Battle Royal by Lucy Parker

Chapter Fifteen

The road to Primrose Cottage the even more twee Petunia Park.

Shorter than the road to Calvary.

But with Pet along for the ride, it doesn’t necessarily feel like it.

Sylvie was becomingincreasingly fond of Pet. Dominic’s sister was a sweetheart. A cheeky, cheerful soul with a razor-sharp brain. Despite the ten-year difference in their ages, she could foresee the development of a solid friendship.

However, she was also beginning to appreciate Dominic’s point about the book recapping.

For all her many delightful qualities, Pet did not possess an appreciation for restful silence. Any pause in conversation seemed to rattle her completely. Sylvie suspected it was situation specific, Pet’s transparent desperation to bond with Dominic emerging as relentless chatter. She was entirely sympathetic to both De Veres, and a psychologist would undoubtedly find the whole situation fascinating. However, she’d spent the past ten minutes mentally designing a pair of invisible noise-canceling headphones.

She’d been given to understand, through Dominic’s absinthe-slurred whinge, that Pet was reading romance novels. Sylvie also enjoyed romance novels. Sylvie would fucking love to hear every last nuance of a romance novel right now. Unfortunately, the book club Pet had joined over the summer—and Sylvie could now recite the names, occupations, and personality quirks of all twelve members—had since moved on to a painstakingly graphic horror novel.

Although she’d mostly recovered from the food poisoning, Sylvie was now feeling slightly carsick. Her stomach was not ready for detailed descriptions of seeping wounds and wiggling maggots, especially recounted with a Pet level of enthusiasm. Despite numerous interruptions from Dominic’s GPS app and the competition of the rain pounding the car windows, the gore from the back seat continued on and on. And if Sylvie was keeping track, they’d only reached chapter eight in the narrative.

A particularly twisty turn in the road coincided with an anecdote about severed heads, and she had to physically gulp. Dominic briefly took his gaze from the unfamiliar country lane and glanced at her.

“Pet, Sylvie’s still not feeling a hundred percent,” he said, taking one hand off the steering wheel to touch hers. She immediately twisted their fingers together. “Cool it with the blood and gore, all right?”

The rough pads of his fingers were gentle on her skin. Multiple times a day, she was still struck by the fact that she was holding hands with Dominic, kissing Dominic, having sex with Dominic.

With each passing second, every part of this had started to feel irrevocable.

And it no longer seemed so strange or unbelievable. Still surprising, definitely not the path she’d imagined her life would take, but a bit wonderful, really. Turning her head and looking at him now, the familiar stubble shadow on his jaw, the bump on the bridge of his nose, the thick, endearingly stubby eyelashes, she was overwhelmed by a sudden surge of feeling. Bubbling joy, possessiveness, protectiveness, lust, a thousand emotions all in a jumble.

Impulsively, she raised their joined hands to her lips and kissed his thumb. His grip tightened, and a strong flash of heat lit his mismatched dark eyes.

“Oh. Sorry.” Pet’s chastened tone brought her back to the reality of their surroundings, the stuffy interior of the car, the endless winding Oxfordshire lanes. The property formerly known as Primrose Cottage appeared to be located in a rural labyrinth.

“Petunia Park must be quite a drive for its aspiring artists,” Pet commented after a twenty-second silence, shifting onto Sylvie’s own train of thought. “Perfect love nest for a clandestine royal romance, though.”

Dominic released her hand to make a sharp turn in the road, and Sylvie rubbed at the foggy side window with her sleeve. She couldn’t see far beyond the glass, but the sporadic cottages and gardens they passed appeared to be thatched and pretty. It was a scene of quiet serenity and must be idyllic in the summer. Tapping her phone on her lap, she brought up the photograph of Patrick and Jessica, happy and in love on the stone steps, circled by primroses and sunshine.

Very lightly, she touched the relaxed lines of Patrick’s face. A fleeting moment of perfect happiness, captured forever.

