Chapter 4
JULIA
By the time the snow started to fall for real, Julia had already had the feeling.
It wasn’t anything concrete. Just a prickle, a quiet, professional intuition honed by years in palace corridors and briefing rooms. The same instinct that had whispered This will be bigger than they think during a minor constitutional wobble, or That MP will be a problem the first time a certain backbencher had opened his mouth.
This time, it had arrived in the shape of a five-year-old in the back seat.
“It’s going to break,” Hyzenthlay said calmly, somewhere around Perth.
Vic, who was in the passenger seat fussing with the satnav, the playlist, and a folder marked OPERATION: P.R.C. (Perfect Royal Christmas, obviously), glanced over her shoulder. “What’s going to break?” she asked.
“The weather,” Hyz said. “It’s going to break and go all sideways.”
Julia’s hands tightened very slightly on the steering wheel. They were on the A9, traffic thin, sky an uninterrupted flat grey. The sort of grey that promised a lot and delivered selectively.
“Sideways,” Vic repeated. “Like… wind?”
“Like everything,” Hyz said serenely, kicking her little boots together. She’d insisted on the red ones, the ones with polar bears. Her coat had polar bears too. It was like dressing an omen in fluff.
Julia smiled despite herself. “Someone’s been listening to the forecast,” she said. “They did say there might be snow.”
“They said there might be a ‘weather event,’” Hyz corrected. “That’s different.”
Vic twisted in her seat, one hand braced on the dashboard. “You’re five,” she said. “Why do you talk like a meteorological goth?”
“A what?” Hyz asked.
“Never mind,” Vic said quickly. “Point is, the schedule can handle a bit of snow. We factored it in.”
Yes. We did, Julia thought, glancing at the bulging folder currently held together by two bulldog clips and Vic’s personality.
But she didn’t say it aloud. She was driving, and commentating on her wife’s micromanaging while navigating Scottish A-roads was multitasking even she didn’t trust herself with.
The roads were mostly clear so far, just a thin dusting at the verges where the fields faded into scrub. Patches of old snow clung to the hillside in streaks, like someone had half-heartedly iced the landscape and given up.
Julia loved this drive.
She didn’t always love what usually awaited her at the other end—formal clothing, stiff dining room conversations, subtle games of influence around the fireside—but Balmoral itself, the journey there, had grown on her over the years.
She liked the way the land opened out, the way London slowly fell away in the rear-view mirror.
She liked the slower pace, the blunt pragmatism of people who had more immediate concerns than political manoeuvring.
And this time, for the first time, they weren’t arriving as part of a formal entourage, but as family.
That thought still startled her sometimes. Not the family part—she’d been co-parenting long before there was a word on paperwork to describe what she was to Vic and Hyz—but the way it fitted here, into all this history. Into all this stone.
She’d started off as Alex’s advisor. She’d shepherded her through some of the biggest challenges and worst days of her life. She’d never imagined that one day she’d be driving up to Balmoral as Vic’s wife with their five-year-old in the back, arguing with her about reindeer.
“What if the reindeer get cold?” Vic asked suddenly, as if plucking the thought from some private stream of anxiety.
“Do reindeer get cold? They must, right? That’s how mammals work.
What if they don’t like the courtyard? What if the triplets are scared?
What if one of them charges Erin and she takes it as a personal attack and ends up in a fistfight with Dasher? ”
Julia snorted. “Erin is not going to punch a reindeer,” she said.
“You don’t know that,” Vic said darkly. “She has a lot of repressed tension.”
“Even if Erin did attempt to neutralise the reindeer,” Julia said, “I’m fairly sure Alex would talk her down.”
“Okay, that’s true,” Vic conceded, letting herself relax back against the seat for all of three seconds. “But what if—”
“Victoria,” Julia said mildly.
“Uh-oh,” Hyz said in the back. “Full name.”
Vic wilted. “Yes?”
“Take a breath,” Julia said. “You’ve listed thirty-two potential calamities between Dalkeith and here. At this rate, by the time we reach Pitlochry, you’ll be worrying about alien abduction and plagues of frogs.”
“Pitlochry,” Hyz repeated, tasting the word. “That sounds like somewhere hobbits would go on holiday.”
“Hobbits like second breakfast,” Vic muttered. “Do we have enough snacks? Did we—”
“We have enough snacks to feed a medium-sized army,” Julia said. “And we’re stopping in Pitlochry for lunch, remember? It’s literally on the schedule.”
Vic perked up. “You read the schedule?”
“I read the parts relevant to not starving,” Julia said. “The ten-page section on fairy light distribution patterns, I skimmed.”
