was eighteen, and her parents died within months of each other when I was two or three, so she may also have slipped into a severe depression. I’m sure she felt terribly alone.”
I carefully wiped his tear before it dribbled into his ear.
“It’s all guesswork, though, at this point,” he added. “Nothing anyone’s ever tried has helped, and she certainly can’t tell us herself.” He let out a mirthless laugh. “One day it’ll probably be called Emma Somers Syndrome.”
“What does Richard think it was?” I asked. “Does he talk about it?”
Nick frowned at the ceiling. “He’s not forthcoming, which I’m sure is no surprise,” he said. “I’ve heard more about her as a person from her friends, her butler, even Great-Grandmother, after a bourbon or six.”
He clasped and unclasped his watch absently. “My own memories of the end are mostly snapshots. I remember a lot of screaming. Her smashing the telephone into a mirror. I remember being scared, and trying to keep Freddie busy so he didn’t hear or see anything, although I suspect I was too young to do a very good job at it.” Another tear snaked down his face. “Finally, one day, Nanny took me and Freddie to Buckingham Palace to get us out of there. We ended up staying for…weeks, I think.”
I snuggled up to him and kissed his shoulder. “I’m so, so sorry,” I said, feeling the inadequacy of the words.
“Me too,” he said. “I try so hard to be there for her. That’s what I was doing half the time I left Oxford. Visiting, moving her from place to place. Father acts like it’s a waste, but she’s in there somewhere, even if she’s buried deep. She needs to see life around her if she’s ever going to…”
He put his hands over his face, letting out a quiet sob. I rolled away and let him have it to himself. I didn’t want to ebb a flow of tears that was clearly a long time in coming.
“I do remember bits from when she was herself,” Nick eventually said. “There was nobody like her. She could laugh so easily, and she had this way of talking to you, right to you, that made you feel like the most important person in the world.”
“I’m sure that’s exactly what you were to her,” I said. “And still are. That never goes away, not deep down.”
Nick shrugged. “I don’t know about that. I do wish we didn’t have to hide it. But Father and Gran made that decision a long time ago. God forbid there be human imperfection in the blessed Royal Family,” he said bitterly. “But every time there’s a story about her, it’s so obviously made up. It’s a transgression of the worst sort and they don’t even know it, and I can’t tell them. Like that thing about her taking up with her bodyguard. We couldn’t very well come out and say it’s impossible because she’s out of her mind and we’ve been lying about it for years.”
His tone grew frustrated. “And even worse, I catch myself wishing they were all true,” he said brokenly. “Because if she was saying those things, if she did have an affair, it would mean she was capable of it. And that she wasn’t lost to us.”
“This was all such a weight to put on you,” I said softly. “Have you ever asked them to come clean?”
“No, Bex. I can’t.”
“Why not? Wouldn’t it be easier on everyone, not having to explain away her absence?”
“People would see the liars, not the lie,” he said. “Besides, I don’t want them to have the satisfaction.”
“The press,” I translated.
“They hounded her,” he said. “My mother was the biggest celebrity in the world. The Guardian did a special edition about her wedding that still holds the record for the most papers ever purchased in the UK. Two girls in Devon died waiting overnight in winter just to meet her. The press hid in the bushes, tapped the phones. They paid off bodyguards and cooks and one of our nannies. The press was the trigger for all of this, for everything that went wrong for her, and my mother would not want them to know they won.”
I curled into him, my head on his chest, the way we lay together almost every night. He clasped me tightly.
“That isn’t going to happen to me, Nick,” I said firmly. “Or to you.”
“I’m sure my mother would have said the same thing.”