Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle (16 page)

It was, as you must realize, a horribly naive notion. Isabella lost none of her panache and, if anything, became even more
famous and sought-after. Perhaps things would have gone differently if Geoffrey had not died. But it seems, in retrospect,
inevitable that the widowed princess would continue to be the subject of much interest and scrutiny. It is hard to imagine
that Geoffrey, Mae, Rafie, and Isabella really thought she could sneak off to America and live quietly with Rafie.

But that is exactly what they thought. The only subject of debate had been over how to fake the death. Mae had urged a simple
plan, and the plan was simply this. Geoffrey and Rafie would take off on an unscheduled predawn run to the royal lodge on
the Selbar Isles for a “spontaneous” day of fishing. Geoffrey knew a spot where low-level flying was considered quite dangerous.
Rafie would bail out. Geoffrey would put the plane on automatic pilot, on a course to fly into the gray cliffs, and then bail
out himself.

Rafie would swim to Lady Fiona’s seaside compound—which was closed for renovations but always open to the royal family—and
would be drinking kiwi cider in the hot tub by the time it became clear that the plane had crashed and Geoffrey was found
clinging to his seat cushion.

Geoffrey would send the rescuers off in the wrong direction, with a fanciful tale of the prince trying to swim for help. In
the days that followed, as scuba divers, trained dolphins, swimming dogs, and more than a few reporters in wet suits would
try in vain to at least recover the body, Rafie would be slipping out of the country, taking a small boat to Turkey. He would
hide there for a few weeks and, with the aid of a fake passport that he had obtained during a long-forgotten presentation
on passport forgery by the head of homeland security, Rafie would emigrate to a rural part of the United States. There he
would wait for Isabella while preparing applications to online speech pathology programs and building a mansion with an interior
courtyard in a remote and forested area near a small midwestern city.

Rafie’s belief in this plan was unwavering. Mae would say, “Do you really think it could work?” And he would say, “I know
it will.”

Isabella’s part was even simpler. She would stay in Bisbania for a few weeks to attend the funeral and pack her rather voluminous
bags. Then she would ask for her privacy and retreat into hiding. Her first hiding place would be half a world away from Rafie,
but she would join him once she was reasonably certain that the world had accepted Rafie’s death and the market had dropped
for pictures of the royal widow.

“It’ll give you time to grow that beard, dear,” she would say with a laugh. As it turned out, it gave him more than enough
time for that.

Despite her doubts, Mae liked the plan’s relative simplicity. (You may be thinking it sounds complicated, but consider the
options. How would you fake a death? Would you care to attempt to orchestrate a train crash? Ask yourself this: How do you
lose a body in a car accident? Would you try to fake a hospital death? With all those witnesses? Many of whom have medical
training! Impossible!)

Still, Mae was gravely concerned that a plane crash would leave Geoffrey under a cloud of suspicion from which he would never
emerge. After all, surviving a plane crash that kills the heir to the throne—especially when the heir’s body is never found—is
not the sort of event that seals your place in upstanding society. And Mae, in spite of her humble origins and neutral shoes,
grew more and more concerned about upstanding society with each day she spent in the castle. She had taken classes aimed at
expanding her vocabulary. She had carefully studied the habits and customs of the more senior servants and the more accessible
royals. She had come to appreciate being able to throw around names (or even just her address) to get what she wanted in stores
and restaurants. “Oh,” she would say when calling the nation’s finest restaurants, “you’re not taking reservations for Friday
night? Well, if you change your mind, please call me at Glassidy Castle.”

Mae did not want to give all that up. She didn’t want to move out of the castle, although she supposed she could hang on to
a little minor celebrity if she could just be grandfathered in on the castle invitation lists. And she certainly didn’t want
Geoffrey to go to prison. Even given that Isabella would remain as a source of protection for Geoffrey, the plane-crash plan
seemed fraught with peril. “What if they ask him to take a lie-detector test?” Mae asked. “He’ll fail! Then what?”

