6. Little Duckies
6
Little Duckies
ALMA
Crown Prince Jacob’s academic record is bad, and there’s no use hiding it. These things always have a way of getting out, whispered from ear to ear until they’re splashed across the front page of some tabloid.
“Idiot Prince Picked as Vorburg Heir”
“Six Times Crown Prince Jacob Misused the Past Perfect Tense: Term Papers Uncovered”
“Dolt on the Throne”
They’re easy to imagine.
I skim through the binder, picking out more damning details. Each time, my stomach drops like a child’s toy, bouncing down the stairs to the dungeon.
There were three suspensions in four years for unruly conduct. At sixteen he was involved in a fistfight with the heir to a powerful petroleum magnate. I double check the name. Vede. Young Jacob Gardner aimed high. I leaf through the documentation showing that, behind the scenes, King Otto settled the dental bills and had his lawyers bribe everyone down to the school janitor’s third cousin to sign non-disclosure agreements.
It won’t matter. These things always have a way of getting out.
I’m not afraid of this biography, as such, but I know how this world works. Jacob doesn’t have an unimpeachable pedigree to back him up. The people of Vorburg aren’t acquainted with his character and have no reason to extend grace when he falls short of perfection.
He will have one shot to introduce himself. Our job, though he doesn’t know it yet, will be to cobble together a story strong enough to weather the damning details. He has to control the narrative from the moment he steps onto the global stage.
Our midday meal reveals an appalling number of things he has yet to learn. He puts his elbows on the table, leaning forward when he speaks. He talks with his hands and devours his meal quickly, prowling the room in a restless fashion while his aide and I finish at a more civilized pace. In the afternoon, I turn to a tab marked ‘Legal Issues and Citations’ and release a relieved breath when I find there’s not much there. A speeding citation for a motorcycle. A dispute involving his business and an aristocratic estate, settled by a small claims procedure for 10,000 polskas . He won that one.
Once he enters adulthood, the dossier gets thinner, and Jacob seems to fade out of the official record. I stare at the page as though doing so will conjure a fully realized human man.
A hand drops over the paper, and I blink, focusing on the nicks and scars over his skin.
“Excuse me,” I say, raising my gaze, “for allowing my attention to wander. Now—”
He flips his hand and knocks his knuckles against the page. “No worries. It’s hard sitting still all day.”
He tells me this like he knows a secret. My secret. About how hard I have to work to dampen every fidget and suppress every twitch. How I have to run every day, the sound of my sneakers absorbed by the dense forest floor, to present the picture of a calm princess. How he sees the invisible waters which rush through me, alive and bracing.
“Of course,” I say, closing the binder with a snap. “You must want to rest.”
He gets to his feet and stretches, rolling his neck. “I don’t like school rooms. Maybe you caught that from the binder.”
I did, where it was buried in records from Little Duckies room aides and the Early Intervention specialist assigned by the school district. “Student has little interest in completing non-preferred tasks…” “Alternate accommodations must be devised for the pre-cooperative child…”
“Are you up for a walk?” he asks.
I glance out the window, where downy flakes drift from the sky. “It’s snowing.”
His mouth pulls into a lopsided smile—endearing for a man his size. “You’re a Sondish princess. I thought the frozen tundra was your natural habitat.”
Conveying facts is safe. “Sondmark is in a temperate deciduous biome.”
“Temperate? Sounds perfect for a walk.” Jacob’s smile sharpens. I realize the trap only after it’s sprung. No matter what the academic record indicates, I can’t afford to underestimate him.
We meet on the top steps of the back garden after I’ve donned a fur-lined winter parka and thick-soled boots. “Is Pane Nowak coming?” I ask, ignoring the miracle of Jacob’s appearance—the perfect fit of the lambswool coat, and the dark knitted cap covering his head. I note that his bare neck is a strong contrast to the white wool.
My examination of him, I tell myself, has everything to do with my mission. The crown prince doesn’t look inconvenient, difficult, or pre-cooperative. Instead, as the snowflakes drift between us, I get a stupid, fluttery feeling that he looks confident and commanding. He looks like a king.
