Chapter Six 3 January 2023 #3
I gave him an insincere smile. Demelza and Birdie had arrived at the wedding in dresses so ridiculous they instantly became internet memes. Demelza’s dress had been composed entirely of hyperrealistic silk butterflies. Meanwhile, Twitter had branded Birdie’s frilly ombré pink frock “labia chic.”
“Oh, I can’t wait to see them either,” I said.
I left him to his plate of pastries. Striding down the hall with my heart thudding, I understood why Mum and Papa had left every engagement that involved Richard with their jaws set and their knuckles white.
It took me a moment to realise that Mary was trailing behind me, her leather binder pressed to her chest.
“Were you waiting for me, Mary?” I asked.
She broke into a trot until she reached my side. “Yes, ma’am. I just wanted to see if I could be of any assistance.”
I realised I was deploying my hospital rounds stride. But it felt too good to stop. Maids, looking slightly alarmed, ceased their dusting and polishing and bobbed their heads as we stalked past. The palace’s old floors buckled and sagged under our feet.
“The Dowager Duchess of Somerset and I need to move to her apartment at Cumberland Palace, probably tonight,” I said.
“Yes, ma’am, I was informed early this morning. Your things are being moved as we speak.”
Abruptly, I stopped, the anger sliding out of me and something heavier taking its place.
Richard had never been going to give me the option to stay.
His staff must have been making calls, arranging for me to be kicked out while I was still asleep in my childhood bed.
I had the impulse to call Louis, who always knew how to handle the family.
Then I remembered I would never speak to Louis again.
With Mum, the cruelty of this one-two punch of absence still wounded me.
It had been twelve years, and every time I heard a juicy piece of gossip or helped set a particularly grisly fracture, my first inclination was to tell her about it.
It occurred to me then that they were all gone. Father, mother, brother. We had once stood together in our snowsuits and goggles and posed as the ideal family. But they lived short lives. The last things they felt were fear and pain. And now I was all alone.
I went to the nearest window, but all I could see were trees.
“Are you alright, ma’am?” Mary asked.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I said. She was silent and I turned from the window to look at her. “Before… you said you were looking forward to working for me. I’m sorry, but I’m not planning to stay. I’ve got a life to get back to in Australia, so I’m only here for a few weeks at most.”
She looked crestfallen. “I see.”
“I’m sorry. But I’m telling you this because I like you and hopefully this gives you time to find another job. I’m not sure what they’ll do with the Wolseley staff.”
She nodded and pushed her glasses up her nose.
“I understand,” she said. “I’d be happy to assist you as long as you’re here, though. You’ll need help with the funeral preparations. You haven’t been here for such a long time—it might be useful having someone who knows the ropes.”
I smiled. Palace aides I’d known my entire life had stopped speaking to me the moment I moved to Australia. When I was still returning home every Christmas, they would turn on their heels and flee if they saw me walking down the halls.
“Mary, this is a complicated place, and I know I’m not exactly… popular here. If you want to stay working at the palace, your chances are better if you’re not seen hanging around me.”
A row of stern-faced servants passed us, curtsying as they went. We were silent until they were safely down the hall. Mary looked up to meet my eyes. That smile of hers was back.
“I’m not very popular here either. Everyone thinks I have funny ideas. So perhaps it’s fitting that we go out together.”
In Louis’s room, I found Amira smoking by an open window.
“Have you heard the news?” I asked, flopping on the bed. “We’ve both been evicted. Can I crash at your place at Cumberland? Or do you think you’ll go stay with your parents?”
She said nothing but sighed smoke into the frosty London air. She had unpinned the bun from her head and her hair cascaded around her shoulders.
“I wouldn’t worry. It doesn’t mean anything,” I added. “It’s just Richard being a twat as usual.”
She took another drag of her cigarette. We used to smoke in our suite at Astley, sitting side by side in the alcove where we wouldn’t be spotted from the grounds below.
I don’t know if we took much pleasure in the act itself, but it was forbidden and therefore appealing.
A photo of me with a fag between my teenaged lips would have been worth ￡10,000 at least, which had only added to the allure.
“I was meant to have my egg retrieval next week,” she said quietly.
I lay on the bed propped on my elbows and stared at her.
As the plane was cruising somewhere over Turkmenistan, I’d had a vivid fantasy that as soon as I arrived in London, Amira would tell me she and Louis had a few embryos on ice.
