CHAPTER 3
LUCIA
On Monday I decide to go back to work, and by Tuesday the palace has decided I shouldn’t.
It starts small. Rot always does. A call from the foundation’s office to confirm Thursday’s mobile-clinic launch in the mountain villages, my launch, my program, the one I have personally planned for months.
Except the launch is no longer mine. It’s been “reassigned to Duchess Alessandra, who has kindly agreed to attend in Your Highness’s place, given the circumstances. ”
Given the circumstances.
Three words doing the work of a firing squad.
I call the palace events office. A young man with a frightened voice explains that the princess’s schedule is being “consolidated for her comfort.” I ask who ordered the consolidation.
The frightened voice becomes more frightened.
Somewhere above him there is a directive, and directives in this palace have one of two names on them, and one of those names shares my bed.
Before that, I try the official route, because I am still, despite everything, a woman who believes in official routes.
The official route is a man named Count Severin, Antonio’s chief private secretary, a pleasant gray cardigan of a man who has survived three Villari generations by never being the bearer of his own opinion.
I meet him in the small audience room, and he brings a folder, and the folder has my name on it, and inside the folder is my life, but reorganized.
“Three appearances next month,” he says, turning pages with apologetic fingers. “All reassigned. The hospital auxiliary luncheon, the harbor reopening, the scholarship reception. Her Grace has graciously offered to cover them.”
“Graciously.”
“It’s a great help, Your Highness. Everyone says so. The thinking is that you should have space.” He smiles, and it is a genuine smile, and that is the worst kind. “The family is very concerned. They only want you well.”
“Count Severin. Did anyone ask whether I want the space?”
The smile falters. He looks down at the folder as if the answer might be in there, and of course it isn’t. I’m not in there either. There’s a schedule in there, and a version of me who is resting, and neither of us has been consulted.
“Tell the family,” I say, standing, “that I appreciate their concern. And tell them I’ll be at Serro Alto on Thursday.”
He writes it down. Men like Severin write everything down; it’s how they survive. I wonder which meeting that sentence gets read aloud in, and who nods, and who makes the next quiet call.
So I go to the launch anyway.
This is important, so I’ll say it plainly: I don’t go to make a scene.
I go because the women in those villages don’t have a spokesperson or a communications strategy.
They have a van with an ultrasound machine in it, and it only exists because I spent years fighting men in suits for the funding, and I will be damned to every circle of hell before I let it roll out without me so a duchess can cut my ribbon.
The village is called Serro Alto, population several hundred on a good day, and the whole of it has turned out.
There’s a banner. There’s a priest who insists on blessing the ultrasound machine.
There’s a woman named Pia who grabs both my hands and tells me the van came to her sister last month, that the sister is fine, that the baby is fine, and I smile and congratulate her, even though it hurts.
You learn to do that. You learn that other people’s babies are not attacks. You learn it roughly ten times a day.
Inside the van it’s worse, and better. It’s all mine, this thing: the layout, the equipment, the little drawer of knitted caps that a women’s cooperative in the north sends down by the boxful.
Our nurse, a tough Sardinian woman named Carla who has delivered babies in five countries and respects no one, walks me through the patient list. Eighteen appointments today. Two high-risk referrals we’re driving to the regional hospital ourselves.
“We missed you,” she says, not looking up from the chart, because Carla doesn’t do sentiment, she does facts. “The duchess they sent to the planning meeting last week asked if the van could be painted to match the palace livery.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her it’s a clinic, not a handbag.”
I laugh. It comes out of me unexpected and too loud, and Carla finally looks up. Her face softens a quarter of an inch, which from Carla is an embrace.
And then, in the second exam bay, there is a newborn.
Three days old, in for a first check, furious about everything, a scrap of a person with a cry far bigger than her body.
Her mother is seventeen and exhausted and glowing, and she asks if I want to hold the baby, because nobody told her, because the village doesn’t watch the news.
I say yes.
I don’t know I should have said no until she’s in my arms, warm and squirming and real, and the small box inside me with the closed lid rattles hard.
Sofia would have been due in six weeks. I know the math. I do the math every day, whether I want to or not; grief is a calendar that never stops counting.
The baby settles. They do that, sometimes, against a heartbeat.
The young mother watches us with tired, happy eyes, and I will not cry in front of a seventeen-year-old who thinks today is a good day.
It is a good day. I hand her daughter back and I tell her the truth, that she’s doing wonderfully, that the van will come every month, that she can call the number on the card any hour.
Then I step out of the van, and I breathe mountain air until the box is quiet again, and I go back in, because that’s the job. Because that’s who I am. Whatever the palace folder says.