Jacob adjusts his gloves, sending me a sidelong glance. “Karl refuses to be seen in anything that doesn’t go with Oxford dress shoes.”
Maybe Jacob only looks royal because he’s abandoned the ill-fitting blue suit and Vorburg-themed tie. Maybe that’s all it is, because his shoulders are too broad and his hands are too big. His nose, I allow, is aristocratic, but it’s got an endearing jog in the bridge where it’s been broken. I wonder if it’s a souvenir from that kid in the fourth form.
I swallow hard and look away, vexed that I keep wandering from the kind of cool, clinical observations I can pass along to my mother.
“Shall we?” I say.
We set off, skirting a stand of spreading oaks planted during the bloody reign of Frederick IV. A wide swing hangs from a thick branch of one of the knotty giants, and I brush the snow from the seat as I pass. We have just twelve weeks to accomplish an impossible task.
“What?” he prods, breaking through my thoughts. Our breath, exhaled in the sharp cold, condenses into fog.
“If I have any hope of helping you, I have to know every detail from that binder.”
He sniffs in the cold and tips his chin up. “I know what people say about my mother’s hair and her name and the fact that she never went to college. You think I’m supposed to be fine with the name-calling now that the source is my father?”
I take a few steps, my boots breaking through the crust of snow. Sooner or later, he has to trust me with this. “I don’t know your mother, but I do know that she stood in the same arena as a monarch for over a decade. That takes perseverance.”
He shoves his hands into his pockets. “Yeah. She has that.”
“What else?”
For a long while, the only sounds are a soft wind and the steady crunch of footfalls. This is his sore spot. The press will find it. They always do.
“She was the youngest,” he says.
I don’t ask questions. I wait.
“She didn’t want to live on a farm, which is funny,” he adds, “because now half her flat is potted plants.”
“I’m terrible at keeping plants alive,” I offer. This is more information than I’ve released to the public in five years. He drags a branch and lets it spring away, dropping a fall of snow. A smile touches his mouth. He knows what I’m doing. Making a trade.
He plucks his lip with a row of teeth. “What do you already know?”
Because I don’t walk into new situations without as much preparation as possible, I know that Tiffani Fawn Gardner dropped out of school and ran off to L.A. when she was seventeen, eventually landing a few USO tours as a little of everything—singer, dancer, comedian.
“Just an outline.” I don’t fool myself into thinking that’s the full picture.
He shrugs and picks up an acorn, flinging it back into the woods. “Then you’ll know that she met my father in West Germany, right before the tanks rolled out of Vorburg.”
I nod.
“They didn’t have more than a couple of days together.” That, I didn’t know.
“Nine months later, I was born in Blackberry,” he concludes. The meat of his story has been picked clean, but I wonder if the dancer loved the king. I wonder if she was scared. I wonder how her parents welcomed the prodigal. Gently, I hope. Dozens of questions beg to be asked, but Jacob, I remind myself, is a job. I only need to know the essentials.
“She managed an apartment complex, I understand.” I reach into my memories of sharing an apartment with schoolmates at Harvard and dropping into the office to report maintenance issues and pick up packages. “Was that so she could have you close by?”
He nods. “She snaked out drains with a baby on her back.” That’s not a fact the press have uncovered. “When I started preschool, she put me on the back of her bike.”
“Little Duckies.” It’s impossible to say the name without wanting to pick daisies and fingerpaint.
He smiles, and I feel a measure of relief. I don’t want this to be torture. “I had a thing for Teacher Teresa.”
His beard catches snowflakes, and his cheek, pink in the cold, tucks. I can’t afford to be derailed by the way he smiles—an odd combination of something new and something very old. A freckled young boy and a mountain god with a long memory. The smiles are potent, pulling at the edges of the official princess, threatening to unravel her. “Your grandparents lived in Skip.”