A short time later, Dominic turned the car through wrought-iron gates and drew to a stop. Jessica’s onetime home was larger than it had appeared in the photo, sprawling backward in a charming hodgepodge of outbuildings. A sort of miniature barn had obviously been converted into studio space; Sylvie could see easels through the windows.

The rain had slowed to a gentle drizzle, so she left her coat hood down when she got out of the car. The cool air was refreshing after the drive. She stood looking at the front of the cottage, lifting her gaze from the photo to the stone stairs where the couple had sat all those years ago. The surrounding gardens were a tangled mass of bare branches, not a flower in sight, but otherwise—

She’d looked at that snapshot so many times over the past few days that the setting in person, so entirely familiar, gave her an eerie tingle. Even the crack in the stone by Jessica’s foot was still there. She could see them in her mind, coming out of the house, laughing, kissing, setting the timer on the camera. For some reason, she was convinced they’d been alone in that moment.

Jessica holding the railing as she sat, Patrick turning his head to look at her, his eyes alight.

Pet looked over her shoulder at the phone screen and shivered a little. “It’s a bit ghostly, isn’t it?”

“Part of me expects that I’ll look up from the photo and they’ll be there,” Sylvie murmured, and for once Dominic’s practicality was a welcome shattering of the spell.

“You’re both under the influence of severed heads and floating corpses. It’s a house. Stones and thatch. Wherever Patrick and Jessica are now, they’re not—”

“What did you say?” The startled voice came from behind them, and for one moment when Sylvie turned, it was as if Jessica had stepped out of time and back into the scene.

The woman who stood staring at them had short dark hair, threaded with silver. She was an age Jessica had never reached, her figure lush and curvy in a print dress and baggy cardigan. Her enviably muscular bare calves ended in muddy Wellington boots, a far cry from Jessica’s flowing skirt and neatly laced shoes. Their faces were different shapes—Jessica’s cheeks had been very round; this woman’s face was long and narrow.

But their eyes were identical. Large and dark with tremendously long lashes, tilted at the outer corners like a cat.

Pet glanced at Sylvie and Dominic before she walked forward with a smile and extended her hand. “Are you Kathleen? I’m Pet De Vere.”

Kathleen took her hand automatically, but her attention remained fixed on Dominic. “Did you say Patrick and Jessica?”

With a few beads of rain rolling down his temple, Dominic studied her for a moment before he spoke. “I’m Dominic De Vere, Pet’s brother, and this is Sylvie Fairchild.”

“I know,” Kathleen said. “I’ve been watching you on TV.” She continued to stare at him, recovering enough from her frozen shock that suspicion was creeping in. “I’m guessing you aren’t really here for a studio tour.”

“No. I’m afraid not.” He glanced at Sylvie, and she stepped forward and held out her phone.

“If you don’t mind,” she said, “we’d like to ask you about Jessica and Prince Patrick.”

Kathleen’s frowning eyes were dragged down to the photograph on the screen. Her breath caught in a little hitch. Slowly, she reached out and took the phone from Sylvie, automatically scissoring her fingers to zoom in on the faces of the couple.

No sound other than the gentle padding of rain against stone.

Finally, she inhaled deeply and lifted her head. “Well. You’d better come in for a cup of tea.”

The unraveling of a royal romance.

The front room of the cottage was delightful, cluttered and cozy, with paintings all over the walls and a fire crackling in the hearth. Sylvie sat on a well-stuffed couch next to Dominic and accepted the cup of tea Kathleen handed her, murmuring her thanks.

“She was the light,” Kathleen said, sitting on an armchair opposite Pet’s. Sylvie had just repeated the words Patrick had spoken to Rosie, Jessica’s sister listening with tears in her eyes. “She was kind and beautiful, and everything he thought she was. And she loved him so much.”

“Did you know him?” Sylvie asked quietly, and Kathleen shook her head.

