They dressed. Alexandra helped Florence with her jodhpurs, the pair from the back of the wardrobe, the ones with theembroidered initials that Erin had ordered from the saddler in the village, and brushed her hair and re-plaited it, and the act of braiding Florence's hair was so ordinary and so precious that her hands trembled and she had to pause and breathe and press her lips against the top of Florence's head before she could continue.
Erin met them in the corridor, dressed in riding clothes: breeches, boots, a dark green shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. Her hair was pulled back in a low ponytail and she looked like herself again, or a version of herself that Alexandra hadn't seen in over a week: relaxed, present, inhabiting her body rather than driving it. The tactical coldness was gone. The operational mask was gone. The woman walking toward them in the corridor was Erin, just Erin, and Alexandra's heart did the thing it always did when Erin appeared looking like this, which was to fill so completely that there was no room for anything else.
They walked to the stables together. All five of them, through the kitchen garden where the lavender was in full bloom and the bees were working the flowers with the industrious focus of creatures who had no interest in human crises, past the walled garden where the roses were heavy-headed in the morning sun, along the path that wound through the orchard with its twisted apple trees and the dappled light falling through the leaves. The children ran ahead: Frank sprinting, Florence jogging, Matilda walking quickly with the air of someone who refused to run but intended to arrive at the same time as everyone else.
"How do you feel?" Erin asked. She was walking beside Alexandra, their shoulders nearly touching, their strides matched in the automatic way that years of walking together had calibrated.
"Strange. Light. Like something's been removed. Something I've been carrying for so long that I'd forgotten it was there."
"Something has been removed."
"I keep expecting to feel devastated. About Cecilia. About cutting her off. I keep waiting for the grief to arrive, for it to hit me in the middle of something ordinary, the way grief does.”
"That might still happen."
"It might. But right now?—"
"Right now, you feel lighter."
"Maybe." Alexandra watched Florence disappear around the corner of the stable block, her braid swinging, her riding boots too big for her. "But right now I don't feel grief. I feel, relief. Is that terrible? To feel relieved that my mother is gone?"
Erin stopped walking. She turned to face Alexandra and her green eyes were steady and serious and full of something that was not pity but understanding, the deep, earned understanding of a woman who had watched Cecilia's effect on Alexandra for so long and had waited, patiently and not so patiently, for this moment.
"It's not terrible. It's honest. Cecilia has been emotionally and psychologically abusive your whole life. The guilt, the manipulation, the gaslighting, the constant message that you weren't good enough, you've been carrying that your whole life. You're not relieved that your mother is gone. You're relieved that the person who was hurting you can't reach you anymore. Those are different things."
Alexandra's eyes burned. She blinked and the tears didn't fall, not because she was holding them back but because they had not yet decided to fall, hovering at the edge, waiting for the right moment. "She was my mother. Whatever else she was, whatever she did, whatever she became, she was my mother. The first person I ever loved. The first person who was supposed to love me back. And I wanted so badly for her to be different. Every year, every Christmas, every birthday, every crisis, I kept thinking,This will be the time. This will be the moment she chooses me over the institution, me over her ambitions, meover her idea of what the monarchy should be.I wanted her to love me the way I love our children, without conditions, without strategy, without keeping score."
"I know."
"The last thing I wanted was to cut contact. I spent my whole life trying to earn something from her that she was never going to give me. And now it's over, and I feel, I feel free. And the freedom feels awful and wonderful at the same time and I don't know what to do with it."
Erin took her hand. The bandaged one, the damaged one, the hand that had split itself open against a wall because the fury of losing Florence had needed somewhere to go. She held Alexandra's hand with that damaged hand and the warmth of her palm and the roughness of the bandage and the careful way she curled her swollen fingers around Alexandra's was the most tender thing Alexandra had ever felt.
"You don't have to do anything with it. Not today. Today you ride with your children and you let the sun warm your face and you don't think about Cecilia or Arthur or any of it. Today is just a day. The first normal day we've had in over a week. Let it be normal."
Alexandra squeezed her hand. The tears came then, not a flood, not a breakdown, but three or four quiet tears that slipped down her cheeks and were dried by the breeze before they reached her chin. She let them fall. She didn't wipe them away. They were not grief tears. They were the tears of someone putting down a weight she'd carried for forty-four years and feeling, for the first time, how heavy it had been.
"When did you get wise?"
"I've always been wise. You were just too busy running a country to notice."
They reached the stables. The children were already there: Frank struggling with his riding hat while the groom tried tohelp, Florence standing beside Percy with her hand on his neck, speaking to him in the low, serious voice she used with animals, Matilda already mounted on Bramble, sitting straight in the saddle with her heels down and her hands quiet in the way that Vic had taught her. The ponies were glossy and groomed, their tack polished, their ears pricked forward with the alert interest of animals who knew a ride was coming.
Sebastian had lost a shoe, the grooms explained apologetically, so Alexandra's horse today was a grey mare named Juniper, small, beautiful and the grooms assured her that Juniper would look after her. Alex didn’t mind one bit, she was happy to take to take Juniper.
Erin's horse was a young dark bay gelding named Fortitude, Fort for short, who had been Erin's favourite horse recently and who matched his rider in temperament: strong, direct and slightly impatient.
They mounted. The groom held Juniper's head while Alexandra settled into the saddle and adjusted her stirrups and gathered the reins, and the familiar sequence of movements: the slight rise onto the balls of her feet, the settling of her weight into the saddle, the opening of her hips around the barrel of the horse, was so deeply embedded in her muscle memory that her body performed it without thought. The familiar feeling of the horse beneath her: the warmth, the gentle movement of the walk, the creak of leather and the smell of horse and hay and the particular scent of saddle soap that always made her think of her own fond memories of childhood.
"Ready?" Erin said from Fort's back.
"Ready."
They rode out. Through the stable yard with its cobblestones and its hanging baskets of trailing geraniums, past the kitchen garden where the gardener was already at work and raised a hand in greeting, and onto the bridleway that curved along theedge of the estate, the wide, sandy track that wound through open parkland and ancient woodland and eventually led to the ridge above the valley where you could see for miles in every direction. Alexandra had ridden this track a thousand times. In rain and snow and the blinding green of spring, in autumn when the leaves turned the woodland to fire, in winter when the bare branches made the sky look shattered. But she had never ridden it with quite this sense of purpose: not riding to exercise or to escape or to think, but riding to be here, in this body, on this horse, with these people, on this morning.
The children went first: Florence on Percy, steady and careful, her small hands quiet on the reins the way Vic had taught her, Frank on his pony Captain ahead of everyone because Frank was constitutionally incapable of not being first, and Matilda on Bramble at a pace that suggested Bramble was in no hurry and Matilda had no intention of arguing with her.
The sun was warm on Alexandra's shoulders. The air smelled of grass and warm earth and horse and the sweet, green scent of the hedgerows in summer. Birds sang from the tree line: blackbirds and thrushes and the high, trilling call of a skylark somewhere above them, invisible against the bright sky. The horses' hooves made soft, rhythmic sounds on the sandy track and the only other sounds were the children's voices, carrying back on the breeze, arguing cheerfully about the route.
