16. Amber Tiara
16
Amber Tiara
ALMA
It’s the queen’s birthday. Not the official one in June when half the country waves flags, dances in the streets, and finds a military man to make out with. Mama’s real birthday is at the end of January when the ice on the roads has frozen into hard sheets and only the people who love her best risk the trip to the Summer Palace to take part in the celebration.
Pietor is not one of her loved ones, but nevertheless, he stands in the corner, scrolling through his phone. Photographers are shivering at the gates of the palace, snapping pictures of grand jewels and couture gowns as the guests drive through, hoping to turn such meager crumbs into a story. For the sake of national peace, one of those stories has to be “Pietor and Alma, Together Again”.
Ella and Clara accept this, but they haven’t let him near me all night.
I stand with Tante Ann-Margrethe, taking a flute of champagne for her when Mama’s housekeeper Una passes them around. Clara performs the same service for her godmother, Lady Grete, who looks around in vacant delight before downing the glass in one swallow.
Freja’s absence is like a sinkhole we’re trying to tiptoe around.
Pictures appear in the press—heartbreakingly ordinary pictures of Freja and her husband in an Italian market choosing oranges, of them walking hand in hand with a bunch of flowers. In every photo, she wears vintage Chanel sunglasses and wide palazzo pants. Though she doesn’t perform for strangers or paparazzi, her happiness is tangible. The pair keep reaching for each other, brushing fingertips, shoulders, waists.
She is with us in spirit, she writes, the card propped among the floral tributes on the sideboard. That doesn’t feel true. My sister, no longer revolving around Mama’s sun, has performed a one-woman celestial revolt.
Could I have done the same in her place? When I planned to marry Pietor, it never entered my mind to truly leave Mama. Consider the concerns of Himmelstein? Yes. Learn a new language? Yes. Prioritize anything over my family and the crown? Never.
Caroline rings a small bell, nodding at the footmen to dim the lights, and a video montage is then projected onto a wall, filling the room with pictures and film clips of Mama’s childhood—riding ponies next to her father, being chased around the garden by her mother. The young princess trying—failing—to smash a champagne bottle against a ship, the bank of dignitaries stunned into inaction. The laughter in the room is tinged with nostalgia.
During a brief clip of Mama walking down the aisle on the arm of her Pavian groom, the room falls into silence. Her steps are resolute, and her face is like war as she forces herself to fulfill the terms of the marriage contract signed by two kings—one dead, the other deposed. The sounds of the protests shook the walls of Roslav Cathedral while she made her vows, they say.
The new queen did her duty, though she had no love for her future husband. The young prince had fled his war-torn country with nothing but his title. When I was a girl, I could listen to that story for hours because I knew how it turned out. Happily ever after.
I watch the shadows moving over my mother’s face as she watches the montage. What emerged from Mama’s loyalty to the crown and steadfast defense of the nation was good, the story went. It’s a lesson I hoped to repeat with Pietor but the problem is that it’s all gone to hell. Their marriage has been wrecked by the same duty to the crown that started it off.
When the montage concludes, the lights come on. Père, standing on the opposite end of the room from Mama, raises his glass. “Helena. May your harvest be a good one,” he says, toasting her a happy birthday in the Sondish way.
I catch Clara’s uncompromising expression over the rim of my champagne flute. She gives her head a micro shake. I can all but hear her make a solemn vow. No arranged marriage for me. Never.
Tante Ann-Margrethe tugs on my skirts. “What is it?” I ask, slipping into a chair. My great-aunt smells of cigarette smoke beneath the Dior perfume.
“Are they still being stupid?” she asks, twitching her finger between my parents. “No, don’t bother answering that. I can see they are.”
“Not stupid,” I say, in a rare mood to talk to someone who’s seen seven decades of scandal wash under the bridge. “They’re hurt. Père is still angry that he wasn’t allowed to attend his father’s funeral. He refuses to see that her hands were tied.”
Tante Ann-Margrethe snorts. “Still your mother’s daughter. Don’t cast her in the role of a helpless damsel, elskede . It doesn’t suit. She’s never been a woman who lacked resources to do what she really wanted to do. Your father knows that, and you’d do well to remember it, too.” She touches my face to soften the sting. “Your mother made a blunder. She ought to own up to it.”
I bristle at the uncompromising judgement. “A number of factors led to—”
Tante Ann-Margrethe cuts me off, adjusting her fur stole. “You can’t turn the people you love into pawns. You can’t run roughshod over their happiness or their suffering. Not if it’s really love.”
She makes it sound simple. My great-aunt shakes off the sentimental mood, taps me on the knee, and asks, her voice raspy, “When is your wedding? Don’t even think of giving me nonsense you couldn’t even peddle to the press.”
I flick a glance at Pietor, in deep conversation to Uncle Georg, and give her a serene smile. “I wouldn’t think of giving you nonsense.”
My silence stretches.
“ Tsch .” The sound is scornful, and the meaning is clear. My generation is hopeless.
