“Ah. Tell Nancy about those muffins I accidentally set on fire. She’ll like that,” he said, and then off he went, whistling anew.
Don’t do it. This is insane. Do not.
My lip trembled. I didn’t need to hear this again; it was seared into me already. I could just follow Nick into the living room and forget this whole thing. But my disobedient hands were already rewinding the video and unmuting it. And there it was, clear as a bell. The woman right opposite the Abbey doors—sporting a Union Jack top hat and caricature of my face on her T-shirt—had started it, her face purple and contorted with rage.
“Slut!”
Her loud, angry braying had spread like a virus through the crowd. Until that day, I’d never personally experienced real booing outside of a baseball stadium. The verbal battery, fully audible on this worldwide TV broadcast, was exactly as I’d remembered it—every sound, every screed, every epithet spit at me from a frothing spectator, a wave of furious words crashing together amid the clip-clop of the horses drawing our carriage. Anyone not booing us just looked broken. Confused. Betrayed. A nation’s worth of what I’d seen on Nick’s face one day prior.
I sat back on the bed and hugged my knees to my chest. The truth was so much more nuanced than Clive or anyone else cared to communicate. But nuance wasn’t worth a damn. No one cares if a future duchess feels isolated by her new global notoriety or about the loss of personal liberty that comes with it. They would hardly cry me a river over how badly I’d missed Nick while he was on his Naval deployments, or the way my relationship with Lacey had been poisoned by the chokehold my love life put on my family. I’d spun out, and Freddie—the spare, adrift in his own way—had caught me, and tried to offer an answer. Running away together would save us both, he promised. But the tug of my love for Freddie was outmatched by the pull of being in love with Nick. Freddie had slunk out of my apartment, our tryst over before it ever began, unwittingly giving a waiting Clive the photographic ammo he needed.
As far as the public was concerned, however, the picture was clear: The Duchess of Clarence had cheated on her duke with his beloved baby brother. The fairy tale was a falsehood. The people had been sold a bill of goods, and they wanted their money back.
“Bex? Are you coming?”
“One sec,” I managed.
I clicked back over to Clive’s email. Without me and Nick on full display, the media hadn’t moved on; instead, everyone filled in the blanks themselves, conjuring up screaming matches, ongoing trysts, legal confabs, and whispers of divorce. One of the papers assured its readers that I was being deported and our marriage annulled; another claimed I was already pregnant and that the baby’s paternity was a big old question mark. It read like a contest to come up with the most plausibly dire headline. I felt another wave of disgust. Clive had emailed because he needed me and Nick. He couldn’t keep winning this game without his pawns, and knowing me as he unfortunately did, he probably figured he’d provoke a rude response from the unruly American that he could release to the world.
I hit delete. As far as that asshole was concerned, I was a ghost.
* * *
“Success!”
I nearly knocked over the jar of murky water I was using to clean my brushes.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” Nick said, materializing by my side. “That’s looking marvelous.”
“Gotta keep my skills fresh,” I said. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with all these paintings of ruined castles, though. They’re starting to pile up.”
“We’ll frame them and hang them in the Hall of Castles, which is a thing I’ve just made up that we should absolutely have.” Nick tugged down the brim of his baseball cap and knelt on the large plaid blanket I’d stretched over the grass. “I saw a baby lapwing inside the keep,” he said.
“Amazing!” I said. “I assume? I have no idea what that is.”
“It’s a bird,” he said, tossing his copy of Birding: A Life on the ground. “With a thingy on its head. You know. Like…a head thingy.”
“You’re really getting the hang of the terminology,” I teased.
Nick laughed, and swung his binoculars off from around his neck.
“Uncle Edwin is obsessed with birds, and Father loves