Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle (15 page)

“The people also can’t count,” said the king, glaring at the royal associate and seeming to notice her presence in the room
for the first time.

And then, as quick as that, his mind was made up. “We’ll use the mechanic’s body and say it’s Rafie,” said the king with a
matter-of-fact air of regal confidence and authority. By this point in history, few leaders anywhere in the world would have
been so audacious. But this king was the king of a small country. And small countries, like small towns, are the sorts of
places where corners are cut and rules are often thought to be unnecessary. They do not lock their doors, and they do not
do DNA testing on dead royals.

“There will be no autopsy,” the king said without hesitation. “It will be simple enough.”

Isabella stood up and looked directly at the king. The young princess may have been famously headstrong and outspoken, but
this was the only time she directly argued with either of Their Majesties.

“Your Majesty,” she said, seeming to gather her courage. “I know you are the king and I am only the Princess of Gallagher.
But I am his
wife
.” She put her hand to her chest to emphasize this. “Or his widow, I guess.” Her voice quivered with that but quickly grew
steady again.

“You cannot ask me to mourn over another man’s body. Besides,” she continued with all the righteous indignation she could
muster, which was quite a lot, “what about
Geoffrey
? What of his family? His wife? You can’t just use his body as your . . . your . . . .”

She paused dramatically before spitting out the next word: “
prop
.”

“This poor deceased royal servant is not just a tool for your convenience. Using him this way is just . . .” She seemed to
search for the right word and finally came up with the perfect one. “It’s just wrong!”

It was quite a speech. It was, in fact, the very sort of thing Isabella could always summon up, even in the most trying of
circumstances.

But the king just waved his hand at her in a dismissive way, asked that Geoffrey’s wife be brought to him, and told everyone
to wait in the other room.

Mae—who had seemed serene as the rescuers searched for her husband’s plane—was waiting in an adjacent room of the house with
friends from among the castle staff. She would have preferred to be with Isabella, but Isabella had been invited to wait with
Their Majesties, and you neither turn down such an invitation nor try to sneak in your common friends. Even when you are the
Princess of Gallagher and the apparent future queen.

But Mae’s calm seemed shaken when Secrest stepped into the room and told Mae that the king wished to speak to her. Mae gasped
and turned white and walked on somewhat shaky legs.

Moments after Mae stepped into the room, people heard her cry “No,” and there were loud wails. The king and Mae were alone
together for over an hour.

The other staff members thought he was comforting her and noted that he was a fine and good king who, in his own time of grief,
comforted a servant’s wife more than his own family.

But he was, of course, trying to sell Mae on his plan.

When she emerged from the room, she ran directly to Isabella, who had taken to sobbing again after getting a phone call from
her sister Lady Fiona’s home. Isabella and Mae hugged for a long time. Isabella said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Finally, she took the American’s face into her hands in exactly the way she does in that famous photo of the memorial service
and said, “Listen to me. You don’t have to do what the king wants. I’ll stick with you. I’ll expose everything. I’ll call
for a full and thorough investigation. I’ll ask for an autopsy. They can’t deny me. I’m the widow. I don’t care what happens.
Do you understand? I don’t care how things turn out. I’ll do it if that’s what you want.”

And Mae said . . .

But I can’t tell you what Mae said, can I? It wouldn’t make any sense. Knowing only what you know now, Mae’s words would be
just so much gibberish. To make sense of Mae’s response, you have to know more than you now know.

See, the great irony of all this is that the king took this drastic step, spent a small fortune to bury an American commoner
in his own dear son’s grave, because the grief-stricken king feared that if people knew the rescuers had been unable to recover
his son’s body, the people would entertain fanciful tales and hold out hope that the prince was alive and trade conspiracy
theories as entertainment.

The poor sad king thought he was doing a good thing. But his actions were filled with irony for one simple reason. Well, actually
for two reasons.

1) There WAS a conspiracy.

2) The prince WAS alive.