“A little town about thirty minutes into the mountains. Do you want to know what they thought of us?”
I do, and it has nothing to do with making him ready to be a king.
“They offered to take us both when I was born. I don’t think they thought she could stick it out on her own.”
“But she did.” The outline fleshes out.
“With lots of babysitting and the occasional hundred-dollar-bill falling from my grandpa’s pocket when we needed it most,” he murmurs, filling in the picture still further.
He describes his mother as independent and brave. She would have to be to fight a king, absorbing every slander the press could throw at her for more than a decade to put her son in line for the throne. How much of the mother is found in the son?
Our steps take us to the point of the palace grounds, and we watch the fluttering white-tipped waves rolling across the ocean below for a few moments before turning back.
“Now it’s your turn,” he says.
“Pardon?”
“I told you about my life.”
A shiver of horror brushes through my veins, but I give a polite smile. “I won’t be giving you a test about me.”
He reaches out, catching a snowflake on his hand—an innocent gesture. “In order to be satisfied…” he says, closing his palm. I watch the microexpressions on his face in fascination, and my boots fumble in the snow. He steadies me. “We both have to give a little. That’s the miracle of capitalism. I tell you about my long-standing passion for a room aide at Little Duckies, and you tell me…”
He coaxes me like we’re simple creatures who met by accident. Like we’re not both operating under a commission from our respective monarchs. There’s a guilelessness about it, and I laugh because it hurts my throat to keep it back. “What do you want to know? I’ve got all kinds of stories about the palace ghosts. Or do you want to know about the jewel vault?”
The last of my laughter evaporates in the winter air, and his chin bucks toward my left hand. “Tell me about your fiancé.”
I take a drag of oxygen and my lungs burn with the cold. I’m prepared to recite an amusing family anecdote about Frederich the Wary—how he gave a crazed speech to parliament carrying his wife’s severed head in a bag. I am not prepared to let him see a millimeter more of Princess Alma than I have to. I shuffle through a store of information and lay the facts down like face cards.
“Pietor is thirty-five. He was educated at the University of Amsterdam and is the Hereditary Grand Duke of Himmelstein.”
Jacob nudges me with his shoulder. That was nothing. “What’s the Hereditary part mean?”
“It means he’s the heir—the crown prince, just as you are.”
“I told you I was a love child, conceived at a U.S. Air Force base. I’m not sure how you’re going to beat that.” I haven’t come close.
“Pietor’s been in Lijuela for several months on a humanitarian mission—plastics prevention and ecological clean-ups.” My words are spare and careful, conveying none of the aggravation of wasted years or the certainty that I’m disappointing my mother.
Our walk brings us to a slight rise, and Jacob moves ahead, kicking steps into the slope with his large boots. He jogs to the top, and placing my footsteps in his, I follow him up the bank.
“Your fiancé does humanitarian work? That’s very…righteous,” he says. “You must miss him.”
Miss him? That would be a confession worth making. Now that it’s all over, I realize I never missed Pietor. I missed having a fiancé at my side when the press was pestering me about the wedding date or when Parliament was running him through the vetting process, but I never allowed the actual man he is to take up more space in my life than an appointment on my calendar.
I stride forward.
“When does he return?” Jacob asks, gaining my side.
I want to break into a run. I could probably lose him in the forest. “I’m not at liberty to say, but thank you for your interest.”
He chuckles, the low rumble of laughter shaking my insides.
“What?”
“You just told me to back the hell off. Is that what this training is going to be about? Learning more inventive ways to be antisocial? Sign me up.”
I will not laugh. “I did no such thing.”
“Far be it for me to contradict a lady,” he retorts, his tone dry.
My lips twitch. He is a man difficult to hold at arm’s length, and I contemplate the next three months with foreboding. It’s easy to imagine that he will storm past my boundaries if they’re too rigid. Perhaps flexibility is the wiser tactic.
I click my tongue and let him see an actual emotion. Exasperation. “I have to teach you how to hold a conversation because you’re not doing it correctly. You ignore the rules which govern polite society, ask more than you have any right to, and give out way too much.”
