11. “Courage to Change” - Sia
“Courage to Change” - Sia
It’s a good thing Davies is acting as driver as well as security, because there’s no way I’d have the presence of mind to get us home without veering off the road and into the steep embankment beside it. By all appearances, neither do my mother and sister.
We don’t speak. What is there to say? If I refuse this proposition, I will single-handedly be responsible for the destruction of Wesbourne. If I consent, it will mean the destruction of my entire life.
But just because our mouths aren’t talking doesn’t mean our bodies aren’t. I’m sandwiched in the back seat of the SUV that came as part of the package deal with the PPOs, and while alike in our silence, the feelings radiating off the women on either side of me couldn’t be more different.
Beatrice sulks on my right, looking out the window with her chin in her palm.
She hasn’t so much as glanced at me since the prime minister presented Parliament’s solution for Wesbourne’s redemption.
Her body screams its irritation like a siren, either because she wasn’t consulted before her boyfriend was offered up for an arranged marriage or because she isn’t eligible to marry him herself. Probably both.
On the other side of me, my mother, the duchess dowager, sits as erect and poised as ever.
Her neat auburn French twist is the final period in her paragraph of elegance.
I don’t need to guess at her thoughts either.
This marriage would be the culmination of her dreams, her magnum opus.
It no longer matters that her obsession with my skin, hair, weight, and education didn’t pay off in a proposal from Henry when I turned eighteen.
In the end, this is almost as good, and she isn’t complaining.
From the slight lift of her chin, I can tell she’s already plotting—likely something to do with the wedding or how I can shed ten pounds in the next four weeks.
From my position in the middle, I am considering prescription drugs as an alluring alternative to facing this situation like a mature adult.
When we arrive home, it’s to a house that won’t be ours for much longer if Parliament has their way.
A family of strangers will put their own fingerprints all over it, obscuring the years we’ve spent here, smudging them out as if they were nothing.
I learned to walk on these parquet floors, using the mahogany wainscot for balance.
The door that leads into the back garden still has a nick from the kitchen knife I hurled at it during the ninja phase I had when I was seven.
As we step inside, Bea and my mother dissolve into the recesses of the house, which leaves the library to me.
Neither of them uses it the way I do, and I’ve never been more grateful for that than I am right now.
There is only one person’s presence I crave, and even though I’ll never be in it again, this is as close as I can get to having him here with me.
I lift the lid of the cigar box and breathe in the musty tobacco scent, then move to the photos lining the bookcase. The room is a hodgepodge: part cozy home library, part office and lounge, part shrine to the late Duke of Whitmere.
My father would have gone his whole life unobserved if it hadn’t been for his older brother’s death at nineteen, when the duchy of Whitmere passed to the spare. He was happy living in the shadows, content to contribute to the glow of his wife and daughters without needing any of it himself.
“What do I do, Dad?”
I pick up one of the pictures of us together.
In it, I’m six years old, the top of my head barely reaching his elbow and my gap-toothed smile broadcasting my excitement.
It was taken right after the King Frederick’s Day parade in the city.
My mother had stayed home with a newborn Beatrice, and having my daddy to myself all day was the best thing I could have imagined.
I can still hear the green-and-white flags snapping in the wind all around us, feel the pebbles encrusted on my cotton-candy-sticky palm from scooping up a handful of strewn flower petals.
There was a whiff of peppermint in the air, intermingled with the scent of fried fish and crushed roses.
Since then, I’ve only smelled that particular combination twice, and each time it smelled like pride.
I thought my heart would burst with it as I stood there next to my father. He was so tall I had to crane my neck to look up at him. When the troops started passing on the street, I straightened as much as I could, saluting them the way he’d shown me.
He taught me what it is to love your country.
Nationalism flowed through his veins, and he joined the military as soon as he was old enough.
He resigned when I was a few years old, when my mother’s nagging him to be closer to home finally wore him down.
He would have given his life for Wesbourne without batting an eye.
He would expect no less from his daughter.
I put the photo back with a sigh and pick up another one, this one of my father before I was born, before he even married my mother.
