Chapter 3 #2
They walked out of the yard together: Vic on the big bay, Florence on the little dun, Jennings following on the grey mare at a respectful distance.
Alexandra watched them go. They turned left along the bridle path and the trees closed around them, the sound of hooves on gravel fading to a soft thud on earth, and then they were gone.
Just the birdsong and the stable sounds and the tabby cat yawning on its mounting block.
Alexandra stood for a moment in the yard with her hand on the warm stone of the stable wall.
The sun was on her face. The horses were dozing in their stalls.
She could hear the distant laughter of the other children through the open windows of the house.
It was going to be a good weekend. She could feel it in her bones, the kind of weekend they needed, with no schedule and no cameras and nothing to do but be a family.
She walked back up the path to the castle and found her way to the terrace.
The terrace ran along the south side of the house, a wide stone balcony with a low wall that overlooked the main lawn and the lake beyond.
The housekeeper had set out a tray with a teapot, a plate of sandwiches cut into triangles, a bowl of strawberries, and a jug of something cold and lemon-scented that caught the light.
A pair of the labradors were lying in the shade beneath the stone balustrade, their tails wagging slowly.
Alexandra sank into one of the cushioned chairs and closed her eyes.
The warmth of the sun was like a hand pressing gently on her chest, easing the tightness that had lived there for weeks.
The schedule had been relentless: four public appearances in the last ten days, a state dinner, two cabinet briefings, a charity gala, Florence's speech rehearsals, and the constant, grinding awareness that every room she entered required a version of herself that was polished and composed and endlessly, exhaustingly perfect.
She was tired in a way that sleep didn't fix. Tired in her marrow.
But here, now, with the sun on her face and the sandwiches within reach and Florence riding through the woods with Vic and the other children playing inside with Hyzenthlay. Here she could let the mask slip. Just for a weekend. Just enough to breathe.
She poured herself a cup of tea and was lifting it to her lips when the terrace door opened and Erin appeared.
She'd changed out of her travel clothes into dark jeans and a fitted grey T-shirt that showed the lean muscle of her arms. Her dark hair was loose around her shoulders and she was carrying two apples, one of which she tossed to Alexandra without warning.
Alexandra caught it one-handed. "Thank you."
"Nice catch." Erin dropped into the chair beside her and stretched her legs out, crossing her ankles on the low wall. She bit into her apple and gazed out across the lawn. "Frank and Matilda are trying to teach Hyzenthlay's dragon game to Audrey."
"Is it working?"
"Audrey's asleep." Erin turned her head and looked at Alexandra, and her green eyes were soft in the sunlight, the hard edges of the bodyguard and the watchful tension of the palace gone. She was just Erin here. Just her wife. "You look better already."
"I feel better." Alexandra reached over and took Erin's hand.
Their fingers laced together, the way they had a thousand times, and the familiarity of it was its own kind of comfort: the calluses on Erin's palm from the gym, the wedding ring warm against Alexandra's skin, the way Erin's fingers tightened briefly around hers, a squeeze that said everything without a word. "I needed this."
"I know you did."
They sat in the sun, not talking, and the quiet stretched between them with the ease of two people who had long since stopped needing words to fill silence.
The labradors sighed in their sleep. A wood pigeon called from the oak tree.
The tea cooled and the sandwiches were slowly eaten and the afternoon settled around them with the gentle weight of something precious and unhurried.
Alexandra thought about the past week: the charity gala where she'd stood for three hours in heels, smiling at donors whose names she'd memorised from Julia's briefing cards.
The state dinner where she'd sat between the French ambassador and a billionaire philanthropist and managed to make both of them feel important while eating a meal she couldn't taste.
The garden party yesterday, and Cecilia.
Always Cecilia. She pushed the thought away. Not here. Not this weekend.
She thought instead about Florence on Percy, riding through the dappled woodland with Vic, and the image made her smile.
