Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle (5 page)

No, I think what he feared was that in some way, his life would be different after he opened that letter. Not obviously and
not immediately. But slowly, over time, he might get swept up into a story that he wasn’t ready for, had not requested.

The letter was simple enough.

Dear Jeff,

Remember me? I’m terribly sorry for falling out of touch. My life has been rather a blur as of late, but that’s no excuse.
I often think fondly of our weekly chats and I hope things are going well for you.

If you’d like to stay in touch, I’ve enclosed a card with my address. If you don’t mind, use the return address “Lord Baron
Dudley.” I’ve instructed my staff that letters bearing that return address be forwarded to me unopened.

Do tell me all about your life. I’m afraid mine is dreadfully dull, although I’m lucky in many ways and I know I should not
complain.

Belle

And there it was. Nothing objectionable on any level. She had neither presumed that he knew about her life, nor condescended
to tell him. Aside from the practical matter of instructing him on how to reach her, she had simply acted as if nothing had
changed.

But things had. Even though you don’t yet know what happened to the man who became known as Geoffrey Whitehall-Wright, even
you must realize that things had changed dramatically for him.

And they would change for Princess Isabella also. They would change the moment that Secrest appeared in the doorway of the
royal bedchamber with a relieved smile on her face and a single envelope in her hand.

Secrest did not know then exactly what “this Lord Baron Dudley business”—as she came to think of it—was all about. The royal
associate knew only that Isabella had been asking repeatedly if any mail had arrived from Lord Dudley, and that Her Royal
Highness had seemed, alarmingly, a bit more crushed each time the answer was no.

Castle employees do not wish to see their royal charges depressed. It bodes badly in so many ways. Depressed royals might,
for example, start eating too much or letting themselves go in some other way, getting the higher-ranking castle advisers
all worked up and bringing down pressure on the likes of Secrest to urge the princess to start taking better care of her nails
or to forgo fig pancakes for breakfast. Or perhaps depressed royals would turn their ill moods in another direction and sulk
around, constantly complaining about the lack of light in their bedroom or proclaiming their lack of royal interest in the
day’s schedule of ribbon cuttings.

It made for such unpleasant company.

Already Secrest had overheard—she was very good at overhearing things—the senior advisers musing about some photos taken of
Isabella at a garden tour, where she had carried herself in a glum, slump-shouldered way that Secrest would have described
as “sullen and spoiled” but Hubert, with uncharacteristic charity, described as “looking pale and tired.” Secrest’s initial
relief at Hubert’s kind description dissolved when she realized it was motivated by his suspicion that Isabella was tired
and pale in a joyous, expectant way—if you catch my meaning.

Secrest thought that sullen and spoiled was more likely. And not just because she knew that Raphael was up late reading speech
pathology texts alone while Isabella was roaming about the castle in her nightclothes pleading insomnia. Secrest had the unglamorous
duty of serving the royal birth control pill on a china plate each morning and restocking the royal—how shall we put this?—feminine
products each month. She thought Hubert was being wildly optimistic.

Hubert might be the head of castle operations, while Secrest was only a glorified chambermaid. But Hubert was a provincial,
small-city, same-haircut-he-had-in-high-school kind of guy, while Secrest was, you see, a woman of the world.

Over the years, Secrest had lived in other countries and pursued other careers while waiting for her mother to give up the
castle position. Most of the other castle help, by contrast, had never left the confines of their own tiny nation. The Huberts
of the castle had spent their pre-castle years helping out in the legendary but struggling royal fig orchards, so vital to
the national self-image but slowly choking on the Bisbanian smog. Or they had worked in Bisbania’s troubled auto industry,
which exported the flashy but unreliable (and, needless to say, smog-producing) Bisba convertibles. These experiences meant
Secrest’s colleagues had trouble imagining a worldview that extended beyond the petty neighborhood politics that so often
dominated Bisbanian affairs. They also had trouble imagining working for a dynamic, profitable, up-to-date operation, but
never mind that.

