Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Arthur
I was delivered to my front door at Kensington Palace like a parcel.
“Your Royal Highness,” the protection officer said softly, opening the SUV door against a press of lenses just beyond the railings. “We’ll go straight in.”
Flashbulbs popped behind the iron. Even from inside the walls, you could feel it—being hunted.
I kept my eyes down, and let the man escort me past the porter, through the side entrance, up the narrow stair that smelled faintly of old stone and polish.
A housemaid stood aside, startled, and bobbed a half-curtsy she hadn’t done in years. The sight almost undid me.
The door to my apartment had been unlocked already.
A courtesy, or a reminder this place wasn’t truly mine.
I stepped inside to the echo of my footsteps.
Someone had drawn the curtains while I was away—this time not by me, because I’d been at Eddie’s.
The rooms felt dim and over-starched, like an old suit pulled from storage and buttoned onto a body that had outgrown it. I pulled off my raincoat and sighed.
My phone buzzed again: three missed calls from unknown numbers, a dozen or so from friends whose names made my throat ache—Laurence, Chris, Eddie; and one from “Mum” with no voicemail attached, because she would say nothing important on a recording.
Then I received a text from Mummy’s private secretary.
Her Royal Highness is five minutes away.
I left my coat on the back of a chair and wandered toward the sitting room.
Someone—probably a footman—had lit a single lamp and arranged a tray on the low table: a teapot, two cups, and a carafe of water.
I poured water from the carafe, then put the glass down because my hand wouldn’t stop shaking.
I’d been angry all morning. Now, with the Palace smell in my lungs—polish, beeswax, something ancient—the anger was dissolving into fear. Not of punishment, exactly. Of loss.
I loved my family. I loved Sunday lunches when everyone was half talking over everyone else and my mother, of all people, laughed so hard she cried at something ridiculous one of my uncles said.
The rituals that most people mocked: the balcony, the hats, the way you always knew where you had to be and at what time, and a man would appear with a car to take you there. I loved it more than I meant to.
But I loved Bryce more than I’d thought I could love anyone.
I heard the outer door open. Voices, then the sound of a coat sleeve dragged across something damp. I straightened and wiped my palms on my trousers, absurdly formal in my own home. The door to the sitting room opened as if it belonged to her.
My mother came in like a weather system: Barbour still beaded with rain along the hem, hair pinned back in a practical sweep, eyes that could peel paint. There were no flowers in her voice when she spoke.
“Sit,” she commanded.
I sat.
Mummy crossed to the window, tugged the velvet back with two fingers, and peered through the gap at the gates beyond the square.
Little camera flashes winked back, hungry for a glimpse of us.
She let the drape fall and turned to face me, hands in her pockets, stance square like a rider measuring a jump.
“Do you have any idea,” she said calmly, “what you’ve done?”
It was identical to the line I’d rehearsed she would say, and it still hurt. But I’d had an hour of being told by official men that I was to “await guidance.”
I was not in the mood to be obedient.
“I went dancing,” I said. “With someone I love. It wasn’t a state secret, or a coup. It was—”
“—a Windsor entwined with the American ambassador in a nightclub. Number Ten now must avoid a diplomatic firestorm, and the press are baying for blood.” Mummy didn’t raise her voice. She never had to. “It was reckless.”
The word hung between us, and the shame flushed hot under my collarbones.
“I didn’t see a camera,” I said, aware of how small it sounded.
“You never do,” she said. “You were born to them, Arthur. You learned to walk toward them. This is not naivety. This is choosing not to remember what you know.”
“Or choosing, for once, to live like I’m not an exhibit in a museum,” I snapped, and the snap surprised us both. I exhaled, and the anger rearranged itself. “You’re angry because it’s public. Not because it’s wrong.”
“Don’t be stupid,” she said, and it wasn’t cruel. It was a mother’s slap with a glove on. “If you think I’d blink twice at your being with a man, you don’t know me at all. We’ve had that conversation. I thought we were past it.”
“We are,” I said. “You are. But the world isn’t. Washington isn’t. The Palace certainly isn’t.”
“The Palace cares only about the Crown,” she shook her head slowly. “It’s allergic to surprises. And you, darling, have given them the kind that makes them break out in hives.”
I stared at my hands because if I looked at her I might cry, and that would be a different kind of humiliation.
“Bryce is getting flayed alive,” I said. “I’m sure his Secretary is threatening recall.”
“Of course he is,” my mother said. “He’s a small man who mistakes severity for strength. He will overreach, and then he will backpedal because he likes his job. But he will make it hurt first.”
That, somehow, was worse than her anger: the cool, bored assessment of a predator she’d met before, probably at a boring state dinner. The stone in my stomach shifted and sharpened.
“I asked if you knew what you’ve done,” my mother repeated. “Do you?”
I lifted my chin. “I’ve made it harder. For everyone. For you, Bryce, and for me.”
“And?” she prompted, because she’d never accepted half-answers from anyone.
“And I don’t regret dancing with him,” I said, voice shaking. “I regret the picture. I regret the world. Not us.”
A muscle flickered in her cheek. Then she came to the armchair opposite mine and sat. Rain ticked at the window in the briefest little taps, like a nervous fingernail.
