The room settled back into its terrible quiet. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked. The labradors had come inside and werelying by the door with their chins on the threshold, watching the corridor as though waiting for Florence to walk down it. Audrey let out a long, low sigh that carried the weight of the entire room.
Julia's phone rang again. She answered it, listened for a moment, and her expression shifted, not alarm, not relief, but something attentive and cautious. She lowered the phone and looked at Alexandra.
"That was security. Charlotte Langford is at the gate. She's asking to see you."
"The Prime Minister?" Alexandra's voice was hoarse. She hadn't spoken to Charlotte since the cabinet briefing last week, a formal meeting, polite and professional, in which they'd discussed education funding and neither of them had mentioned the fact that they were two of the most powerful women in the country and both of them were gay, which was a thing the papers loved to write about and neither of them liked to acknowledge.
"She's been briefed on the situation. She wanted to come in person." Julia paused. "You don't have to see her. I can send her away."
Alexandra considered this. The effort of meeting anyone right now was almost more than she could bear. The idea of composing her face, of standing up, of being the Queen when she was barely managing to be a person. But Charlotte had come. Had driven from London to the castle estate, past the security cordons and the media vans that were undoubtedly already gathering at the gates, to be here.
"Let her in," Alexandra said. She wiped her face with the back of her hand and took a breath that shuddered going in and came out steadier. It wasn't composure. It was survival.
Julia spoke quietly into the phone and within minutes the door opened and Charlotte Langford entered the room. She was taller than Alexandra remembered, her silver-blonde hair in its usual precise chignon, wearing a dark navy suit that she'dprobably been wearing in her office when the call came. Her face was studiously neutral but her grey eyes were sharp, taking in the scene with the rapid assessment of a politician who had spent decades reading rooms.
Vic rose from her armchair. "Come on, you lot," she said to the children, her voice rough and bright with false cheer. "Let's go and take the dogs out to the garden."
Frank looked at Alexandra. She nodded, and he reluctantly untangled himself from her side. Matilda took longer, her fingers clinging to Alexandra's hand before finally releasing. Hyzenthlay stood and walked to the door with the quiet dignity of a child who understood that the adults needed the room. She paused at the threshold and looked back at Alexandra with those observant hazel eyes, and the look said something that Alexandra would remember later. Something like:I'm watching. I notice things.
Then the children were gone and it was just Alexandra and Julia and Charlotte.
Alexandra didn't stand. She didn't offer her hand. She didn't do any of the things that protocol required when the Prime Minister entered a room occupied by the Sovereign. She sat on the sofa with tear tracks on her face and Audrey at her feet and the hollow space where her children had been pressed against her sides, and she looked at Charlotte Langford and said nothing.
Charlotte sat in the chair Vic had vacated. She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees, hands clasped, and when she spoke her voice was stripped of its usual political precision and was something simpler. Something human.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry this has happened to your family."
"Thank you."
"I want you to know that every resource available to the government is being directed towards finding Florence. MI5, the police, GCHQ. Everything. We will find her."
"You can't promise that."
Charlotte held her gaze. "No. I can't. But I can promise you that I will treat this with the gravity it deserves and I will not stop until we have an answer."
Something loosened in her chest. Not relief. Nothing close to relief. But the recognition that Charlotte Langford was not performing concern. She was sitting in a room with a woman whose child was missing and she was being genuine, and the rarity of that in Alexandra's world was enough to make her eyes burn all over again.
"Thank you, Charlotte." Alexandra's voice cracked on the name and she didn't try to fix it. "I don't know if I'm handling this well. I don't know what I'm supposed to do."
"There is no supposed to," Charlotte said. "Your daughter has been taken. There is no protocol for this. There is only what you can bear and what needs to be done, and I am here to help with the second part."
Julia took charge. She moved from the arm of the sofa to the chair beside the fireplace and her manner shifted from comforter to strategist, the way it always did when decisions needed making. "We need to address the public. The media is already speculating. Three news vans at the gate, two helicopters overhead. Social media is alive with rumours. If we don't get ahead of this in the next hour, the narrative will run away from us."
Charlotte nodded. "Agreed. A controlled statement from the family is essential. Silence will be read as weakness or panic."
"I can make the statement," Julia said, looking at Alexandra. "On your behalf. The public will understand?—"
"No." Alexandra heard the word leave her own mouth before she'd consciously decided. It rose from somewhere below the grief, below the fear, from the same place that had carried her through years of public life, through assassination attempts and Cecilia's cruelty and the press and the endless, exhausting performance of being Queen. "I should do it."
Julia and Charlotte exchanged a glance. Julia leaned forward. "Alex, are you sure? You don't?—"
"She's my daughter. I'll make the statement."
Julia studied her, then nodded. "All right. It needs to be within the hour. I'll coordinate with the broadcast team. We can do it from the library. The backdrop is appropriate and the lighting is good." She paused, her warm brown eyes holding Alexandra's with that particular steadiness that meant she was about to say something important. "You need to be strong, Alex. The country needs to see their Queen standing firm. But they also need to see a mother. Don't hide the fear. Don't hide the love. Let them see that you're human and that you're fighting. Can you do that?"
The impossible weight of it settled on her shoulders. The dual requirement that had defined her entire reign: be the Queen, be the mother. Perform strength while living through terror. Look into a camera and ask a nation to help find her child while knowing that the child she was asking about was eight years old and had been too afraid to sleep last night because her grandmother had told her that some Queens don't last.
Cecilia's words echoed in her head. She pushed them away. Not now. Later. Later she would think about what Cecilia had done and what Cecilia might be doing now and the cold, creeping suspicion that had been forming in her gut since Vic burst through the terrace door. Right now she had to be the Queen.