Or maybe you should mind that. For that was precisely where Hubert was making his mistake, Secrest thought. The nation’s misguided
approach to fig production and auto production was, in her mind, related to Hubert’s old-fashioned notions of royal reproduction.
He did not see any reason to move the fig orchards away from the city center. He did not see any reason to reengineer the
Bisba, and he did not see any reason that Isabella would view her royal wifely duties any differently from the few hundred
princesses who had come before her over the past few thousand years. He thought that Isabella would quickly set herself toward
producing an heir because that was what previous Princesses of Gallagher had quickly set themselves toward doing.

Secrest, though, could imagine other worldviews and other sorts of affairs. She had begun to suspect that this Dudley fellow
was not a “distant uncle,” as Isabella had originally, if somewhat nonsensically, suggested. Secrest could imagine all too
well the sort of cross-class, cross-culture friendship that a lonely member of the nobility might be tempted by while being
schooled in a casual, classless country, the sort of undisciplined place that teaches young nobles to hand out silly titles
like “royal associate.”

But Secrest didn’t allow herself to worry too much about all of that on the day when the slightly rumpled envelope with a
Connecticut postmark arrived in Isabella’s mail, mixed in with the usual tea invitations, fan letters, and credit card solicitations.
(“H.R. Highness is already approved!”) Secrest simply snatched up the envelope and dashed off to Isabella’s room, confident
that, whatever problems lay ahead, the immediate problem was solved—no more slightly sullen-looking princess.

Later, Secrest would wonder if she should have told Hubert about the letter. Later, she would promise herself to keep a wary
eye on this Dudley correspondence. Later, she would vow to sneak peeks at anything Isabella left lying around the royal desk,
vow to pick up crumpled drafts from the royal wastebasket, vow to keep her royal associate ears open—especially when Isabella
was busy chatting on the phone and not paying much attention to who was emptying her wastebaskets or straightening her bed
or laying out her clothes.

But on the day the letter arrived, Secrest was only happy and relieved as she burst into Isabella’s room, announcing with
uncharacteristic breathlessness:

“Your Highness, I think, perhaps, you are expecting this.”

N
early a year separated the start of Lord Baron Dudley’s long-distance advice and the time when Isabella’s mythmakers first
marked a turnaround in the princess’s “performance.” But to appreciate the turnaround, you must first appreciate how bad things
had gotten.

Far too often, biographies of the princess have merely breezed through the first year or so of her marriage, chronicling the
well-known “thar she blows” photo, a few fashion mistakes, and the “Dizzy” nickname. I can understand how this happens. I
myself can hardly bear to repeat her many missteps. Remembering them is like remembering the most awkward thing you ever did
in the seventh grade, or some really flawed attempt at flirtation. It just makes you shiver all over. Egad.

But I feel obligated to remind people, especially my younger readers, just how badly the princess struggled at first, after
the honeymoon and before the miraculous remake. I will try to be as brief and discreet as possible. I’ve included the tabloid
headlines as a handy reference.

* Isabella glibly visited an overseas factory widely rumored to be experimenting with biological warfare and, with a goofy
grin on her face, praised their “exciting work.” Headline:
DIZZY IZZY SAYS: GO GERMS!

* On two occasions, she was photographed dancing at nightclubs on St. Teresa of Calcutta Day, then considered the most holy
of the modern saint days. Headline:
HOLY GO-GO? IZZY TANGOS ON SAINTLY TOES.

* She wore shoes made from cloned alligators, a practice long banned in Bisbania. Headline:
HEELS FROM HELL: IZZY’S WRONG AGAIN.

* Surely, I need not rehash the infamous incident involving the Prime Minister of Algeria. Headline:
SLURP AND BURP: IZZY’S DINING DISASTER.

And she was forever dressed wrong. Not that such things should matter, the commentators would always note. But there was just
something off about her. She would be all frilly when sleek would have been better. And she would be all sleek when lacy would
have been better. Ethelbald Candeloro, who wore an overgrown handlebar mustache on his pasty, somewhat flabby face in the
photo that ran alongside his column, once remarked that he wouldn’t have imagined there was a bad time to be sleek until Isabella
came along.

