“No.” I shake my head. “She didn’t want us anywhere near here during the festival. We weren’t even allowed out after dark.”
“I’m not surprised,” Princess Ann says. “Caroline knew what this really is.”
“What is it?” I ask, even though I’m half afraid of the answer.
“It is a fourteen-day celebration of a time when people like them killed people like me.”
I’ve never thought of it like that — how it must feel to look out every night onto that scene, knowing.
“The royal family is very popular now,” I say, but Princess Ann just laughs.
“You are sweet to say so, Grace. Just like your mother.”
It is the perfect time to change the topic, to ask her what she knows about my mother’s death and my mother’s work and all the ways the two things are intertwined. But for some reason I can’t. Not yet.
“Why does the royal family allow it?” I ask instead.
“Because perhaps allowing people to remember history will help us all be less anxious to repeat it.”
“I see,” I say, even though I don’t. Not really.
“Come, Grace,” the princess says. “Your tea is getting cold.”
I follow Princess Ann around to sit on one of the straight-backed chairs that face the window. She pours me a cup and adds a generous dose of honey without asking how I take it.
“You knew,” I say as she hands me the cup.
The princess smiles. “You are very like your mother. I couldn’t imagine you would take it in any other way.”
“Thank you,” I say, but I’m not talking about the tea. I am grateful for the compliment, until I remember all of my mother’s secrets. Maybe being just like her is not such a great way to be after all.
“This is the worst night,” Princess Ann volunteers after a moment. She sips her own tea, places the cup gently on her saucer. “I always sit in this room — in this chair — on the fourth night.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Ms. Chancellor should tell you,” she says, as if I’ve just asked where babies come from and she wants nothing more than to avoid an awkward conversation.
“Please. What happened on the fourth night?” Suddenly, the room is cold even here, on the Mediterranean in the middle of summer.
I watch the princess weigh her options, contemplate what she should and should not say.
“You say your mother never allowed you to attend the festival, but you know the reason for it, don’t you?”
“I know the royal family was murdered, and that it started a war.” I study Princess Ann. “And I know about the treasure.”
For a while, the moment stretches out, the silence hangs heavy between us. “What do you know about it?”
“Ms. Chancellor told me everything,” I try.
“I doubt that, Grace, because no one knows everything. Three elders came to the palace the night of the coup. They salvaged what they could, but died before they could tell anyone the details.”
I nod.
“It must have been chaos,” Ann says. For a moment I wonder if she’s even really talking to me. “They say it was an angry mob, but it wasn’t, you know. In truth it was no more than a dozen people who stormed the palace. At first. Did they come intent on murder? I don’t know. I’ve often wondered, though. Maybe all they wanted was food for their families? Maybe it simply got out of hand? Or did they come up those stairs intending to kill? Does it make me a bad person if I think it was the latter?” She doesn’t really wait for an answer. “Because I do, Grace. I really do. I think they came to kill.”
Ann holds her teacup in her hand, but she doesn’t sip, doesn’t move. It’s almost like she’s frozen, looking back in time.
“Those windows,” she says after a long moment. Then her cup begins to shake. Hurriedly, she places it back on the table. “They hung the bodies from those windows, like trophies. Like a warning. They hung their bodies from those windows,” Princess Ann says, stronger now, “until the fourth night, when the Society came and cut them down.”
I can’t help myself. I look at the windows before me, now tinted and bulletproof and bordered by black silk. There’s no way to see what actually happened, but this room carries the truth inside it still. And maybe it’s just the sadness radiating off of Princess Ann, but I swear I can feel it.
“The Society did that?” I ask.
Princess Ann nods. “They came through a passageway and smuggled the bodies out of the palace. They took them and buried them. I don’t know where. No one knows, and that’s probably for the best. They deserve to rest in peace.”
My tea has gone cold in front of me. I’ve lost all desire to drink it. So I just sit here, thinking about how the king and his family are just people, and for two weeks every year an entire nation celebrates the moment their ancestors died.
“I’m surprised your mother never told you,” Princess Ann says.
Now my teacup is shaking too. “There were a lot of things my mother never told me.”
She must hear the bitterness in my voice. She has no trouble guessing why.
“She never told you about the Society?”
“She never told me about anything.”
“You mustn’t blame your mother, Grace. She loved you so. She just wanted to protect you.”
“From what?” I snap. Ann is not the princess of Adria now. She is my mother’s first and best friend.