CHAPTER 6
LUCIA
The morning of the Founders Ceremony, Antonio wakes me with coffee and a promise.
The coffee is how I take it. The promise is the thing that breaks me, later, when I replay this morning, which I do more times than any doctor would recommend.
But on the morning itself, in the pale early light with the sea going silver below the cliffs, it’s just my husband sitting on the edge of the chaise I still can’t stop sleeping on, holding out a cup.
“You don’t have to do today,” he says. “No one in this family expects it. If you stay in this room all day, I will stand on that balcony and be proud of you for staying in this room.”
“I’m doing it.”
“I know.” He almost smiles. “I’ve known since Tuesday. You had Beatriz steam the blue dress.”
Of course I had the blue dress steamed. Today is the Founders Ceremony, the two hundred and fortieth anniversary of the charter, the biggest day of the Bellacosta year, and it is also, though no one says this part on the program, my return.
My first real appearance since Sofia. The country will be watching to see if the princess is back, and I have decided the princess is back.
But Antonio is looking at me the way he used to, before all of it, and he takes my hand, and he says it.
“You stand beside me today. Whatever happens down there, whatever they whisper, whatever the cameras do. You stand beside me.”
“Say it again.”
“You stand beside me today.”
That is what a promise from this family is worth. Everything, right up until noon.
The morning goes how ceremony mornings go.
Beatriz does my hair with her fierce gentle hands and tells me that I look like myself again, which is the nicest lie in her repertoire.
The blue dress fits, more or less; grief has taken weight off me and the seamstress has chased it.
I stand at the mirror and I practice the face.
Not a smile, exactly. The face that says: I am still here.
Sofia would have been three weeks old.
I do the math every day, but today I let myself say it out loud to the mirror, because if I don’t say it in private it will ambush me in public.
Three weeks old.
There would have been no balcony for me today. I’d have been upstairs with her, in the yellow room, listening to the cannon fire from the harbor and telling her what it meant, that her family had signed a charter on a rock by the sea and built a country out of it.
Instead I am going down there to prove I can stand in the daylight.
What the mirror doesn’t see is what getting ready takes out of me.
I have a system now, a whole private engineering project that produces a functioning princess.
Breathing, four counts in, six out, the grief counselor’s numbers.
The list on the inside of my closet door: eat, dress, stand, smile, home.
Five items. I used to run development programs across four time zones and now I have a list with five items, and some mornings item one is a negotiation.
Today I do all five. I put a little stone from the hospital garden in my dress pocket, the one thing I kept, the thing nobody catalogued. It’s smooth and gray and it fits my fist exactly, and my plan, if the square gets too loud, is to hold it and count its edges instead of the cameras.
“Ready,” I tell the mirror, and the mirror, bless it, agrees.
The palace at noon is controlled chaos. Ushers, flowers, the army of lanyards that descends on any state occasion. Marguerite sweeps past me in the corridor in silver-gray and pauses to deliver her verdict.
“You look rested,” she says, which from Marguerite is practically a hug. Her eyes do a full inventory of me, the dress, the hair, the hands, and something in them settles, like a clerk stamping a form. I take it as the warning it is, though I don’t yet know what it’s warning me about.
Emeric is with her, and he gives me a small nod, and at the time I file it under courtesy.
I spend a lot of time later filing it under conspiracy.
The truth, I eventually learn, is somewhere in between: the nodders are never the architects, but they always know which way the building is coming down.
Alessandra I see only in glimpses, being escorted somewhere by an equerry, in deep green. I think nothing of it. Guests wear green. I need you to understand how thoroughly I think nothing of it, because later I will think of nothing else.
At twelve-forty an attendant appears at my elbow. Not Beatriz. A young woman I vaguely know from the events office, with the tight smile of someone carrying an order she didn’t write.
“Your Highness. There’s been a change to the program. If you’d come with me.”
“A change?”
“If you’d come with me.”
She leads me to one of the small dressing rooms off the ceremonial corridor, and there, on a stand, under a garment bag, is another dress. Champagne-colored. Beautiful. Wrong.
“There must be a mistake,” I say. “I dress for the balcony in twenty minutes.”
The attendant looks at her shoes. “The program’s been adjusted, Your Highness. You won’t be appearing on the balcony today. You’re to watch from the hall of honor. This is the dress selected for the hall.”
The room does a slow tilt. I hold onto the back of a chair and I keep my voice level, because level is all I have left.
“Whose instruction is this?”
“I don’t… I was told the family council finalized the program last night.”