Florence had Erin's intensity about horses, that single-minded focus, the refusal to do anything halfway.
She'd been riding since she was four, first on a lead rein with Vic walking beside her, then trotting independently, then cantering, each milestone marked by a quiet, fierce pride that Florence tried to hide and couldn't. Alexandra loved watching her ride.
It was the one place where Florence forgot to be careful and simply became a child.
She ate a strawberry. It was warm from the sun and tasted of summer. Erin's thumb was still tracing slow circles on her wrist and the sensation was hypnotic, a gentle rhythm that pulled the tension from her body one revolution at a time.
Alexandra was thinking about nothing. Deliberately, luxuriously, nothing. She was watching a dragonfly hover above the lake when the sound reached her.
Voices. Raised voices. From inside the house. Not children's voices. These were louder, more urgent, accompanied by the rapid clatter of footsteps on stone floors.
Erin sat up. Her legs came off the wall and her feet hit the terrace in one smooth motion, her posture changing in an instant from relaxed to alert. Her hand released Alexandra's. Her eyes went to the terrace door.
"What is that?" Alexandra said.
Before Erin could answer, the door burst open.
Vic stood in the doorway. She was still in her riding clothes but her helmet was gone, her hair wild around her face, her green eyes wide and glassy with what Alexandra recognised instantly as panic.
Her chest was heaving. There was a scratch across her cheekbone that was beading with blood. Her hands were shaking.
"Vic?" Erin was on her feet. "What happened? Where's Florence?"
Vic opened her mouth. Closed it. Her face crumpled and she gripped the doorframe as though it was the only thing holding her upright. When she spoke, her voice was raw and cracked and it broke something open inside Alexandra that she would not be able to close again.
"Florence has been taken."
The words didn't make sense. Alexandra heard them but they didn't arrange themselves into meaning. They just hung there, suspended in the warm afternoon air between the teapot and the strawberries and the dragonfly above the lake.
Florence has been taken.
"What do you mean, taken?" Alexandra's voice was very calm. The way her voice always got when her body understood something before her mind did. "Taken where? By whom?"
Vic was shaking. The blood from the scratch on her cheek had run to her jaw.
"A car. On the bridle path. It came from the estate road — it had the right plates, the right windscreen sticker, the security credentials.
The driver said there'd been a change of plan, that Florence needed to return to the house immediately.
Jennings got in the car with her. He said he'd escort her back.
I thought — I thought it was—" She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth.
"I thought it was real. It looked real. Jennings said the documentation looked right. "
Alexandra stood up. The teacup fell from her hand. She didn't hear it break. Everything had gone very quiet inside her: a vast, ringing silence, like the world after a bomb goes off, when the noise is so absolute that it becomes soundlessness.
"Florence." She said her daughter's name and it came out as a whisper. "Florence is gone?"
"We need to get to the security room," Erin said.
Her voice was flat and hard, the voice of a woman who had spent fifteen years running towards crises while everyone else ran away.
She was already moving, her body coiled, her jaw set, her green eyes blazing with an intensity that Alexandra had seen only a handful of times in their marriage.
The bodyguard was back. The protector. "Vic, come with me. Tell me everything. Alex—"
She turned to Alexandra and for one brief second the mask slipped and Alexandra saw what was underneath, raw, blinding terror. Then Erin's face closed and she was all business again.
“Find Julia. I'll find out what's happening."
But Alexandra was already following. She left the broken teacup and the strawberries and the peaceful afternoon behind her and walked through the terrace door into the house, and the warm stone corridor was cool against her bare arms and the sound of her own heartbeat was very loud in her ears.
Her legs were moving but she couldn't feel them.
Her hands were at her sides but she couldn't feel those either.
The only thing she could feel was the place on her palm where Florence's hand had been that morning, small and cool and trusting, when they'd walked together down the path to the stables.
Florence was gone.
The world kept turning but nothing in it made sense any more.