“I’m in your hands.” He holds his arms wide, wide enough for me to step into them. I’m shocked to realize that my feet want to carry me forward. Is this what the old pirate explorers felt when a new discovery rose into view? There are, I am finding, parts of myself that were hiding past the rim of the horizon all this time.
I retreat a fraction. “We have to get back,” I say, touching my cold nose with the back of my wrist. “You’ve given me your deepest Little Duckies secrets, but you’re scheduled to practice your accent with your aide.”
Jacob groans, his face pointed to the sky, the scruff of his beard beyond carefully groomed boundaries.
“Alma—I can call you Alma?”
I go hot and cold. “What if I don’t want you to call me Alma? What am I supposed to say? What if a hundred telephoto lenses and civilian cell phone cameras are picking it up?”
Jacob pivots and walks backward, hands stuffed into his jacket. If scripted royal protocol is my second nature, this easiness is his—the careless, powerful way his body takes up space and the way his eyes never leave my face. I don’t think he even knows he’s flirting.
“Don’t you like it when I call you Alma?”
I do.
Vede.
I do. He says my name like someone who hasn’t heard of the Duchy of Lowenwald or watched me swear allegiance to the Sondish constitution on national TV. He says it like someone who ran into me at the bookstore with a scone on a plate and a copy of The Contentments of Saint Olav under his arm. Like someone I made out with once.
I clutch my hands together. “Whether I like it is not the point. What if I really don’t?”
“It sounds like you do want me to call you Alma.”
I give a little ground to this aggravating man. “You may use my given name, when appropriate.”
“Thanks, Alma. And?”
“And what?”
“You’re going to call me Jacob, right?”
I tilt my head. “Do you notice the way I am not presuming anything?”
“You have to call me Jacob,” he says, missing my point so thoroughly that I want to get his eyes checked. “It’ll be weird if you don’t.”
“My mother is a cousin to half the crowned heads of Europe, and their pet name for her is Lenni. They share memories of summer vacations at the Hunting Lodge every August. Personal letters she receives begin, ‘ Meine liebste Lenni’ but the official ones coming from the same source don’t even use the word ‘you.’ It’s always, ‘In honor of Her Majesty’s 55th birthday…’ or ‘We were heartened to hear of Her Majesty’s visit to affected areas…’ It would be best if I didn’t use your name,” I say.
“Why?” he asks. He couldn’t possibly take my word for it.
“Even as unignorable as you are, there will be times when you have to disappear into your royal role. Formality will allow you to do that.”
“We’re alone, Alma.” He looks left toward the valley and right toward the forest, wreathed in low clouds. “We don’t need to disappear.”
I reach for a better explanation, finding it in the number of traditional handicraft workshops I’ve toured. “Look, you were a woodworker.”
“Am.” He frowns. “I am a woodworker.”
No, he’s not. Even if he doesn’t realize it yet, that life is over. I slip a glove from my hand. “The way you asked to use my name is like picking up splinters when you don’t have to.”
I gesture for his hand and he places it in mine, palm upturned between us. I run slow repeating motions over his skin, back toward his wrist. “ Call me Jacob. Pass the water. You don’t mind me doing this, right? Talking like this is like sanding across the grain.”
He gives a satisfying shudder.
“Now listen to this.” My hand reverses, running slow, easy passes in my direction. “ My name is Jacob. You’re welcome to use it when you feel comfortable. May I trouble you for a glass of water? ”
He’s finally understanding, but it comes with a price. My breathing is uneven, and every pass brings the sensation of fire up my arm. “Do you hear the difference?”
His fingers curl around my hand. “What I hear is that when I do it your way—”
“The royal way.”
“—I don’t get what I want.”
In his grip, I feel a ridge of calluses at the base of each finger and scrapes across the palm. I trace the scar curving over the knuckle of his thumb and turn our hands over to explore further.
