But if most of the nation loved Beatrice, they positively swooned over Jefferson, with what sometimes felt like a single collective sigh. He was the only boy, and the world seemed willing to forgive him anything, even if Nina wasn’t.
As for Samantha … at best people were entertained by her. At worst, which was relatively often, they actively disapproved of her. The problem was that they didn’t know Sam. Not the way Nina did.
She was saved from answering by Professor Urquhart, who started up to the podium with ponderous steps. There was a flurry of activity as all seven hundred students broke off their murmured conversations and arranged their laptops before them. Nina—who was probably the last person still taking notes by hand, in a spiral notebook—poised her pencil on a fresh page and glanced up expectantly. Dust motes hung suspended in the bars of sunlight that sliced through the windows.
“As we’ve covered all semester, political alliances through the turn of the century were typically bilateral and easily broken—which is why so many of them were sealed through marriage,” Professor Urquhart began. “Things changed with the formation of the League of Kings: a treaty among multiple nations, meant to assure collective security and peace. The League was founded in 1895 at the Concord of Paris, hosted by—”
Louis, Nina silently finished. That was the easiest part of French history: their kings were consistently named Louis, all the way up to the current Louis XXIII. Honestly, the French were even worse about Louis than the Washingtons were about George.
She copied the professor’s words into her spiral notebook, wishing that she could stop thinking about the Washingtons. College was supposed to be her fresh start, a chance to figure out who she really was, free from the influence of the royal family.
Nina had been Princess Samantha’s best friend since they were children. They had met twelve years ago, when Nina’s mother, Isabella, interviewed at the palace. The former king—Edward III, Samantha’s grandfather—had just passed away, and the new king needed a chamberlain. Isabella had been working in the Chamber of Commerce, and somehow, miraculously, her boss recommended her to His Majesty. For there was no “applying” to jobs in the palace. The palace made a list of candidates, and if you were one of the lucky few, they reached out to you.
The afternoon of the interview, Nina’s mom Julie was out of town and Nina’s usual babysitter canceled at the last minute, leaving her mamá Isabella no choice but to bring Nina with her. “Stay right here,” she admonished, leading her daughter to a bench in the downstairs corridor.
Nina had found it surprising that her mamá was interviewing in the actual palace, but as she would later learn, Washington Palace wasn’t just the royal family’s home in the capital. It was also the administrative center of the Crown. By far the majority of the palace’s six hundred rooms were offices or public spaces. The private apartments on the second floor were all marked by oval door handles, rather than the round ones downstairs.
Nina tucked her feet beneath her and quietly opened the book she’d brought.
“What are you reading?”
A face topped by a mountain of chestnut hair peered around the corner. Nina instantly recognized Princess Samantha—though she didn’t look much like a princess in her zebra-print leggings and sequined dress. Her fingernails were painted in a rainbow, each one a different primary color.
“Um …” Nina hid the cover in her lap. The book was about a princess, albeit a fantasy one, but it still felt strange to confess that to a real princess.
“My little brother and I are reading a dragon series right now,” Samantha declared, and tipped her head to one side. “Have you seen him? I can’t find him.”
Nina shook her head. “I thought you were twins,” she couldn’t resist saying.
“Yes, but I’m four minutes older, which makes Jeff my little brother,” Samantha replied with irrefutable logic. “Want to help me look for him?”
The princess was a storm of kinetic energy, skipping down the halls, constantly opening doors or peering behind furniture in search of her twin. The entire time she kept up a steady stream of chatter, her own greatest-hits tour of the palace.
“This room is haunted by the ghost of Queen Thérèse. I know it’s her because the ghost speaks French,” she declared ominously, pointing at the shuttered downstairs parlor. Or “I used to roller-skate down these halls, till my dad caught me and said I can’t. Beatrice did it too, but it never matters what Beatrice does.” Samantha didn’t sound resentful, just pensive. “She’s going to be queen someday.”
“And what are you going to be?” Nina asked, curious.
Samantha grinned. “Everything else.”
She led Nina from one unbelievable place to another, through storerooms of pressed linen napkins and kitchens that soared larger than ballrooms, where the chef gave them sugar cookies out of a painted blue jar. The princess bit into her cookie, but Nina tucked hers into her pocket. It was too pretty to eat.
As they looped back toward the bench, Nina was startled to see her mamá walking down the hallway, chatting easily with the king. Their eyes lit on Nina, and she instinctively froze.
The king smiled, a genial, boyish smile that made his eyes twinkle. “And who have we here?”
Nina had never met a king before, yet some unbidden instinct—perhaps all the times she’d seen him on television—prompted her to bob into a curtsy.
“This is my daughter, Nina,” her mamá murmured.
Samantha trotted over to her father and tugged at his hand. “Dad, can Nina come over again soon?” she pleaded.
The king turned his warm eyes on Nina’s mamá. “Samantha is right. I hope you’ll bring Nina here in the afternoons. After all, it’s not like we have a short workday.”
Isabella blinked. “Your Majesty?”
“The girls clearly get along, and I know your wife has a busy schedule, too. Why should Nina stay home with a babysitter when she could be here?”
Nina was too young to understand Isabella’s hesitation. “Please, mamá?” she’d chimed in, brimming with eagerness. Isabella had relented with a sigh.
And just like that, Nina was interwoven into the lives of the royal twins.
They became an instant threesome: the prince, the princess, and the chamberlain’s daughter. Back then Nina hadn’t even known to feel self-conscious about the differences between her life and Samantha’s. For even though they were twins, and royalty, Jeff and Sam never made Nina feel like an outsider. If anything, they were all equally excluded from the glamorous and inaccessible world of the adults—even from Beatrice, who at age ten was already enrolled in private tutoring on top of her middle school courses.
Sam and Jeff were always the instigators of their plans, with Nina trying and failing to keep them in line. They would escape the twins’ nanny and set out on some escapade: to swim in the heated indoor pool, or to find the rumored safe rooms and bomb shelters that were supposedly hidden throughout the palace. One time Samantha convinced them to hide beneath a tablecloth and eavesdrop on a private meeting between the king and the Austrian ambassador. They were caught after just two minutes, when Jeff tugged on the tablecloth and knocked over a pitcher of water, but by then Samantha had already squirted honey into the ambassador’s shoe. “If you don’t want honey in your shoes, don’t kick them off under the table,” she’d said later, her eyes gleaming with mischief.