Alexandra rode beside Erin. Their stirrups nearly touched. The horses walked in step, matching each other's rhythm the way their riders matched each other's breath, and the world beyond the estate, the press, the politics, the investigation, the constitutional implications of what had happened, all of it receded to the edge of awareness, held at a distance by the simple act of being outside on a beautiful morning with the people she loved.
Florence turned in her saddle and looked back at them. Her braid was coming undone again and her riding hat was slightly too big and her face was flushed from the sun and she was smiling, the wide, unguarded smile of a child who was on her pony and happy, and the sight of it was the most important thing Alexandra had ever seen. More important than the crown. More important than the throne. More important than every ceremony and every speech and every state dinner she had ever attended. This. Her daughter on a pony on a summer morning, smiling, safe, home.
"Race you to the oak tree!" Frank shouted, and kicked Captain into a fast trot, and Florence rolled her eyes and followed at a controlled canter because Florence did not race but she did not intend to be left behind, and Matilda sat on Bramble and watched them go with the serene expression of someone who would arrive when she arrived.
Alexandra laughed. The sound surprised her, it came out full and warm and real, the kind of laugh that used the whole body, and Erin looked at her and the look on Erin's face was the same look she'd given her on their wedding day.
"What?" Alexandra said.
"Nothing. I just missed that sound."
They rode on. Through the parkland and into the dappled shade of the woodland and out again into the sunlight of the ridge, where the world opened up below them: green fields and hedgerows and the distant silver thread of the river and the village with its church spire catching the light. The children stopped at the top and looked out and even Frank was quiet for a moment, held by the beauty of it, and the five of them sat on their horses on the ridge in the summer sun and the world was spread out before them like a gift.
"This is ours," Alexandra said. Not to anyone in particular. To the sky, maybe. To the land. To the morning itself, with itsgold light and its birdsong and its three children on ponies and its two horses standing side by side at the edge of the world. "All of this. And nobody can take it from us."
Florence turned in her saddle. "Mummy Alex, can we canter back?"
"If you're careful."
"I'm always careful."
"I know you are, darling."
Florence smiled. Percy's ears pricked forward. And then they were moving, all five of them, the ponies breaking into a canter and the horses following, the track opening up before them in a wide sweep of sand and sunlight, and the children were laughing and the hoofbeats were drumming and the wind was in Alexandra's face and in her hair and the world was beautiful and fast and full of the sound of her family being alive.
Erin reached across the space between their horses and took her hand, just for a moment, just long enough for their fingers to lock and squeeze and release, and they rode on, and the children's laughter drifted back on the warm air, and the day was theirs.
24
The bedroom was quiet and the evening was long and the children were asleep and Erin lay on the bed with her head on the pillow and listened to the sound of water running in the bathroom.
It was the first evening in over a week that had felt like evening, not like the space between one crisis and the next, not like the dark hours when the control room hummed and the phones rang and sleep was something that happened accidentally in stolen minutes on camp beds and car seats. This was evening. Actual evening. The windows were open and the summer air drifted in carrying the smell of the gardens: cut grass and jasmine and the faint, sweet scent of the honeysuckle that grew along the south wall. The bedroom was warm and soft and lamplit and the sheets were clean and the duvet was turned down and the house was still.
She could hear Alexandra in the shower. The rush of water against tile, the particular acoustics of their bathroom, the way the sound bounced off the stone walls and the glass screen and created a white noise that was specific to this room, to this house, to the private space they'd carved inside the publicinstitution they inhabited. Years of lying in this bed while Alexandra showered, the evening routine so deeply ingrained that her body relaxed to it the way it relaxed to nothing else.
She thought about the first time. Not the first time they'd had sex, although she certainly had fond memories of that after a night out disguised in soho. The sound she'd made when Erin's hand had found her hip. The way Alex had put her hand down her pants, touched herself and then put her fingers in Erin’s mouth, the taste of her desire so potent the Erin had no longer been able to avoid the thing that was building between them. The look in her eyes afterward, dazed and bright and completely, recklessly happy, that had told Erin, with a certainty she'd never experienced before, that this was not a passing thing. This was the thing. The thing her life had been pointing toward since before she'd known to look for it.
Not that first time. The other first time, the first time she'd lain in this bed, in this room, in the castle, and heard Alexandra in the shower and known that this was her home. It had been three weeks after the wedding. The castle staff had been formal and slightly bewildered, adjusting to the presence of a former protection officer in the Queen's private quarters. The bed had seemed enormous. The room had seemed designed for someone more important than her. The portraits on the walls had watched with the impassive gaze of ancestors who were waiting to see if this interloper deserved to be here. And then Alexandra had come out of the bathroom in a towel, her hair wet, her feet bare on the stone floor, and had smiled at her and saidMove over, Sergeant Kennedy,and the room had stopped being the Queen's bedroom and had become theirs.
She thought about other times. The night after Erin had come out of hospital, when Alexandra had held her so tightly that her bullet wound had ached and she hadn't said a word because being held was worth more than breathing. The nightafter the children were born, the three of them, early, high risk, and Florence- impossibly small, and Erin standing by the incubators at two in the morning watching them breathe and knowing, with a certainty that had remade her at a molecular level, that she would die for any of them without a second thought.
Many years now. Many years of this woman, this room, this life. And the last eight days had nearly taken all of it. The distance between them, the silence on the phone, theI have to gothat had meantI can't let you see me fall apart,the wall she'd built between herself and the woman who loved her, had been the most frightening part of the whole ordeal. Not the kidnapping itself, not the empty house at Latimer's, not even the long nights when the worst-case scenarios had played behind her eyelids like films she couldn't turn off. The distance. The feeling that the crisis was not just threatening Florence but threatening them, the foundation, the core, the thing that had started in that first day when Erin had taken the job protecting Princess Alexandra and grown into a marriage and a family and a life she would fight the entire world to keep.
She would not let that happen again. She would not build walls between herself and Alexandra. Not ever again.
The bathroom door opened.
Alexandra stood in the doorway. Wrapped in a white towel, her hair damp against her shoulders, her skin flushed from the heat of the water, her bare feet on the stone floor. The lamp on the nightstand caught the droplets of water on her collarbones and turned them to gold, and the towel was wrapped loosely around her body, not tucked tight the way she normally wore it but held in one hand at her chest, the fabric parting at her thigh, showing the long line of her leg from hip to ankle.
She was looking at Erin. Not the exhausted, worried look of the past week. Not the measured, regal look of the Queenmanaging a crisis. She was looking at Erin the way she'd looked at her that night they got back from their secret outing to Soho years ago, direct, certain, her blue eyes carrying an invitation that was not a question.
"You're staring," Alexandra said.
"You're worth staring at."
"I've just had a shower. I'm dripping on the floor. My hair's a mess."
"Your hair's always a mess after a shower. I've always liked it."
