No.
Daphne’s mouth formed the word, but she hadn’t actually spoken it aloud. She closed her eyes, clutched the phone tighter in her hand, and whispered, “No. That’s not possible.”
“I assure you that it’s true,” Rebecca snapped. “A messenger just arrived at the house to let us know the committee’s verdict. And to collect our things.”
Daphne knew precisely which things her mother meant. Her parents’ coronets, their ermine-trimmed robes, their papers of nobility.
“Daphne,” her mother went on, and somehow her voice had gone even sharper and icier. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything!”
It was an automatic response, the same thing Daphne used to say when she was a child and her mother slapped her for reaching for a cookie, or tracking mud in the house, or any of the other thousand transgressions she was constantly committing.
“Why did you get involved? I explicitly told you to speak to no one! Your father and I were handling it, but then you had to go antagonize Gabriella and ruin all our hard work!”
Daphne turned aside, leaning against a doorframe and lowering her voice. “I don’t understand. Gabriella said she would get her father to drop the charges.”
“She clearly lied to you!”
“But that can’t be right; Nina got her scholarship back.” Why would Gabriella have carried out Nina’s request but not hers? Was it because she saw Nina as an irrelevant nobody, whereas Daphne was Jefferson’s girlfriend, and an actual threat?
“What are you babbling on about? How is any of this related to Nina?” Rebecca spoke the name like a dirty word.
“I…nothing. Never mind.” There was no use explaining her plan to her mother, not when it had gone so horribly wrong.
“You made a real mess of things, Daphne. You kicked the hornet’s nest, and now the Madisons are out for blood. You should have come to me for advice before you tried whatever moronic scheme you came up with!”
“I was trying to help,” Daphne said weakly.
“You failed! Peter was lobbying the committee members one at a time, trying to get them on his side. If you hadn’t gotten involved, he might have had a fighting chance. But since you went after Gabriella, Ambrose Madison spoke out against Peter—and after that, there was no hope.”
Daphne felt sick to her stomach. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t make up for the damage you’ve done. Sorry doesn’t win us back our title. Do you even understand what position we’re in now, Daphne? We’re common! We aren’t entitled to attend court events, our names don’t appear in the social register, we’re a plain Mr. and Mrs. now! We might as well be dead!”
“That’s a bit of an overstatement, Mother.” For some reason, Daphne thought of what Nina would say to all of this. “We’re all healthy and safe, and things could certainly be worse.”
“Healthy and safe? Things could be worse?” Rebecca repeated. “What is wrong with you? I would rather you were in the hospital, critically ill, than that you had disappointed me like this!”
Daphne recoiled as if she’d been slapped. She had always known that Rebecca wasn’t the warm and cuddly, bedtime-story type. Yet it stung, hearing how little she cared about Daphne as anything but a vessel for her own ambition.
“Does everyone know?” Daphne whispered, eyes already cutting back down the hall in the direction of the ballroom.
“Technically the news shouldn’t be released until the next Court Circular goes out, but you know how word travels. People are probably already talking,” her mother snapped. “Daphne—what do you think Jefferson is going to do when he finds out? What about his mother? You expect Adelaide to let a common nobody marry her only son?”
“I’ll figure this out. I just need time,” Daphne said blindly, frantically.
“Time is the one thing you don’t have. You’d better act tonight, before everyone learns of our disgrace.” With that, Rebecca hung up the phone.
Daphne stood there for a moment, staring numbly at some portrait of a man in a wig and ruff without really seeing it. Her vision had gone blurry; she felt like she didn’t dare take a step or she might vomit, pass out, tumble to the floor, scream.
What a traitorous snake Gabriella was. She’d assured Daphne that she would speak to her father, when clearly all she’d told him was that Daphne was harassing her, and that the Deightons needed to be taught a lesson.
Well, now Gabriella would learn a lesson of her own: that Daphne followed through on her threats.
Her breath coming in short gasps, Daphne logged onto the dummy email account she’d been using for the past months, every time she sold a photo to Natasha.
The Daily News might be interested in this footage of Gabriella Madison, she typed, and then attached the video, cropped so that only Gabriella was visible, snorting cocaine.
If Gabriella wanted to ruin Daphne’s life, then Daphne would drag her down too.
“You really are a great date at events like this,” Sam told Marshall as they walked in a slow loop around the ballroom. She’d discovered that as long as she kept moving, no one bothered her, because they all assumed she was headed to talk to someone else—but the moment she and Marshall fell still, a princess or king or another of the lords attendant would come say hello.
“Yes, obviously. But which of my many stellar qualities are you talking about?” Marshall quipped. “Because I’m tall, or well dressed, or a fantastic dancer?”
Sam smiled, though she saw that his heart wasn’t fully in their banter. For the past week, she and Marshall had both been pretending that the rest of the world didn’t exist. Aside from their afternoon at the football game, and a couple of events for the duchy—where he dodged questions from reporters about their relationship—Marshall had lain low, coming to visit Sam here at Bellevue.
And now they were on the cover of Time as the faces of America’s problematic dialogue about race.
It felt like to America, she and Marshall were no longer people at all. They were symbols, whose value and purpose were decided by newspaper editors, by online commenters and movie directors, by the hundreds of people shouting each time they made an official appearance. By everyone, really, except for themselves.
Here at Bellevue, surrounded by royals who had their own countries to manage, they were able to skate by relatively unnoticed. But the real world was looming, and eventually they would have to face it.
“Sam, Marshall!” Nina hurried toward them. “Has either of you seen Daphne? She left about fifteen minutes ago, and I’m getting worried.”