Royal Rumble - Crown and Love

THE CORONATION BELLS

The bells of the Abbey had been ringing since before dawn, and by the time the grey light of morning had properly settled over the city, it seemed to Aurora that the whole of London had been transformed into something out of a picture book: every window along the Mall dressed with bunting in scarlet and gold, every lamppost wound about with garlands, and the crowds already ten deep along the railings, though the procession would not pass for hours yet.

She stood at her window in the Palace, still in her dressing gown, and watched them gather in the cold. Men in their good coats, worn perhaps only twice a year, stamped their feet against the chill. Women had brought their children wrapped in blankets and propped upon shooting-sticks, that they might see over the heads of the crowd when the moment came. A boy of no more than seven sat upon his father's shoulders, waving a paper flag with such vigour that Aurora, three floors above him and quite unseen, found herself smiling despite everything.

It was, by every account that would be written of it, a beautiful day for a coronation. The frost had come hard in the night and silvered the plane trees in the Park, but the sky above the Abbey's grey towers had cleared to a hard, bright blue, as though the weather itself had been summoned to attend upon Elena.

Aurora's sister. Aurora's Queen, as of this morning.

She ought, she knew, to have been dressing already. Lady Cordelia had laid out the gown the night before, ice-blue satin with a bodice worked in seed pearls, and the sapphires, her mother's sapphires, sat waiting in their case upon the dressing table, catching what little light came through the curtains. There would be a fitting of the tiara, and the rehearsal of where precisely she must stand in the Abbey, three steps behind and to the left, and the long, slow procession by carriage afterward through streets so thick with well-wishers that the horses would scarcely need guiding, they would go so slow.

And yet Aurora lingered at the window a moment longer, her breath fogging the cold glass, watching the crowd, and beyond it, the bare black branches of the trees, and beyond that, nothing she could properly have named, only a restlessness that had settled into her these past weeks like a stone dropped into still water, sending its ripples outward long after the stone itself had vanished from sight.

She could not have said, that morning, what precisely unsettled her. It was not grief, though grief was near enough the surface always, her father two years in his grave and this the first great ceremony of state to pass without him. It was not envy of Elena, though she supposed a less generous sister might have felt it, watching a crown settle upon another's head that would never, by right of birth or law, settle upon her own. It was something else, some sense that stood just outside the room with her, waiting.

"You'll catch your death standing there," said Cordelia, coming in with the breakfast tray and setting it down with the particular briskness she reserved for mornings of importance. "And there is no earthly reason for you to be cold on your sister's coronation day. Come away from the glass."

"I was watching the people," Aurora said, though she came away readily enough, and let Cordelia fuss the dressing gown closer about her shoulders. "There is a boy down there with a flag nearly as tall as himself."

"There will be several thousand such boys before the day is out, and you will see none of them so well as from up here, so you may as well eat your breakfast." Cordelia poured the tea with the steadiness of a woman who had risen at four to see to a hundred details before this one small kindness, and Aurora, watching her, felt a rush of affection so sudden and complete that it startled her.

"What should I do without you, Cordelia?"

"Muddle along very badly, I should think, and be late to your own sister's coronation besides." But Cordelia's mouth had softened, and she busied herself unnecessarily with the tray a moment, not quite meeting Aurora's eye. "Eat something. It is a long service, and a longer day after it, and there will be no chance of a proper meal until this evening at the earliest."

Aurora ate, obediently, though she tasted little of it. Beyond the window the bells continued, that great, rolling clamour that seemed to come not from any single tower but from the whole grey sprawl of the city at once, as though London itself were announcing the day to the heavens.

*

The Abbey, when at last she stood within it, was a forest of gold.

Aurora had attended state occasions before, had stood in her share of ancient, echoing naves beneath banners that had hung there since before her grandfather's grandfather was born, but she had never seen the old stones dressed as they were dressed that day, every column wound about with cloth of gold, every high window admitting a light that seemed, by design or happy accident, to fall directly upon the space before the altar where the Chair of State waited, empty still, beneath its ancient canopy.

