Daphne clutched at her chest in a sweet, old-timey way. “I’m so glad I’m not the only one this happens to,” she said. “I thought you were very brave that day. I would faint if that happened to me. I’m not very good at this.”
“No one has ever called me good at this,” I said. The carriage jerked to life. “And I wasn’t brave at all. We got by on a combination of shock and having no other choice. Inside I was a mess.”
Daphne exhaled tremulously. “This is the first time I’ve left the Netherlands since…”
She didn’t say it, but she didn’t have to. Daphne had been seventeen when she was kidnapped by a group of political radicals who wanted to replace the monarchy with an atheist oligarchy. She was lucky that they had been very bad at kidnapping and were caught before a full day elapsed.
“It’s been fifteen years, but it still feels fresh, somehow?” she confessed. “At first I stayed close to home because I felt safer, but the longer that went on, the bigger a deal it became whenever I did go out, and that made me anxious as well. I couldn’t face your wedding, but Mother convinced me this would be a lower-profile way to test the waters.”
“I’m glad she did,” I said, pointing out the window. “Otherwise, you’d have missed getting to trot past this cute local bistro called McDonald’s.”
Daphne laughed lightly. “I hope it works. I do not want to be stuck in The Hague forever,” she said. “My mother is the most outgoing person in all of Europe, I think. It’s hard to live up to that even for a normal person. I know she frets about how I’ve become, and I am terribly worried that I disappoint her, so I agreed to try. But I’ve been so nervous.” She shot me a grateful look. “Less so now.”
“We’re in this together,” I said. “And don’t stress. Between your guys and all our PPOs, we’re in good hands here. You and I are gonna nail this.”
I held out my fist, and she paused for a second before bumping it, awkwardly, as if it were the first time she’d done that.
“We are going to be friends, I hope,” she said.
“Too late. We already are,” I said. “The last time I made a new friend was in college. I’m glad to have you.”
The rest of the morning was a well-choreographed blur. Daphne and I were near the end of the procession, so photographs were already underway when we arrived. Richard, in a gray suit with a dapper tie and pocket square, stood with Hax on one side—as fair as Richard was dark, and a head shorter—and Nick and Freddie on the other in their usual dueling blues. Nick had a stripe in his tie that coordinated with my deep berry coatdress and shoes, painstakingly crafted by the team at Alexander McQueen. We certainly looked the part, if nothing else.
“How did it go?” I whispered when I caught up to him.
“Quite well,” he said. “The king told Richard I was very well informed during the inspection.” His lips twitched. “Freddie didn’t get a word in, for once.”
“It’s not a contest,” I said through a smile.
“Doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it,” was his response.
Daphne, aware as she was that her home country’s papers would make a huge deal out of her traveling for this, stayed admirably steady. But I could already see how her mother would be an impossible act to follow, both as a human and as a queen. Her dress was the color of sunshine; her hat, like nothing so much as a feathered pineapple. The photos of her carriage ride with Nick and Freddie were practically dental porn, so wide and open were their mouths from laughing together. She loved the exhibit of memorabilia from the UK and the Netherlands’ long relationship. She sympathized expertly with the prime minister, a bucktoothed septuagenarian named Doris Tuesday, on a matter that had bedeviled the House of Commons recently. And she gushed over the official gift from Richard: a framed photograph of Eleanor meeting a seven-year-old Hax in Holland sometime in the mid ’60s, in which he wore an ear-to-ear grin and Eleanor wore a hat that looked like a sea urchin. When Lax learned the photo had been Nick’s idea, she had taken his face in her hands and announced he was doing great credit to Eleanor. And she did all of this with vibrant sincerity, altogether projecting a wildly different vibe than the more proper and restrained Eleanor would have.
Well, Britain and the Netherlands are wildly different countries, I imagined Eleanor saying with a haughty sniff.
The dinner was to take place in the same Buckingham Palace ballroom where Nick had his twenty-fifth birthday celebration. Back then I had to pretend I didn’t love him, as we were dating in secret, but at least got to do so in a dress that I’d liked. This time, I was publicly his lawful wife, but we were barely speaking in private, and my outfit would live in infamy.
“This…is…” Donna’s voice had shot up two octaves as she yanked my ball gown out of the dress bag. “A bubblegum nightmare.”
The dress was a pink fabric, shot through with subtle gold swirls, like a brocade you’d use to upholster an expensive chair in a child’s nursery. I poked at the leg-of-mutton sleeves, hoping they would deflate. They did not. It was like Molly Ringwald’s dress at the end of Pretty in Pink, crossed with Nick’s mother’s wedding gown, with a dash of a hot-air balloon.
“Is it too late to call Harrods?” I asked.
“You can’t wear off-the-rack to a state dinner!” Donna collapsed into a silk-upholstered chair in the back bedroom that we’d turned into my dressing area. “They told me they were on it. They told me they had