“I never met him. None of her friends did. I believe I was the only one she told.” She smiled a little. “I was eighteen, and it was the most romantic thing I’d ever heard. A secret romance with a real-life prince. Like something out of a book.” Her smile quivered and faded. “It didn’t end like the fairy tales.”

She picked up the photo album she’d taken from a shelf and set it in front of Sylvie, who looked down at a large studio portrait of Jessica. Once again, a camera had managed to capture the lively spark in her eyes, suppressed laughter in every line of her face.

“She looks . . . joyful.” It was the only word.

Kathleen nodded. “That’s exactly what I associate with her memory. Joy. Pure joy in life, in people, in her hopes for the future. In her love.” She shook her head. “She was a human being; of course she had moods and moments. But if she lost her temper, it never lasted long and she’d apologize very solemnly, and hug you tight, and you’d be laughing again in minutes. I miss her,” she said. “As much now as I did in the days after her death. Over a quarter of a century, and I never stop hoping she’ll walk through the door. This is still her house, really. She always called it Petunia Park. In the summer, the field out the back is just a sea of petunias. She liked to curl up amongst them at night and look up at the stars. I can still feel her presence out there so strongly.” Her voice turned thoughtful, abstracted. “I suppose that’s why I moved here. Why I’ve stayed so long. I can’t leave her.”

She’ll be alone. I don’t want to leave her alone.

Blinking away a sudden burn at the back of her eyes, Sylvie cleared her throat. “According to Rosie, Jessica decided she couldn’t live the life of a royal, that she wouldn’t be able to bear it.”

“She tormented herself over it.” Kathleen was still clutching Sylvie’s phone tightly. “She came to see me one night, in tears. I’d never seen her like that. I think she had to talk to someone, and there was nobody else she could trust. She’d seen how the press treated his previous girlfriends, you see. How the public tore their lives wide open. Eyes always on you. Scrutinizing every gesture, every outfit, every word. How many marriages in that family have survived with any love and happiness left intact? She’d walked away from him that day, and it was like part of her had died. The light in her eyes just . . . gone.”

They were all very quiet. Instinctively, Sylvie slipped her hand sideways and back into Dominic’s. She sensed him look at her, before his fingers tightened around hers.

“She didn’t sleep a wink that night. She barely slept at all for four days,” Kathleen went on. “Finally, five nights after she’d left him, I came here with her to Primrose Cottage, as it was then, and we lay out in the petunia field until dawn. I think she needed to be here, where she’d always found solace. And where she’d been happy with him.” She exhaled shakily again, running her fingers over the image of her sister’s face. “I remember dozing, waking on and off, and seeing her looking up at the sky. At some point, she stopped crying, and this look came over her face. I could hear her voice, just a breath in the breeze. We can do it. That was all she said.”

She lifted her head and looked at them. “She would have been brilliant. Whatever situation life threw her into. And she adored him. I knew from the moment she turned up on the doorstep that she’d never be able to go through with it. She always would have chosen him, in the end.”

It took a second for that to register, and Sylvie saw Dominic’s own head lift.

Pet had been sitting quietly, one hand tucked against her cheek as she listened, but she pushed forward in her chair now. “You mean she changed her mind? She went back to him?”

“She was going back to him. That day.” Kathleen’s jaw worked. Her voice had the hoarseness of one who still, even after all this time, didn’t quite believe the reality of loss. “Once she’d made the decision, it was like she’d . . . ignited. She was Jessie again, so excited and determined to see him right away. She packed a bag and left. I still remember her grabbing my face and kissing me, laughing.” Her fingers flexed on the phone. “She was forty minutes outside of London when a truck slid out of control in an intersection. The cab smashed into the driver’s-side door. She died before they could cut her from the wreckage.”

There were tears on Pet’s cheeks, and Sylvie felt the wetness under her own lashes. Dominic covered their linked fingers with his other hand.

