be rude, but we’ve those dinner reservations, and as you can tell, I need to sort my hair before I’m seen in public.”
Bea’s crisp dark bob looked exactly the way it always looked: perfect.
“Bea,” I said as she escorted us to her black-painted front door. “I know we say it a lot, but you’re not actually going to kill Clive, are you?”
“Not personally,” Bea said, and closed the door in our faces.
* * *
“Nick!” I said, climbing onto the bed and shoving him. Nothing. I rolled him harder. “Nick. Nicholas. Wake up.”
Nick stirred. “Pistachio housecakes,” he mumbled.
“You choose now to be a sound sleeper?” I said, aggravated. I eased myself up so I was full on sitting atop him. Nada. I resorted to tickling him anywhere I thought would work. His lumbar region did the trick. He shot up like a cannon, sending me tumbling to the side.
“What is it?” he asked.
I slid off him and tossed The Sun onto the bed.
“Bea,” I said. “She gave him exactly what he wanted. That’s how she took care of it. No wonder she didn’t want us to know what she was going to do.”
“Clive?” Nick asked. His hair was ridiculously mussed from sleep. He rubbed his eyes. I poked at The Sun.
GOING DUTCH: FREDDIE HAS A ROYAL STEADY
And Clive Fitzwilliam Hears Wedding Bells
After three years of upheaval, the royal family finally has something to celebrate: a royal romance between playboy Prince Frederick, 29, and Daphne, Princess of Orange, 33, heiress to Holland’s throne. You can take it exclusively from me: This clandestine coupling is more than titillating talk.
“A wedding is absolutely in the cards. They’re utterly besotted. Everyone at the palace is over the moon,” confides our exclusive source. “The Queen loves her. Princess Daphne is serious, well educated, and refined.”
“Besotted,” Nick said. “This is Bea, isn’t it?”
“Sure sounds like her.”
“This was her plan? Freddie’s not going to like it.” He hauled himself up to lean against the back of our headboard. “Nor will Daphne.”
“Neither will you,” I said. “Read the rest of it.”
What a refreshing change of pace from our recent royal bride, Rebecca, the Duchess of Clarence, an icon of impropriety who has stirred up scandal in her wake. Per our latest report, succession itself is now threatened: Rebecca’s refusal to take proper care of herself has led to suspicions by royal doctors that she is barren and unable to bear the heir that history and a hereditary monarchy demands, meaning the line will sidestep the cuckolded Clarence duke and his salacious succubus and—as it did with the Queen herself—land in Freddie’s lap. How might a Dutch union complicate that?
Nick’s eyes got progressively wider. “Crikey. That is rubbish,” he said. “What was Bea thinking?”
I grabbed my phone and opened Twitter, after sending up a little hello to Marta, whom I imagined trawling the internet from an armchair in the Great Beyond. People were abuzz with the romantic fantasy of it all: Daphne’s abduction made for a particularly juicy backstory, and so the Tragic Princess Finds Safety with Hero Prince fanfic wrote itself.
“Interesting. Check this out,” I said. “Apparently on Sunrise this morning, they really let Clive have it for some of this.”
I hit play on a clip that was going around of new substitute anchor Penelope Ten-Names—whose second husband had brought with him two more hyphens—and her cohost looking aghast as they passed around the morning papers.
“It’s jolly for Freddie and all, but those comments about the duchess’s fertility are beyond the pale, don’t you think?” said the main anchor.
“I do,” Penelope said. “Implying Rebecca is to blame for those issues, if they’re even real, is disgraceful. Abhorrent. And after he ran those photos of her during the royal tour, it’s clearly not reporting; it’s a vendetta. He should be run out of town.” She turned to the camera with a snarl. “And you can take that from me.”
Nick looked impressed. “That’s going to go viral.”
“It already has,” I said. “You’re welcome, Penelope.” Then I scrolled further and shot Nick an uneasy look. “The Daphne stuff is already getting messy, though.”
When the story broke, someone thirty thousand feet above Europe tweeted that Daphne was at that moment sitting in first class on their commercial flight to Gatwick. The paparazzi swarm lying in wait when she exited the airport was so overpowering that she stopped dead in her tracks, turned on her heel, and fled back into the airport.
“Goddammit, Bea,” Nick said, almost to himself. “You threw them under the bus