Chapter One Thousand Three Hundred Twenty-Eight
16th May 1959
Rock Creek Park, Washington D.C.
A seventeen-year-old with a chip on her shoulder, who had who knew what sort of poison dripped into her ears by her elders was an international incident waiting to happen. Nancy’s worries were offset somewhat by Kiki’s inclination towards being nice. She hadn’t said or done anything untoward, yet anyway. It wasn’t helped by the usual sort of idiocy that infested Washington D.C. Anyone who said the Supreme Court wasn’t composed of politicians in black robes was deluding themselves. They had recently tried to side-step a direct challenge to the State of Michigan’s restrictive vice laws by ruling that the plaintiff in the case lacked standing. In their clumsy attempt to avoid making a definitive decision about a contentious issue, they had sited a late Nineteenth Century case that had some of the most odious quotes about women imaginable associated with it. Informed women everywhere were outraged by what had happened and regrettably that included Kiki herself.
Nancy had spoken with Kiki about it and had convinced her that the American public didn’t want to hear about the times they fell short of their ideals by a teenaged visitor. At the same time, Nancy was very much aware that an outsider’s perspective was probably clearer than that of people who had spent their entire lives living on the inside. Not that the view from the inside was much better when one knew what they were looking at. Nancy had gotten an earful of woe when she had made the mistake of calling her friend Beatrice in Portland. Beatrice was convinced that her husband Ross was having another affair and she was terrified that she was pregnant again. Thirty-two years-old, five children and trapped in a loveless marriage because in Oregon getting a divorce required moving Heaven and Earth. Even if she was successful in giving Ross the boot, the odds were very high that Beatrice would lose everything in the process. If Nancy had wanted to be mean, she would have asked if this was a part of what Beatrice had been expecting when she had gotten married right out of school. At the moment, all Nancy wanted to do was go home and not have to think of any of this.
This afternoon, watching Kiki interact with a group of girl scouts in their green and white uniforms in was a reminder that she actually was good at this. The girls were eating it up as Kiki told them about enduring military training and her ambition to become a Surgeon of Emergency Medicine eventually. She was wearing the conservative civilian clothes that Kiki tended to wear whenever she didn’t wear some sort of uniform. With her glasses and slightly unkempt curly hair, she just looked like an ordinary collegiate. The ideas she represented were quite radical for America though. Aside from Nancy, no one else present had any idea that the dark blue beret that she was wearing to contain her hair was a sign that she was in the Militärischer Sanitätsdienst. Perhaps if Beatrice had met the likes of Kiki early on then perhaps her life would have changed for the better.
Presently, Kiki was sitting on a picnic table with the girls around her on a warm spring day. Every few minutes Kiki would say something and there be giggling. She certainly knew her audience, Nancy had to give her that much. The girls had loads of questions. Was Kiki really a Princess? Did she have a boyfriend? Did she live in a castle? Where her friends like her? Kiki was answering their questions patiently.
Yes, she was the Princess of Prussia. No, she didn’t have a boyfriend at the moment. Then she mentioned her dearest friends, Zella and Aurora. Zella was the daughter of a Markgraf, something that resulted in her getting a collective blank look, then she said Margrave and it happened again. Giving up on trying to explain that, Kiki said that Aurora’s parents were artists and that she envied the relative freedom that her ordinary friends had. The girls had not understood what she meant by that. Then Kiki was asked why she talked so funny. There was a bit of nervous tittering during the second or two it took Kiki to formulate a response to that. Most of these girls would be unlikely to encounter someone from Germany in America these days and had no idea that Prussia was even a place within it. In good humor Kiki said it was because she was from a far-away land with castles but no dragons. That resulted in giggling. Then Kiki spoke to them in rapid fire German, followed by French and Russian, describing what she was doing in the park. The girls were back to staring at her, unsure how to respond to that as she asked them if they had additional questions. They had dozens.
The meeting with Clive Heywood had gone nowhere near as well. Mrs. Heywood had come with her husband and had been absolutely giddy at the prospect of meeting Princess Kristina. The reality was far different than what they had been expecting. Mrs. Heywood was a big fan of the pageantry of the sort that Kiki abhorred. There had been an awkward moment when Kiki had explained that rather than being introduced to Berlin Society when she was sixteen, she had decided that the Joint Medical Service would be a better use of her time and cost the family trust considerably less money. The plans that her younger sisters were making were going to bankrupt the family trust, so her father needed all the help he could get. It was impossible to tell if Kiki was joking or not. Nancy knew Marie and Victoria and she wouldn’t put it past them to demand something extravagant for when they turned sixteen. Mrs. Heywood had no idea about any of that.