The problem is, it can be hard to remember that. Which is how I got myself into trouble.
A text comes through: TIME IS RUNNING OUT.
With a thump Lacey bursts into my room, atypically ashen considering how much money she spends never to be that color. I am so startled to see her that I can only blink as she slams the door and leans breathlessly against it. She feels so far away from me even though she’s standing right here.
“I did something,” Lacey begins, not quite making eye contact.
So did I, but of course she already knows that. Once upon a time, I would ask for her help, us against the world. Now, it’s her against me, and the world probably will pick her side.
I might be Cinderella today, but I dread who they’ll think I am tomorrow. I guess it depends on what I do next.
Part One
Autumn 2007
“O then ’tis! O then, I think no joy’s above
The pleasures, the pleasures of love.”
—King Charles II, “The Pleasures of Love”
Chapter One
If you believe my unauthorized biography, The Bexicon, Nick fell in love with me at a pub on my first night at Oxford, and angels burst into song while rose petals fell from the sky:
The King’s Arms was packed with reveling youngsters hungry for one last bit of mischief before the new term. But Rebecca Porter radiated a halo of confidence and serenity, modestly leaning against the back wall, holding a ladylike half-pint she would only sip twice. “Bex was never a drinker,” a friend says. “She knew how to have a laugh, but you’d never find her dancing on a table to impress people.” Indeed, the more he watched the seraphic American student—diffident and humble in sweetly vintage clothes surely destined for the Victoria and Albert Museum—the more Nicholas knew he had to claim her. He had found someone special. He had found his queen.
Complete fiction. In fact, the whole book is so inaccurately gushy that I often wonder if the author is on Queen Eleanor’s payroll. The week it was published, we were in Spain at what everyone refers to as “Prince Richard’s cabin”—Nick’s father’s coastal spread with fourteen bedrooms and its own vanity winery—and Nick laughed so raucously when I read this section aloud that his aunt Agatha, a full fifty yards away, jumped and dropped her gin and tonic.
“Are you sure it doesn’t say, ‘You’d never not find her dancing on a table’?” he’d asked. “Isn’t that more accurate?”
“I am not table dancing right now.”
“Pity,” he grinned, raising his scotch to me.
“There’s still time,” Nick’s younger brother, Freddie, had said from his deck chair. “In fact, Agatha over there could use some pointers. I don’t think she’s had any fun since she married Awful Julian.”
In reality, Agatha does occasionally have fun, though usually only when needling her boozy bounder of a husband about how his ancient father refuses to die (and thus hand down his viscountcy). Nick and I never went to The King’s Arms, because pubs with royal nomenclature make him self-conscious. And when fate pushed a prince into my path, my hair was dirty, I smelled like the canned air of the Virgin Atlantic plane that had deposited me at Heathrow, and my jeans and sailor-striped T-shirt could only be classified as vintage because of their extreme age. Aurelia Maupassant, author of The Bexicon, would be crushed.
* * *
When we were small, Lacey and I would sneak flashlights under the covers to read aloud from books about plucky British kids, their boarding-school hijinks, and their ill-fated wartime love affairs. Lacey was obsessed with the swoony kissing parts, but what stuck with me was a different kind of romanticism—the sense of epic sprawl compressed onto a small island that positively burst with art, antiquities, and history hiding in plain sight. I itched to inhale it, to live it, to sketch it all. So when I found out Cornell could do an exchange with the University of Oxford, I applied about five minutes later. Oxford didn’t sound as overwhelming as London, yet every photo I saw of its glorious collage of buildings—never quite new, so much as old, older, and oldest—promised it would be an artist’s dream. The tour guides tell you to try every door you find because it just might open, and it feels true; there are still quaintly cobbled streets with perfect, petite gardens behind wrought iron gates, and its picturesque nooks and crannies all but vibrate with centuries of secrets waiting to be unearthed. Its mystery, its age, its textures…Oxford is in all ways the opposite of Muscatine, my rural Iowa hometown (or even the bucolic North Atlantic beauty of Cornell), and for me it was perfect. I didn’t come to England to fall in love with anything but England. I didn’t come to get married. I came to draw. I came to be inspired. I came for adventure.
I suppose I got it.
Oxford’s student body trickles in as many as two weeks before the beginning of the new term—the crew team needs to adjust its sleep cycle just as much as a jet-lagged American does—so I arrived late on a mid-September afternoon with about ten days to unpack, recalibrate, and explore. The academic colleges there function like mini-universities under the Oxford umbrella—as if my old Cornell dorm also had its own professors and classrooms—and I had been accepted to live and study in one called Pembroke. It was smaller than some of the other thirty-seven dotted around town, and its lack of notoriety may directly correlate to being right across the street from the imposing, absurdly famous Christ Church college. We lived in its shadows—literally, come late afternoon—and during my year there, when the omnipresent red tour bus stopped to point out the historic building that was in the Harry Potter movies and observes its own time zone, the guide wouldn’t even so much as glance across the street. Now, Pembroke is the main stop on the Royal Romance tour, which leaves from the train station every forty-five minutes. According to Gaz, who took it six months ago on a lark, it’s almost as fictional as The Bexicon. He cried anyway.
A light drizzle was falling that first day as I hauled two giant suitcases, a laptop bag, and my purse up the cobblestone road toward Pembroke’s main entrance. My suitcase kept catching a wheel and flipping over, twisting my wrist and causing my shoulder bags to whack me in the leg; by the time I reached the door, I was panting and had slim rivulets of rain dribbling down my nose. I rang twice for the porter and cursed loudly when no one answered. It had been a plane, train, and automobile odyssey to get me from Des Moines to that front stoop. I was cold, wet, and exhausted, and, from what I could tell, my deodorant had not stood up to the journey.
I buzzed again. The door opened and a tall, sandy-haired guy poked out his head.
“Need a hand?”
“Oh, please. Yes. Thank you.”
He held up a stern palm. “Wait, how do I know you’re supposed to be here? I heard you swearing. Foul language doesn’t befit an Oxford student.”
I stammered an apology until I noticed he was grinning.
“I’m joking,” he said. “You’re Rebecca. I was told you’d be coming.” He widened the door and came through to get my bags. “The porter is very protective of his tea break, so I said I’d sit in and look out for you.”