Not Your Cinderella: a Royal Wedding Romance (Royal Weddings Book 1) Page 4

  Wait, was it Your Highness? The bodyguards had called him Sir. Was that a military thing? He’d been in the army for ten years or so. Maybe she should ask. Should she? Maybe asking was rude and you were meant to know this, like maybe they taught it in schools or something. Only not the shitty sink school Clodagh had been to, where the only thing you really learnt was how to smoke behind the gym and give a blowjob in the toilets…

  “Excuse me? Miss?”

  Clodagh jerked awake in the middle of Cambridge Central Library, a woman in glasses standing over her. Oh God, please don’t let me have fallen asleep. Please don’t have been obvious…

  “I know the Civil War can be a bit boring,” the woman said, looking over Clodagh’s history module, “but you were snoring loud enough to interrupt the kiddies’ storytime.”

  Chapter Three

  She didn’t see the prince for a couple of weeks.

  He’d joined Lady Mathilda College and moved into an undisclosed location which had to be, as Clodagh understood it, within a ten mile radius of Great St Mary’s Church. Since this radius also included every other student at Cambridge, it didn’t narrow things down very much.

  Clarence House reported that the prince was settling in and enjoying his studies and would be undertaking light royal duties for the foreseeable future. Clodagh didn’t know what exactly ‘light royal duties’ might entail. Cutting the odd ribbon at the opening of a shopping centre? Polo matches every now and then? Polishing a few tiaras?

  She kept her head down, read pages of her textbooks in the pub, typed up essays on the library computers, and tried to avoid Hanna and Lee. They were going through a honeymoon phase now anyway. They always did after he’d hit her. Clodagh knew the pattern like she knew her own face.

  She finished a particularly boring module on the Chartist movement, checked out a much more interesting book on Rosa Parks and gave herself a few days off studying. Then, one damp day in October, the pub door opened and a large man in a black suit came in.

  He was followed, slightly nervously, by some of the students who’d been here at the start of Michaelmas term. Ruchi with the funky glasses and Hunter the cocky American and the Chinese boy with the stutter whose name she couldn’t remember. A couple of others. And then Prince Jamie.

  Clodagh made a point of being disinterested.

  Hunter was the one who strolled up to the bar, as the others spread out over a couple of tables. He was probably the most socially competent of them all, but he had that air about him, like he called girls ‘chicks’ and said things like, “I’m not sexist, but…”

  Clodagh smiled professionally at him as she marked her place in the book and set it aside.

  “What can I get you?”

  “Howdy. I’ll take three pints of lager, three pints of that warm stuff you call bitter and one vodka and orange.”

  Clodagh ignored the ‘warm stuff’ comment she’d heard a variation of from every American she’d ever met in a pub, nodded and moved to pick up a glass. She’d been told to upsell if people asked generically for ‘a lager’ but with students she didn’t bother. Whatever was cheapest was usually fine with them.

  She hesitated at the tap though. What if she poured cheap beer and the prince didn’t come back again?

  Oh, fuckit, Clo, not like he’ll be a regular here anyway. He’s only here slumming it with his new study buddies before he pisses off somewhere fancy for some decent champagne.

  Cooking lager it was then. She poured three pints, then reached for a different shelf for the beer glasses.

  “Why the different glass?” enquired Hunter.

  “What?”

  “It’s a different shape glass for the ‘bitter,” his fingers made the inverted commas, “than for the ‘lager’.”

  Clodagh looked at them. Yep, tall and narrow for the lager, shorter tulip shapes for the beer. “No flies on you,” she said, and started pulling the first bitter.

  Hunter waited for her reply, then when none was forthcoming, “Yeah, but why though?”

  Clodagh shrugged. “No idea. Maybe it tastes different in a different kind of glass.”

  “It’s ‘cos proper beer doesn’t need fancy glasses to taste good,” piped up Stevo from his corner of the bar.

  Hunter took a lip-smacking pull of his lager. “This is proper beer.”