Vic clutched at her heart. “Betrayal.”
She’d been like this for weeks, Julia reflected. Buzzing. Overstimulated. Pouring every spare second into the to-do list that had begun as a sensible, concise document and had mutated into a digital Kraken.
On good days, it was endearing. Watching Vic run on coffee and spreadsheets and raw enthusiasm, drawing up secret Santa lists like a general planning a campaign, was one of Julia’s quiet pleasures.
On bad days… Julia saw the cracks.
The way Vic’s eyes slipped past the present moment toward the next problem. The way her jaw clenched when something small went wrong. The way most of her jokes about messing things up were only half jokes.
It wasn’t that Vic had never cared about Christmas before. She had. They all had, in their own ways. But there was an extra layer to it this year, an almost brittle determination.
“We’re giving them the Christmas we didn’t get,” she’d said one night, pacing their kitchen while Julia leaned against the counter and watched the tea go cold.
And that, Julia understood.
Her own childhood Christmases had been a mixture of obligation and avoidance.
A duty rota shuffled between relatives, a tree that appeared and disappeared as if by magic, presents selected by secretaries from acceptable lists.
The first time she’d had a Christmas that felt like it belonged to her, she’d been in her thirties, in a tiny flat with old university friends with a cheap fake tree and a handful of friends who’d had nowhere else to go.
They’d eaten instant noodles with turkey-flavoured crisps and laughed too loudly and she’d gone to bed that night feeling something uncoil in her chest.
She wanted better for Hyz. She wanted warmth and silliness and the comforting predictability of rituals built over time.
Vic wanted all that too. She just… wanted to control it in a way that made Julia’s fingers itch to gently pry the clipboard out of her hands.
“Hey,” Julia said now, glancing sideways at her. “We’re early. Two whole days before everyone else. You’ve checked the deliveries. You’ve terrorised Mr. Patel. You’ve assigned people their stocking hooks.”
“I have not terrorised Mr. Patel,” Vic said. “He likes me.”
“He likes your enthusiasm in the abstract,” Julia said. “He fears your email frequency.”
“Lies,” Vic said, but she smiled.
From the back seat, there was a rustle of paper. “This says we get to decorate cookies the day after tomorrow,” Hyz announced.
Vic twisted again. “Hey, that’s confidential.”
“You left it on the seat,” Hyz said. “Possession is nine tenths of the law. Auntie Erin says so.”
“No, Auntie Erin says that about biscuits,” Vic said. “Which is different.”
“It’s similar,” Hyz argued.
Julia hid a grin. Erin did, in fact, have startlingly strong opinions about baked goods and rightful ownership.
“What else does it say?” Julia asked.
Hyzenthlay squinted at the child-friendly version of the schedule Vic had made—less columns and risk assessments, more stickers.
“It says… tomorrow we ‘inspect the grounds’ and make snow angels,” she said. “And then on the day after that, the Queen arrives with the triplets and we do ‘warm welcome ceremony.’”
“See?” Vic said, smug. “Structured fun.”
“And then there is a picture of a deer with sparkles,” Hyz continued.
“Ah,” Vic said. “Classified.”
“Reindeer,” Hyz said, with the reverence of a kid who’d grown up around crown jewels and still thought antlers were the coolest thing in the world. “I told Florence, and she screamed.”
Julia winced. “You’re not supposed to tell Florence yet,” she said. “Or Matilda. Or Frank. We agreed to keep it a surprise.”
“I didn’t tell Frank,” Hyz said loftily. “He’d tell everybody. He has no sense of operational security.”
Julia glanced at Vic. “Can’t imagine where he gets that from.”
Vic stuck her tongue out at her. “He gets it from Alex,” she said. “She’s the one who live-broadcast her coming out to the entire world. Zero chill.”
“That’s not quite the same thing,” Julia said, but there was fondness in her tone.
The sky had darkened slightly while they’d bickered. It was only early afternoon, but the flat grey had taken on a heavier quality, a weight behind it.
Julia flicked the headlights on and watched the sweep of the beams pick out road signs, hedgerows, the occasional startled sheep.
“Is it starting?” Hyz asked.
“Maybe,” Julia said. “We’ll see.”
They drove in companionable silence for a few miles. The road rose and dipped, curving around low hills. A lorry rumbled past in the opposite direction, wipers squeaking across its windscreen. A cluster of houses appeared and vanished.
The first snowflake landed on the windscreen just north of Pitlochry.
It melted instantly, leaving a tiny, ghostly star on the glass.
“Ha,” Vic said, leaning forward as if her disapproval alone could intimidate the weather. “Is that all you’ve got?”
The universe, unbothered, responded with a few more.