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  The Royal Birthday

  American Royalty: Book #1

  Written by Laura McGehee

  Copyright © 2017 by Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.

  Published by EPIC Press™

  PO Box 398166

  Minneapolis, MN 55439

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  International copyrights reserved in all countries.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without

  written permission from the publisher. EPIC Press™ is trademark

  and logo of Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.

  Cover design by Laura Mitchell

  Images for cover art obtained from iStockPhoto.com

  Edited by Ryan Hume

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: McGehee, Laura, author.

  Title: The royal birthday / by Laura McGehee.

  Description: Minneapolis, MN : EPIC Press, 2017. | Series: American royalty ; #1

  Summary: The day of King Jonathan George Washington’s 65th birthday party can only mean one thing. It is time for him to name his successor. While each of the three children scheme, double-cross, and posture as best they can in order to secure the crown, Queen Donna Franklin sets a plan in motion that could topple the world entirely. The King’s decision sends shockwaves throughout the nation.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016946187 | ISBN 9781680764772 (lib. bdg.) |

  ISBN 9781680765335 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Washington family (Fictitious characters)—Fiction. | Kings, queens, rulers, etc.—Fiction. | Inheritance and succession—Fiction. | Interpersonal relationships—Fiction. | Young adult fiction.

  Classification: DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016946187

  This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

  To absurdity, for keeping us young

  George Washington took a long, deep swig of mead and basked in the reflective glow of intense adoration from his fellow Revolutionists. They each stared at him with wide, hungry eyes that were consumed with his thoughts, opinions, and directives. He had never experienced such complete and total ownership of another’s self—not even over his own horse Buttercup, who had become prone to demanding oats wherever and whenever she wanted them no matter the circumstances.

  George filled his gut with a deep breath and delivered the punch line that his boys needed.

  “And so I said to the King’s chambermaid, ‘There’s a reason they call me the Sword of the Revolution, if you know what I mean,’” he said, with a wink and a gesture toward his nether regions. The bar erupted into rowdy cheers and raucous laughter; nobody could tell a joke like Washington, not even Franklin when he drank twelve glasses of wine and insisted on acting in character as Williamsburg Williamson, a hapless British solider with a lisp.

  “Another shot of Whiskey Rebellion for the boys!” Washington shouted, which elicited even more cheers. The boys were red-faced, disheveled, and far too drunk to hold the course of history in their hands. Washington regarded them all with an intense feeling of camaraderie that only months of sweating profusely together in a tiny hidden chamber, plotting the future of the nation, could inspire. Hamilton and Adams were in the middle of an ill-advised chugging contest that would certainly end in patriotic pain, Jefferson had pulled his top hat over his eyes and seemed to be sleeping while standing up, Franklin mimed Williamsburg Williamson trying to shoot a gun but accidentally holding it backwards, Madison was on the verge of another deadly illness but proudly pounding back scotch in an effort to cleanse his spirit, and Burr sat in the corner with a dark smile. The bartender passed around shots of Whiskey Rebellion, and the men lifted their glasses high. George smiled at the thick mixture in his glass, and decided that this would be his first item to tax when he was in office; he knew his country could never live without their whiskey.

  “To the future President of the new country!” Hamilton shouted loudly. Washington shook his head and refused to raise his glass, shooting a wry smile at his treasured Alexander Hamilton while batting his eyes. The boys loved this routine, and Washington loved his boys. They laughingly jostled him and urged him to join in their toast. Washington solemnly shook his head.

  Everybody laughed even harder and shouted until their faces turned red, demanding that he take the shot. Washington sternly shook his head once more; as his boys knew, he was great at pretending to be noble. When Hamilton leapt onto the bar top and began to sing “We’re not throwing away this shot!” with his arms around Burr and Franklin, Washington broke into a beaming grin. Hamilton always knew the way to his heart. He gravely rose to his feet, and the boys immediately quieted down.

  “To the best goddamn leader you boys will ever have!” he said, with as much force as his gravelly voice could muster. His boys cheered in response. George tipped the abrasive substance down his throat and felt it burn, just as the British had burned in a bright blaze of American glory. He had never experienced pain that felt so savagely empowering, not even when shrapnel had lodged into his right knee during Yorktown.