Things reached their nadir, I suppose, a few months after the wedding, when Isabella was rushing out of the castle to catch
a flight to Russia for the baby shower of a minor duchess in the recently restored but, needless to say, much humbled Russian
royal family. (The Russian royals had, by this point, taken to calling the Russian Revolution and the century of communism
that followed it “the experiment,” and they were calling the slaughter of most of their ancestors “the accident.”) Isabella
was running late because of some sort of security scare that had been triggered by a wayward raccoon rustling about in the
royal garbage. So she was not quite herself as she dashed off to the airport. That is how she came to be photographed climbing
into a stretch Bisba, wearing a denim peasant skirt and carrying in her right hand a goblet of ice water. Her hair was somewhat
askew.

The tabloids had a field day.

First off, they dubbed the skirt a “prairie” skirt, which was not correct in the fashion sense, but perhaps was close enough
from a political standpoint. “How have we reached a point,” Ethelbald Candeloro wrote in what became an infamous column, “where
the wife of the Bisbanian heir scoots off to represent us among the nobility of other continents, wearing the fashion of rough-handed
American cattle herders and carrying glassware into motor vehicles, as if the royal family could not afford a proper, lidded
thermos cup?

“Moreover,” he continued, “the goblet appeared to be German, an insult to the hardworking glassblowers of Bisbania’s Eighth
Street Glass Factory. While the water, I understand, was imported from Morocco. Morocco! As if Bisbanian springs did not produce
water as fresh and tasty as that of a desert country most famous for playing it again, Sam.

“All of that would be reason enough to leave His and Her Majesty beside themselves, but it also appears,” he concluded, “that
the Princess of Gallagher could stand to be introduced to a comb, a tool the rest of us use, often daily, to arrange our hair
into pleasing—or at least nonoffending—configurations.”

Ethelbald was being awfully unfair. While I’ll be the first to admit that carrying crystal into a car does seem a bit gauche,
the goblet in question came straight from Queen Regina’s kitchen, and thus if anyone owed an explanation to the Glassblowers
of Local 808, it would be the queen. Meanwhile, Isabella had planned, as was the custom of royal travelers, to change her
skirt and comb her hair on the plane en route to Moscow, which at last report was located in Europe, not another continent.
(Besides, given the Russian royal family’s then-recent stint as peasants, it would seem unlikely that they could make a case
for being offended by the humble styling of Isabella’s skirt.)

Finally, I have it on good authority that the water came straight from the royal lavatory sink, not from a well in Casablanca.
Isabella had drawn the glass herself while packing up her toiletries, although Ethelbald would surely think both activities
were beneath her station in life. (She had insisted she would handle those tasks so that Secrest could check the royal mail
one last time. And it was the last time Secrest allowed herself to be dissuaded from doing her own job, I can assure you of
that.)

But the truth did not matter. This is exactly the sort of nonevent that tabloids can drag out for several weeks, with new
rounds of leaked criticism and rumored backlash.
FORMER BUTLER SAYS IZZY ALWAYS INSISTED ON IMPORTED STEMWARE,
one headline would say.
QUEEN ORDERS MIDNIGHT RAID OF IZZY’S KITCHEN, DIRECTS ALL FOREIGN WATER DUMPED IN ROYAL TOILET,
would read the next.

People not in that circumstance have trouble understanding how hard it is to turn your public image around once it has taken
this sort of battering. Isabella was seen as someone levelheaded enough, but just too awkward, frumpy, and ill at ease to
represent a country that wants potential tourists to believe it is good-looking and laid-back. People who were far more awkward
and frumpy and ill at ease resented her, saying she made them all look bad. She’d tread off to some obscure nation and sit
in bleachers with other dignitaries at some silly dedication, and fifty-five-year-old, balding, overweight, badly dressed
factory workers would yell at the screen during news accounts of the event: “Look now what’s she done, she’s grinning during
the prayer, she makes us all look like fools.” Or “What’s that? Wearing black to a coronation? They’ll think we’re all rubes.”
And it mattered not that, at Yale, young women wore black everywhere. “This ain’t Yale,” the commentators would say, snickering
a little at what they considered their clever use of American slang.