But Geoffrey was game. Rafie was game. Isabella was game. Mae, the sole holdout, couldn’t withstand the pressure. It’s unfathomable,
looking back, that four worldly, sophisticated, decent people hatched and enacted such an evil, dangerous, and stupid plot.
Rafie, I believe, thought he had no choice. The royal cage is a cage only of the mind. But a cage of the mind is the strongest
cage there is. Rafie did not believe that he could escape his destiny to be king except through death. Royals can do anything,
but they somehow don’t realize they can do the one thing that almost all the rest of us started doing as toddlers: disappoint
our parents. Rafie’s decision was one of desperation.

Isabella? I’m not sure I understand her motivation even now. I think she wanted to make her husband happy. She wanted to prove
that she did not need the glamour and the glitz of royal life.

And Mae? Mae was just weak-willed and too optimistic. She lined up all her reasons against the plan and then said, basically,
“Ah well, it will probably work out okay.”

But what about Geoffrey? He was the one with the most to lose, and he did lose the most. The risk he was taking was the most
senseless, given that he had nothing to gain from the plan, not privacy nor happiness nor money nor love.

If the plan had gone as envisioned, he would have lost the life he so enjoyed. He surely would have lost his royal mechanic’s
job and the lucrative pay. And he would have lost the daily companionship of Isabella and Rafie. Geoffrey’s act can only be
explained as the generous act of friendship.

I guess.

But sometimes when I’m in a dark and foul mood, when I have lost my optimistic spirit, when I entertain demons that make me
think ill of people and suspect that no one is generous and good, sometimes in those moments, I remember the last time I saw
Geoffrey and Isabella together. It was moments after they danced at Princess Iphigenia’s investiture ball. They slipped out
onto a balcony and believed themselves alone.

Geoffrey said, “If you go through with this, you know, there’s no going back. You can’t decide a year from now or a decade
from now that it was a big mistake.”

Isabella just smiled, rolled her eyes toward the tiara she was wearing, and shrugged.

Geoffrey put his hand on her cheek. “It’s not just that, babe,” he said. “Not just the queen thing. If you do this, you can’t
ever leave Rafie. He’ll be dependent on you. He’ll have given up everything for you. You’ll be more married than ever. You
can’t back out of that, either.”

“I’m not going to back out of that,” she said.

They just stared at each other for a moment or two. He nodded. “Okay, then.”

She touched his face and leaned forward and whispered something I could not hear. He rubbed his hand along the beading on
the waist of her peacock-blue dress, and I felt something pass between them that I did not understand.

Many times since then, I’ve wondered if the words I heard Geoffrey speak that night were true. If he really thought that Isabella
would be more married than ever, or if he secretly dreamed of what Rafie must have feared. I wondered if he thought that Isabella,
for all her apparent ambivalence about royal life, had not merely married a crown. Did Geoffrey think he was helping Rafie
and Isabella be together? Or did he hope that he was pulling them apart?

We do not know. Geoffrey took his motivations and the secrets of his heart with him into the icy, stormy sea. Rafie was never
able to explain what had gone wrong to Isabella or Mae, and he also never adequately explained the long delay between the
crash and the moment when Isabella finally received a call from Lady Fiona’s phone.

“The plan was going just spick-spack when I bailed,” Rafie said. “Dear Geoffrey, I can’t imagine what happened.”

Rafie would later tell the women that it took him a little over two hours to reach Fiona’s home—an hour longer than they had
planned—in part because he had to stay hidden on the rocky beach for a good half hour while some of Fiona’s neighbors came
out to watch the search planes. He was supposed to call Isabella immediately upon reaching the home, but he was so exhausted
that he just collapsed on the sofa and napped. Or so he said.

Isabella clucked sympathetically and stroked his hair, but Mae noticed a faraway look in the princess’s eyes and wondered
if she had thought the same thing that Mae had. When Rafie had first broached the sea-crash plan, Geoffrey had opined that
the people would never be satisfied if they did not find Rafie’s body. Rafie had dismissed Geoffrey’s concern.

Mae wondered, had Rafie been confident all along that there
would
be a body?