  Stevo just snorted and turned back to his pint of bitter and his incomprehensible conversation with Paulie about how badly Spurs were playing this season.

  “Hey, do you know, Your Highness?” Hunter said, and Clodagh only spilled a bit of the beer she was pulling.

  She glanced up as Hunter explained the question to the prince, who’d sidled up without her noticing. “Why’s it one kind of glass for your lager and another for your beer? And what is the difference anyway?”

  “Colour, taste, method of production, temperature,” she said without thinking.

  A slight pause. She mentally kicked herself for replying.

  “Is that so?” asked Hunter. “What is the method of production?”

  Clodagh, who was more or less repeating what an old boss of hers had said when she’d asked the same question, shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Hunter gave her a look of satisfaction. Of course, if she had known, he’d have pushed until he found something she didn’t. Wanker.

  “Do you?” Prince Jamie asked him.

  Clodagh blinked.

  “What? No, man, I’m a scientist, not a… brewer.”

  “Brewing is science,” said the prince reasonably. “Chemistry at the very least. There may well be something in the shape of the glass,” he held two up to the light to compare them. “As with red and white wines. Perhaps the lager is in a narrower glass to create a smaller surface area to maintain the lower temperature?”

  Clodagh found herself smiling as she poured the third pint.

  Hunter said, “Well, it’s better cold anyway,” and took two glasses over to the table.

  “We do have trays,” Clodagh said.

  Prince Jamie winked at her and expertly gathered up the remaining four pint glasses in one go.

  “Rosa Parks, huh?” he said, even though she’d put the book on the back of the bar. And then, under his breath, he started singing the Horrible Histories song about her as he turned away.

  Clodagh gaped like a landed fish. Again.

  “I think it’s to do with the, what-d’you-call-it, effervescence,” Jamie said when he went back to get Ruchi’s vodka and orange.

  The barmaid raised her eyebrows. His heart had sunk a little when he’d walked in and seen her there, because she was the one who’d behaved like a frightened rabbit last time he was here. Only, maybe she wasn’t. She certainly seemed to have found some backbone from somewhere. Probably dealing with Hunter W Carmichael III, who thought he was God’s gift to women, science, and the universe.

  “Effervescence?”

  “Yeah. I mean, lager is supposed to be… fizzier, for want of a better word, than beer. Stands to reason that a smaller surface area will allow less of it to evaporate. Whereas with an ale, you don’t want it fizzy…”

  “Therefore you do want some of it to evaporate,” she said as he trailed off. She made a face as if she was considering that. “Could be. Or maybe it’s just tradition.”

  “Maybe it is,” he said, and paid for the drinks with his grandmother’s face.

  Most of his conversation with his fellow students conversation on this, the first Friday of their first term as postgrads, was about the course, the tutors, and the sheer overwhelming amount of work they were expected to do.

  Forty hours a week, that was what he’d been advised. Lab work, individual research, seminars, tutorials and the like. It was a full time job, he’d been told. There wouldn’t be much time for partying any more.

  Jamie had nodded sincerely and tried not to laugh his head off at the idea that forty hours was a full working week and that he ever went out partying if he didn’t have to. He’d never done les
s than sixty hours a week for the last ten years; even more since he’d left the army. He’d had to apply for special dispensation to carry out his royal duties, which had been drastically reduced. “For Christ’s sake, your grandmother is the Queen,” Olivia had said. “Get her to tell them to cut you some slack.”

  “No bloody fear,” said Jamie, who’d never run to his granny for help in his life and wasn’t about to start now. “Won’t be a proper doctorate if I don’t take it seriously.”

  His phone bleeped. Peaseman, reminding him he had his weekly meeting on Saturday. Jamie had tried to talk his secretary into coming to Cambridge for, say, one weekday lunch meeting a week, but the good major had insisted this was impossible, so Jamie had to go down to Kensington Palace for it instead, where his entire family could bug him about why he couldn’t just accept an honorary doctorate like his father had done.

  Beside him, Ruchi whooped with sudden laughter and he abruptly tried to tune back in to the conversation.

