Page 22 of The Midnight Princess
I nod.
“They didn’t have more than a couple of days together.” That, I didn’t know.
“Nine months later, I was born in Blackberry,” he concludes. The meat of his story has been picked clean, but I wonder if thedancer loved the king. I wonder if she was scared. I wonder how her parents welcomed the prodigal. Gently, I hope. Dozens of questions beg to be asked, but Jacob, I remind myself, is a job. I only need to know the essentials.
“She managed an apartment complex, I understand.” I reach into my memories of sharing an apartment with schoolmates at Harvard and dropping into the office to report maintenance issues and pick up packages. “Was that so she could have you close by?”
He nods. “She snaked out drains with a baby on her back.” That’s not a fact the press have uncovered. “When I started preschool, she put me on the back of her bike.”
“Little Duckies.” It’s impossible to say the name without wanting to pick daisies and fingerpaint.
He smiles, and I feel a measure of relief. I don’t want this to be torture. “I had a thing for Teacher Teresa.”
His beard catches snowflakes, and his cheek, pink in the cold, tucks. I can’t afford to be derailed by the way he smiles—an odd combination of something new and something very old. A freckled young boy and a mountain god with a long memory. The smiles are potent, pulling at the edges of the official princess, threatening to unravel her. “Your grandparents lived in Skip.”
“A little town about thirty minutes into the mountains. Do you want to know what they thought of us?”
I do, and it has nothing to do with making him ready to be a king.
“They offered to take us both when I was born. I don’t think they thought she could stick it out on her own.”
“But she did.” The outline fleshes out.
“With lots of babysitting and the occasional hundred-dollar-bill falling from my grandpa’s pocket when we needed it most,” he murmurs, filling in the picture still further.
He describes his mother as independent and brave. She would have to be to fight a king, absorbing every slander the press could throw at her for more than a decade to put her son in line for the throne. How much of the mother is found in the son?
Our steps take us to the point of the palace grounds, and we watch the fluttering white-tipped waves rolling across the ocean below for a few moments before turning back.
“Now it’s your turn,” he says.
“Pardon?”
“I told you about my life.”
A shiver of horror brushes through my veins, but I give a polite smile. “I won’t be giving you a test about me.”
He reaches out, catching a snowflake on his hand—an innocent gesture. “In order to be satisfied…” he says, closing his palm. I watch the microexpressions on his face in fascination, and my boots fumble in the snow. He steadies me. “We both have to give a little. That’s the miracle of capitalism. I tell you about my long-standing passion for a room aide at Little Duckies, and you tell me…”
He coaxes me like we’re simple creatures who met by accident. Like we’re not both operating under a commission from our respective monarchs. There’s a guilelessness about it, and I laugh because it hurts my throat to keep it back. “What do you want to know? I’ve got all kinds of stories about the palace ghosts. Or do you want to know about the jewel vault?”
The last of my laughter evaporates in the winter air, and his chin bucks toward my left hand. “Tell me about your fiancé.”
I take a drag of oxygen and my lungs burn with the cold. I’m prepared to recite an amusing family anecdote about Frederich the Wary—how he gave a crazed speech to parliament carrying his wife’s severed head in a bag. I am not prepared to let him see a millimeter more of Princess Alma than I have to. I shufflethrough a store of information and lay the facts down like face cards.
“Pietor is thirty-five. He was educated at the University of Amsterdam and is the Hereditary Grand Duke of Himmelstein.”
Jacob nudges me with his shoulder.That was nothing.“What’s the Hereditary part mean?”
“It means he’s the heir—the crown prince, just as you are.”
“I told you I was a love child, conceived at a U.S. Air Force base. I’m not sure how you’re going to beat that.” I haven’t come close.
“Pietor’s been in Lijuela for several months on a humanitarian mission—plastics prevention and ecological clean-ups.” My words are spare and careful, conveying none of the aggravation of wasted years or the certainty that I’m disappointing my mother.
Our walk brings us to a slight rise, and Jacob moves ahead, kicking steps into the slope with his large boots. He jogs to the top, and placing my footsteps in his, I follow him up the bank.
“Your fiancé does humanitarian work? That’s very…righteous,” he says. “You must miss him.”
