Part of the ritual of Marta’s body lying in state was that four people—members of the military, generally—took turns in a seventy-two-hour round-the-clock watch over her body, one at each corner of her flag-draped coffin, which was topped with both flowers and her iconic crown. One shift was always taken by the men of the royal family in their respective military uniforms, and Nick, Freddie, Edwin, and Richard were up that afternoon.
“Service in here is wretched,” Richard said. “Come outside with me while I call him, Beatrix, I need to discuss what Frederick will be telling the guests.”
He stalked out, Bea trailing behind him, navy-blue Smythson leather notebook in hand, leaving me and Nick alone with Freddie for the first time since everything fell apart on Thanksgiving. Nick shoved his hands into his trouser pockets and rocked back on his heels.
“How was your flight?” he finally asked.
“We barely made it out. The weather was terrible,” Freddie said. “I came straight from the airport and changed in a bathroom I never knew was here. Of course, why would I? No one’s died lately.” He closed his eyes, and his face seemed to crumble with the effort to open them again. “No one here, anyway.”
I could see an ache settle on Nick’s face. His arms tensed, as if he wanted to hug his brother but was uncertain whether it would be welcome. So his hands remained at his sides.
“We’re awfully glad you’re back,” he said. “I hope it was…or rather…that you found what you were looking for.”
Freddie’s face was unreadable. Nick and I exchanged glances as the heavy wooden door banged open and a storm-faced Richard and Bea came back inside, followed by a chastened-looking Edwin, who was trying to straighten a medal that looked like he’d made it himself. Edwin’s Naval career had not been illustrious, nor entirely voluntary, and it had been a tragedy for no one when it was cut short due to crippling nausea.
“I couldn’t find my hat,” he fretted. “Elizabeth has a head cold and so I told her she could sleep in, but I realized she was the last person to wear it, when we were—”
“Enough,” Richard said, his upper lip curling. “The RAF has already gone over its allotted fifteen minutes. Mother’s watching this, Edwin. There’s a livestream. Stand up straight.”
Edwin’s lip trembled. “Stand. The last word I played against Granny,” he moaned.
“That’s good!” I said. “Five letters!”
“Technically it was and, but close enough,” he said, wiping his streaming ducts.
After a flurry of last-minute adjustments, the men walked through to stand their somber watch. Bea pulled an iPad out of her tote—like Mary Poppins’s carpetbag, it contained an infinite supply of useful items—and pulled up the livestream, propping the tablet up on a table against a religious-looking object that was probably now being lightly defiled. Nick and Freddie had taken the positions at the foot of Marta’s casket, while Richard and Edwin (still fiddling with his jacket) stood at the head. The public kept shuffling through the vast candlelit room up to the coffin, seemingly oblivious to the four taciturn princes fifteen feet away, save for one young woman who afforded Freddie a sly grin. The Freddie of yore might have twinkled at her a little, but this one was stony and listless.
“Does he seem okay to you?” I fretted.
“He’ll feel like himself after a night in his own bed,” Bea said. “And Daphne gets here tomorrow. She’ll help get him sorted.”
“Will she?”
Bea cocked her head and studied my face. “Does that bother you?”
“Not at all,” I said. “I just didn’t know she was doing so much heavy lifting.”
Bea made a note in her book. “A true friend’s work is never done, and Freddie needs as many of those as he can get right now,” she said. “You look tired. Do you need a chair?”
“No.” In truth I was dying to sit down—my four-inch Sarah Flint heels were killing me, and my black sheath was pinchier than it used to be—but I wasn’t about to admit it to Bea.
“I don’t want you to be uncomfortable,” Bea said.
“Since when?”
“Since the entire world is going to be watching you at this funeral tomorrow, and we can’t have you walking like your feet hurt,” she said. “What other reason could there be?”
I tried to hold a neutral facial expression. I had wrapped the pregnancy test in paper towels before shoving it in a sausage-roll box and disposing of it in a dumpster behind one of the staff buildings, like a dead gerbil I was trying to hide from a child. Bea didn’t seem like someone who’d root through people’s trash, but then again, Bea had also once counseled me that other people would. She had a way of making me feel exposed, and she was doing it again now. I turned away from her inquiring eyes, and we watched the rest of the fifteen-minute shift in silence.
CHAPTER TWO
Royal funerals make royal weddings look like Vegas elopements. There are days upon days of somber events, almost all of them involving cannons and bells, weeping distant relatives and mopey dignitaries, and men and women marching in full regimental garb. And every single moment of this one was being broadcast, from Marta’s body making its way from Buckingham Palace to the Palace of Westminster; to the three days it lay in state there; to its journey into Westminster Abbey for her actual service, and then out again, this time to Windsor Castle for her burial next to King Richard and Georgina. Her coffin was escorted along this very long and winding path to eternal rest by different contingents of men in her life, ranging from Richard to Marta’s personal chauffeur and her long-retired