He looks sharp and handsome in his dark green uniform, grinning broadly at the camera alongside the rest of his squad.
I trace a thumb over the lines of his face, which has grown hazy in my memories. What I wouldn’t give for one more day.
“I thought I might find you here.” My mother’s voice is quiet, but it startles me anyway. She hands me a tissue, and I realize my cheeks are wet with tears.
I wipe them away and turn the photo toward her. “He looks so young.”
“Only eighteen,” she says. “We met several years after this was taken.”
“I still can’t believe he resigned. He always seemed so proud of his service.”
As much as I loved all the time I had with him as a result of his early retirement, I’ve always imagined that he harbored a small resentment toward his wife for making him quit. And if he didn’t, I do.
“He changed in those last few years,” she says. “He never told me about the things that haunted him, just kept them bottled up inside. It was best that he came home when he did.”
“Did he ever mention going back?”
“Not that I recall.” She claps her manicured hands together. “Now, let’s talk about what we’re going to do with the bomb Parliament dropped.”
It’s such a classic Rosalind move, I almost break into a sob, but I catch myself at the last second.
She won’t sympathize or appreciate the lack of composure.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter which of her daughters walks down that aisle and marries the heir to the throne.
She pinned her hopes on me, and when that didn’t work out, Beatrice made for a nice replacement.
But Parliament has presented a plot twist, and she’s more than happy to revert to the original plan.
It’s like she’s waved a wand and cast some magical spell over the kingdom.
“Not now, Mum. I just need time to think.”
“Time is the one thing you don’t have,” she says.
“I have seventy-two hours,” I remind her. “And I intend to use every one of them.”
I waste the next eight hours eating my way through an entire Hawaiian pizza—picking off the pineapple and eating it separately—binge-watching Poldark, and crying every time something terrible happens to Ross or Demelza, which basically means once the opening credits roll, the tears don’t stop.
Mum is likely downstairs looking for therapists with last-minute openings.
I wake the next morning groggy with sleep, the way you do when you take a two-hour nap in the afternoon and rouse to find the day wasted and your mouth tasting like roadkill.
My bedroom looks like the aftermath of a high school slumber party, with one stark difference: this mess belongs to a party of one.
It’s time to pull myself together. I decide to try a Katniss Everdeen.
“My name is Celia Chapman-Payne,” I tell the mirror.
“I am twenty-five years old. I am the Duchess of Whitmere and the director of the Wesbourne Historical Society. I live in a beautiful home, and I’m engaged to the man I love.
I’ve just been informed that I’ll need to sacrifice all of these things if I have a single decent bone in my body.
Otherwise, my country will be destroyed and I’ll become known as the most selfish human being alive. ”
How is this supposed to help? Maybe I should put myself in Parliament’s shoes.
If the goal is to do what’s best for Wesbourne, what’s one measly young woman in the grand scheme of things?
She comes from good bloodlines, is less likely to be an embarrassment than about 80 percent of the population, and has good teeth.
Cut her off from everything she knows and loves, marry her off to the nation’s biggest disgrace—two birds, one stone—and throw a crown on her head. Problem solved.
I scowl at my reflection. None of this is making things any easier.
How in the bloody hell am I supposed to make this kind of decision?
My formal education, while exceptional, did not prepare me for finding out I might be the rightful queen of Wesbourne.
I have a newfound sympathy for Mia in The Princess Diaries.
If only I had a queen grandmother to shout “shut up” at.
This sparks an idea. She may not be a queen, or my grandmother, but Dame Adelaide could easily pass for both, and she sure as hell will let me yell at her if I want to.
“Sure, come over, love,” she says when I call her. “I’m at Englewood Manor for the weekend.” I can hear the tide crashing in the background, muffling her voice. “Bring your wellies.”
“What?” I say, louder so she can hear me over the waves. “Why do I need my wellies?”
A garbled reply is all I get before she hangs up. Walking to the mud room, where my Le Chameau rubber boots are standing along the wall, I stuff my feet into them, then pluck my waxed jacket from its hook. I guess I’ll find out what she’s up to when I get there.