Author's Preface
Three months later. The last Friday in April. I am so stressed that I have developed a persistent twitch in my left eye.
Since six in the morning, I have been running circles around my new house, tearing into moving boxes. During the busiest week of my entire career, the news came in on Monday that construction of my beachfront villa was finished. I was promptly and unceremoniously evicted from my basement dwelling at the records office—“Nothing personal, I don’t think; Martha just needs to hire a new junior clerk and they need to take your old room,” according to Laurie.
I am happy about my new house, but the move could not happen at a worse time. Today, Friday afternoon, is the engagement party. All of my personal belongings were packed up and shipped to my new house last Tuesday. Which would not be a problem, except that at the exact same time, Edgar delivered several dozen boxes of dresses, jewelry, makeup, and accessories straight to my house. Mom will need more than just her cheap ready-to-wear dresses in order to impress the royal court. The boxes, as far as I can tell, are nearly identical to the ones containing my own junk. I do not know which is which without slicing them open and dumping their contents on the ground.
Fortunately, by eight in the morning, help arrives. Edgar has sent a seamstress, an elderly woman named Marybeth, to make last-minute fittings to the dresses and prepare Mom for her first royal appearance. Pansy and Mom show up by carriage barely a minute later and not a moment too soon. The four of us scramble around the unpacked boxes for about an hour until we find everything, then I hurry to get them set up in the brand-new dressing room that still reeks of fresh paint.
Marybeth is a neutral third party not privy to my secret. So shortly after I step out of the dressing room, I hear Mom say, “Sorry, Marybeth, just got to use the little girl’s room, before you get too far into it!” before she comes trotting after me. Her tiny body is practically swallowed inside a fluffy white bathrobe, and one section of her inky black hair is pinned up in pink rollers. Once out of sight, we stop for a quick hug on the stairs.
“I’ll see you at the party, Mama,” I whisper.
“You’re not coming back here?” she asks.
I shake my head. “Work.”
“That bastard. He’ll work you to death if you let him,” Mom shakes her head. “You tell him that I’m very disappointed with how he’s treating his records clerk, and I’m taking it personally . At the very least he owes you a raise.”
“In all fairness…he did give me this house.”
“Another raise. A bigger house.”
“I’ve got to go. Be nice to Marybeth, please.”
“Alright, alright. You told her no shaving? No waxing? I love a makeover but I have my limits.”
“Yes, Mom. I told her.”
“If she goes anywhere near my crotch with a razor, I have a gun and am not afraid to use it. ”
“That’s a threat, Mom, a crime. I don’t advise.”
I wish her luck and pull away. Then I hightail it to the palace. Today is not only the day of the engagement party. It is also the day that we are finally filing Edgar’s legal petition to recover Mom’s lost gifts—all one hundred thousand obols of it. Calculating that monstrous sum has been half of my job for the better part of three months. It has required me to comb through each and every bank statement and receipt in Pym’s office, then painstakingly record into a ledger the date of purchase, amount paid, and item bought; and finally compound every number together, filling in a good-faith estimate where a record was noticeably missing.
On the first day of each month, over the course of eighteen years, Edgar made regular cash payments to the Rossach household to cover bills, groceries, and miscellaneous expenses. These payments were not modest, either. Had we received this money, Mom would have never needed to get a job. I could have attended a boarding school. We could own a respectable house fit for the gentry, perhaps somewhere in the countryside where we would have plenty of space to store the buggy and horses that Edgar gifted us. And according to one particularly detailed itemized breakdown, the monthly household allowance would also compensate for the salaries of a housekeeper, a personal cab driver, and, for the first few years of my life, a live-in nursemaid and tutor. None of this is including the hundreds of mail-order gifts sent intermittently over the years—jewelry and hats and dresses for Mom, toys and dolls and candy for me, stationery and craft supplies and musical instruments and books and fine art and novelties imported from all over the world for the both of us. Edgar wanted Mom and I to live not just comfortably, but effortlessly.
“I just wanted my daughter to have a mother in her life,” Edgar told me one day, on one such occasion when we were going through the receipts together. “My own mother was so busy being queen that she never had time for me. Once, when I was four years old, Philomena took me by the hand and tried to show me off to her friends, but I had not seen her in so long that I didn’t recognize her—so I started to scream that someone was kidnapping the prince.”
He chuckled, but I could see the wounded child deep in his eyes.
“I could never be there for Ellie. I will always be a stranger to her. But I wanted to ensure that she would always have her mother. That’s what all of this was for.”
