Red, White & Royal Blue(101)

“Stop it!” Henry bursts out. All the eyes in the room swivel to him, and he looks pale and shocked at the sound of his own voice, but he goes on. “You can’t—you can’t intimidate me into submission forever!”

Alex’s hand gropes across the space between them under the table, and the moment his fingertips catch on the back of Henry’s wrist, Henry’s hand is gripping his, hard.

“I know it will be difficult,” Henry says. “I … It’s terrifying. And if you’d asked me a year ago, I probably would have said it was fine, that nobody needs to know. But … I’m as much a person and a part of this family as you. I deserve to be happy as much as any of you do. And I don’t think I ever will be if I have to spend my whole life pretending.”

“Nobody’s saying you don’t deserve to be happy,” Philip cuts in. “First love makes everyone mad—it’s foolish to throw away your future because of one hormonal decision based on less than a year of your life when you were barely in your twenties.”

Henry looks Philip square in the face and says, “I’ve been gay as a maypole since the day I came out of Mum, Philip.”

In the silence that follows, Alex has to bite down very hard on his tongue to suppress the urge to laugh hysterically.

“Well,” the queen eventually says. She’s holding her teacup daintily in the air, eyeing Henry over it. “Even if you’re willing to submit to the flogging in the papers, it doesn’t erase the stipulations of your birthright: You are to produce heirs.”

And Alex apparently hasn’t been biting his tongue hard enough, because he blurts out, “We could still do that.”

Even Henry’s head whips around at that.

“I don’t recall giving you permission to speak in my presence,” Queen Mary says.

“Mum—”

“That raises the issue of surrogates, or donors,” Philip jumps back in, “and rights to the throne—”

“Are those details pertinent right now, Philip?” Catherine interrupts.

“Someone has to bear the stewardship for the royal legacy, Mum.”

“I don’t care for that tone at all.”

“We can entertain hypotheticals, but the fact of the matter is that anything but maintaining the royal image is out of the question,” the queen says, setting down her teacup. “The country simply will not accept a prince of his proclivities. I am sorry, dear, but to them, it’s perverse.”

“Perverse to them or perverse to you?” Catherine asks her.

“That isn’t fair—” Philip says.

“It’s my life—” Henry interjects.

“We haven’t even gotten a chance yet to see how people will react.”

“I have been serving this country for forty-seven years, Catherine. I believe I know its heart by now. As I have told you since you were a little girl, you must remove your head from the clouds—”

“Oh, will you all shut up for a second?” Bea says. She’s standing now, brandishing Shaan’s tablet in one hand. “Look.”

She thunks it down on the table so Queen Mary and Philip can see it, and the rest of them stand to look too.

It’s a news report from the BBC, and the sound is off, but Alex reads the scroll at the bottom of the screen: WORLDWIDE SUPPORT POURS IN FOR PRINCE HENRY AND FIRST SON OF US.

The room falls silent at the images on the screen. A rally in New York outside the Beekman, decked out in rainbows, with waving signs that say things like: FIRST SON OF OUR HEARTS. A banner on the side of a bridge in Paris that reads: HENRY + ALEX WERE HERE. A hasty mural on a wall in Mexico City of Alex’s face in blue, purple, and pink, a crown on his head. A herd of people in Hyde Park with rainbow Union Jacks and Henry’s face ripped out of magazines and pasted onto poster boards reading: FREE HENRY. A young woman with a buzz cut throwing two fingers up at the windows of the Daily Mail. A crowd of teenagers in front of the White House, wearing homemade T-shirts that all say the same thing in crooked Sharpie letters, a phrase he recognizes from one of his own emails: HISTORY, HUH?

Alex tries to swallow, but he can’t. He looks up, and Henry is looking back at him, mouth open, eyes wet.

Princess Catherine turns and crosses the room slowly, toward the tall windows on the east side of the room.

“Catherine, don’t—” the queen says, but Catherine grabs the heavy curtains with both hands and throws them open.

A burst of sunlight and color pushes the air out of the room. Down on the mall in front of Buckingham Palace, there’s a mass of people with banners, signs, American flags, Union Jacks, pride pennants streaming over their heads. It’s not as big as the royal wedding crowd, but it’s huge, filling up the pavement and pressed up to the gates. Alex and Henry were told to come in through the back of the palace—they never saw it.

Henry has carefully approached the window, and Alex watches from across the room as he reaches out and grazes his fingertips against the glass.

Catherine turns to him and says on a shaky sigh, “Oh, my love,” and pulls him into her chest somehow, even though he’s nearly a foot taller. Alex has to look away—even after everything, this feels too private for him to witness.

The queen clears her throat.

“This is … hardly representative of how the country as a whole will respond,” she says.