“I tried to get in touch with Patrick, but I didn’t have any direct way to contact him.” Kathleen took a creased hankie from a voluminous pocket and scrubbed over her eyes. “If Jessie ever wrote down his number, I never found it, and obviously you can’t just call the palace and ask to speak to the prince. We’d already had the funeral before I finally managed to speak to a royal aide, who—” Her voice cracked. “Who passed on the palace’s deepest condolences and proceeded to politely fob me off. First, he wouldn’t believe that Jessie had even known Patrick, and then when I wouldn’t give up, he—he made it sound as if there were other women, that Patrick had any number of casual relationships on the go. I was only eighteen, and he was so . . . matter-of-fact about it.”

Something in her expression became almost childlike, the confused, grieving teenage girl she’d once been.

“I believed him,” Kathleen said. All that chilled nothingness fell away, leaving her voice raw with grief. “I thought Patrick had just been a typical playboy prince, leading Jessie on. Making her believe she’d found this great love, when really, he wouldn’t even care that much that she’d—that she’d died. I was so angry for so long. I kept remembering her face that day when she was getting in the car. The weeks before then, when she was literally dancing as she walked. The months on end she spent making a sculpture for him, ignoring all her other work—she was the most incredible artist, did you know? Bronze, stone, glass, ceramic. She could draw the beauty out of anything.”

She was speaking rapidly, changing course and continuing before anyone could reply. “She said he’d put it in his favorite part of the gardens at St. Giles Palace, the only place he could sit and think and be. It was his petunia field, she said. And after that conversation with the aide, I thought, It’s all a lie. Jessie spent hours and hours making the mold for that bronze, and he probably just threw it in a cupboard. Just another dusty old relic in some dreary abandoned room.”

The stream of words came to a halt. Kathleen’s callused fingers were shaking as she stroked the sides of Sylvie’s phone, staring down again at that photograph. At the transparent emotion on Patrick’s face, the way his body naturally curved toward Jessica’s.

“It wasn’t true, was it?” The tears streamed down her face, and Pet got up and went to crouch at her side. She rested her hand on the older woman’s wrist, rubbing gently in comfort. Kathleen lifted her eyes to meet Sylvie’s. “He did love her.”

“He loved her very much.” Sylvie was squeezing Dominic’s fingers tightly. “There was no one else. Only Jessie, for all of his life.” She hesitated. “He never knew that she’d changed her mind, that she was coming back to him.”

“Patrick notoriously hated the interference of senior advisors. If the aide you spoke to told him anything of that conversation, and that’s not a given, he may have persuaded Patrick that Jessica’s family wanted nothing to do with him. Perhaps that you blamed him for her state of mind that week,” Dominic put in grimly. “Probably assuming the prince would move on faster if all lingering ties were cut. A clean break. From everything I’ve heard of Patrick, if he was informed of Jessica’s death then, I can’t understand why he wouldn’t have come to see you, unless he believed he was respecting your own wishes.”

Sylvie was mentally replaying her conversation with Rosie. The princess had spoken of her uncle mourning Jessie all his life. Mourning her loss, her absence in his life. Rosie had never specifically mentioned her death. Slowly, she said, “He may not have known anything about any of it. She’d told him she had to leave, and he’d done the last thing—the only thing—he could do for her. He let her cut contact between them completely, so she could go and live the life that he thought would make her happiest in the end. A bird that was always meant to soar.”

Kathleen made an audible gulping sound, the fingers of one hand curled against the brooch at her breast. It was a beautiful little bronze piece, two entwined hearts. A gift from a very talented, affectionate sister? “Oh God,” she said, and her face crumpled. “That poor man.” With another sudden sob, she clutched Pet’s hand. “But I’m so . . . To know that she did find that sort of love, that she lived in perfect happiness even for a short time, and it was real and true . . .”

Her smile was shaky—but it, too, was almost identical to Jessica’s.

“Thank you,” she said, very simply.

