A few men might have looked for me to dance, but I avoided them all with the expertise of someone who knows a subpoena is coming, dodging everyone like they’re potential process servers.
“Not quite used to sea travel?”he asks.
“No.”
“That must make the voyages between India, America and England torture.”His tone isn’t accusatory, but the statement tells me I’m being suspicious again.Or “curious,” as he likes to call me.
And I can’t exactly tell him that I’m not used to boats because I travel on planes.
“My body adapts eventually during a trip and then immediately forgets everything it learned about the motion of the ocean about ten seconds after I’m back on dry land.”I do always get butterflies in my stomach when I take off and land in planes, no matter how many times I fly.That must be the same principal.
“Let’s get you seated.There is a topside lounge.If you can make it another twenty feet.”
“I’ll manage.”But I tighten my hand around his bicep anyway.For stability.Completely ignoring the smooth wooden railings along the luxury boat.
Leo opens the door to the lounge, and I brush past him to get inside, followed by Anne, who has been following me like a shadow.There are a few members of the royal household already in the lounge, and they give us judgmental looks but return to their conversations.
I sit down on the closest surface, a blue tufted bench.The same bench goes along the entire edge of the room, with a gleaming wooden dining table in the middle.Windows cover the walls above the couches, so I can still enjoy the view while not being sprayed by the sea.
If only my stomach wasn’t trying to stage a rebellion to rival the one that happened in the US in 1775.Instead, I lean back and close my eyes as Leo sits down next to me.
“It will not be a long trip, Your Highness.”
It’s so weird to be addressed as a princess.And reminds me that I’m a liar.“Thanks.But please call me Meera.”
“That’s very familiar.”
“I’m odd, remember?”
“Not odd.But curious, I would say.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Odd implies something I should probably avoid.Curious makes me want to investigate further.”
His voice is low when he says that, making me strain to hear him over the water crashing against the side of the boat.Sitting down, I feel stable enough to raise my head, open my eyes, and look at him again.
He’s looking back at me, attentive even though I was practically having a nap on the bench.His wavy hair looks especially soft in the filtered light of the lounge, making me want to run my hand through it not only to see how soft it is, but to watch it move and bounce as I straighten it then let it go.Right now it’s flopping over one eye.Rakishly.A fitting attribute for my first ever, real life rake.
It's no longer just a concept I’ve read about in historic romances.
“I want to know more about you,” he says.“The truth.Where you are from.What you do there.How you think.You already know everything there is to know about me.Anything worth reporting in the papers, at any rate.”The last two sentences are said in a tone so bitter it gives me whiplash from the cheerful, demanding tone of the first few.And from his generalI love lifeoutlook.
But my real story would make his head explode.“There’s more to people than what’s fit for newspapers.”
It’s why I love diaries so much.The big events are reported in history, written about and analyzed by contemporaries and modern historians.But in a diary, I get to see what someone actually thought when no one else was looking, about every day, ordinary subjects.It’s intimate.It makes me feel close to them.
Not too many people keep them.Not even me, even though I’ve started one approximately twelve times at various stages of my life, never to be kept up for more than a few weeks each time.I should probably start one now.Except if someone read it, I would be locked away.Maybe not then.
But I don’t just want to know about the big moments in famous people’s lives.I want to connect to those people, see how they thought about what was happening to them.Get a peek into what their daily life looked like.Ideally, I would be able to read them from more people in the past, from the aristocrat who lived in the country house, to the builder who built it, to the maid who worked in it, to the coal miner who supplied fuel for it.But it doesn’t really work that way, unfortunately.
“It is the only thing that lasts.”
“Maybe.”This historian can’t argue with that.“But who cares what people a hundred, or even two hundred, years from now think?The people who are close to you know you in a way the papers never will.And that’s special too.”
“I want to know you.”
He’s persistent.Not so much of a careless rake then.“I’m a scholar.I study history and then write about it and teach it.”There, I can give him part of my story, without any unnecessary details.Like geography, or time period.
