A burst of raucous laughter carried across the lawn.
“You’re off your head,” a girl cackled from several yards behind us.
“I am not! Look at him in that uniform! And now he’s all heartbroken, and needy, which makes him even sexier,” her friend said.
“Give that here,” said the first girl, and I heard the flutter of what sounded like a magazine being tossed from one to the next. “No, sorry, you’re mad. His wife went off and shagged his brother! He can’t know what he’s doing in there.”
“It’s not his fault she’s rubbish,” her friend said. “Imagine getting to have it off with them both, though, eh? And she did pick Nick, so he must not be totally useless.”
“Nah, love. Nick will be king in the streets, but Freddie is king in the sheets,” the girl said. This sent them into gales of laughter.
“Please have not totally useless put on my headstone.”
My eyes clicked back into focus. Nick was peering over my shoulder at the source of the chatter.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied. “I’m just reveling in how lucky we are to picnic in this perfect field and paint medieval ruins.”
Nick rolled onto his stomach, facing the castle. “I wish I knew how to explain the effect these places have on me without sounding like a total prat,” he said. “It’s not like we don’t have oodles of stupendous old things in England. In London alone.”
“Well, these stupendous old things are new to you,” I said. “Of course they feel different.”
“They make me feel small. In a good way.” He picked a blade of grass and stretched it between his fingers. “Standing on top of centuries of history reminds me that being the future king is a fragment of it. I am not a big deal. In the scheme of things, I’m a blip. And maybe so is…”
He stopped himself. I took a deep breath. “Nick,” I said. “We should probably—”
“Don’t say it.” He turned onto his side, his long, lean form stretched fully out on the blanket. “I’m not ready.”
I tapped my brush. “I’m wondering if we’ll ever be.”
“I feel so free here,” he said. “No one pays me any mind. I’m like any other bloke, looking at birds and eating a ham sandwich on a blanket with his wife. I can do whatever I want. We can do whatever we want, with no gossip and no papers chasing us. I’ve never had that, Bex, not really.”
“It is chasing us, though, Nick,” I said, gesturing at the girls behind us. “You know it is.”
“We’re still ahead of it. Please don’t take this from me. Not yet.”
“We can’t run forever.”
“Please.”
He searched my face, and I felt myself nod.
But the mood had shifted. Nick pulled his cap brim lower over his face and plucked his binoculars off the blanket.
“I’d like to go bang around the castle again,” he said, and without a backward glance, he trudged up to Caerlaverock.
The outside world had found its way in.
CHAPTER THREE
If Nick’s refuge was in ancient ruins, mine was in running. Every day before my morning coffee, I would hit the roads, reveling in working up a fresh-air sweat the way I did before I’d gotten engaged and been consigned to a treadmill. My route took me out of town and along the river, where no one gave me a passing glance other than the odd motorist who honked for my safety; I could easily hide under my new Sheffield Wednesday baseball cap, which I’d bought because I’ve always thought Sheffield Wednesday sounded less like a football club than a heroine in a novel who’d be described as “formidable” and “whip smart” and who’d constantly get the better of condescending men. I wish I could have used her as my alias.
At first these runs were just one more welcome sliver of normalcy, but lately, that daily hour or so had become meditative. The rhythmic pounding of my feet had a metronome effect on my thoughts. They didn’t tangle up in each other the way they sometimes did when I was sitting on our couch; they simply came in an orderly way, one after the other, check, check, check.
Today, I’d needed that order: I had to come to grips with the fact that we were close to the end in Wigtown.
You can’t unburst a bubble.
The longer Nick and I had lived like ostriches, the easier it had become, to the point where I had been astonished to look at a calendar and see we were deep into June. Nobody had asked us to come home, but the complete silence we’d once found to be a relief suddenly felt unnerving. Hearing those girls giggle about us proved nothing had changed as much as we might have imagined. Even now, as I jogged, I wondered where our rotating cabal of personal protection officers was. I knew intellectually that Stout, Twiggy, Popeye, and Furrow—so christened by Nick and Freddie years ago because they hadn’t been given their real names—were experts at creating the illusion of privacy, and that escaping royal life didn’t mean escaping royal security, but it wasn’t until this past Tuesday that I’d started to look for them in my periphery. Surely Eleanor had deployed them. There’s no way we were as alone as we pretended to be. I’d tricked myself into obliviousness, but it wasn’t working anymore. I had to talk to Nick.
But I didn’t know how. We were here, in the global sense, because my secrets had hurt him. Loving Nick had meant giving him whatever agency he could find in this, for as long as was feasible, but hiding out had just been a convenient illusion for us both. Ever since our afternoon at Caerlaverock, any time Nick left the room, I’d sneak online to gauge public opinion, and the news wasn’t good. Nothing had been forgiven, or forgotten. I tried
