Chapter 5
The private living room was quiet in the way that rooms become quiet when something terrible has happened and no one knows what to say.
Alexandra sat on the sofa with Frank pressed against her left side and Matilda curled into her right, their small bodies warm and solid against hers.
Audrey lay at her feet, the elderly great dane stretched across the carpet with her fawn-coloured head resting on her paws, her brown eyes half-closed.
The dog had not moved since Alexandra had sat down. Animals knew. They always knew.
Hyzenthlay was cross-legged on the floor near the window, reading quietly.
She'd chosen to stay without being asked, as though she understood that her presence mattered and that leaving would say something she didn't want to say.
Vic was in the armchair opposite, still in her riding clothes and the pink knitted jumper, the scratch on her cheek cleaned and covered with a small plaster.
She was gripping the armrests with both hands and staring at the floor and she hadn't spoken in twenty minutes.
Julia stood by the mantelpiece, her phone pressed to her ear, murmuring in the low, efficient voice she used when managing a crisis.
She'd taken off her reading glasses and her dark hair was smoothed back into its usual neat updo, and despite everything she looked composed.
She always looked composed. It was both a comfort and an impossibility.
How could anyone be composed right now, when Florence was somewhere in the country with people they couldn't identify, in a car they couldn't find, protected by a bodyguard who had gone silent?
Alexandra was crying. Not the dramatic, heaving sobs of the first hour.
Those had burned themselves out and left behind a quieter grief, steady tears that ran down her cheeks without stopping, her nose running, her eyes swollen and raw.
She hadn't bothered to wipe them. There was no one here to perform composure for.
Frank and Matilda had seen her cry before.
They'd seen her cry when Audrey had been ill, when their goldfish died, when the news played footage of children in war zones and she'd had to leave the room.
But they'd never seen her cry like this.
The kind of crying that came from a place they couldn't reach, and both of them were holding onto her as though they were afraid she might disappear too.
"Mummy Alex?" Frank's voice was small against her arm. "Where's Flo?"
"She's... gone away at the moment, darling. Mummy Erin and the team are working very hard to bring her home."
"But where did she go away to? She was riding Percy."
"I know, sweetheart."
"Did she fall off? Is she at a hospital?"
Alexandra closed her eyes. The lie would have been easier.
A riding accident. A hospital. Something concrete and fixable and not this.
This vast, shapeless horror that she couldn't explain to herself, let alone to a child.
"No, she didn't fall off. Something happened and some people took Florence somewhere, and the police and our security team are finding her right now. "
Frank went rigid against her side. "Took her? Who took her?"
"We don't know yet."
"But that's not — people can't just take our sister.” His voice was climbing, the outrage of an eight-year-old confronting a world that had suddenly stopped making sense. "That's kidnapping. We learned about it. That's a crime."
"I know it is."
Matilda said nothing. She pressed her face harder into Alexandra's ribs and her small hand found Alexandra's and held on.
Her fingers were cold. Of the three children, Matilda was the one who absorbed the emotional atmosphere of a room the way a sponge absorbed water, silently, completely, without anyone noticing until it was too late.
She wouldn't ask questions. She would simply feel everything that the adults around her were feeling, and she would carry it quietly, and Alexandra would need to watch her closely in the days ahead.
Julia ended her call and crossed the room.
She sat on the arm of the sofa and placed a hand on Alexandra's shoulder.
"Erin is with Helena and the MI5 team. They're tracking the vehicle through the national camera network.
There are already hits on the A3 heading north-east." Her voice was calm and measured, each word chosen to inform without alarming the children. "They're doing everything possible."
"Is Mummy Erin OK?" Frank asked.
Julia met Alexandra's eyes briefly. A look that said she punched a wall and screamed in the service yard and she's barely holding together. What she said was: "Mummy Erin is being very brave and very strong and working with the team to bring Florence home."
The room settled back into its terrible quiet.
The clock on the mantelpiece ticked. The labradors had come inside and were lying by the door with their chins on the threshold, watching the corridor as though waiting for Florence to walk down it.
Audrey let out a long, low sigh that carried the weight of the entire room.
Julia's phone rang again. She answered it, listened for a moment, and her expression shifted, not alarm, not relief, but something attentive and cautious. She lowered the phone and looked at Alexandra.
"That was security. Charlotte Langford is at the gate. She's asking to see you."
"The Prime Minister?" Alexandra's voice was hoarse.
She hadn't spoken to Charlotte since the cabinet briefing last week, a formal meeting, polite and professional, in which they'd discussed education funding and neither of them had mentioned the fact that they were two of the most powerful women in the country and both of them were gay, which was a thing the papers loved to write about and neither of them liked to acknowledge.
"She's been briefed on the situation. She wanted to come in person." Julia paused. "You don't have to see her. I can send her away."
Alexandra considered this. The effort of meeting anyone right now was almost more than she could bear.
The idea of composing her face, of standing up, of being the Queen when she was barely managing to be a person.
But Charlotte had come. Had driven from London to the castle estate, past the security cordons and the media vans that were undoubtedly already gathering at the gates, to be here.
"Let her in," Alexandra said. She wiped her face with the back of her hand and took a breath that shuddered going in and came out steadier. It wasn't composure. It was survival.
Julia spoke quietly into the phone and within minutes the door opened and Charlotte Langford entered the room.
She was taller than Alexandra remembered, her silver-blonde hair in its usual precise chignon, wearing a dark navy suit that she'd probably been wearing in her office when the call came.
Her face was studiously neutral but her grey eyes were sharp, taking in the scene with the rapid assessment of a politician who had spent decades reading rooms.
Vic rose from her armchair. "Come on, you lot," she said to the children, her voice rough and bright with false cheer. "Let's go and take the dogs out to the garden."
Frank looked at Alexandra. She nodded, and he reluctantly untangled himself from her side.
Matilda took longer, her fingers clinging to Alexandra's hand before finally releasing.
Hyzenthlay stood and walked to the door with the quiet dignity of a child who understood that the adults needed the room.
She paused at the threshold and looked back at Alexandra with those observant hazel eyes, and the look said something that Alexandra would remember later.
Something like: I'm watching. I notice things.
Then the children were gone and it was just Alexandra and Julia and Charlotte.
Alexandra didn't stand. She didn't offer her hand.
She didn't do any of the things that protocol required when the Prime Minister entered a room occupied by the Sovereign.
She sat on the sofa with tear tracks on her face and Audrey at her feet and the hollow space where her children had been pressed against her sides, and she looked at Charlotte Langford and said nothing.
Charlotte sat in the chair Vic had vacated. She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees, hands clasped, and when she spoke her voice was stripped of its usual political precision and was something simpler. Something human.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry this has happened to your family."
"Thank you."
"I want you to know that every resource available to the government is being directed towards finding Florence. MI5, the police, GCHQ. Everything. We will find her."
"You can't promise that."
Charlotte held her gaze. "No. I can't. But I can promise you that I will treat this with the gravity it deserves and I will not stop until we have an answer."
Something loosened in her chest. Not relief.
Nothing close to relief. But the recognition that Charlotte Langford was not performing concern.
She was sitting in a room with a woman whose child was missing and she was being genuine, and the rarity of that in Alexandra's world was enough to make her eyes burn all over again.
"Thank you, Charlotte." Alexandra's voice cracked on the name and she didn't try to fix it. "I don't know if I'm handling this well. I don't know what I'm supposed to do."
"There is no supposed to," Charlotte said. "Your daughter has been taken. There is no protocol for this. There is only what you can bear and what needs to be done, and I am here to help with the second part."