“Then there’s been a mistake,” I say again, and even I can hear it, the note of a woman saying the words because the words are supposed to have power. “My husband told me this morning that I stand beside him today.”
She has no answer for that. She’s twenty-three and underpaid and she has no answer.
And then, through the walls, through the thick palace stone and the ceremonial hum, I hear it.
The herald’s amplified voice from the square, the program beginning, the formal welcome, and then the announcement, in the beautiful rounded vowels of the palace press office, beamed to the square and the screens and the country:
“…and on this Founders Day, the family asks the nation’s understanding as Princess Lucia Villari has voluntarily chosen to step away from royal duties, to devote this period to her health and recovery…”
Voluntarily.
I am holding the back of a chair in a dressing room with the wrong dress on a stand, and somewhere above me a voice is telling my country that I chose this.
That I chose the small rooms and the reassigned events and the vanishing.
That the woman who launched a clinic in the mountains weeks ago and answered every hard question they threw at her has decided, voluntarily, to step away.
I don’t remember deciding to move, but I do remember moving.
The ceremonial corridor is long and hung with banners and I walk it fast. The ushers who see me coming look stricken and step aside, because nobody told them what to do about this, because nobody was supposed to see me at all.
At the end of the corridor is the antechamber behind the balcony, and through its tall open doors I can see the light, that flat Mediterranean noon light, and in it, framed in it, my husband in his dress uniform.
Beside him, Alessandra. In deep green. Wearing, at her shoulder, two hundred years of Bellacosta sapphire.
The brooch. The one that was returned to the vault, the one she was never going to wear again.
Someone released it a second time, and I know exactly how few people have that authority. None of them is me.
And between them, in the position the cameras have been told to find, the position that has been left empty at this ceremony exactly twice in a century and both times for war, stands a nine-year-old boy in a new suit, doing his very best to be good.
The tableau lasts a second.
The country will see it for years.
Antonio turns. I don’t know what makes him turn; the herald is still talking, the square is still applauding, and his eyes come off the crowd and find the shadowed corridor and find me in it, in my blue dress.
He sees me.
I will spend a long time, later, taking that second apart.
Because there is a version of this story where he doesn’t know, where it’s all his mother’s machinery and my husband is another victim of it, and I clung to that version for weeks afterward, in the dark, because the alternative was unbearable.
But I was there. I was twenty feet away.
I watched his face do the reckoning, watched him understand everything, the dress, the announcement, the boy, the sapphire, me.
He understands. I know he understands. His face goes gray with it.
He does not move.
He stands in the light beside another woman and another woman’s son, and he looks at his wife in the shadows, and his hands stay at his sides, and the applause rolls over the square, and he does not move.
I move. I take one step toward the balcony doors, toward the light, toward my own place, and two men materialize out of the antechamber’s side door.
Palace security, senior officers, men I know.
Men who have driven my car and carried my coat and wished me happy birthday.
One of them, Tomas, has a daughter in my scholarship program.
“Your Highness.” The older one, Brig, speaks very quietly, very gently, and positions his body between me and the doors. Not grabbing. Never grabbing. Just present, immovable, a wall that used to be a person I knew. “I’m going to ask you to come with us.”
“Get out of my way, Brig.”
“I can’t do that, Your Highness.”
Behind him, in the light, my husband is still watching.
He’s seen the guards step in. He can see everything: the wall where my path should be, my face, my dress, my hands.
One word from him ends this. One word. He is the Prince of Bellacosta and the commander of every person in this building and one word from him opens the corridor.
The word does not come.
“Antonio,” I call out, and my voice carries into the light, and the herald stumbles over a sentence, and half the antechamber staff turn to stone around us.
My husband looks at me across the divide and an unbridgeable distance, and I watch him choose. I actually watch it happen. The jaw sets. The prince arrives.
He turns back to the square.
“Take me to him,” I tell Brig, and my voice is doing something I don’t recognize. “Take me to him right now or get out of my way.”
“I’m sorry, Your Highness,” Brig says, and means it, and it makes no difference at all. “We have our orders. If you’d please come with us.”
The applause swells again out in the square, for the charter, for the founding, for the future of the Villari line, and behind the banners, in the shadow of the ceremonial corridor, the princess of Bellacosta is escorted away from her own balcony by men whose salaries she has paid, while her country watches her replacement take a bow.
I go with them. Not because I consent, but because the alternative is being carried, and the one thing I still own, the last thing, is how I leave the room.
I walk. Head up. Blue dress.
Behind me, out in the light, my country applauds its new future.