The Heir Affair

headlines read, as if he were telling a bad joke over a whiskey. I snorted derisively.
I knew I should stop reading. But on the internet, you are only ever a few easy clicks from a horror show, and I could not turn away from mine. One story about Freddie at the opening of a distillery had me studying his face again for signs of stress, and that led me to an older one theorizing that he was drowning his sorrows in socialites. Another click took me to a report that Queen Eleanor might exile us. The tabloids had pulled whatever photos they had of me and Freddie and turned their body-language experts loose to find proof that he was checking me out, or vice versa. I fell further and further down the wormhole, all the way back to those grainy early morning photos of Freddie leaving my apartment, which Clive had used to bolster his claim of an affair. Eventually, I landed on the BBC’s video of my entire wedding—right down to its abysmal end. I’d never seen it. Why would I have? I’d lived it.
I hit play.
Everything started out brilliantly. The commentators lapped up the décor, swooned over my dress, and—in a twist of dramatic irony I would find delicious if it were on one of my soap operas—extolled me as a perfect future queen.
“She looks stunning,” the BBC lip-reader caught Freddie saying to Nick as I came up the aisle. “You’re a lucky man.”
(That explained the headline of one of Clive’s pieces from the aftermath, ‘LUCKY NICK,’ SAYS TRICKY PRICK.)
You could pinpoint the second the news broke, even before the lead commentator’s sharp intake of breath. Nick and I had emerged from signing the register behind the altar when, amid the choir’s gorgeous elegy to our love, a light murmur started to creep through the Abbey.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the commentator said, “we’ve received word of the most astonishing story…”
As I curtsied to the Queen, you could see from above how many people had ignored the directive to switch off their cell phones. Their screens lit up one after the other, sweeping like fire all the way down the pews of the church, apace with the realization I remembered washing over me with every step toward the Abbey door: Clive had called our bluff. Or maybe we’d called his.
Reflexively, I hit mute to see, rather than hear, the next part. Incredibly, our veneer never visibly faltered. If you had somehow missed the headline OPEN-DOOR DUCHESS: BEX SCANDAL BLINDSIDES BUCKINGHAM, or slept on the Mirror’s poetic FREDDIE NICKS NICK’S BRIDE, then you’d have assumed our happy ending was delivered on schedule. The newly minted duke and duchess, who seemed a lifetime removed from me and Nick even though it had been only about six weeks, emerged into the soundless streets of London as if nothing were the matter. We waved. We held hands. As we climbed into the carriage and began the journey to Buckingham Palace through what were meant to be adoring crowds, Nick even held mine aloft and kissed it. He had suffered the most in all this and yet he’d been the perfect gentleman. As a silent film, it was flawless.
But with the sound on…
Nick poked his head into the bedroom, and I stabbed at the pause button. “Ready yet? I’ve got the picnic packed.” He studied my face. “You look pale. Are you feeling all right?”
“Nothing a little vitamin D won’t fix,” I said, smiling as brightly as I could. “I’m finishing up a note to Mom.”
“Ah. Tell Nancy about those muffins I accidentally set on fire. She’ll like that,” he said, and then off he went, whistling anew.
Don’t do it. This is insane. Do not.
My lip trembled. I didn’t need to hear this again; it was seared into me already. I could just follow Nick into the living room and forget this whole thing. But my disobedient hands were already rewinding the video and unmuting it. And there it was, clear as a bell. The woman right opposite the Abbey doors—sporting a Union Jack top hat and caricature of my face on her T-shirt—had started it, her face purple and contorted with rage.
“Slut!”
Her loud, angry braying had spread like a virus through the crowd. Until that day, I’d never personally experienced real booing outside of a baseball stadium. The verbal battery, fully audible on this worldwide TV broadcast, was exactly as I’d remembered it—every sound, every screed, every epithet spit at me from a frothing spectator, a wave of furious words crashing together amid the clip-clop of the horses drawing our carriage. Anyone not booing us just looked broken. Confused. Betrayed. A nation’s worth of what I’d seen on Nick’s face one day prior.
I sat back on the bed and hugged my knees to my chest. The truth was so much more nuanced than Clive or anyone else cared to communicate. But nuance wasn’t worth a damn. No one cares if a future duchess feels isolated by her new global notoriety or about the loss of personal liberty that comes with it. They would hardly cry me a river over how badly I’d missed Nick while he was on his Naval deployments, or the way my relationship with Lacey had been poisoned by the chokehold my love life put on my family. I’d spun out, and Freddie—the spare, adrift in his own way—had caught me, and tried to offer an answer. Running away together would save us both, he promised. But the tug of my love for Freddie was outmatched by the pull of being in love with Nick. Freddie had slunk out of my apartment, our tryst over before it ever began, unwittingly giving a waiting Clive the photographic ammo he needed.
As far as the public was concerned, however, the picture was clear: The Duchess of Clarence had cheated on her duke with his beloved baby brother. The fairy tale was a falsehood. The people had been sold a bill of goods, and they