“There is a flip side to those advantages.” Rosie paused. “I’m sure you can understand that it’s rather difficult to know whom one can confide in, at times.”
“I can very much imagine that would be the case.” Especially if Rosie’s senior staff were spying on her every move and reporting any small misstep to her relatives and their staff. It would be like living in a game of Minesweeper, constantly trying not to step on the bombs.
“I learned, the hard way, to make swift judgments as to character,” Rosie said crisply. “And instinctively, right from the beginning, I’ve trusted you. You could have sold the story of my behavior in Sugar Fair that night to the gutter press. You didn’t.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Not everyone in my family is happy. With me, with my engagement. Or in general.” She briefly pressed her lips together. “I’m not sure what I would do without Johnny at my side. Through all the pressure, all the press, all the . . . dissent, he’s been there. He’s on my team, all the time. Just this morning, he saw I was about to blow my fuse and he took me out to the mulberry tree in the palace gardens. Patrick’s thinking spot. It’s the only part of my home where I feel like I can truly breathe.”
Her words had dropped to a whisper, as if she’d forgotten Sylvie was there; but her eyes focused again. “When I met him, it was like something out of someone else’s life. Some people couldn’t understand it. They don’t see him. I saw him,” she said simply. “And he saw me. The way I felt, I’ve never experienced anything like it. When I was growing up, I didn’t have . . . Daddy and my mother . . .” Rosie trailed away circumspectly on that point.
The body language between the Duke and Duchess of Albany did not speak of an immensity of love. In every photo, every video clip, it resonated with total indifference. It was fairly common knowledge that the duke spent more time with his horses than with his wife.
“It was a total game changer for me. But it isn’t easy for him.” Her voice went through a lightning hitch. She stopped. Cleared her throat twice. “There have been moments lately when he’s been preoccupied. Distant—”
“Your Highness.”
“Rosie.” The princess set her teeth.
“Rosie,” Sylvie said softly. “I’ve struggled to deal with the tiny notoriety of a television show. I can’t even begin to imagine the pressures on your relationship. But if I may say so, it’s very, very evident how you feel about each other. It’s a privilege to be involved even this far with your wedding, for that reason alone.” In this instant, she was talking only to a very stressed, not particularly happy woman. “I truly don’t think you need to doubt that Johnny is where he wants to be. I expect it’s where he needs to be.”
Rosie’s jaw worked. “But is it fair to him?” In anyone else, that might have been a passionate outburst, yet the very soberness of the princess’s response was all the more powerful. “Is it fair to him?” she repeated, and that bleakness was back in her eyes. “I’m sure you’ve seen the press lately. I’ve had it since the day I was born, and I’ll be dogged by it until I die. But Johnny—he doesn’t have to live like this. He doesn’t deserve any of it. He’s enduring it because of me. For me. I love him,” she said with sudden fierceness. “I love him more than anything. So much more than myself. And yet I’m pulling him into a way of life that’s going to make him miserable.”
“Rosie—”
“It happened to Patrick.” Suddenly, there were tears in Rosie’s eyes. “It happened to Patrick, years ago. He loved someone desperately. But she’d seen how his previous girlfriends had been treated. She knew what her life would become, the moment they went public. And in the end, it wasn’t a path she could walk.”
Sylvie reached out and took her hand, and Rosie gripped on to her very tightly.
“He loved her all his life,” she said, rubbing her back of her free hand under her wet lashes. “There was never anyone else, ever again. He—he mourned her, all his life.” She turned a stark look on Sylvie. “But he never blamed her for the decision she made. He said . . . He said, so simply, ‘She was the light. She was everything that was beautiful and kind, and she would have struggled every day, for the rest of her life. I would have caged a bird that was always meant to soar. I had to let her go.’ I’ve never forgotten the way he said it.” Another tear slipped down her cheek. “I think his spirit—the Patrick he would have been then—went with her and never returned. He was the light in my life, until I met Johnny, but he carried his sadness with him.”
She looked down at their joined hands, and Sylvie had a suspicion that very few people had ever reached out and held on to Rosie. “In the last days before he died, he wrote a final piece of music. I have it in my dressing table. I’ve never told anyone else about it. I’m not musical, so I’ve never heard it played.” A faint smile that spoke more of grief than pleasure; and not an old grief. Sylvie heard in the princess’s tone anticipated grief, and she tightened her grip. “I suspect it would make me cry, though. And the laundry is probably already wondering why I’m going through so many hankies.” She lifted her gaze back to Sylvie’s. “He wrote it for her. It’s called—”
Even later, Sylvie wasn’t sure exactly why she was so certain in that moment, as she saw in her mind that small glass globe and the simple inscription that encompassed—everything. “Jessie.”
If nothing else, it shocked Rosie out of the dark spiral that obviously had icy fingers on her, pulling her down. Sylvie knew what it was like, those moments when it felt as if you were drowning in the absence of light.
The princess stared at her, lips parted. There was a dead silence, before she said, “As far as I know, there isn’t another person living who knows about Jessie. Either you found something at Abbey Hall, or you’re way more qualified than I thought to spend your nights hovering over a cauldron.”
Sylvie reached into her bag and pulled out her phone. Bringing up the photos she’d taken in the archives, she passed it across to Rosie, who looked down at the inscription on the glass globe.
Immediately, a new sheen appeared in her blue eyes. She flipped to the envelope with its intimate little sketches, zooming in, tracing her fingertip over Patrick’s handwriting. “Jessica Maple-Moore. I never knew her full name. Patrick only ever called her Jessie. And he was typically circumspect about any private details.”
Sylvie waited, watching Rosie’s face as she turned to the last image. The other woman went very still as she looked down at the photograph of her uncle and Jessie on the steps at Primrose Cottage. The pure love and absolute happiness in both of their faces.
After a full minute in which they sat in silence, Sylvie asked quietly, “The originals are at Abbey Hall and I think they’ll be returned to you, but in the meantime, do you want me to send you that photo?”
Rosie nodded wordlessly. She finally looked up. Her eyes were drenched, and there was a deeply sad twist to her mouth, but she was smiling.
“Thank you,” she said, through her tears. “I’ve never seen him like that. That light in him—he brought so much happiness to so many lives, I’m so glad to know that at least for a short time, he knew that sort of joy.”