Ella leads a cohort of rowdy younger guests off to the billiard room, and I spend the evening circulating, seeing to the comfort of the older ones. In a lull, I approach my mother, wishing her a happy birthday. The paper crown on her head manages to look regal, and she gives me a kiss on the cheek.
“You’re doing well,” she says. Her praise fails to warm me.
At the stroke of eleven, I walk Pietor to the Great Hall. Music emanates from the family wing as we wait for his car to be brought around, and I gaze at our reflection in the tall mirrors. From a distance, we look like a pair of lovers saying a long goodbye.
“I have an interview with The Sun Rises on Himmelstein next week, and I’d like you to be there,” he tells me. “We can pre- record the segment in my hotel suite. I’ll have my secretary be in touch.”
I nod. This is just business.
“Your uncle told me about that man I saw in your suite.” My nerves shiver to attention as Pietor brushes his lapel. “They’ll let anybody be a crown prince, these days.”
“They let you.” I pivot sharply, gathering my skirts, and make for my suite.
Before I even make it to the sitting room, I hear Jacob’s English carried through the door, unregulated by any sense that he might be overheard.
“I am,” he says, speaking over the phone. “It’s fine. No, it’s not like the Royal Academy. For one thing, no one is trying to stuff my head into the toilet. No, I’m kidding.”
I slip off my slingbacks and creep forward, taking a path to my door that would appear random to a cat burglar or anyone who hadn’t walked these creaking floorboards every day for eight years.
“I’m not lying. Mom. Mom. Honestly.” I open my door, my heart thrumming softly in my throat. Jacob oiled these hinges last week, and I don’t have to worry he’ll hear me.
“I’m not sure you’ll recognize me when I come back,” he goes on. “I’m not sure I’ll recognize me. I’ve learned that every natural instinct I have is wrong, but I’ve also learned three ways to tie a tie. Yeah. Mid-March. His Royal Zekle— What? I’m a grown— Oma wouldn’t even know what it means,” he protests. But he murmurs an apology. “His Majesty the King wants me back for a couple of weeks before we do the state visit.”
“No, the food is fine. They don’t like herring.” I think I hear a grin in his voice. “Well, nothing tastes like your food.” He laughs. “No, no, no. Don’t send them. Mom. Honestly. I’m hanging up now. It’s late. Yeah. Love you. Mom. Mom. Mom. I have to go.”
When I thought about the kind of woman who could single-handedly turn her child into the next king of Vorburg, I pictured someone with a cell phone surgically attached to her hand and a team of aestheticians working on fine lines and wrinkles. The more I’ve come to know Jacob—his work ethic, his sturdy sense of right and wrong—the more I assumed he was embarrassed of her. I thought that’s what he was trying to hide when he ripped the pages from the dossier.
I was wrong. The affection between them is palpable, even through a heavy door and a phone line.
I hear his floorboards shift and I dart through my door, catching the corner of an occasional table with my dress. A lamp totters and my desperate attempt to right it sends us both banging to the floor in a loud crash.
“Alma.” I hear his muffled shout.
Vede .
“It was a ghost,” I call, Wolffe family shorthand for, “It’s nothing. Don’t come.”
But Jacob doesn’t know about Celine of Anjou, whose husband caught her in flagrante delicto with a Danish philosopher. She’s a restless spirit and we blame things on her all the time.
Jacob bursts through the door, breathing hard, and takes in the lamp and lack of blood. He sags against the doorframe, pushing a hand through his hair.
“Alma.”
An inevitable concert t-shirt skims his stomach like the wing of a bird over a peaceful lake, and I flop back, sinking in acres of tulle, clamping my eyes shut. Jacob, filling out American denim in the way he does, is too much for my delicate constitution.
He rights the table and the lamp, setting the squashed lampshade over the bulb like a hat. Then he reaches for my hands and hauls me to my feet. “Are you okay?” he asks, turning me around by the shoulders to perform an inspection. He leaves fire everywhere he touches and I shrug out of his grasp before my ball gown goes up in flames.
“It’s nothing.” I take a step back into a chair and sit down with a thump.
“I didn’t realize you were in here,” he says. “I wouldn’t have been so loud.”
“No bother,” I answer, reaching for the clasp of my necklace, fumbling for the catch.
“Nice party?”
I feel like a bubble of glass emerging from a hot furnace—malleable around him in a way a princess should never be. I can’t tell him the truth, so I coat something bland in frosting and hope he doesn’t know the difference.
“It’s an ordinary birthday party. Paper buntings and a cake.”
For such a big man, his smiles are soft. “Candles and ice cream, too?” he asks, standing behind me. He pushes my hands aside and finds the clasp of the necklace, fingers brushing sensitive skin. When it’s undone, he lets go, and it slides into my palm.
“It’s January.”
He shakes his head. “There’s never a wrong time for ice cream,” he says, settling onto the bench at the end of my bed.
I should shoo him out of here on the principle that Vorburg should not have such easy access to Sondmark, but part of me wants to crawl onto my bed, bare feet tucked up under my skirts, and talk about my day with someone who actually wants to know about it.