We would have to act fast: the procedure would need to happen in a matter of days.
But a nice big donation from Vikki’s chequebook in exchange for the surgeon’s silence would seal the deal. Vikki would do it—I was certain of it.
An ancestor of mine was nicknamed The Old Pretender because his rivals were utterly convinced the true heir to the throne had been stillborn, and a living infant procured and smuggled into the Queen’s chambers inside a bed warmer.
Was thawing out a speck of Villiers tissue and inserting it into the line of succession worse than what The Old Pretender’s parents did?
They would have done the same if the science were available to them.
The line was a thousand years old, and it had rarely been straight and true.
I joined Amira by the window. We could see the red asphalt courtyard below. The cigarette switched hands between us.
“I’m sorry,” I said and inhaled. “I didn’t know you were trying.”
“I haven’t drunk alcohol or coffee or smoked for three months in preparation for this week. Instead I’m going to his funeral.”
We stayed by the window for a long time. I hadn’t smoked since secondary school and my head was swimming. I handed her the cigarette.
“Would you like to go get drunk at your apartment?”
Cumberland is a royal residence at the opposite end of Hyde Park from the sovereign’s palace.
Once a lavish gift to an old queen’s favourite, it has since been converted into apartments for the monarch’s relatives.
Now it’s sort of like an exhibit for endangered animals at the zoo: a safe place for these useless but fascinating creatures to loll about.
Beyond its gilded wrought-iron gates, they had no chance of survival.
All the apartments looked inward to a central courtyard so that the inhabitants spent their days peering through their curtains to spy on each other. Mum caused an uproar in 1997 when she had wooden shutters fitted to finally grant herself some privacy.
“A middle-class monstrosity,” Granny’s mean sister Beatrix had declared. But she’d always been resentful that Mum and Papa got Cumberland 1, the largest apartment, while she languished in the slightly smaller Cumberland 2.
I begged Stewart to let Amira and me walk across Hyde Park with hats and sunglasses to disguise ourselves.
“She needs the fresh air, Stewart,” I whispered at the entrance to the palace.
“Absolutely not,” he said and walked me to the waiting Range Rover. “Now, ma’am, you understand that after the funeral there will be much to discuss. Prince Frederick’s will… among other things.”
“Fine,” I said, relieved to hear I had four whole days during which no one would corner me and force me to decide everything at once.
When we got to the apartment, Amira disappeared to change her clothes and left me standing in the drawing room where I had grown up.
I hadn’t been inside Cumberland 1 since Granny gave it to Louis as an engagement gift.
They’d had the place gutted and remodelled, the echoes of my childhood now almost imperceptible.
The shutters were gone, replaced with chic linen curtains.
A Hermès blanket was artfully draped across a white boucle couch.
On top of a terrazzo coffee table were ruthlessly neat stacks of Tom Ford books and Diptyque candles the size of buckets.
I lit the enormous candles, deciphered the sleek and powerful bluetooth speakers to put on a Spotify playlist of 2010s throwback hits, and went into the kitchen in search of provisions.
The abrupt end to their Zermatt ski trip and our decampment from the main palace meant no staff had yet had the chance to stock the fridge.
But there was butter, half an onion, parmesan cheese and a shrivelling lemon.
I went into the pantry and dug through packets of konjac noodles, bags of buckwheat flour, sugar-free chocolate, monk fruit sweeteners, powders and protein bars until I found an old box of orzo. Then I went looking for the gin.
By the time Amira emerged from her room dressed in an Olivia von Halle tracksuit, I had orzo al limone bubbling on the stovetop. She sat down at the kitchen island and eyed me suspiciously.
“Ready for your martini?” I asked and she shrugged.
I took the shaker from the freezer and poured her an ice-cold dirty martini with three olives.
As teenagers we’d split a VK mixed pack.
But after lurking at the periphery of a few frosty family Christmases in the last decade, I knew that this was her drink.
“Cheers,” she muttered, took a gulp and closed her eyes. “Goddamn it, that’s good.”
I laughed.
“We shouldn’t get too drunk though,” she added. “I think they want us to inspect the flowers tomorrow.”
I took a sip. “We don’t have to do that, you know. It’s a lot to ask of you. It’s been, what? Four days?”