Chapter 4 #3
“Am I in the Princess Charlotte suite?” Scottie glanced at Cranston then Somba. “It has such a beautiful view.”
“It’s all ready for you, Lady Royal,” Somba announced with a curtsy. “Would you like to go up now?”
“Please and thank you.” Scottie motioned to the protection officers who carried in her cases from the motor. “You can leave them by the stairs. I’ll carry them up.”
“Miles.” Cranston snapped his fingers at the head footman.
“See to Lady Royal’s luggage.” The young man with ruddy cheeks hopped to, and his team of red-coated footmen appeared from the back of the foyer, where he no doubt had them lined up and waiting.
They carried her three pieces of luggage, backpack, and messenger bag up the Grand Staircase in military fashion.
“Lady Royal, can I prepare something for you to eat or drink?” Chef George bowed, making a sweeping gesture with his arm. “I’ve a light refreshing cherry drink, low on calories, you might enjoy. Along with a turkey sandwich?”
“Chef George, you are mind reader. That’s perfect. Thank you.” Scottie drew him into a light hug. “I do not deserve all of this attention. And please, call me Scottie. I’ll be here for a while and want to feel I’m among friends.” She turned to Michael. “I’m not breaking too many rules, am I?”
“You can choose what you want to be called,” he said. “The queen insists.”
“Good.” She started up the stairs. “Kate said you’d want to go over my schedule sometime today.”
“Yes, Lady Roy—Scottie. We can go over your diary after tea. You’ve a number in your room to call down to the security office. I’ll be there until you’re ready.” What was he to do with the American lass staring down at him from the middle of the stairs?
“Why don’t you come to the Princess Charlotte now? We can talk.”
“If you wish.” Cranston gave him the eye as he stepped aside for the stairs.
What? He heard her. Lady Royal—Scottie—had invited him up.
He was her equerry, after all. Truth was, he hadn’t spent much time around Americans and never an American woman.
Not up close anyway. He’d been on duty once when Princess Gemma traveled with Prince John, but she’d had her own security detail.
Scottie seemed different. Cut from finer threads. From something special.
Up the Grand Staircase to the Grand Gallery Scottie chatted with the first footman, Miles.
“Weren’t you an expectant father the last time I was here?”
“Yes, miss. We have a three-month-old son.”
“Congratulations.” Scottie patted him on the back. “How proud are you?”
“Busting me buttons, miss.”
To Michael, the lyrical sound of her southern words seemed to hover over him, making air curly cues. She talked as if she’d known the footman for eons. Would she be the same with him?
From his pocket, his phone buzzed. A quick glance told him it was his mother. “Leave it, Mum,” he muttered. She was increasingly insistent about Michael joining the Pratt Printing dynasty.
He refused. One day he hoped she’d have the courage to ask him why.
Just before the Princess Charlotte suite, Scottie slowed by the portraits on the Wall of Princesses.
Enormous, beautifully painted images of her mother when she was Crown Princess Catherine, of her aunt, Princess Arabella, and of the nineteenth- and eighteenth-century Blue princesses.
Charlotte, Clemency, and Louisa. The portraits continued around the corner and down the Royal Hallway.
Scottie paused in front of the portrait of her mother. “People say I look like her.” She glanced over at Michael. “What do you think?”
“Yes, miss, very much.”
“Miss? Please, call me Scottie or don’t call me at all.” She air drummed with a ba-da-dump. Michael cracked a slow smile. Was he supposed to laugh? “Wow, tough crowd.” And she turned for her suite.
Miles and another footman exited the large second-floor apartment as Scottie entered. One of the maids had brought round a tea trolly with a heating kettle and a covered plate of something—Michael assumed a small plate of puffs—a beloved North Sea Island Nation pastry.
Scottie collapsed onto the curved burnt-orange colored couch.
“Did you ever notice the colors of this room, the muted greens and pinks, yellows and blues, match Princess Charlotte’s portrait?
” She glanced back at him. “It seems to whisper, ‘leave all your cares here.’ Do you think it was like this when Princess Charlotte was alive?”
“Hadsby Castle was renovated in the last twenty years. Princess Charlotte was born in the eighteenth century. Styles have changed. But she was well-educated, an artist, author, and horsewoman.” Michael focused on the tapestried walls and carpeted floor, the coffered ceiling with the row of crystal chandeliers.
Scottie was not wrong. The room invited him to leave off his cares.
“This side of the castle endured several bombings from our German neighbors during the second war. I believe this room was all but destroyed by fire.”
“Yet now it’s so peaceful.” Scottie moved to the tea trolly and raised the lid from the plate. “I can’t eat all these puffs. Help yourself. Plus, I didn’t realize how exhausted I was until I sat on the couch.”
To where she returned, legs curled under her, eating in silence, going for a bottle of water from the ice bucket on the bottom of the trolly.
Michael did not go for puffs, though they were one of his favorite treats, but stood off to the side with a cup of tea and waited for her conversational cues. Did she want to go over her diary or rest? After all, he wasn’t hanging round for a proper chinwag but business.
