Chapter 19
Three in the morning and the safe house was silent and Alexandra was sitting in the dark.
Julia had gone to sleep on the sofa in the second room an hour ago, her phone still in her hand, her reading glasses slipping down her nose.
She'd stayed up until two, managing the stream of updates from Mills and Charlotte's office and the Home Secretary's private secretary, but exhaustion had won in the end and she'd curled up with a cushion beneath her head and fallen asleep mid-sentence.
Alexandra had pulled a blanket over her and left her there, because Julia had earned it, because Julia had been holding everything together for a week and a woman could only hold for so long.
Now Alexandra sat alone. The living room lamp was off.
The only light came from the kitchen, where the extractor fan's small LED cast a cold blue glow across the tiles.
The curtains were closed but she could see the outline of the garden through the gap, the hedge a dark shape against a sky that was not quite black, the thin, pre-dawn grey that came at this hour in summer, when the night was already beginning to remember the day.
Her phone was on the arm of the sofa. Silent.
The last message had been from Erin at twenty-three forty-two: Team entering grounds now.
Will update when I can. That had been three hours ago.
Three hours and eighteen minutes. Three hours and eighteen minutes of sitting in the dark and counting seconds and trying not to think about what silence meant.
Silence could mean the search was taking longer than expected. Thirty-two rooms, Erin had said. Plus outbuildings. That was a lot of rooms. A lot of doors to open, a lot of spaces to check, a lot of methodical, systematic work that took time even when the people doing it were trained.
Silence could mean they'd found something and were processing it and hadn't had a moment to call.
Silence could mean they'd found nothing, again, and Erin was standing in another stranger's garden in the dark, unable to bring herself to make the phone call that would end Alexandra's hope for the second time.
Silence could mean worse things. Things she would not name because naming them might conjure them into existence.
Things that prowled at the edges of her mind like animals in a forest, visible only as shapes and movement, and she kept them there, in the periphery, because looking at them directly was not something she would survive.
She pressed her hands together in her lap.
Her fingers were cold. The safe house heating had gone off at midnight and the air in the living room was cool and still and smelled of the cleaning products that MI5 apparently used to sanitise every surface.
She thought about praying. She had not been a particularly religious woman since childhood.
The Church of England faith she'd been raised in had become more tradition than conviction somewhere around university.
But Matilda had prayed for Florence, had said it with the simple certainty of a child who believed that prayers were heard, and Alexandra wanted to believe that too.
She wanted to believe that the universe was listening and that it cared and that her daughter was somewhere safe and warm and waiting to come home.
Please, she thought. It was not a prayer and it was not a plea.
It was something between the two, a word offered into the silence of a dark room in a village in Surrey at three in the morning by a woman who had run out of everything except the ability to ask.
Please let her be there. Please let Erin find her. Please let this be the end of it.
The house creaked around her. Old timber, old walls, settling in the cold.
A car passed on the road outside, not stopping, just passing, its headlights sweeping across the curtains and then gone.
She tracked it with her ears, the sound building and fading, and the silence that followed it was deeper than the silence before.
She thought about Florence's bed at the castle.
The rabbit. The slippers. The cracked spine of her favourite book.
She thought about the morning routine: Florence's careful precision, the shoes lined up, the thank you for today whispered into the dark.
She thought about all the ordinary moments she'd taken for granted, the ones that filled a life so completely that you didn't notice them until they were gone, and she promised herself that if, when, Florence came home, she would notice every one of them.
Every goodnight. Every breakfast. Every ride on Percy.
Every argument between the triplets about whose turn it was to sit in the front seat.
She would hold all of it, because she had learned what it meant to have it taken away.
She was still sitting like that, hands pressed together, eyes closed, the catalogue of ordinary moments running behind her eyelids like a film, when she heard the car.
Not the quiet approach of a car keeping a low profile.
Not the measured pace of a security vehicle maintaining protocol.
This was the sound of a car driving fast on gravel, the crunch and spray of stones under tyres that were not interested in stealth, the engine note rising as it turned into the drive and the headlights swinging across the living room curtains in a bright, moving arc that made the shadows jump.
Alexandra was on her feet before the car had stopped.
She was at the window, pulling the curtain back, pressing her face to the glass, and in the glare of the headlights she saw the black Range Rover skidding to a halt on the gravel, and she saw the doors opening, and she saw Erin stepping out, and she saw what Erin was carrying.
A child. Small. Blonde hair tangled with sleep.
Pyjamas. Arms wrapped around Erin's neck.
Face pressed into Erin's shoulder. A child who was alive and whole and being carried across the gravel toward the house by a woman whose face, in the headlights, was streaked with tears and shining with something that Alexandra recognised because she'd seen it years ago, on their wedding day, when Erin had looked at her and the expression on her face had been so full and so fierce.
Alexandra ran.
She didn't walk. She didn't proceed. She didn't maintain the composure that years of being Queen had trained into her bones.
She ran. Through the hallway, past the security officer who tried to say something and didn't finish, through the front door that she wrenched open with both hands.
The cold night air hit her face and the gravel was sharp under her thin shoes and Erin was six steps away and Florence was in her arms and Alexandra covered those six steps in something that was closer to a sprint than anything she'd done since school.
"Florence. Florence, Florence, Florence."
She was saying the name like a prayer, like a spell, like a word that had power if you said it enough times.
Her hands found Florence's body, the warmth of her back through the thin pyjamas, the solid weight of her, the realness of her, and she pulled her daughter from Erin's arms and into her own and Florence's small body pressed against her chest and the sound that came out of Alexandra was not a word and not a cry.
It was something more fundamental than either: the raw, unfiltered sound of a mother whose child had been returned to her, and it came from a place deeper than language.
"Mummy." Florence's voice was muffled against her shoulder. Sleepy and confused and absolutely, heartbreakingly ordinary. "Mummy Alex, you're squeezing too tight."
"I know, darling. I know. I'm sorry. I can't — I can't stop.
" She was laughing and crying at the same time, her face wet and her chest heaving and her arms locked around Florence with a force that she knew was too much and that she could not reduce by a single fraction.
She pressed her lips to Florence's hair, to her forehead, to her temple, breathing in the smell of her: shampoo and sleep and the faint, woody scent of the summer house stove.
And each breath filled her with more of the reality that her daughter was here, was safe, was alive, was in her arms.
Florence pulled back enough to look at her.
Her blue eyes, the same blue as Alexandra's, the same blue as her own mother’s, the blue that photographers loved and that Alexandra sometimes caught in the mirror and thought of her children, were wide and bewildered and still half-asleep.
Her blonde hair was tangled and her pyjamas were too big for her, not her pyjamas, someone else's, cotton with a pattern of small flowers that no one in Florence's life would have chosen for her, and there was a smudge of something on her chin that might have been chocolate.
She looked healthy. She looked unharmed. She looked like an eight-year-old girl who had been woken up twice in one night and wasn't entirely sure why everyone was crying.
"Why are you crying, Mummy? Did something happen?"
The innocence of the question was almost too much. Alexandra pressed her forehead against Florence's and breathed and the tears kept coming and she let them because there was no stopping them and no reason to try. "Something wonderful happened, darling. You came home."
Erin's hand found her back. Warm and steady and there, and the three of them stood on the gravel drive of a safe house in Surrey in the cold dark and held each other, and the security officers watched from the doorway and the driver sat in the car with the engine running and nobody moved or spoke because there was nothing to say that was larger than this.