Not Your Cinderella Read online

That was the thing about the Prince’s Arms. The regulars might be a scruffy lot but they paid their tabs, they didn’t get into fights, and they treated her with some respect. They were half old men who’d been drinking there forever, and half students spending more than they could probably afford on lager whilst arguing about the principles of robotics.

  The wallpaper was fading, the drinks menu was limited and there was an entire corner of the lounge bar dedicated to the conker tournament that had been run for thirty years by the previous landlord, but Clodagh had definitely worked in worse places.

  By the time she’d poured Stevo’s pint and added it to his weekly tab, the men had conferred with Marte one more time and left. She came back to the bar, looking somehow pale and flushed at the same time.

  “What’s going on?” asked Clodagh, the three of them congregating in the narrow corridor between the two bars.

  “Cellar inspectors?” said Oz.

  “Did you ever see cellar inspectors in black suits?” Marte twisted her hands. “Well, you’ll see.”

  Clodagh frowned. Oz groaned. “Not strippers, Marte!”

  “No,” she said, an odd look on her face. “Not strippers.”

  “What, then?”

  Marte peeked around into the top bar, which had gone somewhat silent. “See for yourself.”

  The entirety of the top bar seemed focused on the small party entering the pub. Sound came only from the bottom bar, where football ebbed and flowed from the TV in the corner.

  “Evening,” said a voice which sounded oddly familiar.

  A slight murmur of ‘evening’s chorused back. Marte pushed Clodagh out into the bar, where she stood frowning and then suddenly gaping at the man on the other side of it.

  He seemed unaware of her scrutiny. “I’ll have a pint of…” he perused his choices. “Carlsberg, I think. Lads?”

  The two large men behind him had gazes that seemed to drill into Clodagh’s brain. “Tonic and lime,” said one of them.

  “Two tonics and lime, please.”

  Prince Jamie looked up at Clodagh then, smiling his white-toothed, open, friendly smile.

  Clodagh gaped at him some more. His hair really was as thick and wavy as it looked on TV. The eyes that twinkled at his cute niece and nephew shone greenish-hazel in the pub’s dingy lights. He had really long lashes, like a cow.

  Oh God, I just compared a member of the Royal Family to a cow.

  “And maybe some crisps? Do you have prawn cocktail?”

  Clodagh nodded. She had no idea. He wore a Pac Man t-shirt.

  “D’you want,” someone said, and she realised it was her, “Schweppes or Fevertree?”

  “Schweppes is fine,” said one of the men in black.

  “Slimline,” said the other.

  “One regular, one slimline,” said the prince, still smiling at her as if she was an ordinary person and not one whose brain had leaked out of her ears. Pac Man had a crack down the middle of his vinyl printed face.

  “Clodagh!” snapped Marte from behind her. Louder, she said, “One Carlsberg, was it, sir?”

  “Your Royal Highness,” corrected Oz from her other side. “Prawn cocktail?” He placed a packet of crisps carefully on the bar. The crackle startled Clodagh, who moved her gaze from Prince Jamie’s patiently smiling face to the condensation ring an inch from the crisps.

  “I’ll clear that up,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said the prince, but she was already stumbling off to find the paper towel, her hands shaking like anything.

  What the hell? What the actual hell? Prince Jamie in the pub? Prince Jamie, youngest son of the Prince of Wales, grandson of the Queen for God’s sake, was out there ordering prawn cocktail crisps. And lager. Which she still hadn’t poured.

  She emerged again with too much paper towel, started scrubbing the bar, and watched Oz pull a pint of beer. He set it down, eyeing her with amusement, and went to the till.

  “While you’re there,” said the prince, too quiet to be heard over the increasing murmur of voices, “a round for everyone?”

  Oz paused. One of the men in black slid over a credit card.

  “And yourselves, of course,” Jamie added. He took a sip of lager. “Ahh. Gentlemen, shall we find a table?”

  With that, he sauntered off to a table in the conker corner. He really does have amazing hair. Clodagh watched him peer closely at the conkers in their neat mounts and read the comic poems Stevo’s father-in-law had composed about the winners of each annual tournament.