  Washington had discovered somewhere around his twenty-first birthday that the key to success in this world was pretending as if you knew what you were doing. He had been thrust into power as the major of the Virginia militia following his Uncle’s untimely demise, and adopted an aloof reserve that stemmed more from his lack of experience than anything else. But as he continued to grow up (quite literally) and silently tower above the rest of his men—occasionally uttering phrases that seemed weighty and wise by their isolation—he realized that being well-liked was simple. To the public, he was reserved, and they assumed he was always deep in thought when he was often just thinking about dinner. He saved his rowdier moments for the privacy of late nights, like tonight’s eve of celebration on the cusp of determining the course of history.

  They had worked hard for years to get to this point, and had spent the past few months in a caged prison of heat-induced insanity in that godforsaken hidden Pennsylvanian meeting room. After all of the screaming matches, debates, and thinly veiled threats on each other’s families, they were poised to sign the Constitution tomorrow and give birth to a new nation. Washington thought it was time for some good, old-fashioned, drunk American unity. Also, he had been restricting his drinking to only eight drinks a day during the Constitutional Convention, and he thoroughly missed the warm buzz of copious amounts of whiskey flowing through his veins at all hours of existence.

  At six feet two inches, George stretched over the rest of his peers like the oldest tree in a forest. His distinguished nose and chiseled jaw imbued him with the sort of power that seemed predestined, and he had spent his whole life in the endless pursuit of greatness. He looked down into his wine glass and was startled by the soft splash of his wooden teeth. He quickly shoved the set back in his mouth and darted a glance around to make sure nobody had noticed. Luckily, they were busy arguing about Alexander Hamilton’s idea to turn the traditional duel into a battle of dance and song.

  “I’m telling you guys, it would be an incredible way to prove who is the best through wit, stamina, and the crafting of breakaway hits of self-expression!” he said, his eyes bright.

  “I am not dancing,” Jefferson said staunchly. “No matter what.”

  “It thurely would be a thupid, thupid uthe of time,” Franklin lisped in that silly presentation of Williamsburg. “Which meanthe that I, a thupid Brit, fully thupport it!”

  “Oh, hush,” Hamilton said with an eye roll. “It’s the future, I promise. They’ll all be talking about our musical duels for centuries.”

  “What’s wrong with the normal way of dueling?” Burr as
ked from the corner, swirling his whiskey.

  Washington chuckled and shook his head. This sort of debate would only end in drunken wrestling, which he simply couldn’t stomach with all the Whiskey Rebellion sloshing around his gut.

  “Well, I best be going home,” Washington said gravely to the room at large, working hard to move his thick tongue in accurate articulation. As he lurched to his feet, the entire bar groaned and shouted protests.

  “Just eight more thots, that’s all I athk!” shouted Franklin, who was now inexplicably shirtless and dancing with a coatrack.

  “Your last night as a free man! The party is just starting!” Adams said from his apparent slumber in the corner. The men rallied around George, and the bartender handed him another shot of Whiskey Rebellion. George smiled at the flushed faces surrounding him, and used the excuse he knew would work.

  “Sorry, fellas. I have to go . . . show my lady the Sword of the Revolution,” he said with a wink. One by one, the boys broke into beaming smiles.

  “You dog!” Hamilton screeched, thumping Washington on the back.

  “This man just cannot, and will not, be stopped,” said Madison. The men would not let him leave until he gave them all the very top-secret Freemason handshake, which had the distinct possibility of becoming less and less top-secret the more they shouted about it in the tavern late at night. But Washington performed it expertly, finishing with a flourishing tap of his Square and Compass engraved ring against his fellow Freemasons’ hands. He stumbled out of the bar into the night and the crisp September air.

  He walked over to his trusty steed, Buttercup. She had been with him for years, and he trusted her as much as he trusted his boys. Come to think of it, he probably trusted her more, because she had never even once tried to dip his fingers in warm water while he was sleeping to make him pee his pants.

  “How you doing, honey?” George asked. Buttercup sniffed his mouth and then blew air out angrily. She pawed the ground with her hoof and shook her mane in frustration.

  “I’m sorry, really, they wouldn’t let me stop,” George said. “But let’s just go on home.”