“Do you think I should be here?” Scottie said, glancing back at him. “Hanging out with the Queen of Lauchtenland like I’m one of them. Can I really pull off a title like Lady Royal Blue? What are people saying about me? That I’m a grifter? Imposter?”
Her eyes met his, and he spied again the initial vulnerability. Then, as now, it caused a movement in his chest.
“It’s not for me to say, miss. As your equerry, I am to manage your schedule. As your protection officer, I’m to keep you safe.”
“What about as a confidant?” Scottie munched on a puff.
“Certainly everything you say and do is privileged, miss. I’m here in whatever capacity you need.”
“Okay, then please call me Scottie. Second, be honest with me and help me do things right. Kate acts like it’s a cakewalk to come here, hang out like one of the family simply because I’m her daughter.
” She paced to the window, plate in hand.
“The whole flight over, I kept asking myself, ‘What are you doing, S.O.? Leaving the life you know, the job you love, to play daughter and aide to the woman who abandoned you?’”
“It’s my understanding the queen invited you, miss—rather, Scottie. I assume she wants to know you. Undo those years of separation. Is it fair to say you feel the same?”
Touché was the look in her eye. “It’s fair. I wanted to come. I spent the last two weeks preparing my team at O’Shay to take my place. But you know, sometimes you make a decision and later you”—Scottie faced the tall, mullioned window again—“wonder if you’d lost your ever-loving mind.”
“You seem sane from where I stand,” he said. “To answer your question, I think you should be here if it means spending time with people you love and who love you. Her Majesty was terribly cut up she could not come down to greet you. The doctor ordered her to rest.”
“Yes, I know. She had an IVIG treatment for her GBS yesterday,” Scottie said. “It knocks her out. She called me three times to apologize.” Scottie pressed closer to the window, leaning to see to the left of the castle.
“Did you see something?” Michael joined her at the window.
“A man. Walking along the perimeter wearing a long duster-like jacket—I think you call it an anorak—and a wide-brim hat. He stopped, looked up at me with really piercing eyes, then seemed to disappear.”
“That’s odd,” Michael said, joining her at the window. “Emmanuel?” By her short description, it sounded like him, a Lauchtenland legend.
He was a story children learned in school.
A tale adults told round campfires. As a member of the Cross family, knowing stories of Emmanuel—God with us—visiting Lauchtenland was part of his education.
His ancestors kept records of the man’s appearance.
If he was real, he’d be eight hundred years old, so clearly he was a cultivated Lauchten fable.
Though some insisted he was real and divine, Michael had never sensed a divine being interacting with his family or his country.
“Emmanuel?” Scottie said.
“Yes, the name means God with us,” Michael said.
“There’s a legend about the woodsman who comes down from the twin peaks of the Highcrest Mountains every blue or red moon to visit the people.
We Lauchtens love our legends and lore, our fairy tales.
” Michael moved to another window to scan the castle grounds where a field of lavender bloomed wild on the edges of Whistlecrag Bluff.
“I daresay it was one of the gardeners disappearing in the sunlight.”
The sun was unusually high and bright on this spring day.
Scottie stared at the golden swaths falling in long drapes over the flowers and lavender, then glanced over at Michael, as if testing his story.
“You look exhausted,” he said as a maid arrived with her turkey sandwich and cherry drink.
Beautiful but exhausted. Perhaps more from the magnitude of her trip than the travel itself.
“Let’s go over your diary later.” He pointed to the end table phone then regarded her for a moment before collecting himself.
“Ring down to the Operations Room when you’re ready. ”
Once in the gallery, he gave himself a proper reprimand. “Get a hold of yourself, mate.”
He’d been utterly gobsmacked by her—this lovely being from the House of Blue and the House of O’Shay.
Hardly the sort of reaction listed in his job description.
He wasn’t ready for the flutter that came from standing too near a stranger.
And it was too soon to let Purnell go. She deserved his loyalty still—and he’d give it to her in death if not in life.
* * *
“The king consort is off on a fishing trip with his mates. Prince John and his family are traveling, and I just heard Prince Gus and Princess Daffodil are in New York. Princess Arabella and her husband, Sir William, and Princess Rachel are at Perrigwynn. Which Blues will be at the Hadsby Garden Party?! I finally got an invitation!”
— @StefwithanF on IG
* * *
“@StefwithanF. Us too! We got an invite to the Garden Party! We can’t believe it! #whattowear”
— @LoyalRoyalBlog
* * *
“I’m quite looking forward to seeing the queen’s daughter and the newly styled Lady Royal Blue at the Garden Party.
I know some will disagree with me, but I think she brings such a refreshing sensibility to the House of Blue, and though she’s Creative Director for a men’s fashion house, her taste is impeccable.
She turned heads at Christmas last year, walking to Clouver Abbey with the Family.
Utterly elegant. The American women really are bringing their A-game these days, aren’t they?
There’s something so wonderfully genuine about Scottie O’Shay.
The queen inviting her to serve as companion during the spring is rather touching. ”
— Tuppence Corbyn & Friends