Mathilde Aldric

Full Name: Mathilde Aldric

Date of Birth: 22 March 1968

Height: 5'5"

Title: Her Highness Princess Mathilde of Sorvaine

Elder sister of Rémi · oldest child of Édouard III and Yvonne · aunt to the five Aldric children

Appearance: Dark hair, still dark, worn up and elaborate for exactly the sort of evening the rest of the family attends out of duty and she attends because she enjoys it. Dark eyes, expertly made up, and the kind of smile that has clearly just heard something it has no intention of repeating. She dresses with more daring than women half her age would risk — sapphires, a good deal of shoulder, a glass of champagne held like a permanent accessory — and she wears all of it as though it were the least remarkable thing about her. She is the only member of the family who looks entirely delighted to be photographed, because she is.

The woman she is: The scandal, affectionately. Rémi's elder sister, unmarried by choice and unbothered by the commentary, with a romantic history the principality has never stopped discussing and she has never once explained. She arrives when she pleases, stays as long as it suits her, and leaves before anyone has finished deciding what to make of her. She has spent a lifetime declining to be the respectable version of a princess and has enjoyed every minute of the declining.

Underneath the glitter she is sharper than she lets the room believe. She notices what the family is doing and says the true thing more readily than anyone else in it, usually wrapped in something that makes it land as a joke. The people who dismiss her as merely decorative tend to be the ones she reads most completely.

Family: She adores Felix, and Felix adores her — he calls her Tante Mat, and she is, not coincidentally, the relative he most resembles in temperament: the charm, the ease, the gift for being forgiven. She is the daughter Yvonne worried over and never managed to make conventional, and the sister Rémi loved and could never quite predict. She is closer to the family than her comings and goings suggest. She simply refuses, on principle, to be counted on in the ordinary way — which is not the same as being absent when it matters, a distinction the family is still, after almost sixty years, occasionally surprised to rediscover.