I
suspect I’ll have to get a new agent once Frederick gets to this point in the story. He’ll surely have had a heart attack
by now. I told him there was plenty of new material to explore, but he kept wanting me to write about King Will’s granddaughter,
the one who seems to be bringing hats back into style on the streets of London. Poor Frederick. He really has no sense of
history. Hats? My word!

But I do suspect that even those of you more strongly constituted than Frederick must be getting a bit weary of the twists
and turns. I can’t help it. It’s not as if I’m making this up! The facts are the facts. And I am confident you will find,
if you bear with me for just a while longer, that the story of the Prince and Princess of Gallagher is the most beautiful
and romantic and touching and tragic story ever told.

At least Isabella thought so. I guess Mae did, too.

It started out as a conspiracy of four. The plan had been hatched in those long sessions between the two couples. The dream
had started with Rafie himself.

See, Rafie was a happy, happy man but an unhappy prince.

His unhappiness had dawned upon him slowly, after he had come to accept the fact that he loved Isabella. For most men the
notion that they love their wives is not exactly news. They might be a little surprised to discover the feelings so fresh
and alive if they, as Rafie did, were to find themselves overcome with adoration several years into their marriage. But they
would take such a discovery as a small, unexpected, but much appreciated gift. For Rafie it was a crushing life crisis.

You see, Rafie had known since he was twelve that he would not, could not, should not even consider marrying for love. (Or
have I said that already? Yes, I believe I have.) His mother and father had made that quite clear. They had also drilled into
him what it was that he needed and wanted and felt. What did he feel? Loyalty, mostly. To the crown, to the monarchy, to the
people. Duty, he felt lots of duty.

What did he want? To be a good king. To rule a prosperous nation. To help the poor. To ensure dignity. To pass on the crown
as untarnished as it had been passed on to him.

What did he need? Solid advisers. A respectable wife. An heir and a spare, by whatever names you called them.

But in those wonderful, carefree Isabella years, Rafie began to realize that he didn’t want or need or
feel
any of those things. What he wanted was to run off with Isabella and keep her all to himself, to steal away with her for
long weekends and read aloud to her the most fascinating passages of
Accents and Affectations: Diagnosis and Detection
. He wanted to cook meals with her in a small kitchen and to fill a tiny home with love and children and the smell of spaghetti,
a popular Italian food normally shunned as “ethnic” by the Bisbanian royal family.

“Oh, you’re silly,” Isabella would say. “We can do all those things now.”

“No,” he would say, “we can’t.”

I’m not sure if Rafie ever explained it very well to Isabella. But one late night, he explained it to me. He was the heir
to the throne. If he decreed that he would never work on weekends, that he would cook his own meals, that he and Isabella
would live in one of the servants’ quarters, there would be grumbling and wringing of hands and the advisers would sweat and
swear and storm off, but it would be done. Even his father couldn’t really stop him.

But it would all be a ruse. He and Isabella still wouldn’t truly be an ordinary couple. There wouldn’t be any richer or poorer
or better or worse. “Oh, I suppose one of us could get sick,” he said. “But we’ve got the best health care money can buy,
and that’s the best health care there is.

“It’s not that I think Isabella married me just to be queen or anything,” he went on. “But until recently, even I couldn’t
separate myself from the king I am to become, so how could she have made such a distinction? I don’t want Isabella to be married
to His Royal Highness the Prince of Gallagher. I want her to marry Ralph Gallagher, a workingman, a bird-watcher, a speech
pathologist.”

Rafie thought about abdicating, but there were already republican rumblings in the Senate, and he feared that the movement
needed only a final push, such as the abdication of an heir—especially an abdication inspired by nothing more dramatic than
a desire to go to speech pathology school. It is one thing to walk away from your own destiny to be king. But to ruin the
royal gig for your whole family? That was too much.

He thought about getting involved in some sort of scandal that would force him out of the line of succession, but in researching
the family history, he concluded that such an unprecedented scandal would surely have to involve a multiple homicide. That
didn’t seem quite right.

“The only way out of being king,” he said with a sigh, “is to die.”