The peers of the realm sat in their robes of crimson and ermine, tier upon tier of them rising into the shadowed heights of the nave, and the choir's voices, when they rose, seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, filling the vaulted stone until Aurora felt the sound of it in her own chest, a physical thing, pressing against her ribs.

She stood in her appointed place, three steps behind and to the left, and watched her sister come up the long aisle in a gown so heavy with gold thread that two ladies were required to bear the train of it, Elena's face composed into the particular stillness she had worn since their father's death, that stillness which Aurora had come, privately, to think of as the mask the Crown required of its wearer, and which she feared, some nights, would never again be fully set aside.

The Archbishop's voice rolled out over the assembly, ancient words in the old cadence, and Elena knelt, and was anointed, and rose at last with the crown itself settled upon her fair hair, and the whole vast congregation rose as one and the cry went up, God Save the Queen, and the trumpets sounded from the high galleries, and Aurora, watching her sister transformed in the space of a single hour from Elena, who had once cried over a broken doll in the nursery, into Her Majesty the Queen, felt tears start in her own eyes that she could not, afterward, entirely account for.

It was somewhere in that same hour, in the crush of peers and clergy and foreign dignitaries all rising and settling and rising again, that she first became properly aware of him.

She had seen him before, she realised, though only at the edges of things: a tall figure in RAF blue among the equerries and household officers who attended upon such occasions, standing a little apart, as such men were trained to do, his bearing so upright and so still that he might have been carved rather than born. She did not, that morning, know his name. She knew only that when the trumpets sounded and the whole Abbey seemed to hold its breath at the sight of the crown descending onto her sister's head, she found her own eyes had strayed, for no reason she could name, to the stillness of that one figure among so many, and that he, in that same moment, was not watching the Queen at all.

He was watching her.

It lasted no longer than the space of a breath. He looked away at once, his attention returning with proper correctness to the ceremony before them, and Aurora told herself, in the carriage afterward, jolting slowly through streets so thick with cheering that the horses could scarcely walk, that she had imagined it, that a man in his position would no more have dared look at her so than he would have dared address the Archbishop out of turn.

And yet.

*

That evening, when the state banquet had run its long course and the last of the foreign dignitaries had been seen to their carriages, and Elena, still crowned though changed now into a gown of deep violet, sat exhausted upon a smaller chair in a smaller room, permitted at last a single glass of wine and the company only of her sister and two ladies, Aurora found herself asking, with a carelessness she did not entirely feel:

"Who is the new equerry? The tall one, RAF."

Elena, who missed very little despite the exhaustion plain upon her face, glanced up. "Group Captain Jacques. Father brought him in, near the end. A decorated flyer, I understand, from the war. Why do you ask?"

"No reason," said Aurora, and reached for her own glass, and did not look at her sister as she said it, for fear of what her face might give away, though she could not have said, that night, precisely what there was to give.

Outside, the bells had at last fallen silent, but the city beyond the Palace walls still rang with a lower, wordless sound, distant singing, the murmur of crowds not yet ready to disperse, bonfires lit along the river that sent a faint, drifting smoke smell even into the high windows of the Palace itself. Aurora stood at one such window again, later, alone this time, in the small hours when even Cordelia had at last gone to her bed, and looked down at the last of the revellers below, small as toys in the darkness, their bonfires burning low and gold against the black water of the Thames.

She did not know, that night, what was coming. She could not have named the shape of it, standing there in the cold with the coronation bells only just fallen silent in her ears. She knew only that something in her had shifted, quietly and irrevocably, in the space of a single held breath inside the Abbey, and that whatever it was that waited for her beyond this night, beyond this glittering, gilded day, it had already begun.

Somewhere below, a lone bell, later than all the rest, tolled twice, and was still.