A memory surfaces from last spring. I had pulled up to a crosswalk while a primary school was having an animal parade, and I watched five-year-olds march past with homemade masks and tails tucked into the back waistbands of their trousers, singing a song about piglets as their teachers herded them out of traffic. I laughed the whole day, but when Pietor had asked me what I’d done, I dropped a few names of government ministers I’d met with. Even then I was editing myself for him, holding back the best part.
I don’t have to protect anything from Jacob. I swallow thickly and stare at my reflection, wondering where this certainty came from.
He knocks my knee with the back of his hand. “What else? Was your fiancé there?”
I want to tell him about Clara’s hard, determined expression and the way Caroline, failing to read the room, chose too many photos of Mama and Père looking at one another like people who had produced five children, open to the imminent possibility of producing a sixth.
“I’m getting ready for bed,” I say.
He lifts his hand. Be my guest.
“Okay,” I surrender. “Let me change first.”
I sweep off to my changing room, immediately filled with regret for not asking him to get my zipper started. But that would have been foolish in the same way that walking a tightrope over a venomous snake pit is foolish, I think, wrestling it open.
When I return, I’m wearing one of my full-length satin nightgowns, the blue robe billowing behind me as I walk.
His lounging posture jerks to attention. “What’s this?”
“This is what I sleep in.” I lift a challenging brow. “This is my room. If you’re not leaving, I’m not digging up some sweats just to make you feel comfortable.”
“I’m not mad.” He raises his palms but looks away. “Tell me about the party.”
I reach for the make-up remover. “We toasted the queen with champagne.”
“Drinking again?” he tuts.
I fire a cotton swab at his head, and he bats it away with a grin.
“You were talking to your mother, weren’t you?” I go on offense.
“She couldn’t sleep,” he says, satisfying the spirit of interest haunting the room.
I appear to be engrossed by the process of removing my eyeliner. He picks up a pile of knitting, puts his hand into a hat, and turns it this way and that, seeing the flaws.
“She lives in Vorburg—a small flat off Liberation Square.”
“That sounds nice.”
“It is nice. It’s just large enough to host her book club.” His smile shifts.
“An English book club?”
He nods. “Mom can manage most of the Vorburgian vocabulary, but tenses and syntax are a mystery. You should see her try to buy lemons. She’s a menace.” I laugh and hear a low, answering chuckle.
I catch his eye in the reflection. “She sounds nice.”
His expression sobers. “She is nice.”
I turn my head when the windowpanes shake in the wind. Jacob reaches forward, a light touch at the lobe of my ear and along my neck, and a shiver brushes against my skin that might be me or him.
“You’re missing an earring,” he says, lightly guiding my head to tilt the other way. The chandelier of stones brushes my cheek. “I’ll find it.”
He crouches, running his hand along the patterned rug until he discovers the back and then the long earring, resting under a table skirt. From a kneel, he holds them to me in his palm, the lamplight flashing along each facet. This is nothing like the last time a man presented me with jewelry from this position. Even in my memory it feels like something that happened to a stranger.
“Do you like this kind of thing?” he asks. “Or do you wear it because you’re expected to?”
He lays the earring on my palm, and I place it in the case. “I like that it has centuries of meaning, and feeling connected to the people who wore it.”
I begin to work a solution into my skin, turning pink and shiny. “Vorburg has some of the best jewels in Europe.”
“Do we?” He reaches for my cozy mystery and smiles, cupping a hand behind his head. The hem of his t-shirt lifts a few centimeters, and I perch tingling fingertips on a tube of hyaluronic acid, not even giving my inner voice the satisfaction of reading me a lecture about decorum and hot, foreign future heads of state. I’m starting to go deaf to her.
I clear my throat. “Vorburg’s Viking raiders never saw a monastery they didn’t plunder. And of course, you’ve got all that amber.”
He finds my bookmark and starts reading. “Miss Pendragon inspected the doilies scattered around the tearoom to discover patterns of skulls and daggers dripping with poison in each one. Macabre, certainly, but the handiwork was extraordinary…”
I should stop him. Maybe give him a copy of Timeless Manners for the Modern Royal to round out his education. But his reading voice is perfect, and I slide into bed, pick up my much-abused knitting, and stab out a few rows while he unfolds the mystery. A storm batters the stone walls of the palace, but I am perfectly content.
He turns a page, his voice soft and drowsy. “My wife will wear an amber tiara?” He places a finger to mark his spot and closes his eyes.
I let myself look at him, watching the gentle rise and fall of his chest.
My own tiara is intimidating and regal, but the amber tiara is romantic—five wreaths of diamonds in a looping wildflower pattern. Within each loop hangs a golden drop of amber, salvaged from the original crown given to the bride who traveled from Sondmark all those centuries ago.
I nod, though he can’t see it. “Diamonds and amber.” A vision of Jacob putting it into the care of his future wife hits me like a wave. “Take care not to fall in love with a blonde,” I say. A cloud slides over the moon, deepening the shadows in the room.
I yawn and yawn again. His reading continues, and the knitting slips from my hands. He takes it from me and arranges a blanket up to my chin.
“I won’t,” he murmurs, brushing dark hair from my face.