The press is there too, because the palace sent them, because a duchess at a clinic was supposed to be a nice safe story and now there’s a princess instead and that’s a better one. I do the walkthrough. I shake hands. I hold it all together with both hands and a spine I didn’t know I still had.
And then a journalist from the Gazette, a young woman with a sympathetic face and absolutely no mercy, steps forward with her recorder.
“Your Highness. There are reports you’ve been receiving treatment since your loss. Is your health the reason you’ve stepped back from royal duties? Can you still carry out the role?”
The square goes quiet. Pia’s face hardens on my behalf, which is kind of her and unnecessary, because I have gone somewhere cold and precise instead.
“I wasn’t aware my medical treatment was public knowledge,” I say. “Could you tell me who reported it to you?”
She doesn’t answer.
She doesn’t have to.
“I’ll answer the second question,” I say, and my voice is steady, and I hold it steady all the way through.
“I lost my daughter. I am grieving her. I am also standing in a village I care about, launching a service I built, doing the job I’ve done for nine years.
Grief and competence are not enemies. If anyone has told you otherwise, I’d ask what they gain by you believing it. ”
It plays well. It plays everywhere, actually.
Then Antonio comes home, and I find out what my small victory cost.
“The question wasn’t fishing,” he says. He’s pacing our sitting room with his phone in his fist, and his face is a shade of angry I haven’t seen since the hospital, since the night he told three senior doctors what would happen to their careers if they ever again used the phrase “these things happen.”
“She had specifics. Dosage specifics, Lucia. Your treatment was discussed in a council briefing.”
“By whom?”
“That’s what I’m going to find out.” He stops pacing.
“Someone in that room carried your private medical information out of it and fed it to the press. To make you look fragile. To make the country doubt you.” He says it like he can’t quite believe he’s assembled the sentence, and I watch understanding move through him in real time, and I wait for it to arrive at the obvious station.
It doesn’t. It gets off one stop early.
“I’ll handle it,” he says. “There will be an internal inquiry. Quiet. If we make it loud, we confirm the story matters.”
“Quiet?” I repeat. “Someone read my medical file aloud to a room of politicians and you’re going to handle it quietly?”
“Loudly is what they want. A scandal proves instability. Quietly, I find the leak, I end the leak, and no one outside this family ever knows how close it came.”
“Antonio. They already know. The question was asked in a public square, in front of cameras, about my dosage.”
His jaw works. And here is the thing I have been learning, the thing I keep refusing to learn: my husband is brilliant at protecting me from consequences and useless at protecting me from decisions.
He will hunt the leak to the ends of the earth.
He will not ask why the leak found such a welcoming room.
“Give me a week,” he says. “I’ll have a name.”
“And then what?”
“And then it’s over.”
Over. As if anything in this palace ends.
*
The port ceremony is on the first truly cold day of the season.
The reopening of the east harbor was my event, scheduled around my foundation’s coastal programs, announced with my name, planned with my staff. Three weeks ago it was “consolidated.” For my comfort.
I watch it on television, in the small sitting room, alone, because the staff have all developed appointments elsewhere. Everyone in the palace knows what I’m about to see and nobody wants to be in the room for it.
The harbor looks beautiful. The banners are the ones I approved. The harbor master says the words we drafted together, and then he welcomes “His Highness Prince Antonio, accompanied by Her Grace the Duchess of Rinaldi and young Signor Luca,” and the camera finds them.
It’s the photograph again, except this one moves.
Antonio in his dress uniform. Alessandra in dark green, standing where a wife stands, angled toward him with practiced ease.
And Luca between them, holding a small flag, gap-toothed and thrilled, waving at the cameras while forty years of broadcast tradition frames the three of them in one shot and the commentator says, without a flicker of irony, “a glimpse, perhaps, of Bellacosta’s future. ”
The future.
Standing on my dock.
Cutting my ribbon.
I turn the television off. I do something I haven’t done since the hospital, something I’ve been rationing, because once you start you can’t stop.
I go upstairs, and I stand in front of the yellow door, and I put my hand on the handle.
I don’t open it.
Not yet.
But for the first time, my hand isn’t shaking.
“They’re not waiting for me to get better,” I say to her, to Sofia, to the room behind the door. “They’re waiting for me to disappear. And the worst part, the very worst part, my love, is that your father keeps calling it temporary.”
Downstairs, a door slams. Antonio’s voice, calling my name, home early, full of his quiet inquiries and his week of promises.
I take my hand off the handle and go down to meet him, and I already know what he’s going to say before he says it. I could write it for him. It was management. It was one ceremony. Give me time.
Temporary.
Everything here is temporary except the woman they’ve moved into my place.