The absence of sound—even of breathing—penetrates my consciousness. I tug my hand away and walk toward the safety of the palace. “Tomorrow, we have to begin moisturizing your skin.”
That evening, I elect to have dinner in my mother’s apartment, and she asks for my thoughts on this strange half-royal creature we’re incubating until the state visit. I tell her about his language proficiency. I hold the secret of my attraction for him, hiding in my careful palms. At the end of the night, I retreat to the gym.
Clara is on the stationary bike, texting on her phone, and Ella is on the floor with a manga spread out under her chin. I miss the sight of Freja doing some dumbbell lunges in the corner, ignoring us while she blasts Puccini through her earbuds.
“How bad was he?” Ella asks, turning a page and shifting into another yoga position.
“Nothing to report,” I say, beginning my warm-up.
“Why do all my sisters lie to my face?” Ella grunts, shaking her hair out of her face.
Clara rolls her eyes. “ Stultes es , get over yourself. Freja’s wedding wasn’t personal.”
Ella crashes to the ground, a sheen of sweat on her face. “We shared a womb. Of course it’s personal.”
“We can’t make the stroopwafel twice,” I cut in. What’s done is done.
I sacrifice myself for familial peace. “Would it interest you to know that the Crown Prince of Vorburg is a walking diplomatic disaster?” I turn the treadmill to my preferred settings and pick up my pace, visualizing my royal duties hailing me from the palace grounds, flat-footed and dithering, while I speed away.
Clara joins my peace project. “Ooh, do tell. What’s he like?”
“I thought he was nice,” Ella says. “Big and nice. He’ll do fine.”
I dig into my stride, springing off the balls of my feet, pacing myself. Ella’s words could describe a well-kept lawn, not a man who brings every nerve to attention when he walks into a room. “Nice isn’t going to help him become a crown prince,” I say. “He doesn’t care about titles. He doesn’t think I have anything to teach him. I’m not even sure he wants to be here.”
“You sound like one of the guys from Five Minutes to Marry . You know,” Clara’s voice drops into a gruff impression of a reality show bro, brows comically tented. “I just want to make sure she’s here for the right reasons.”
Ella laughs but my thoughts catch on the memory of Jacob kicking the snow into steps. Big and nice. There are other words I could use to describe the crown prince.
Obstinate.
Hot.
I close my eyes tight. The number of times I caught myself checking him out today… Too many. I steady myself on the bars of the treadmill, sweeping the mental image almost all the way out of my head. I can blame Pietor and our broken engagement for this. Nature abhors a vacuum.
I glare in the general direction of Lijuela, south, southwest. If I were still firmly engaged, I would be thinking of Jacob as an inconvenience with a jam stain on his shirt, figuring out ways to solve him, not thinking, “Take it off. Let me pop it in the laundry while you wait.”
My sisters glance at each other and I school my expression. “If he were a civilian I met on a walkabout, he wouldn’t make any kind of impression.” Every word is a lie.
“As things stand, the gulf between Jacob Gardner and The Future Monarch of the Entire Country of Vorburg is wide. I have to construct a big enough trebuchet to fling him across the gap,” I say.
Clara laughs, never failing to be amused by medieval siege engines, and Ella hops on the treadmill next to mine.
“It’ll be all right. He sounds like me.”
What is meant to be a bit of encouragement makes me uneasy. Ella’s commitment to being the perfect princess is nonexistent. She only gets away with it because with four other children to choose from, Mama can deploy her strategically. Vorburg has but one king and one prince.
Clara hops from the bike and joins us.
“I just have to break through his resistance,” I resolve.
“I was resistant, too, but I’m just as royal as you are,” Ella says. “I’m just not like the rest of you.”
“How’s that?” Clara asks.
“Insufferable.” Ella makes a face of disgust.
Clara is distracted by a text, and Ella’s eyes meet mine in the mirror. “Our ancestors split skulls to get on the throne. They weren’t philosopher-kings,” she reminds me. “There’s room for all kinds of royals in this world. Let Jacob be Jacob.”