Even Pet wasvery quiet on the trip back to London. When they were about twenty minutes from St. Giles Palace, Sylvie heard a muffled sniff from the back seat and stretched her arm back.

Pet’s hand clasped hers. Her fingers were damp. “I wish I could go back in time and tell him,” she said in a fierce, unsteady whisper. “It’s so— It’s awful. That he never knew she’d chosen him. That she was going to fight for them.”

Sylvie looked at Dominic. His profile was grim and handsome and so very . . . dear. “Maybe he knows now,” she said softly. “I hope he knows now.”

He turned his head and their eyes met for a long moment.

It wasn’t raining in the city, but the cold air was a sharp bite. Dominic found a parking space a couple of blocks from the palace, and Sylvie huddled inside her coat as they walked the distance to the west grounds. Although it was still a bit mad that she had the private cell number for a senior member of the royal family, she’d contacted Rosie before they’d left Oxfordshire. The princess was on her way to a royal engagement in the Cotswolds, but she’d granted them permission to enter the private part of the park.

Sounding preoccupied, a definitely tight note underlying her greeting, Rosie had given her concise directions to the location of Patrick’s “thinking spot.”

“I’ll let security know you’re coming. You might bump into Johnny,” she’d said before hanging up. “He’s needed quite a bit of breathing room in the garden this week.”

That two-minute call had done nothing to alleviate Sylvie’s growing concerns about this wedding.

A guard let them through a locked gate, and they followed a winding path through rain-soaked trees. It was lovely—she’d had no idea the gardens were so extensive; it was bizarre that a hop and a skip away were some of the busiest metropolitan roads in Britain. They crossed over a little bridge, Pet peering over the side at a large pond.

“No fish,” she murmured with obvious disappointment.

Sylvie knew when they’d found the right place, even without consulting Rosie’s instructions. Under the enveloping branches of an enormous mulberry tree was a small wooden bench, carved from a tree trunk, the legs a whimsical profusion of whittled leaves and flowers. On closer inspection, she saw a small carved mouse peeking around the left side. There were rosebushes everywhere, but arranged far more haphazardly than the precise landscaping elsewhere. In the warmer months, the ground would likely be a carpet of wildflowers.

There were artworks right throughout the grounds, but Sylvie found the sculpture in a small clearing beyond the tree.

Jessica’s gift to Patrick was a cast bronze of two kneeling figures, a man and a woman. There were no facial features, merely smooth planes and deliberate mystery. They sat facing one another, knees and foreheads touching. Their hands were extended, the man’s cupped beneath his lover’s. On her upturned palms was an intricate trinity knot.

The edges of the knot were wrought from delicate ribbons of bronze, and Jessica had filled in the interior with stained glass. Even on an overcast day, when the sky was dull and heavy with rain clouds, the weak light sparkled in the glass, shimmering in a multitude of colors.

Dominic came to stand at her side, and for long minutes they remained there in silence. Pet had sat down on the bench at the mulberry tree, obviously giving them privacy.

At last, he said, “I can see why it gave him comfort to come here.”

She pressed her cheek against his bicep, his wool coat scratchy against her skin.

He lowered his head to rest against hers.

They were leaving the peaceful copse with Pet, Sylvie flicking through the photos she’d taken of the sculpture, when she heard the low murmur of voices.

Frowning, she looked around, but saw no one. There were guards patrolling the park, but she hadn’t seen them for some time.

“Who . . .” Pet began as they turned the corner, and then Sylvie saw them outside a small stone building.

Johnny stood in the doorway with a tall blonde woman. Spiral curls were poking out under her woolen hat, and her gloved hands waved for emphasis as she spoke. She was doing most of the talking, Johnny inserting a word here and there, shaking his head.

The body language on both sides was intense.

As the sky overhead gave an ominous rumble and the first raindrops began to fall again, the woman moved forward and suddenly they were clutching each other’s arms.

Johnny fell back a few steps.

And as they disappeared back into the outbuilding, their mouths slammed together in a fierce kiss.