  “… and then he said, ‘Actually can you help me with Call of Duty, I’m stuck on #YOLO mode and I can’t restart from a checkpoint!”

  Laughter rippled around the table.

  “Seriously, what does he even think YOLO means?” Ruchi said.

  “I didn’t know it had that mode,” Jamie said. “Ugh. I’m so behind on my gameplay.”

  “You only get it when you’ve completed the ordinary play,” said Micah, who was specialising in game development. “But I could probably hack it for you.”

  “No, I’m bad enough at it as it is. There was this one level… I can’t remember, but I died so many times, it was just embarrassing.”

  “Especially for a real soldier!” said Ruchi, then coloured as if she’d gone too far.

  Jamie laughed to show her he wasn’t offended, and to hide the memories of Helmand from himself. “Exactly! If my old sergeant heard about it he’d never stop laughing. Right.” He made to stand up. “Is it my round?”

  “Oh, dude, I was going to get the last one.” Hunter passed him a twenty, which wasn’t really enough. Jamie took it with a smile anyway.

  The minute you stop being generous is the minute people ask what their taxes are paying for…

  He made his way to the bar, noting as he did that the place had filled up. Geraint and Cutter were minding him tonight, and Jamie found, as he usually did, that the crowds parted somewhat for him in their presence.

  The guy with the eyebrow ring served him this time. He had a Kiwi accent, and Jamie was entertaining himself trying to work out if it came from the north or south island, when the girl with the Rosa Parks biography leaned over.

  “Nucleation,” she said.

  “Sorry?”

  “The process of creating bubbles in lager. It’s called nucleation. They etch designs into the bottom of the glass to trap oxygen and promote seeding. To keep the head of the lager frothy,” she explained, reaching past the Kiwi for a Stella Artois glass with a stem and tilting it to show Jamie the base.

  “And I guess giving it a stem helps keep your warm hands away from your cold beer,” Jamie hypothesised.

  “Just like with wine,” she replied, smiling, and Jamie blinked at the sight of that smile.

  The girl carried on serving her customer, joking with him about raising the price of the beer now they had royal patronage, darting glances at him from under her hair. Curly hair, brownish, lighter than her skin. He watched her hands as she gave the customer his change and turned to pull the cask beers for the Kiwi. Good, capable hands with short, unvarnished nails. A cheap watch on her left wrist. No rings.

  You shouldn’t be noticing whether she wears a ring.

  Jamie mentally shook himself and took the lagers back to the table, handing Zheng the shandy he’d asked for in a whisper, and setting Ruchi’s orange, no vodka, down in front of her. He wanted to ask the girl behind the bar how she knew about nucleation, but she was serving someone else when he went back for the other drinks, and after half an hour talking about security metrics with the other postgrads, he’d forgotten.

  The weekend passed with a busy Saturday shift in the shopping centre and another busy shift in the pub. Word had got around about Jamie’s visit to his namesake pub, but the Prince’s Arms remained empty of its main attraction that weekend.

  Sunday was Clodagh’s day for catching up on sleep and TV, but this weekend Hanna and Lee were being pointedly smoochy in the living room, so she walked to the pub anyway, sat nursing a Diet Coke all afternoon, and made some progress with the next module on her course.

  This time, she was determined to get it in on time. She’d forfeited too many course fees by missing deadlines before, and her tutors were getting sick and tired of her excuses. The first time, Whitney had suffered pre-eclampsia and been sentenced to bed-rest, requiring Clodagh to take care of her on a constant basis. The second time she’d welched on the deadline had been when Scott had some drugs planted on him—at least, that was his story—and she’d spent months and months researching and pleading his case until she’d wondered if she should be studying law instead of humanities. The third time she’d just run out of money and had to work every hour God sent instead of studying…

  Well, anyway. Clodagh had given up trying to explain why it had taken her ten years to get the basic qualifications most people got by the time they were sixteen. She was on the home stretch now. A year or so more on this course and she’d have enough credits to apply for an actual degree. Hopefully. Maybe.