And that was when the idea of faking his death came about. It was a grand, romantic plan. Rafie was especially proud of his
decision to stage his death the morning after Princess Iphigenia’s investiture ball, figuring the nation would be so gaga
over the young, beautiful princess that they would love the notion of her being tragically propelled onto the throne, and
the monarchy would be more beloved and stronger than ever. (He did not seem to worry what it would mean for Princess Iphigenia
to be tragically propelled to the throne, or to ask himself what it would mean to her modest ambition to publish a children’s
version of WEAR!)

Isabella sometimes grew frustrated with Rafie’s constant ruminating on the subject. “Is our life together so bad?” she would
say. “Are you so miserable?” Coveting middle-class life is, she argued, unbecoming for a prince. “Just as unbecoming as it
would be for a middle-class man to go about wishing he lived in a castle. If you have enough,” she said, “you should be grateful
for what you have. And you have a lot to be thankful for. You have a lovely home.”

The prince rolled his eyes. “Dad makes all the decorating decisions,” he said in what might legitimately be described as a
whine. “I had to beg for permission to put up a football poster in my office. My office! And he only relented because it was
a commissioned, one-of-a-kind, impressionistic watercolor on handmade paper. That’s not even a poster! It’s original art!”

“You have satisfying work,” Isabella said, continuing with her list of blessings as if Raphael had not spoken. “You get to
visit deserving projects, give attention to worthwhile charities, shed light on the important issues of the day.”

“Yesterday,” said the prince with a bored sigh, “I watched schoolchildren perform an ode to figs and attended a ribbon cutting
for a cat museum.”

“You meet interesting people,” Isabella said. “You get to travel.”

The prince shook his head sadly. “Next week I’m scheduled to tour a sewer project with the prime minister’s wife, an awful
woman who is always showing off her tawdry French manicures and insisting that the royal flight attendants bring powdered
creamer for her tea.” He exhaled slowly. “She likes to talk about her surgeries.”

“You don’t appreciate how nice it is to have a staff,” said Isabella. (She had cleaned her own toilet in college, and she
had not forgotten it.) “You don’t even throw away your own toenail clippings. You just leave them on the bedside table for
the maid. I’m sure I don’t know what would happen if we didn’t have a maid. We’d be drowning in royal toenail clippings.”

“I said I didn’t want to be king,” Raphael said. “Who said anything about not having a maid?”

“And what about your family?” Isabella asked. “You’ll never talk to them again? Never see them again? Your parents’ funerals?
Your sister’s coronation? All the happiness and sadness of their lives . . . all the happiness and sadness of
your
life . . . how can you not share that?”

“I’ll share it with
you,
” Raphael would say.

That was how the conversations went. The prince spent a year trying to convince Isabella of the plan. What a wonderful, romantic
year it was for the two of them! He courted her then in a very unprincelike way, making dinner, giving her foot massages,
winning stuffed animals for her at boardwalk carnivals, growing her favorite herbs in a small garden that he stole away from
the professional gardeners. Leering at her, if Burger Boy is to be believed, at White Castle drive-through windows.

Isabella was charmed. (Maybe not by the leering part, but generally.) And so it was because of her love of Rafie—and, I think,
because of another reason—that she agreed to the silly, extravagant plan. But to her everlasting relief and shame, she refused
one part of the plan: She refused to fake her death as well.

“As if I could jump out of a plane!” she would say whenever Rafie and Geoffrey urged it as the most logical course of action.
“Into cold water, of all things! All the columnists laughed their heads off at me when I climbed into that stupid old tank
for the veterans’ parade. Now I’m going to act like some sort of special unit military force? You can’t be serious!”

And so in the late-night strategy sessions, the Gallaghers and the Whitehall-Wrights came to believe that only Rafie needed
to fake his death, that Isabella would, as the widowed princess, soon lose her panache. The world’s eye would turn to Princess
Genia and would be content for Isabella to occasionally appear at royal family functions, such as the annual racing ball.
Rafie even convinced himself that this was an ideal setup, because it would give her an opportunity to have intimate chats
with the royal family and keep him supplied with the gossip and news he would otherwise surely miss.