Red, White & Royal Blue: Chapters 12–15

Henry lands in the middle of the night and isn’t even allowed to come near the Residence, instead sequestered in a hotel across town.

“Don’t condescend to me. You know as much as anyone what I’m capable of, what I’ve seen. If you told me, I would get it.”

He’s so close he’s practically breathing Luna’s reeking cigarette smoke, and when he looks into his face, there’s a flicker of recognition at the bloodshot, blackened eyes and the gaunt cheekbones.

cool waters and a shore of white chalk. the ancient part of you carved out of stone in a prayerful circle, sacrosanct.

i get the nomenclature now—saints’ names belong to miracles.

Her jaw is set, ironclad.

It’s the game face he’s seen her use to stare down Congress, to cow autocrats.

The full email transcripts have been uploaded to WikiLeaks under the moniker “The Waterloo Letters," seemingly named for a reference to the Waterloo Vase in the Buckingham Palace Gardens in one email composed by Prince Henry.

“Setting aside the ramifications for President Claremont's ability to be impartial on issues of both international relations and traditional family values,” Republican presidential candidate Senator Jeffrey Richards said at a press conference earlier today, “I’m extremely concerned about this private email server. What kind of information was being disseminated on this server?”

Amy walks him through the colonnade and up the stairs, saying nothing, and when they reach the hallway between the East and West Bedrooms, he sees them.

There’s nothing that wasn’t laid out in there: Henry being gay, Bea going to rehab, the queen tacitly keeping Henry in the closet.

“I told you to stay away—” Bea is saying as soon as the door is open, brandishing a guitar over her shoulder.

Philip drove in from Anmer Hall the minute the news broke and has been rebuffed by Bea every time he tries to get near Henry for what he says “will simply be a stern discussion about the consequences of his actions.”

Six feet of boy curled around kicked-in ribs and a recalcitrant heart.

That’s beyond our sense of decorum!

Shaan and Zahra’s forces combined have managed to secure them a meeting with the queen at Buckingham Palace, but they’ve been told to take a winding, circumspect route to avoid the paparazzi.

“I’m afraid I am too old to understand how things are filed away in space,” she goes on, “but I have been told any number of lies can be manufactured and disseminated. One could...create files that never existed and plant them somewhere easy to find. None of it real. The most flagrant of evidence can be discredited and dismissed, just like that.”

The queen holds up one wizened hand to silence her.

"...Why you have chosen to undermine the hard work I’ve done to maintain the crown’s standing is beyond me, and why you seem set on disrupting my efforts to restore it by demanding I summit with some...boy”—here, a nasty lilt to her polite tone, under which Alex can hear epithets for everything from his race to his sexuality—“when you were told to await orders, is truly a mystery..."

My position is unchanged, dear: Your role in this family is to perpetuate our bloodline and maintain the appearance of the monarchy as the ideal of British excellence, and I simply cannot allow anything less.

“Well,” the queen eventually says. She’s holding her teacup daintily in the air, eyeing Henry over it. “Even if you’re willing to submit to the flogging in the papers, it doesn’t erase the stipulations of your birthright: You are to produce heirs.”

“Are those details pertinent right now, Philip?”

“Someone has to bear the stewardship for the royal legacy, Mum.”

“The country simply will not accept a prince of his proclivities. I am sorry, dear, but to them, it’s perverse.”

“The country simply will not accept a prince of his proclivities. I am sorry, dear, but to them, it’s perverse.”

“Of course they do, Mum. Of course the bloody Tories in Kensington and the Brexit fools don’t want it. That’s not the point. Are you so determined to believe nothing could change? That nothing should change? We can have a real legacy here, of hope, and love, and change. Not the same tepid...drudgery we’ve been selling since World War II—”

“I’m sixty years old, Mum,” Catherine says. “Can’t we eschew decorum at this point?”

He really could have used Nora’s nonplussed approach in this situation, or, really, just his best friend’s company.

Basically, Richards hired a firm that hired the photographers who followed Alex and the hackers who breached your server, and then he hired another third party to buy everything and resell it to the Daily Mail. I mean, we’re talking about having private contractors surveil a member of the First Family and infiltrate White House security...

I'm Oliver Westbrook, and with me, as always, is my exceedingly patient, talented, merciful, and lovely producer, Sufia, without whom I would be lost, bereft, floating on a sea of bad thoughts...

But the truth is, also, simply this: love is indomitable.

“Like a common vagrant?” Queen Mary asked.

“Beatrice," Henry admonishes. “It was going to be a surprise.”

“—become a badass civil rights attorney with an illustrious Captain America-esque career of curb-stomping discriminatory laws and fighting for the disenfranchised—”

The whole half-Mexican, all Democrat thing. There’s a very loud contingent there that does not like me and does not want me to represent them.

She grabs his face in both hands and squishes it, and he groans but doesn’t push her off. “So, like. You want to throw out some contingency plans? You want me to run some projections?”

“I just. I need you to help me rewrite this speech for, uh.” There’s a considerable pause. “Well. Just in case of concession.”

The magic comes in a nervous trickle—Henry’s tie, hopeful lilts in voices, a few stray bits of confetti that escape the nets laced through the rafters and get stuck in Nora’s hair—and then, all at once.

“Of course I did,” Liam says, grinning. Beside him, there’s a cute guy grinning too. “I mean, it kind of seemed like the Secret Service were gonna come requisition me from my apartment if I didn’t come.”

“I didn’t mean to remediate me!”