Red, White & Royal Blue (41 page)

She thunks it down on the table so Queen Mary and Philip can see it, and the rest of them stand to look too.

It’s a news report from the BBC, and the sound is off, but Alex reads the scroll at the bottom of the screen:
WORLDWIDE SUPPORT POURS IN FOR PRINCE HENRY AND FIRST SON OF US.

The room falls silent at the images on the screen. A rally in New York outside the Beekman, decked out in rainbows, with waving signs that say things like:
FIRST SON OF OUR HEARTS
. A banner on the side of a bridge in Paris that reads:
HENRY
+
ALEX WERE HERE
. A hasty mural on a wall in Mexico City of Alex’s face in blue, purple, and pink, a crown on his head. A herd of people in Hyde Park with rainbow Union Jacks and Henry’s face ripped out of magazines and pasted onto poster boards reading:
FREE HENRY
. A young woman with a buzz cut throwing two fingers up at the windows of the
Daily Mail.
A crowd of teenagers in front of the White House, wearing homemade T-shirts that all say the same thing in crooked Sharpie letters, a phrase he recognizes from one of his own emails:
HISTORY, HUH?

Alex tries to swallow, but he can’t. He looks up, and Henry is looking back at him, mouth open, eyes wet.

Princess Catherine turns and crosses the room slowly, toward the tall windows on the east side of the room.

“Catherine, don’t—” the queen says, but Catherine grabs the heavy curtains with both hands and throws them open.

A burst of sunlight and color pushes the air out of the room. Down on the mall in front of Buckingham Palace, there’s a mass of people with banners, signs, American flags, Union Jacks, pride pennants streaming over their heads. It’s not as big as the royal wedding crowd, but it’s huge, filling up the pavement and pressed up to the gates. Alex and Henry were told to come in through the back of the palace—they never saw it.

Henry has carefully approached the window, and Alex watches from across the room as he reaches out and grazes his fingertips against the glass.

Catherine turns to him and says on a shaky sigh, “Oh, my love,” and pulls him into her chest somehow, even though he’s nearly a foot taller. Alex has to look away—even after everything, this feels too private for him to witness.

The queen clears her throat.

“This is … hardly representative of how the country as a whole will respond,” she says.

“Jesus
Christ,
Mum,” Catherine says, releasing Henry and nudging him behind her on protective reflex.

“This is precisely why I didn’t want you to see. You’re too softhearted to accept the truth, Catherine, given any other option. The majority of this country still wants the ways of old.”

Catherine draws herself up, her posture ramrod straight as she approaches the table again. It’s a product of royal breeding, but it comes off more like a bow being drawn. “Of course they do, Mum. Of course the bloody Tories in Kensington and the Brexit fools don’t want it. That’s not the
point.
Are you so determined to believe nothing could change? That nothing
should
change? We can have a real legacy here, of hope, and love, and
change.
Not the same tepid shite and drudgery we’ve been selling since World War II—”

“You will not speak to me this way,” Queen Mary says icily, one tremulous, ancient hand still resting on her teaspoon.

“I’m sixty years old, Mum,” Catherine says. “Can’t we eschew decorum at this point?”

“No respect. Never an ounce of respect for the
sanctity
—”

“Or, perhaps I should bring some of my concerns to Parliament?” Catherine says, leaning in to lower her voice right in Queen Mary’s face. Alex recognizes the glint in her eyes. He never knew—he always assumed Henry got it from his dad. “You know, I do think Labour is rather finished with the old guard. I wonder, if I were to mention those meetings you keep forgetting about, or the names of countries you can’t quite keep straight, if they might decide that forty-seven is perhaps enough years for the people of Britain to expect you to serve?”

The tremor in the queen’s hand has doubled, but her jaw is steely. The room is deadly silent. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“Wouldn’t I, Mum? Would you like to find out?”

Catherine turns to face Henry, and Alex is surprised to see tears on her face.

“I’m sorry, Henry,” she says. “I’ve failed you. I’ve failed all of you. You needed your mum, and I wasn’t there. And I was so frightened that I started to think maybe it was for the best, to let you all be kept behind glass.” She turns back to her mother. “Look at them, Mum. They’re not props of a legacy. They’re my
children.
And I swear on my life, and
Arthur’s,
I will take you off the throne before I will let them feel the things you made me feel.”

The room hangs in suspense for a few agonizing seconds, then:

“I still don’t think—” Philip begins, but Bea seizes the pot of tea from the center of the table and dumps it into his lap.

“Oh, I’m
terribly
sorry, Pip!” she says, grabbing him by the shoulders and shoving him, sputtering and yelping, toward the door. “So
dreadfully
clumsy. You know, I think all that
cocaine
I did must have really done a job on my reflexes! Let’s go get you cleaned up, shall we?”

She heaves him out, throwing Henry a thumbs-up over her shoulder, and shuts the door behind them.

The queen looks over at Alex and Henry, and Alex sees it in her eyes at last: She’s afraid of them. She’s afraid of the threat they pose to the perfect Faberge veneer she’s spent her whole life maintaining. They
terrify
her.

And Catherine isn’t backing down.

“Well,” Queen Mary says. “I suppose. I suppose you don’t leave me much choice, do you?”