The rest was left unsaid, but I could hear it loud and clear. And I failed miserably. If I could respond, I could not say that Edgar’s failure was harmless. Before I was old enough to read and write to soothe my soul, my early childhood was indescribably lonely. I had no siblings or cousins to care for me. Our neighbors shunned us to avoid Mom’s perceived insanity. With Mom working so much at the washing house, from twelve to sixteen hours a day, I was left to run amok with the street orphans, dirty and feral and hardly any different from them. The only constant that I had, which the orphans did not, is that I could go home and wait for Mom to return. Which she always did. Sometimes it was late. Eight o’clock, ten, sometimes midnight. But when she trudged through the door, weary and ragged like an old dish towel, I would jump up from the couch and hug her tight. And no matter how late, she would sit by my side while we rested at the hearth, sharing weak bone broth and stale bread, until I grew sleepy and drifted off in her lap, and she carried me on her shoulder up the creaky wooden steps, and tucked me into bed beside her.
The tragedy of it all is, truly, that all of our suffering was preventable. Edgar feels this anger as deeply as I did back when I found out about it for the first time. When Imogen was banished from the palace, Edgar begged the Queen to let him save her. To give her money, buy her a home, anything but drive her penniless onto the streets. Queen Philomena smiled and told him that he could. And for eighteen years Edgar operated on the assumption that his mother was a woman of her word. He sent the money, he wrote the letters, he bought the gifts. He rarely received responses from Imogen or his daughter. But he assumed this was just part of the deal. No royal makes a deal without strings attached, and if the string of this deal was that Edgar may never hear from his beloved and child again, then he had to accept that. His own grief was the price to ensure they lived in comfort.
I have since forgiven him for spiraling into two weeks of near total madness. His reality was shattered the moment he broke through Pym’s office door—nearly two decades of trust in his own mother, decimated. I cannot blame him for going scorched earth.
Yet, at the same time, I struggle not to confess my side of the story. That in one way, he didn’t fail. He wanted his daughter to always have her mother with her and he got just that. Even if she was away at work for every daylight hour, I never once feared that Mom was not there. She would always come home. No matter how long I had to wait, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that soon she would walk through that front door.
Edgar failed in many places. Not that one.
When I reach my office at the records department, Moretti is already waiting outside. “You’re late,” he remarks.
“Blow it out your ass,” I tell him calmly, then let him inside.
In the three months since, I have made significant improvements to Pym’s chaos, notably the addition of fireproof metal filing cabinets to protect and organize the precious records. I had the ratty old furniture removed and replaced with a handsome green velvet couch, a black leather executive chair, and a newly-polished mahogany desk. Thorunn’s poem is finished and hangs in a frame above the hearth. Still, at this stage of an advanced legal proceeding, a little chaos is unavoidable.
“I hope you made copies of these,” Moretti remarks, pushing aside a haphazard pile of papers that occupy the guest chair opposite my own.
“Those are the copies. I’m not a fucking animal.” I mill about the office, picking out select documents and tucking them inside a manila folder. “Given the fragility of the originals, I will be keeping them locked away for now. I made copies of everything you should need for the initial filing—just use those.”
“The King prefers originals for a legal proceeding,” says Moretti. “The Queen will issue a subpoena to get them, you know.”
“That’s fine. Let the Queen issue whatever she wants, then I will hand over the originals—and if those originals mysteriously go missing while under her care, then there is no question as to who is responsible.”
Moretti does not love this, because the subpoena process will be undoubtedly very annoying for him and his secretaries. But, in his own words, this is why I am so important to his case. Although clerks usually do not take such an active role in their boss’s personal litigation, I possess an “exacting scrutiny” and “oddly insightful paranoia” that make me uniquely capable to protect this massive volume of records.
“And, per your request,” I add, handing him a thick sheaf of papers, “these are copies of every single utility bill, paycheck, and rent receipt from the Rossach household. At least, the ones I could find.”
He flips through, skimming the documents, though spends the most time on the cover page that I typed up to summarize all of the numbers. “All eighteen years of them?” he asks, incredulous. “Impressive.”
“My mother doesn’t like to throw things away,” I explain. “Neither do I, I suppose, since we kept all of this. I will note, we are missing a few records from the early years—the roof leaked and took out a huge chunk from July 476 to April 478—but Mom’s had the same landlord this whole time, and the factory she used to work for is still in business. So they could possibly fill the gaps.”
Our goal in this petition is not just to show that Edgar paid for the gifts. It is also to show that Mom received none of them. A detailed record of her abject poverty is our key to victory.
