INTERNAL MEMORANDUM — Schloss Aurelin. From: Office of the Press Secretary. To: All Household Staff. Re: Yesterday. "Staff are reminded that the events of Maypole Day are not to be discussed, reenacted, or set to music. The kitchen is thanked for its restraint in the matter of the commemorative pastry, which will not be going into production."

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The Crisis Room of Schloss Aurelin had been, in gentler centuries, a chapel. Leopold had always found this appropriate. People came to it to confess, to bargain, and to be told what penance would cost.

He sat at the head of the table at 7 a.m. with the national press spread before him like an accusation in eleven fonts. The photograph was everywhere. It was, he had to concede, technically magnificent. The light. The ribbons. The woman's hair falling like the third act of an opera. His own face wearing an expression he did not recognize and would have liked returned to wherever it came from.

SAVED BY LOVE?!

"I was saved," he said, to the room, "by assault."

"With respect, sir," said Ilsa Brandt, press secretary, from behind two phones, "nobody cares."

Ilsa Brandt had been managing the palace's image since the year of the Catastrophe, and had emerged from that year with a monochrome wardrobe and the emotional register of a smoke detector: silent for years at a time, then suddenly, piercingly, unignorable. She laid a folder on the table as though dealing the death card.

"Overnight polling," she said. "Do you want it with breakfast or instead of breakfast?"

"Instead."

"Support for retaining the monarchy: up four points. Four, sir. Overnight. Among voters under thirty-five, up nine. Nine points of young people who yesterday regarded you as furniture and today believe you are the wronged hero of a love story they have decided to finish on your behalf. The hashtag — I am obliged to report there is a hashtag — is 'maypole husband.'"

Leopold adjusted his cufflinks. Twice.

"Then issue the correction," he said. "The lady is a professional consultant who happened to be present. There is no story. The palace thanks her. A fruit basket. The end."

Ilsa looked at him with the particular patience she reserved, he knew, for royals about to be wrong.

"Sir. If we deny it, here is tomorrow's headline: PALACE DENIES LOVE. Here is Wednesday's, when they find out she is a crisis publicist who was in the country pitching the tourism board: IT WAS ALL PR. Here is the referendum, which we lose, because the one morning this family looked alive in twelve years turned out to be — their words, sir, I am merely forecasting — 'another royal lie.'" She let that sit. "We cannot deny it. We cannot confirm it, since it is regrettably false. That leaves the third door."

"There is no third door."

"We make it true," said Ilsa. "Cosmetically."

The sentence entered the room and removed its coat.

"A courtship," she continued, in the tone of a woman reading terms and conditions aloud. "Public, warm, photogenic, and contractually supervised. Ten weeks. Through the referendum. Miss Sharma is retained — quietly — as a consultant, which has the advantage of being technically accurate. Afterward, an amicable and dignified separation, timed for August, when the nation is on holiday and grateful for closure. The monarchy gets its pulse. She gets her fee. You get your country."

"You are describing," said Leopold, "fraud."

"I am describing narrative, sir. Fraud is when the money is real."

"The affection would be counterfeit."

"So is the national anthem, sir. It's a Bavarian drinking song with the geography changed. The country sings it with tears in its eyes regardless."

Leopold rose and went to the window, which is what men in his family did instead of shouting. Below, the palace lake lay flat and silver. The ducks were assembling near the east bank with the entitled patience of creatures who knew the seed schedule better than the government knew anything. Half past seven. He was late for them. This annoyed him more than the constitutional crisis, which told him something about his life he declined to examine.

Twelve years ago, in a room two doors down, a different press secretary had explained to a seventeen-year-old how his father's departure would be phrased. Stepping back from public duties. His mother had sat very straight through all of it and signed where indicated, and afterward, in the corridor, she had knelt — she was already Regent by then, there were photographers at the gates — and said the only thing anyone said that whole year that he still kept: "They will always want a story, Leo. Make sure you know which parts are yours."

He touched his breast pocket, where her watch lived, and did not turn around.

"She tackled me into a cheese display," he said, "and invoiced my dignity on the spot. 'You're welcome.' She said 'you're welcome' to the Crown."

"Yes, sir," said Ilsa. "It polled extraordinarily."

"She is impertinent, reckless, and entirely without —" He stopped, having become aware of the quality of silence at the back of the room.

Barrow stood by the coffee service, achieving that particular stillness by which he made himself both invisible and completely central, like a stage manager. He had been present the entire meeting. He had been present, as far as anyone could determine, since the fifteenth century.

"You have a comment, Barrow," said Leopold. It was not a question. Barrow's comments arrived like weather; one could only dress for them.

"No, sir," said Barrow, arranging a cup with the precision of a man defusing it. "I would merely observe that the young lady, upon perceiving danger to Your Highness, ran toward it. In my experience of the last twelve years, sir, the traffic has been rather consistently in the other direction."

The clock ticked. Ilsa examined her second phone with the absorption of a woman granting the sentence room to work.

"That will be all, Barrow," said Leopold, eventually.

"Very good, sir." At the door, without turning: "The Grand Duchess requests the pleasure of your company at eight. She has seen the newspapers. She asked me to convey that she is" — a pause of curatorial care — "'entertained.'"

The door closed. Leopold looked at the photograph again. The woman's hand fisted in his lapel. His own hands placed with imbecile correctness, waist and shoulder blade, as though mid-waltz. Four inches and forty thousand witnesses. The Prince Finally Feels Something.

The truly objectionable part — the part he would not be confessing in this or any former chapel — was that for four seconds, under a falling sky, with a stranger's hair around his face and her heartbeat arguing with his sternum, he had felt, unmistakably, awake. He had spent twelve years constructing a man to whom nothing could happen. It had taken her eleven meters to demolish him, and she hadn't even been aiming.

"Sir?" said Ilsa.

"Ten weeks," said Leopold. "Cosmetic. Contractual. And Ilsa — she is to be told the whole of it. What the referendum is, what it costs if this goes wrong, all of it. If we are to commission a lie, we will at least be honest about it."

"That is the general spirit, sir, yes."

"And the fruit basket," he said, retrieving his gravity from wherever it had rolled, "is cancelled."

---

He was twenty minutes late to the lake. The ducks received him coldly. He distributed the seed — Tuesday: barley mix, per the rotation — while nine small ingrates pretended they had not been waiting, which was a diplomatic posture he respected, having invented it.

"Don't," he told them, "start."

Aloud, to a duck. He stood in the wet grass, a man of thirty-five with a country on his back, and found he was replaying, again, you're welcome — the sheer effrontery of it, the total absence of curtsey in her spine — and that the corner of his mouth had, without authorization, moved.

From the terrace above, unseen, Barrow observed this development, checked his pocket watch, and permitted himself the expression of a chess player who has left a knight where the opposition cannot help but take it.

"Indeed," he said, to no one, and went in to see about the contracts.