“Oh, you have a choice, Mum,” Catherine says. “You’ve always had a choice. Perhaps today you’ll make the right one.”

In the corridor of Buckingham Palace, as soon as the door has shut behind them, they fall sideways into a tapestry on a wall, breathless and delirious and laughing, cheeks wet. Henry pulls Alex close and kisses him, whispers, “I love you I love you I love you,” and it doesn’t matter, it
doesn’t matter
if anyone sees.

He’s on the way back to the airstrip when he sees it, emblazoned on the side of a brick building, a shock of color against a gray street.

“Wait!” Alex yells up to the driver. “Stop! Stop the car!”

Up close, it’s beautiful. Two stories tall. He can’t imagine how somebody was able to put together something like this so fast.

It’s a mural of himself and Henry, facing each other, haloed by a bright yellow sun, depicted as Han and Leia. Henry in all white, starlight in his hair. Alex dressed as a scruffy smuggler, a blaster at his hip. A royal and a rebel, arms around each other.

He snaps a photo on his phone, and fingers shaking, types out a tweet:
Never tell me the odds.

He calls June from the air over the Atlantic.

“I need your help,” he says.

He hears the click of her pen cocking on the other end of the line. “Whatcha got?”

FOURTEEN

Jezebel
@Jezebel

WATCH: DC Dykes on Bikes chase protesters from Westboro Baptist Church down Pennsylvania Avenue, and yes, it’s as amazing as it sounds. bit.ly/2ySPeRj

9:15 PM · 29 Sept 2020

The very first time Alex pulled up to Pennsylvania Avenue as the First Son of the United States, he almost fell into a bush.

He can remember it vividly, even though the whole day was surreal. He remembers the interior of the limo, how he was still unused to the way the leather felt under his clammy palms, still green and jittery and pressed too close to the window to look at all the crowds.

He remembers his mother, her long hair pulled back from
her face in an elegant, no-nonsense twist at the back of her head. She’d worn it down for her first day as mayor, her first day in the House, her first day as Speaker, but that day it was up. She said she didn’t want any distractions. He thought it made her look tough, like she was ready for a brawl if it came down to it, as if she might have a razor in her shoe. She sat there across from him, going over the notes for her speech, a twenty-four-karat gold American flag on her lapel, and Alex was so proud he thought he’d throw up.

There was a changeover at some point—Ellen and Leo escorted to the north entrance and Alex and June shuffled off in another direction. He remembers, very specifically, a handful of things. His cuff links, custom sterling silver X-wings. A tiny scuff in the plaster on a western wall of the White House, which he was seeing up close for the first time. His own shoelace, untied. And he remembers bending over to tie his shoe, losing his balance because of nerves, and June grabbing the back of his jacket to keep him from plunging face-first into a thorny rosebush in front of seventy-five cameras.

That was the moment he decided he wasn’t going to allow himself nerves ever again. Not as Alex Claremont-Diaz, First Son of the United States, and not as Alex Claremont-Diaz, rising political star.

Now, he’s Alex Claremont-Diaz, center of an international political sex scandal and boyfriend of a Prince of England, and he’s back in a limo on Pennsylvania Avenue, and there’s another crowd, and the imminent barf feeling is back.

When the car door opens, it’s June, standing there in a bright yellow T-shirt that says:
HISTORY, HUH?

“You like it?” she says. “There’s a guy selling them down the block. I got his card. Gonna put it in my next column for
Vogue.
”

Alex launches himself at her, engulfing her in a hug that lifts her feet off the ground, and she yelps and pulls his hair, and they topple sideways into a shrub, as Alex was always destined to do.

Their mother is in a decathlon of meetings, so they sneak out onto the Truman Balcony and catch each other up over hot chocolates and a plate of donuts. Pez has been trying to play telephone between the respective camps, but it’s only so effective. June cries first when she hears about the phone call on the plane, then again at Henry standing up to Philip, and a third time at the crowd outside Buckingham Palace. Alex watches her text Henry about a hundred heart emojis, and he sends her back a short video of himself and Catherine drinking champagne while Bea plays “God Save the Queen” on electric guitar.

“Okay, here’s the thing,” June says afterward. “Nobody has seen Nora in two days.”

Alex stares at her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’ve called her, Zahra’s called her, Mike and her parents have all called her, she’s not answering anyone. The guard at her apartment says she hasn’t left this whole time. Apparently, she’s ‘fine but busy.’ I tried just showing up, but she’d told the doorman not to let me in.”

“That’s … concerning. And also, uh, kind of shitty.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Alex turns away, pacing over to the railing. He really could have used Nora’s nonplussed approach in this situation, or, really, just his best friend’s company. He feels somewhat betrayed she’s abandoned him when he needs her most—when he and June
both
need her most. She has a tendency to bury herself in complex calculations on purpose when especially bad things happen around her.

“Oh, hey,” June says. “And here’s the favor you asked for.”

She reaches into the pocket of her jeans and hands him a folded-up piece of paper.

He skims the first few lines.

“Oh my God, Bug,” he says. “I— Oh my God.”

“Do you like it?” She looks a little nervous. “I was trying to capture, like, who you are, and your place in history, and what your role means to you, and—”

She’s cut off because he’s scooped her up in another bear hug, teary-eyed. “It’s perfect, June.”