Chapter 9 #2
"Well, anyone could have used that code.
A member of staff. A secretary. These systems are labyrinthine.
You know that. One doesn't need Arthur himself to access Arthur's pathway.
" Cecilia stopped. She pressed her hand to her chest, the universal gesture of wounded innocence, and shook her head slowly.
"Alexandra. You're frightened. I understand that.
Any mother would be terrified. But your mind is playing tricks on you, darling.
The stress of this, the terror. It makes you see enemies everywhere.
Arthur loves Florence. He adores the children.
He sent them birthday presents only last month. "
The birthday presents. Alexandra remembered them. Three wrapped packages delivered by courier, containing expensive age-appropriate toys that Arthur's secretary had no doubt chosen. A gesture designed to look like love, calculated to provide exactly this kind of deniability.
There it was. Your mind is playing tricks.
The phrase that Cecilia had been deploying since Alexandra was a child.
The gentle, devastating suggestion that Alexandra's perception of reality was unreliable.
That what she saw and felt and understood could not be trusted, because she was emotional, because she was stressed, because she was too close to the situation to think clearly.
Cecilia had used it when Alexandra confronted her about the leaked photographs.
She'd used it when Alexandra questioned her relationship with Lord Hugo.
She'd used it after the assassination attempt, when Alexandra had suggested that the shooter might have had help from inside the royal household.
Your mind is playing tricks, darling. You're upset. You're not thinking straight.
"And what about you, Mother?" Alexandra said quietly. "Were you involved?"
Cecilia's hand flew to her throat. "How can you ask me that?
" Her voice was thick with hurt. "I'm your mother.
Florence is my granddaughter. The idea that I would — that you could even suggest—" She broke off and pressed the handkerchief to her eyes, her shoulders trembling with what appeared to be suppressed sobs.
At that moment, the door opened and a young member of staff entered carrying a tea tray. She was in her early twenties, dark-haired, with the careful deference of someone new to royal service. "Tea, Your Majesty? Your — oh, Your Highness. I didn't realise — shall I bring another cup?"
Cecilia's transformation was instantaneous.
The tears vanished. The trembling stopped.
She turned to the young woman with a radiant smile that lit her face like sunrise and made her look twenty years younger.
"How lovely. Yes, please, another cup would be wonderful.
Thank you so much, my dear. What's your name? "
"Alice, Your Highness."
"Alice. What a beautiful name. Thank you, Alice.
" Cecilia's voice was warm honey. She placed her hand briefly on Alice's arm as the girl set down the tray, a gesture of intimacy and connection that Alexandra recognised with a sick lurch in her stomach as the same gesture Cecilia had used on every member of staff, every charity volunteer, every person she wanted to charm.
Alice left with a flush of pleasure on her cheeks. The door closed.
Cecilia turned back to Alexandra. The warmth drained from her face as cleanly as water from a sink. "Now. Where were we?"
"I asked if you were involved."
"And I answered. The suggestion is offensive, Alexandra. After everything I've done for this family—"
"What have you done for this family?" The words came out before Alexandra could moderate them, hard and sharp and carrying years of accumulated grief.
"You offered my wife a million pounds to leave me.
You supported the man who assaulted me. You've undermined my reign at every opportunity.
You told Florence, you told an eight-year-old child, that some Queens don't last."
Cecilia's eyes narrowed. For a moment the mask slipped and something cold moved behind her gaze, something calculating and reptilian that Alexandra had glimpsed before but that Cecilia usually kept buried beneath the charm.
Then it was gone, replaced by sorrowful bewilderment.
"I have no idea what you're talking about.
I would never say such a thing to a child.
Florence must have misunderstood. Children hear things and misinterpret them, darling. You know that."
"Florence did not misinterpret."
"You're upset. You're not yourself. This is a terrible time, and I understand, I truly do, but you're lashing out at the people who love you most, and that's not going to help find Florence."
Alexandra stared at her mother. The performance was flawless.
The concern, the hurt, the gentle deflection.
Every word calibrated to make Alexandra doubt her own judgment, to reframe her accusations as symptoms of stress rather than evidence of betrayal.
Cecilia had been doing this since Alexandra was a child, building a world in which her version of reality was the only one that counted and anyone who challenged it was confused, emotional, or unwell.
The old Alexandra would have crumbled. The Alexandra of ten years ago, of her early reign, would have apologised and accepted the doubt and retreated into the familiar safety of believing her mother's version of events, because the alternative, that her own mother was capable of orchestrating the kidnapping of her child, was too monstrous to hold in her mind.
But she was not the old Alexandra. She was a Queen who had survived assassination attempts and public exposure and the relentless erosion of her confidence by exactly this woman, and she had Erin beside her, and Erin had never once made her doubt what she knew to be true.
"I think you should go, Mother." The words cost her something. They always did. Every boundary she set with Cecilia felt like pulling a tooth without anaesthetic, necessary, painful, and accompanied by the irrational conviction that she was the one doing something wrong.
Cecilia's hand paused mid-dab at her eyes. "Darling—"
"I need to check on the search. Erin is in the control room and I want an update.
" Alexandra stood. Her legs were steady.
Her voice was steady. She did not feel steady, but she had spent her whole life performing steadiness when what she felt was the ground falling away beneath her feet, and today was no different. "Thank you for coming."
"Alexandra, please. I'm worried about you. I'm worried about Florence. Let me stay. Let me help."
"Julia will show you out."
She walked to the door and opened it and Julia was there, as promised, standing in the corridor with her phone in one hand and her reading glasses in the other. Their eyes met. Julia's expression said she'd heard everything through the door.
"Please see my mother out," Alexandra said.
She walked down the corridor away from the drawing room, away from the scent of Shalimar, away from the performance.
Her footsteps were measured on the stone floor.
A painting of her father watched her from the wall, George, in his ceremonial robes, his expression kind and tired, the way he'd always looked in the last years of his life.
He would have known what to do about Cecilia.
He'd spent forty years married to her and he'd never once let her run the show, not truly, and when he'd died the restraint had died with him and Cecilia had been free to become her fullest, most destructive self.
Alexandra kept her spine straight and her shoulders back and her chin level and she did not look back.
She made it to the morning room before the emptiness hit.
It came like a wave, sudden, complete, pulling everything out from beneath her.
She closed the door and pressed her back against it and slid down until she was sitting on the floor with her knees drawn up to her chest. The faded chinoiserie birds watched her from the wallpaper with their painted, indifferent eyes.
The tea on the side table had gone cold.
Through the window, the lavender in the kitchen garden swayed in a breeze she couldn't feel, and the afternoon sun made the stone paths glow the colour of honey.
The emptiness filled her up from the inside, cold and vast and hollow.
She could not tell if her mother was involved.
That was the worst of it. Not the accusation, not the denial, not the gaslighting.
She could recognise all of those. She'd been recognising them for years. But the question underneath was the one that she could not answer: was her mother capable of this? Was the woman who had held her as a baby, who had taught her to ride, who had braided her hair before state dinners and told her she looked beautiful, was that woman also the woman who had ordered the kidnapping of Alex’s daughter?
Yes, said the evidence.
I don't know, said Alex’s troubled mind.
Alexandra pressed her forehead against her knees and sat on the cold floor of the morning room while the tea went cold on the table and the lavender nodded in the garden outside and the clock ticked and the world continued in its appalling, indifferent way, and there was nothing inside her at all.