all the blanks she’s leaving open.
There has always been this writhing black ball of something between us, something that gets in the way of us having a genuinely honest relationship with each other.
Something that rears its ugly head every now and then to remind us that it is in control, no matter how badly we’d like to think that we are.
It stirs in the pit of my stomach, creating a vortex of nausea and dizziness. As it comes to life inside me, there is one word that keeps repeating in my head, dropping itself into all of the spaces Bea hasn’t filled in.
Henry, Henry, Henry.
No. Please, god, no. I cannot bear to hear that my sister is sleeping with my husband after all this time. I thought we’d put this behind us. But what else could those tear-saturated lashes and blotchy face point to? There is only one thing in the world that we both know would bring me to my knees.
I beg all of the superpowers of the universe I don’t believe in to fly through time, into the past, and rewrite history, so that when I wake from this awful nightmare, Bea will tell me she’s seeing someone Mum won’t approve of, or has decided to move to Australia, or—
“I’m pregnant.”
The room spins around us, a whirlwind of color and art and opulence. Bea is still standing in front of me, but instead of the scarlet A I mentally pinned to her breast, she’s wearing the scared look of a twenty-two-year-old who has just found out she’s going to be a single mum.
“You’re what?” I say when I can’t find any other words.
“I’m so scared,” she says, reaching for my hands and grasping them in her cold ones. “Tell me what to do.”
My mind is still trying to get off the merry-go-round that is my fury at finding out Bea and Henry are having an affair. “I—I don’t know.”
“Please, Celia. You have to help me.”
“I will.” I nod, hoping it will help clear my head. “Of course I will. Who is the father?”
Bea hasn’t dated anyone publicly for several years. In fact, I don’t think she’s seen anyone seriously since Rhett Cole broke her heart the last time.
Her brows pull together, shaving ten years off her face, and she draws her lip into her mouth again. Before she can answer, the door opens and a maid walks in. When she sees us, she startles, then quickly curtsies. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize the room was occupied.”
“We’ll only be a minute,” I say.
She backs out, closing the door behind her.
I turn back to Bea, but the cloudiness has disappeared from her eyes. “Tell me quickly before it happens again. Who’s the father?”
She shakes her head, still biting her lip, but resolve has settled in her eyes. “I can’t.”
I frown. “Why not?”
“I just can’t.”
“Can’t, or don’t want to?”
“Either. Both.” She shrugs her dainty shoulders, making her loose dress shimmer. “How is that important?”
“Does he know?”
She shakes her head again, blonde waves floating with the motion.
“Are you going to tell him?”
A green pallor steals over her normally creamy skin. “Do I need to?”
“Don’t you want to?”
The reality of what she’s telling me sinks in.
My sister, Princess Royal, is pregnant out of wedlock and not in a relationship with the father, at least not a public one.
There will not be a quick hush-up wedding or a nationwide jubilation over the new royal baby.
This is not a celebration. This is a nightmare.
Her hands start fidgeting again, tying themselves into knots. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
Whoever this bastard is needs to pay.
“You weren’t . . . hurt, were you?”
She quickly shakes her head once more. “No, nothing like that.”
“Okay.” That’s a relief at least. “Can’t you give me a clue? He should have some responsibility in this as well.”
“Please,” she says. “I’ll take full responsibility. I would rather no one found out. About us.”
A prickling sensation crawls through my veins. “Bea, why—”
My phone rings from my handbag, and I pull it out. Henry’s name flashes on the screen. He’s probably wondering why I’m not at the meeting I called. I send it to voicemail and stick the phone back in my bag.
When I look up, Bea is still standing there, hopelessly begging for help, keeping secrets to protect someone. Who is important enough for her to go to these lengths to protect?
My bag vibrates with another call. I roll my eyes and reach in to silence it when it hits me.
No.
My stomach lurches with another wave of nausea, and I clamp my hand over my mouth. I remind myself to breathe. In, out, in, out.
Bea is starting to look concerned for me now. I drop my hand and inhale deeply through my nose, stealing myself for what I have to do. “Bea, I need to know,” I say.
I’m ready for it. I’ve braced myself against the news she’s going to deliver, feet planted on this floor, ready for something—anything—to take me on.
“I told you. I can’t.” There are tears in her voice, mirroring the ones hanging from her eyelashes.
I do not have the strength to go against her on this. If she wants to take this secret to her grave, fine. In fact, good. “You know what?” I say. “That’s fine. I don’t want to know.”
It’s true. I don’t think I can handle the truth, no matter how hard I dig my heels into the carpet. Nothing can prepare me for the eviscerating knowledge that has the ability to tear my world clean down the middle.
I think about all the time Henry and Bea have been spending together. I was happy—happy—that they were becoming friends rather than potential lovers. I’m a delusional fool.
“You—you don’t?” she asks. We both know that I am completely intolerable when kept in the dark.
I shake my head. “No. We’ll take care of this ourselves.”
My mind is already working out the possible options. The biggest priority will be keeping this from the press. Those bloody vultures would take the story and use it to bring our family down, and the whole monarchy with it.
Hope glimmers in Bea’s eyes for the first time. “I knew I could trust you to help.”
“I need to go.” I’m already fifteen minutes late. “But we’ll talk about this soon. You have options, Bea. And you’re not alone.”
And you’ll never be alone again—not if I have anything to say about it.