“Lady Isabelle, move to the back row; you’re too tall. Lady Janet, turn to the side—no, the other way, and drape your arm over the back of that chair—the other arm! Lady Gabriella, a step forward, if you please….”
Gabriella Madison flounced forward. She had the air of someone who expected to be constantly curtsied to, as if she considered herself the highest-ranking person in every room—even now, alongside the queen.
Sam’s palms felt sweaty inside her gloves; she tugged absently at the bodice of her gown, a cloying pink chiffon that her stylist had assured her would be salmon-colored, but instead made Sam feel like a little girl playing dress-up.
Her eyes kept sliding nervously toward the door. The photo shoot had begun with only the ladies-in-waiting—because of course, ladies first—but any minute now the lords attendant would show up. Which meant she would see Marshall.
Beatrice reached over to give her hand a squeeze. “You’ll be fine.”
“I know,” Sam murmured back, unconvinced.
The ladies-in-waiting clustered around them in a perfumed huddle of whispers and rustling dresses. Beatrice kept her eyes trained on Colin, who was fiddling with the tripod of his camera. “I can always pretend to faint, like Jeff did that time in Telluride, if you want to call off this whole thing.”
“I think Jeff pretended he was going to vomit, actually,” Sam recalled, a corner of her mouth lifting in reluctant amusement.
Colin had been the royal family’s official photographer for three decades now. He took all the Washingtons’ official pictures, the ones intended for postcards and coffee mugs and their Christmas photo. When they were children, the royal siblings had posed every year in matching outfits—red-and-green beribboned dresses for Sam and Beatrice, a collared shirt and knee socks for Jeff—usually out in a grassy meadow. As if by taking their Christmas photo outside the palace, they could convince everyone that they were a relatively ordinary family.
“Smile, ladies!” Colin exclaimed, and they all settled into position.
A few minutes later, when Sam felt half-blinded by the flashbulb, raucous male voices sounded down the hallway, and the lords attendant burst into the room.
And there was Marshall.
His eyes flicked up and met Sam’s as if drawn there by magnetism, by gravity. Then the floor seemed to fall out from beneath her, and bile rose up in her throat, and it all came rushing back in a nauseating whirl. The raw anguish in his voice when he’d told her, I won’t walk away from the dukedom, not even for you.
She’d worked so hard to distract herself—with the trip to see Nina, and by focusing on the League of Kings, trying to support Beatrice—but seeing Marshall, Sam knew that she hadn’t healed in the slightest.
Beatrice squeezed her fingers again—just the slightest pressure, a brush of support and sympathy—and it gave Sam the strength to tear her eyes from Marshall’s and paste a smile on her face.
She let Colin arrange her in various positions, placing her hands on the back of Beatrice’s chair or sitting on the steps of the dais, her pink skirts poufing around her. Her smile never faltered, though the entire time she was hyperaware of Marshall in her peripheral vision.
She kept smiling until Colin finally stepped away from his camera, lifting his hand in a dramatic flourish. “Well done, well done! I’ll have the final proofs next week, and will be sending them all electronically….”
Sam couldn’t wait an instant longer. I’ll be right back, she mouthed to Beatrice. Not daring to look in Marshall’s direction, she stumbled out into the hallway, grabbing fistfuls of her pink skirts.
Her chest felt tight; her breath was coming in shallow gasps. Sam ran through the East Gallery, where tapestries of Roman gods and goddesses stared impassively down at her; then through the Blue Chamber, painted with a fresco depicting the Battle of the Chesapeake. King Louis XX had commissioned it when he built Bellevue, as a symbol of Franco-American cooperation. Sam had long ago given up counting the historical inaccuracies.
She turned another corner and came face to face with a wooden door whose placard read her majesty.
Beatrice wouldn’t mind if Sam escaped into her office, just for a minute. No one would bother her there.
Beatrice’s massive desk stood on the opposite side of the room, stacks of paper arranged neatly on its surface. Sam pulled out Beatrice’s chair and collapsed into it, then closed her eyes and groaned.
Maybe it was good that she’d been forced to see Marshall today. They were bound to run into each other eventually; better that their first encounter post-breakup be here, amid the stiff formality of a photo shoot. As much as it hurt to see him again, it would have been even worse to run into him without warning.
When Sam opened her eyes again, they landed on the paper tucked to one side of Beatrice’s desk.
I, Lord Theodore Beaufort Eaton, being of sound mind and body, do absolutely and entirely renounce my position and my titles…
This was Teddy’s statement of renunciation.
Sam read the document once, twice, in a dull sort of shock.
When she heard a low voice ask, “Sam? Are you in here?” she thought at first that she’d dreamed it, that she’d been worrying about Marshall so much she’d hallucinated him. But there he was, standing hesitantly in the doorway.
“Sorry,” Marshall added clumsily. “I’ll leave you alone. I just saw you rushing out of the photo shoot, and you seemed upset….”
I was upset because of you, she thought. Because it hurt so acutely to see Marshall and know that he wasn’t hers anymore, that she couldn’t reach over and touch him the way she used to. That they had to behave like strangers now.
“Wait!” Sam blurted out, before he could turn aside. “You don’t have to go.”
Marshall took a single step into the room, then shifted his weight as if he wasn’t sure whether he was allowed any farther. “Um…I saw you went to a party with Nina and Jeff last weekend. How was it?”
Sam was still sitting behind the desk. She reached to tuck back a wisp of hair, only to realize she’d loosened the tiara pinned there. “It was nice to see them.”
“That’s good.”
There was another awkward silence. “How’s Rory?” Sam asked, hating how stilted it sounded.
“She’s good.”
Silence again.
Sam couldn’t take any more of this. She wasn’t sure what Marshall had expected, coming in here and checking on her, as if they had anything to say to each other anymore. They’d said it all on the beach that night, and now there was nothing left.
“Look, I should probably be getting back.” She pressed her hands on the surface of Beatrice’s desk and stood, but Marshall cut her off.