“When you were nine,” she said, “you went missing for forty minutes at Balmoral, and I thought I would die. You were found under a rhododendron with a fistful of biscuits, feral and delighted. Do you remember what I said to you?”
“You said, ‘If you’re going to run away, leave a note. It’s only polite,’” I replied, and the memory put a stupid, involuntary grin on my face.
She snorted. “I said that after. First I said, ‘There is a difference between freedom and thoughtlessness. One is brave, and the other is selfish.’”
I could have argued the fairness of applying that to a dance floor. I could have made an elegant case about double standards and why must our lives be kept small to keep other people comfortable. Instead, I stared at my hands again because they wouldn’t stop trembling.
“What do you want from me?” I murmured.
Her gaze softened by a millimetre. It was as much as the world ever got from her, and I’d learned to translate the whole sentimental dictionary out of it.
“What I have always wanted,” she said. “For you to be clever. And careful. And kind. To yourself and to the Crown. Those are not mutually exclusive.”
“They feel like it,” I said.
“Of course they do. You are in love.” She sighed. “Loyalty feels like a noose when your heart belongs to someone else.”
It hit so cleanly I had to press my fingers to my mouth not to make a sound. I loved Mummy for the accuracy and hated her for it too.
“You’re not a working royal,” she went on.
“You do not draw a salary, and you don’t carry out engagements.
Arthur, you have more freedom than most people with your surname.
That freedom is real. You can live a life that is mostly your own.
But you do not get to pretend that your name isn’t attached to everything you touch.
The perks and the prison are the same building, Arthur. ”
All the perks flashed through my brain — doors opening, waiters laying out tables, private museum tours that made me feel like the only person alive inside a painting — and alongside them the prison: drawn blinds at noon, some officious man I hadn’t hired deciding I mustn’t be seen because my face might upset tomorrow’s front page.
I saw children at the charity clinic, palms trembling, then grinning because I’d shown up; I winced at my selfishness for liking the roar when crowds called our names.
And beneath it all was Bryce, walking into a ring of cameras like a soldier into fire.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“Now,” my mother said, “you keep your head down for a few days and you do not feed the wolves. You don’t sneak out to see him tonight no matter how much you want to, because that will make it worse for Mr. Lewis, and you know it.
You answer no questions. Just let the story exhaust itself.
And privately, you decide whether you can live like this.
Not for a week, but for a very long time. ”
I pictured it with ugly clarity: clandestine cars and coded messages; holidays not in the sun but in borrowed houses with covered walks; Bryce’s staff frowning, mine sighing; the first time a camera caught us again because it always does, and the story getting even sharper teeth.
“And if I can’t?” I asked, and I hated how my voice wobbled.
“Then you do the honest thing and end it before you ruin both your lives,” she said, and if there was cruelty in it, it was the kind I’d asked for.
“You don’t drag him through years of this to prove a point about modern love.
He has a country to serve. You have… a different kind of life.
A good one, if you want it. Don’t throw it away to live in a bunker. ”
“I don’t want a bunker,” I said. “Mummy, I want to dance with my boyfriend in a room without worrying whose hand is in whose pocket.” I laughed, a wreck of a sound. “Isn’t that ridiculous? A prince wishing for a bad DJ and a good night.”
“Not ridiculous,” she said. “Human.” She leaned back, tracing a crease in her glove with a thumb. “You know I’m not the enemy here.”
“I know,” I said, and meant it. “I just wish the Crown weren’t sometimes.”
She smiled, brief and bleak. “I’ve wished that longer than you’ve been alive.”
We let that sit, the two of us on our opposing chairs like players who’ve finally admitted they’re on the same side and still don’t know how to win.
“Do you want me to say I’m sorry?” I asked after a while.
“I want you to be sorry for the mess,” she said. “Never for loving someone worthy of you.”
The words hit like a key turned in an inner door I’d been rattling for years. I closed my eyes and breathed because it was either that or cry. When I opened them, she was watching me with that old, fierce tenderness she hid from the world because it was not the brand.
“Will you speak to him?” I asked. I meant the King, but I didn’t say his name because somehow that made it both grander and smaller.
“If I must,” she said. “I’ll tell Father there’s nothing to be gained from treating you like part of the royal apparatus when you are not. And I’ll remind him that whatever else we are, we’re a family before we are a firm.”
I nodded, throat thick. “Thank you.”
She rose. I did too, because the choreography is in my bones.
For a second we faced each other in the dim light, and I thought she might hug me, and I realised I wanted her to with an ache that startled me.
She didn’t. Mummy reached out and squeezed my shoulder instead, which was her version of the same thing.
“I love you,” she said. “That is not conditional, but my approval is. Don’t confuse them.”
“I won’t,” I said, even though I already had and probably would again.
She released my shoulder and glanced toward the door. Duty called, even when it was only the duty to keep breathing. “One more thing,” she said, hand on the knob. “Whatever you decide, decide it on purpose. Don’t drift into a life and then call it fate. That’s cowardice dressed as romance.”
The door shut. I sank to the floor, my knees unable to hold me up, and a question began to swirl through my head.
What am I going to do?