Especially Zan.
My younger-by-ten-minutes sister, Alexandra, is a fiercely independent businesswoman presently living in Zurich who considers arranged marriage so horrifically medieval that she plans to wear black to the wedding in protest.
Maybe it’s the fact that we’re triplets that’s made Lizzy’s fate so hard to stomach. Zan and I know that if the stars had aligned a little differently on that cold December day, it would have been one of us led to the slaughter instead of sweet, shy Lizzy.
But as Lizzy’s identical twin—Zan shared a womb with us, but she doesn’t share our matching DNA—I can’t help but feel it’s worse for me. I can sense Lizzy’s emotions, even when miles separate us. I know she’s miserable to be leaving home.
As I head down the trail, leaving my campers to get settled in their yurts before the guided hike this evening, I catch waves of Lizzy-flavored melancholy wafting up the mountain toward me.
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow, I will lose my sister forever.
Every time I think about it, tears prick my eyes. I’ve always been a look-on-the-bright-side kind of person, but lately, the sunny side has been hard to find.
I can’t bear the thought of my sister married to Andrew the Atrocious.
I only spent one summer with Andrew and his brothers, but that month by Lake Lucerne was enough to make me loathe the Royal Turd. Even under the supervision of the nannies hired to watch over the six of us while our parents and the boys’ grandfather drank too much German wine and debated the terms of Andrew and Lizzy’s betrothal, Andrew managed to make Lizzy cry no less than ten times.
He thought his pranks—everything from the relatively benign “crickets in the oatmeal” trick to the more brutal stashing of snakes in Lizzy’s bed—were hysterical. Zan and I were not amused, of course, but poor Lizzy was traumatized.
She still checks her sheets at least twice before she turns out the light, just to make sure nothing slithery is hiding under the covers.
And no, it doesn’t matter that the snakes weren’t venomous, or that Andrew was only nine years old. My sisters and I had only been five at the time, and all three of us knew better than to torment other children, and our parents were far more checked out of the parenting process than the Gallantian elders.
Surely, Prince Andrew had been warned by his grandfather to be kind to his future bride and her sisters, but he made a different choice. Sometimes people just turn out rotten, no matter how hard their parents and grandparents try to raise them to be decent human beings.
These days, Prince Andrew seems to be your average playboy prince, rambling around the globe with his brothers, drinking too much, partying too hard, and taking scandalous pictures with half-naked women. But I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he’s still got a mean streak.
Once a snake-hider, always a snake-hider.
And once they’re hitched, he’s going to be hiding his snake in my sister.
The thought makes my stomach turn. Lizzy deserves better. She deserves a man who worships her, a man she can’t wait to share her life and her bed with.
Which is why you have to do something, Sabrina. Now! Before it’s too late.
“But what?” I grumble as I head through the garden and into the afternoon shadows cast by the only home I’ve ever known. I talk a tough game, but I’ve never lived anywhere but here, with my parents. I was homeschooled by various nannies, got my botany degree online, and have lived a very sheltered life. I’m unfit to lock horns with a worldly opponent like Prince Andrew.
Or even my parents.
My parents mean well, but they’re from another age. They were raised to believe that children should be seen and not heard, that food magically appears at the table without any effort on their part, and that the cash to fund castle expansion and a lavish ball (or four) every year is their birthright.
By the time the royal bank account finally ran dry, my sisters and I were old enough to get part-time jobs to lessen the blow, but my parents have never fully recovered from the shock of learning that the heat would have to be turned off in the west wing for the winter and that there was no money for Brie, just cheddar, the cheap kind that can be bought in bulk.
The transition was especially hard on my father, a mild-mannered but largely oblivious man who was dressed by his valet until he was in his fifties and literally had to learn how toput on his own pantsas a full-grown man. But he still awakens every morning and dresses in a three-piece suit from his vast collection, determined to keep the glamour of the old world alive.
He will never be an ally in the fight to keep Lizzy at home, no matter how much he enjoys having someone to talk art theory with at dinner. My father thinks this marriage is a good thing.
And maybe it is. Maybe my mother’s right and my mind has been warped by too much modern entertainment. Maybe love is a stupid reason to get married.
It certainly wouldn’t have worked out in my case. Thor, my first and only love, adored me, but only until an heiress with a bigger bank account (and boobs) entered the picture.
I often find myself wondering if it was the boobs or the money that sealed the deal, but it doesn’t really matter. Thor is gone; I don’t plan on taking surgical action to alter the flatness of my chest, and my bank account is perpetually overdrawn.
Living in an ancient castle that’s constantly in need of repair will do that to a girl.
As I mount the crumbling marble steps of the back veranda, I find my suited father at his easel, painting the sweeping Alpine view and the quaint village nestled in the valley below for the hundredth time.