  “I’m going mad,” she said out loud.

  “Yeah. I thought that when I first saw the conkers,” Marte said. She chucked Clodagh under the chin. “Come on, Clo, never seen a royal before?”

  “Er, no,” Clodagh managed.

  “Really? The Princess Royal opened the new swimming pool last year.”

  “Duke of York did prize-giving at my sister’s college,” Oz put in.

  “He’s starting at Lady Mathilda, isn’t he?” said Paulie.

  “What, the Duke of York?”

  “No, fathead, Prince Jamie. Summink to do with computing, I don’t know. It was in the papers. Here, pass us the papers.”

  Mechanically, Clodagh did just that. Computer science, wasn’t it? A PhD? The gifs from the clickbait article danced dizzily in her head. Prince Jamie giggling at something his nephew said. Prince Jamie in full military dress. Prince Jamie with his grandmother, the Queen.

  From under her hair, she watched him take a sip of his lager and smile at something one of his bodyguards said. He glanced around with a bland smile on his face.

  His gaze lingered on the group of students trying to ignore him.

  Then it moved on.

  “Well, this place is a dive,” said Khan.

  “It’s not that bad,” said Jamie, still fascinated by the conkers. There were poems attached to each one, in rhyming verse, telling the story of the match as if it was an epic battle.

  “Laddie, I’ve been in nicer places in warzones,” said Morris.

  “It’s authentic. So many pubs these days are all the same. Gin bars and hummus on the menu. Look, there’s a whole verse here about soaking it in vinegar.”

  “How often,” said Morris, “do you go to pubs?”

  “As often as you let me,” Jamie said, which wasn’t often enough. “Look, this place has actual students. Maybe I’ll make friends with them. You know, friends? People you have things in common with and choose to spend time with?”

  “Like Lady Olivia?” said Khan slyly.

  Yes, like Lady Olivia. Who, as Jamie had often been at pains to point out, was the only one of the eminently suitable young moppets Nanny Barkatt had chosen for the royal nursery all those years ago he was still in touch with.

  “Olivia is one of my best friends,” he said evenly, “but she doesn’t give a fig about coding. She has no idea why my shirt is funny,” he added, looking down sadly at Pac Man and the two ghosts. I see dead people, ran the caption.

  “That’s because it isn’t,” Morris said.

  “You people,” said Jamie. He looked around at the bunch of old men clustered around the bar and the students huddled at a couple of sticky-looking tables, and smiled. He was older than a lot of the students, for sure, but that girl there had a Game of Thrones t-shirt and that guy there had his laptop open with lines of code streaming by. These were his people.

  “Scuse me,” said one of the regulars from the bar. Jamie glanced up, a ready smile on his face. He smiled at everyone so much it sometimes hurt to stop. “Are you Prince Jamie?”

  “Indeed I am. Nice to meet you. What’s your name?”

  “Er,” the man clutched his pint and looked slightly panicked. Behind him, his mates egged him on. “I’m Stevo. Er, there was a thing in the paper about you.”

  “Was there?” said Jamie, trying not to let his sarcasm show.

  “Yeah. Page 23. Look.”

  He thrust a local paper at Jamie, who
allowed Morris to take it and smooth it out on the table. The two men would have already checked it for half a dozen visual signs of contamination before it even got within five feet of Jamie.

  “Ah, yes. Royal pubs of Cambridge. ‘Which one will Jamie the student choose?’”

  “It even mentions us!” said Stevo proudly, and Jamie dutifully scanned the page until he found it. It wasn’t hard; much had been made of the pub’s moniker.

  “The Prince’s Arms, Lady Mathilda’s Passage,” he read, to an accompanying snigger apparently the regulars hadn’t grown out of. “‘Despite its royal name, there’s little to recommend this spit & sawdust pub down a dingy backstreet near the Faculty of Computer Sciences, except perhaps its location. We expect the prince would prefer a more bustling environment like The Eagle on nearby Bene’t Street, the location where Watson and Crick announced their discovery of DNA.’ Well.”