She could not know. She knew only that when Isabella held the American widow’s face between her royal hands there in the home
of Lady Carissa’s acquaintance and said that she could demand a full investigation and that everything would come to light
and that whatever that would mean is whatever that would mean, Mae made a split-second judgment that she sometimes regretted.

She said, “No, for then Geoffrey would have died in vain.”

I
t’s done now. Isn’t it? I look down at my hands, and I see that I am shaking. It has been four days since I wrote the last
chapter. I haven’t slept well since. Secrets are hard to keep, but I am learning now that they are sometimes harder to tell.
I don’t even know you, but I have spilled to you my worst knowledge, the memories I have held in my heart even while shielding
them from my mind for all these many long years. I have hinted to you the darkest suspicions of my soul. I wonder now if that
is right. Or if I am just a tired old woman who has had too much time to think.

Rafie was a good man. I know not one bad thing about him, other than perhaps he used poor judgment in finding a way to get
out of the family business. He was exceedingly kind to Mae in the years following the accident. “There, there,” he would say
whenever she got weepy. He would pat her arm, hand her a tissue. He would repeat himself as long as he needed to, because
he understood that there was no way to elaborate. “There, there,” he would say. “There, there.”

He offered, in other words, only the good and simple kindness that you would expect of any decent human being. He did not
seem motivated by guilt or shame.

In fact, he was kind enough to her even beforehand.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have said as much as I did. But in the past four days, I have gone over and over the last chapter, and
I cannot decide what I would cut. The story that I am telling is important and needs to be understood in all its appropriate
context. I cannot presume to know what detail or suspicion or fear was insignificant. So I guess I must include it all.

Besides, I fear that writing it down is, in and of itself, going beyond where I can turn back. I have, if only while moving
my lips silently as I lean over my keyboard, voiced the unspeakable truth, the unbearable suspicions. Deleting them now would
make no difference. They have escaped my heart. They are loose in the world. I cannot get them back.

That is, at least, how I feel.

The castle’s official mourning lasted one year. During that time, the queen and Princess Iphigenia always wore somber colors.
The annual racing ball was suspended, and official banquets did not serve dessert—though after the first few months, the kitchen
staff was able to slip in a final fruit course, which was often seasoned a bit with sugar and butter and sometimes cooked
with a bit of flour. You know, sort of like cake.

The nation’s mourning was much shorter. In the first few hours, the florists sold out of Bisbanian mums, then lilacs, which
were the official flower of the Prince of Gallagher. Tulips, a nod to Isabella’s Dutch heritage, were the next to go. During
those first few days, nearly all work stopped, and bus drivers, cops, and other public servants were often seen blinking back
tears. The smell of the flowers—first sweet, then sour and rotting—hung over the city-state for weeks.

Investigations were called for. “How did we get to the point,” the prime minister asked, “where the heir to the throne is
being flown about by a mechanic? Does the castle security staff do anything anymore?”

That sort of talk lasted for months.

And for years—even now, in fact—there were all sorts of rumors: that perhaps a missile shot down the plane, that maybe the
engine had been tampered with, that surely the pilot had not wanted to fly through that storm but the prince, cocky and overconfident
and used to getting his way, had insisted.

(Raphael could not help but be irritated by those rumors. “Cocky?” he’d say in the e-mails he exchanged with Isabella while
they were in hiding half a world away from each other. “Since when have I been cocky? I’m positively unassuming. That’s always
been written about me!”)

Mae did not sue the royal family, and that decision was seen as highly suspicious by the sorts of people who were suspicious
about the whole thing anyway.

There were questions about why it took so long to get search boats out, and there was concern about the condition of the castle’s
aging plane fleet. In out-of-the-way Internet chat rooms, people with a loose hold on reality theorized that either the royal
family had, at some point, been placed under a curse, or they had their own son killed to keep Isabella from eventually becoming
queen.

(“That’s just ridiculous,” Raphael would write to Isabella each time a tabloid featured that line of reasoning. “Wouldn’t
they just kill you, then?” he’d ask, leaving Isabella a bit too flabbergasted to reply. “Why involve me in it?”)