  October dragged on, with Hanna and Lee getting steadily less cosy and Clodagh glad of any excuse to get out of the flat. Her property search threw up hideously expensive flat-shares in impractical parts of town, and the couple of times she found somewhere she thought might work, someone had always pipped her to the post.

  Prince Jamie came back to the pub once or twice, as pleasant and friendly to her as he was to everyone. This was fine by Clodagh, who didn’t want to be forever known in his memory as the Frozen Rabbit Girl.

  Oz asked her one Tuesday if she could work a private party on Wednesday in place of a friend of his who’d had to pull out at the last minute. The hours were long, involving both serving and clear-up afterwards, but the pay wasn’t bad. She said yes, and got out her smart black trousers and good white shirt.

  By the time the party ended the shirt wasn’t so white any more and Clodagh’s face ached from smiling at people who pointed and laughed at the red wine stain on her chest. It wasn’t even her fault; some posh bird had got into a shriekingly loud argument with her boyfriend and thrown her glass in his face. But her aim was bad and the catering company only paid for the cleaning of their own uniforms.

  Three am, plates and glasses packed away and the agency vans driving off, Clodagh huddled into her coat and calculated how long it’d take her to walk home. The buses didn’t run this early, and besides there was some terribly long and drawn out construction work going on near Midsummer Common that made a bus journey slower than walking.

  “Nice to meet you,” she said to the last girl leaving, then watched her slip on a wet leaf on the bottom step of the stoop, flail wildly and smash her arm into the spike of the metal railings guarding the building from the street.

  For a second there was silence, then the girl—Becca, maybe?—let out a scream.

  “Okay, let me have a look,” Clodagh sighed, but Becca wouldn’t even let her touch her arm. Blood started running out of her sleeve. Clodagh could see how torn the fabric was, and didn’t really want to see the flesh below it.

  She looked around, but at three o’clock on a Wednesday morning there wasn’t a soul to be seen.

  “Okay, I’ll call an ambulance,” she said, and held Becca’s good hand until it came. Sitting there on the step, she tried to distract her, like she’d always distracted her siblings from childhood hurts. She told Becca the story of the time Whitney had fallen off the swings and cut her lip, and had been such a martyr to it she’d bandaged her whole head and insisted on a week of school
. It had been bloody annoying at the time, but she could make it funny now.

  Becca insisted Clodagh came with her to the hospital, which she could really have done without, but the girl was clearly frightened and alone and in pain, so she could hardly say no. She sat with her in A&E, tried to smother her yawns, and when they were finally released into the cold pale dawn, asked in vain hope which way Becca might be headed.

  “Cherry Hinton,” she said, which of course she would, because it was nice and close to the hospital and also completely the opposite direction of the one Clodagh needed to go in. “You?”

  “Arbury.” A good half hour bus ride on the best of days.

  She hugged Becca goodbye, took a phone number she’d never call, and waved her off on a bus which, of course, arrived before her own.

  She was chilled to the bone by the time it turned up, and if she hadn’t found a seat she might have committed murder. The bus chugged on through the dawn light, and she leaned her head against the window, earbuds in, hood up, almost dozing off before the bus stopped and the driver announced this was the end of the line. Clodagh blinked at the street outside.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she muttered, and wondered why that raised a smile until she realised they were on Jesus Lane. Great. Another ten minutes walk, fifteen maybe, in the freezing dawn air.

  Clodagh got off the bus, so tired she felt drunk, and trudged halfway up Victoria Avenue before the cold and the tired and the smell of wine and blood and disinfectant got too much and she flopped onto a damp bench at the corner of Jesus Green, tears overwhelming her.

  Thursday she had a lunchtime shift at the Prince’s Arms. She had to be at work in… oh God, five hours, and she couldn’t bear it. Back home to the cold, frightening flat she was forced for now to call home, snatch a few hours of sleep if Hanna wasn’t being spitefully noisy, and then get up and spend eight hours being cheerful to men who began sentences with phrases like, “The trouble with young people these days…”