  He looked around the pub, where the regulars and the students alike wore expressions mixing pride and shame. The carpet was scuffed and thinning, the ceiling sagged, and the wooden panelling had been repainted so many times the original grain was invisible.

  “No mention, I see, of Rosalind Franklin in that article,” said Jamie, and got no response.

  The manager, or landlady or whoever she was, watched him warily. The lad who’d served him raised one pierced eyebrow. The girl who’d frozen frowned a bit and picked at a thread on her sleeve, not looking directly at him.

  Jamie raised his voice and said, “I’m sure The Eagle is wonderful, but I rather like it here. So cheers.”

  He raised his glass, and everyone else did the same.

  “In fact I think I’ll stay for another,” he said, even though he had to take several rather large gulps of his pint to justify that.

  “Don’t overdo it, laddie,” muttered Morris.

  “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  “I left it in Sarajevo.”

  Jamie grinned as he got up for another drink. Neither Morris nor Khan had got more than a quarter down theirs.

  One of the students got there before him, ordering a lager top and trying to look as if she wasn’t waiting for Jamie to stand next to her. She was the one in the Game of Thrones t-shirt, her glasses framed in chunky blue, her hair pinned into a bun with a couple of pencils.

  “Yes, sir?”

  Slightly to his annoyance, it was the frozen girl who served him. Eyebrow Guy was filling the lager top with lemonade.

  “Another Carlsberg, please.”

  She nodded and reached for a glass, not quite meeting his eye.

  “There’s a plaque to her,” she said to the lager tap.

  “Sorry?”

  “Rosalind Franklin. In the Eagle. It’s newer. In the middle bar. Don’t sit there though, people will interrupt you for photos.”

  “Occupational hazard,” said Jamie. She still hadn’t looked at him.

  “Excuse me,” it was the Game of Thrones girl, “are you really doing your PhD in Computer Science with us?”

  He smiled at her. “Yes, I’ll be starting soon. What’s your area of study?”

  “Interactive analytical modelling,” she said.

  “Oh, that’s cool. I read a paper on that earlier this year. Professor Khattak, I think.”

  Her eyes lit up. “He’s a tutor on this course!”

  “Yes, I’ve heard. I’m really excited to work with him. What’s your name?”

  “Ruchi Sarkar.” She held out her hand, then hesitated. Jamie took it before she could get embarrassed and start curtseying or something.

  “Nice to meet you, Ruchi. I’m Jamie.”

  “That’s three-seventy. Shall I put it on your tab?”

  He glanced aside at the barmaid. “Yes, please. And Ruchi’s too.”

  The barmaid gave him a weirdly assessing look, but nodded and went to the till as Ruchi tripped over her words trying to thank him.

  “No problem. Now, are you using queuing theory in your modelling?”

  He went back to Ruchi’s table with her, which had the added bonus of making Morris annoyed at the change in arrangements, and continued to talk with her about measuring and calculating the behaviour of the various elements of computer systems.

  She could talk the hind leg off a donkey when it came to computer science, which was fine by Jamie. The others were in a similar vein, every single one of them happy to discuss algebraic subtyping or grammatical error correction in non-native English, but when he asked them where they were from or what they did when they weren’t studying, they clammed up, stammered, spilt their drinks.

  “These are my people,” he said to Khan as he slightly unsteadily left the pub two hours later.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I mean who cares about titles and royal bloody christenings? Ruchi had this brilliant theory about—no, it was Zheng who said it—about how Jon Snow is going to defeat the White Walkers using wildfire, because it’s not magic, it’s science, and all the stuff that’s actually made a difference in Game of Thrones has been about practical applications of science.”

  “Yes, sir.” Khan opened the car door for him.

  “Apart from the Red Witch and… no hang on it doesn’t work as a theory, does it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  “No, sir. Hour and a half to get home, sir. Don’t forget to strap in.”

  Jamie laid his head back against the headrest. Tonight had been fun, the kind of fun he just didn’t get to have often. The first time he’d been a student he’d mostly hung around with the same crowd he had as a kid. Nights out at Chinawhite and Mahiki, private jets to Monaco, It Girl models giving him the eye. He’d always felt more like he was pretending to have fun than actually having it.

