I told him to cheer up and he said, “You know why you’re here, don’t you? It means your parents are afraid London is about to get hit again.” He said he feels useless not being able to help, because he’s too young and his eyesight is terrible. Then he fretted about if Hitler took over the world. (Mummy says that won’t happen. I’m a bit scared, but I don’t want to look like a baby so I pretend I’m not.) Then Ellie sat down next to Henry and hugged his arm and said, “Granny told me I will be Queen someday, and I need to learn to stand tall in a storm. But I don’t know how to do that.”
I don’t like being sad, so I said, “Stop moping, ninnies. There’s nothing we can do from here.” I decided the best way to cheer everyone up was to have a mud fight. Ellie said it was too dark and we’d get in trouble and it wouldn’t be safe, but I told her nothing bad could happen if Henry was with us. And then HE said, “You’re quite right, Georgie,” which are words that I do not hear often enough, and then he turned to El and he was so lovely with her. He said, “Why don’t we go stand tall in a storm right now, as we are, and show it we’re not afraid. Of anything,” and he pulled her up and she gave him such a smile and then I realized: ELLIE HAS A CRUSH ON HENRY, which is RIDICULOUS because he is positively ancient. (Although I had a crush on Laurence Olivier last year so I suppose this is rather like that.) Henry took us out through the kitchen, and we jumped in the puddles, and laughed, and got VERY dirty and wet until Mummy called us back inside, and we were in EXTREME TROUBLE. “I expected better,” Mummy said to Henry, and he ran off as fast as he could because you do not argue with Mummy. She said to Ellie, “I don’t know what you’re playing at. You’re third in line for the throne. Do you know what that means?” And Ellie stood up very tall and said, “I am Princess Eleanor and I am showing the storm I’m not afraid.” Mummy spanked us both anyway.
Nick poked his head into our sitting room. “You’ve beaten me for once,” he said.
I waved the diary. “I’ve just met your grandfather.”
“Give him my regards,” Nick said. “Come on, our chariot awaits.”
I set the diary on the end table with a shiver. All this royal family pageantry triggered flashbacks to the last time I’d engaged in it, and been deluged with jeers. At least then I’d had Nick’s hand to hold. This time I was on my own. Nick hadn’t completely shut me out, but time and space had done nothing to make it easier for him to look at me through the fog of everything we’d dredged up, and every time he did, I saw the struggle.
Queen Lucretia, at least, did prove to be a gas. When Nick and I arrived at Horse Guards for the official welcome, she enveloped him and patted him on the back of the head like he was a baby (at over six feet in heels, she was one of the few women who could do that). She then grasped my shoulders and gave me a warm shake.
“It is wonderful to see you,” she said, her accent a mix of twenty years in the Netherlands, a childhood in Argentina, and college in Boston. “We had a glorious time at your wedding, until the actual wedding.” She tilted down and touched our foreheads together. “Fret not, my darling. Things happen. Hendrik’s brother’s wife tried to leave him at the altar, and the police brought her back to the palace. Now they’re having twins.” She winked. “Everything is possible with love!”
She then reached inside a cluster of large, suit-clad, Secret Service–looking men and retrieved a wan strawberry blonde in dreary beige. “This is my daughter Daphne Estrella, my North Star, my joy.”
Daphne glanced at me, tight-lipped, looking like the polar opposite of all those things. She was two inches shorter and a few years older than me, but her fingers tugged at each other in the manner of a twelve-year-old.
“Hello,” she said.
And that was it. Shepherding Princess Daphne to the palace had sounded like an easy, low-pressure gig, but apparently Lax had