I hand Moretti the final folder, a massive block of pages summarizing all of Edgar’s gifts and Mom’s paid bills, but a mere drop in the bucket compared to the snowdrift I shoveled through to arrange them. Countless sleepless nights were poured into that folder. Moretti has seen parts of it, but not all compiled together, and he flips through it with nothing short of awe.
“If I didn’t know better,” he muses, “I would think that you had been preparing for this your whole life.”
I give a pressed smile. “Subconsciously, perhaps, I was.”
“Eloise.” Moretti’s brow furrows, and his voice drops low and soft. “I appreciate your help. Truly. But you are aware that, being so involved in the case…you will be called to testify. And if you are asked whether you have some relation to Edgar, if anyone questions why you are so unusually devoted to your employer…you are obliged to tell the truth.”
I am aware. I nod with a deep inhale. “And I will.”
“I thought you wanted to keep your identity secret.”
“Yes. And I intend to. As long as I can.” A shaky exhale. “Just try to postpone it until we are certain that we can win.”
For a long time, Moretti stares at me, his head tilted curiously. I know how Thorunn thinks of him, and out of respect for my beloved fiancé, I have tried to keep my relationship with Moretti strictly professional. But in moments like these, I cannot help but think that Thorunn was wrong. Not once has Moretti looked at me like I am “a piece of meat.” All I see is a profound, almost reverent respect. After our first meeting with the dart gun, Moretti has treated me as an intellectual equal—his warnings and advice are never issued as if he believes I am learning them for the first time; on the contrary, he knows I have already considered these possibilities, and gives them only to make his own opinion known.
“You’re asking a lot of me,” he finally says, “but I will do my best.”
I glance pointedly towards the chunky folder in his lap. “And I performed hundreds of hours of unpaid labor for you. So I hope your ‘best’ is as good as they say.”
A dry chuckle. “I hope so, too.”
There are a few more technicalities to be ironed out, so Moretti and I spend an hour more reviewing the documents for its final details before he is ready. But once it is finished, although time is of the essence, he pauses at the door.
“Last call,” he says. “Once this is filed, Eloise…everything will change.”
He is wrong. Nothing I do or say, from here on out, will do any more damage to this timeline than what has already been done. The moment I stepped into the palace, I set in motion a chain reaction that has spiraled fully out of my control—everything changed when Martha pulled out the file of Eloise Rossach, Pym panicked, and Edgar realized something was terribly, terribly wrong. Now I cannot stop Edgar’s crusade any more than I can pull the moon down from the sky.
“You’d better get going, counselor,” I tell Moretti. “Mr. Hatfield leaves early on Fridays.”
That gets him running. After he is gone, I push my heel against my desk, letting my chair slowly swivel around towards the window. Outside, in the castle gardens, the groundskeepers are setting up tents, tables, chairs, and decorations for this evening’s party. On the horizon, gray clouds are gathering.
PETITION TO HIS MAJESTY’S COURT OF PLEAS
PRINCE EDGAR ROSENCRANTZ,
PETITIONER,
V.
QUEEN PHILOMENA ROSENCRANTZ,
DEFENDANT.
LET IT BE KNOWN, to all men here witnessed, that His Highness, PRINCE EDGAR ROSENCRANTZ, by and through his counselor Viscount Niccolo Moretti, enters his first appearance in the Royal Court of Pleas; and thus petitions His Majesty KING EDWINN ROSENCRANTZ III for specific relief and monetary damages, in the order as follows:
— To find, by royal decree, that Her Majesty QUEEN PHILOMENA ROSENCRANTZ is guilty of the crimes of FRAUD, CONVERSION, and BREACH OF ORAL CONTRACT against Prince Edgar;
— To find, by royal decree, that Her Majesty has unlawfully taken from the personal accounts of Prince Edgar a monetary sum no less than ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND OBOLS;
— To find, by royal decree, that Her Majesty must restore the sum of ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND OBOLS to Prince Edgar with all due speed;
— To find, by royal decree, that Her Majesty falsely and erroneously annulled the marriage of Prince Edgar to his lawfully wedded wife, LADY AMIRA AL’KILIC;
— And to find, by royal decree, that Her Majesty deliberately caused the estrangement of Prince Edgar’s rightful daughter and heir, GRAND DUCHESS ELIZABETH ROSENCRANTZ.
Evidentiary Exhibits Attached and Certified By Prince Edgar Rosencrantz’s Royal Notary and Clerk of Records, MS. ELOISE ODRIC.