  The closest he’d come to this kind of comradeship was the army. After all, he’d pretty much been bred to stand on ceremony and lead people, and he’d made some good and genuine friends there. But still…

  …sometimes he really just wanted to talk about computer games and why Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory probably wasn’t all that smart.

  Rosalind Franklin. Of course, around here she was probably better known than elsewhere. Funny how that was the only thing the starstruck barmaid had found to say to him. He supposed it took all sorts.

  Jamie yawned. Hour and a half until home. He found himself smiling. “When I live here, I’ll be home now,” he said.

  “Sorry, sir?”

  He replayed that. “I mean in two weeks’ time I’ll be home in five minutes.”

  There was a slight pause from the front seat. “Yes, sir. Perhaps try to get some rest.” More pointedly, “There’s water in the cooler.”

  Jamie cracked open a bottle and closed his eyes. Ten days. I can wait ten more days.

  I can’t live here another day.

  Hanna hadn’t managed to get into Clodagh’s room, but she had thrown out all her food and broken her favourite mug. She and Lee were having noisy make-up sex when Clodagh got home, late, after she’d got tired of the regulars speculating on their royal visit and called last orders. Thumps and groans came through the wall.

  Fed up, Clodagh thumped back. “Everything okay in there? Sounds like someone’s choking.”

  Lee called back something Clodagh only caught half of. That half was bad enough.

  She checked the lock on her door, jammed a chair under the handle, and shoved her earbuds in, cranking the Hamilton soundtrack up to top volume and wondering what the founding father would have done in these circumstances.

  The next day Hanna more or less behaved as if nothing had happened and she and Clodagh were great friends. Bleary with tiredness, Clodagh escaped to the library, where she nabbed a desk and sat making notes on her next module.

  Her sisters thought she was mad to try to get into Cambridge. Her mother thought she was daft even trying to get an education. “I worked in a shop all my life,” she’d say to Clodagh, “and it never did
me no harm.”

  “You worked in a shop four times in your life, none of them for more than a year,” Clodagh pointed out.

  “Well, maternity leave, innit? Takes a lot of work looking after six kids and I didn’t get no help from Little Miss Brainy, did I?”

  Clodagh had stopped bothering to reply to this. She’d done as much raising of her younger siblings as her mother—probably more—and had learned a long time ago that asking why her mother didn’t, yanno, stop having babies, wasn’t a useful thing to say.

  “You’ll understand when you have kids,” Sharon would say.

  “If, Mum, if I have kids.” Privately, she thought it was bloody unlikely.

  Clodagh tapped her pen on her book and realised she’d been staring into space for ten minutes.

  Right. Witchcraft and the Civil War, witchcraft and the Civil War…

  Imagine what her mum would say if she heard Prince Jamie came into the pub last night. Probably get on the first train into town and work her way through the gin menu while she waited for him to come back.

  “You should marry him, Clo. Good-looking fella, innit? All that lovely money. Our Kylie’s been after her own flat that long, just imagine! Where do they all live, in Buck House?”

  Or worse, she’d come onto him herself. Christ, imagine having Prince Jamie as your stepdad! He was only—Clodagh looked it up on her phone—yeah, he was only a couple of months younger than Clodagh herself, not that the age gap would stop Sharon Walsh if she had her sights on a new man. After all, the last one had been slightly closer to Clodagh’s age than her mother’s.

  Witchcraft and the Civil War, witchcraft and the Civil War…

  If he came back into the pub, Clodagh would have to apologise for her frozen-rabbit impression. No doubt he thought she was completely witless. He’d come back in, and she’d have warning this time because she’d know what the bodyguards were for, and she’d be composed and friendly and professional. She’d smile, and get his drink, and as she handed it over she’d say, “By the way, I’m so sorry for my behaviour the other day. I was just a bit startled and I’d been having a bad day—” No Clo, he doesn’t care about your day, “—I was startled and reacted weirdly and I’m so sorry, Your Highness. It won’t happen again.”