Nobody in Particular(37)
I don’t mean for my lip to curl. It does it of its own accord. Luckily, the swarm of paparazzi bordering the gardens don’t see me, as I’m angled away from them. Unfortunately, Alfie, who attended the christening with his parents, does.
“Why’d you look at the baby like that?” he asks in a low voice.
“Oh,” I say, before blowing a noncommittal raspberry. “He’s just a bit…”
Alfie patiently waits for me to elaborate. I hold back until we’ve cleared enough space between us and the nearest potential eavesdropper to reply. Sidney and Theodore break away from my parents and follow Alfie and me down the dirt path.
“Well, he’s a bit ugly, isn’t he?”
“Rosie.”
“He looks like a grandpa!” I say, indignant at his indignance. “He’s got all those wrinkles, that little frown, like he’s reading a newspaper article that’s outraged him. That is an old man who’s been shrunken down and clothed in a little terry cloth one-piece.”
“Rosie.”
“But he’s not fooling me.”
Alfie folds his arms and gives me a stern, if somewhat amused, look. “Rosie,” he says, and I mouth my name along with him. “Where’s your soul?”
“Traded it for beauty.”
We slow our steps as we reach a number of cone-cut trees and stand together beside one, surveying the crowd of attendees. The trees block us from the paparazzi. It’s instinctual for us to seek out a photo-opportunity obstacle, though I’m sure my parents will be furious if they notice. It’s the perfect opportunity for me to be seen on my Very Best Behavior, after all.
“You won’t feel that way about your own, you know,” Alfie says, still gazing ahead. “Wrinkles, frowns, all of it. Once it’s lived in your stomach for nine months, it’ll look like a diaper model.”
This time when my lip curls, I make no effort to conceal it. “Babies don’t grow in your stomach, Alfie, there’s acid in there. Besides, why on earth would I want to give birth to a baby? Ghastly.”
“Can’t you ever be serious?”
“I’m perfectly serious.”
“For just a minute?”
“I’m not sure which part is confusing you, Alfie.”
Alfie gives me a long-suffering sideways glance. “The part where your job is to produce an heir?”
“Ahh. Yes, now you point it out, I can see the incongruence.” He’s clearly waiting for me to go on, so I reluctantly give him an earnest answer, though it comes out sounding rather less sincere and rather more sulky than I would have liked. “I said I don’t want to birth a baby, not that I won’t.”
It’s not as though I have much of a choice. The Hennish royal family, like most, is a blood lineage. While I may have an array of duties and responsibilities, the most overarching, the most urgent, is to preserve us. That means protecting the institution in the present, and ensuring its continuation. I hardly need to ask what would happen should I announce my refusal to bear children. Father would do everything within his power to change my mind and, should that fail, he would be at liberty to consult with parliament over changing the line of succession to Uncle Albert. A future monarch who refuses to prioritize her duties over her own selfish wishes has no business being a monarch at all. Not when it’s so widely accepted that the symbol of a strong royal family is analogous to the strength of the country itself. Somehow.
It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a reigning king or queen has skipped over a prince or princess when handing down the crown, though historically it’s been in favor of a younger sibling, of which I have none. Father does, though.
Although I’m sure removing me from the line of succession would break him, it would still be preferable to the potential outcome should I take the throne and shirk my duties. Though there’s no legal requirement for me to have children, and the throne would simply pass to Uncle Albert’s line if I were unable to for any reason—as it would have if I were never born—I’m not sure if I could bear the shame that would be piled on me for the rest of my life should I willfully refuse.
Not to mention, our family is on shaky ground as it is. Stepping outside the lines when ruling a majority-Catholic country is quite the dangerous activity as it is. Doing so only a decade after that terrible referendum is practically begging for a re-vote.
Truthfully, it’s not the prospect of having a child I oppose, anyway. It’s the idea of pregnancy itself that chills me. Whenever I picture it, I think of Mum, lying in a hospital bed, her skin so translucent I could trace a perfect map of her veins. I think of the snippets of information I gathered eavesdropping until I scraped together a shaky understanding from snatches of conversations. I had lost yet another would-be sibling, and had very nearly lost my mother in the process. And though nobody discussed it with me directly, I took a grave lesson away. New life cannot be formed without gambling an existing life. And I’m rather attached to the idea of my continued existence. I suppose I’m selfish like that.
If I set aside the pregnancy issue, I don’t mind the idea of having a child at all. In another life, one where my choices didn’t carry an entire bloodline of pressure behind them, I may have had children of my own free will. Only in that life, I would have wanted my wife to carry them.