Characters

Yvonne Aldric

Dowager Sovereign Princess of Sorvaine, eighties, and the family's great endurer. She married the heir at twenty-two, stood beside him for thirty years, and lost him without warning in 1996 — after which she left the palace for a house of her own two streets back from the Portarène harbor. She has outlived a husband and a son and carries both without ceremony. She appears when she is truly needed and not merely when she is expected, and she misses nothing.

Full Name: Yvonne Aldric (née de Sarraut)

Date of Birth: 2 November 1943

Height: 5'2"

Title: Her Serene Highness the Dowager Sovereign Princess of Sorvaine

Married Édouard III 1966 · Sovereign Princess thirty years · widowed 1996 · grandmother to the five Aldric children

Appearance: White hair, still thick, worn up in the soft formal style of a woman who has been dressing for state occasions since before most of the room was born. Dark eyes that have not dimmed, and the fine, composed features of Riviera nobility, elegantly kept. In the formal portraits she wears it all correctly: the tiara, the orders, the sash, every piece in its right place. She carries the whole apparatus the way she carries everything, which is as though it weighs nothing and means less than the people it was worn for.

The woman she is: The endurer. She came from French Riviera nobility, married the heir to Sorvaine at twenty-two, and stood beside him for thirty years — and then, on an ordinary Tuesday in 1996, he was gone, suddenly and without warning, and she was no longer the Sovereign Princess of anywhere. She did not stay to haunt the rooms that had been hers. She chose a house in the old quarter of Portarène, two streets back from the harbor, and made a life there on her own terms.

She has outlasted more than any one person should be asked to. A husband, without warning. A son — Clément, the youngest, lost in 1999 — a grief she carries whole and does not set down. And now she is losing her eldest son by degrees, the cruellest loss of the three, because it is happening slowly and there is nothing in it she can do. She does not speak of any of it to manage other people's feelings. She holds it the way she holds everything: completely, privately, without asking anyone to help her carry it.

Now: In her eighties, and entirely present — which is not the same as being untouched, and she would be the first to make the distinction. She lives quietly and by her own clock, appears when the family genuinely needs her rather than when the calendar says so, and stands on the balcony every fourteenth of July for the Fête Nationale in her role as Dowager Sovereign Princess. She watches the fireworks over the harbor and thinks about the people who are not there to see them. Nobody has to ask what she is thinking. They know.