photo of us laughing together on our walk up the hill to the church was as good as gold. PLACE YOUR BEX, ordered the Mirror; the Mail’s Xandra Deane went with DAMN YANKEE. I’d been allowed to tell my mother, Lacey, and our closest friends that a betrothal was imminent, as much to employ their aid as anything, but I didn’t let on that Nick had already asked and been accepted. With our lives becoming public fodder, I wanted one secret that belonged only to us, and for similar reasons, Nick had insisted that the presentation of a ring—one that didn’t come out of a box of American snack food—should unfurl without first being scripted by Marj. And to that end, he’d been thoroughly irritating. He fished through his pocket during pregnant conversational pauses. He hid things in his clenched fist, only to reveal that they were coins or paper clips or, once, a dead bug. He even pulled a jewelry box from under his pillow one morning, then opened it to reveal his favorite cufflinks with a bemused, “How did those get there?”
By the time my birthday rolled around, Nick had told me very seriously that Marj realized a formal proposal was impractical until after his Navy deployment, and that she had Eleanor’s authorization to push E-Day to the following year. So I thought nothing of it when he presented me with a large rectangular box swathed three times over in a crumply surplus of Thomas the Tank Engine paper. (As with every guy I’ve ever known, including my father, Nick is the worst at wrapping presents.) I ripped off the blue bow and stuck it to my forehead, then tore into the gift and laughed when it turned out to be a dented Cracker Jack box.
“Yes!” I crowed. “I just finished my last one. How did you know?”
I blithely pulled open the top, which I do remember thinking had been glued extra messily by the assembly line, and shared a few handfuls before I fished around for my toy.
“Aha!” I brandished a ring. “Man, it’s heavier than the usual cheap crap.”
Nick’s lip twitched. “I’ll be sure to give Gran your glowing review.”
It was in that second that I actually looked at the ring. I had seen it before. The whole world had, on the finger of a certain prince’s mother, and I nearly dropped it when I realized I was holding something very old, very significant, and very, very not cheap.
“Holy shit” was my regal reaction.
“Happy birthday,” Nick said proudly.
The twelve-carat Lyons Emerald was a flawless, classically square stone, ringed twice with tiny diamonds and set in antique Welsh gold. It originally belonged to Queen Victoria II, and when her daughter Princess Mary inherited it, she stuffed it in a drawer because she insisted baubles like that were for shallow, selfish, silly little girls, to which her sister-in-law Marta allegedly retorted, “If you’d been a little sillier and a little more shallow, you might not die a virgin.” (Richard did not fall far from his grandmother’s tree.) This feud frothed until Mary did die at age seventy-two, virginity status unknown, while watching the competitive sheepdog trial show One Man and His Dog—at which point the ring went to Eleanor, who gave it to her son, who slipped it onto the finger of one Lady Emma Somers. I have never been much for jewelry, beyond my flag pin and diamond pendant from Nick, but even I always thought the Lyons Emerald was magnificent. And though I hated to admit it, for fear of sounding like the avaricious Ivy League climber I’d been reputed to be, I loved the sight of it sparkling at the end of my arm.
I must have given Nick quite a look, because he jumped out of his seat. “Though it pains me to say this, you are going to have to hold that thought,” he said, opening the front door.
“Goodness, you’re punctual,” said my mother, whom I’d thought was in Iowa, as she breezed inside holding a cake box. “It is Bex we’re talking about here.”
Lacey ran in after her, squealing and wielding Champagne, and Nick suddenly found himself in the middle of a high-volume group hug as the three of us wept and hugged and cooed over my ring—our joy mixed with regret for the thing that none of us wanted to say out loud, which was the unfairness of Dad not being there to see it, too.