  He clambered up the side of Buttercup and struggled to swing his leg over the saddle. As he teetered on the edge of the horse, gravity bested him and he toppled back down to the ground with a sickening thud. Buttercup neighed and reared her head, shaking her head definitively. George lay on his back on the ground and stared up at the clear night sky for a few moments before reluctantly rising to his feet. He eyed Buttercup once more and could not exactly bring her blurry figure into focus, no matter how much he tried to squint.

  “Alright, alright,” George finally muttered under his breath. “Maybe we best walk.” He grabbed Buttercup by the reins and began the three-mile trek back to his home. He knew he couldn’t afford to get another drunk-riding charge, not when he had a country to lead. He walked through the shadowy streets, savoring the crisp air that could only mean fall was around the bend.

  By the time he arrived home, he had walked a good amount of the whiskey out of his system, and it felt a lot less like he was going to lose the contents of his stomach at any moment. He brought Buttercup into the stall, remembering at the last minute to tie her up correctly. Martha would have his head if she woke up to find the horse in the kitchen again, calmly munching through their stock of fresh oats. He tiptoed in through the back entrance, hoping that Martha would be fast asleep and he could slide in next to her without waking her. But he tentatively opened the door to find Martha calmly sitting at their kitchen table with a glass of wine, a constantly flickering candle, and a hell of a lot of legal scrolls.

  “Hello,” Martha said.

  “Hi,” he said, and then began to giggle. He couldn’t help it; the Whiskey Rebellions had certainly taken their toll. Martha’s dark eyes softened and she emitted a few giggles of companionship.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “I’m going to be President tomorrow,” George said. “I’m going to be the most important man in the entire world.” Martha responded with an even louder laugh, and before long, the two were clutching their stomachs and crying tears of laughter. George felt his head swim with elation, and he thought that this was quite possibly the happiest he had ever been. After a few moments, their full-bellied laughs subsided and George sat down with Martha. He poured himself a glass of wine, which made Martha raise her eyes.

  “I didn’t drink that much,” George protested.

  “I could smell the whiskey from a mile away,” Martha said.

  “Well, I didn’t drink that much wine,” George clarified, taking a sip and smiling. “I think this is a time for celebration, don’t you?”

  Martha nodded and raised her glass to meet George’s.

  “We did it. All those years and all those . . . sacrifices,” she said.

  “If that housemaid wanted to keep her ears, she shouldn’t have used them to overhear our conversations,” George said.

  “My thoughts exactly,” Martha responded.

  “To us,” George said.

  “To us,” Martha agreed. They clinked their glasses together and drank the sweet red wine.

  “And the paperwork is all . . . taken care of?” George asked, his eyes darting to the family trees and adoption papers scattered on the table in front of them.

  “They’ll be filed tomorrow. Nobody will ever know,” Martha said with a smile. George felt the rush of cool relief flood through his veins; he could always count on his wife. After a few moments of luxurious contemplation on both their parts, George asked another very important question that had been on his mind for quite some time.

  “Do you think my face would look good on a mountain?”

  After a few more glasses of wine and long discussions about the correct scale with which one should be carved into a mountain side, George and Martha retired to their bedroom. Within a few moments he was deeply and truly asleep, his dreams taking him to a world that even he couldn’t imagine.

  He slept fitfully during the night, living a fugue state that shattered his reality in ways that not even the Freemasonic spiritual retreat, induced by healthy portions of mushroom pie, had managed. His dreams were chaotic, vivid, and governed by a meandering narrative that did its best to communicate a sense of youthful recklessness and search for identity, despite its occasional lapses in structure and clarity. He awoke in a cold sweat, even before Farmer John’s rooster sounded the morning alarm, unsure what had been real and what had been a dream. He shook Martha awake.

  “What? What is it?” she asked groggily.

  “Are you real? Is this real?”

  “It’s too early for existential crises,” she mumbled into her pillow. George propped himself up and rubbed his pockmarked face to make sure it still felt the same.

  “What if we could have more?” he asked.

  “For the last time, we already have three horses, George, we don’t need any more.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean, Martha! What if we could have more of everything, and there could be one supreme organizing force that would let us retain control over everyone under our domain. What would you say?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Martha said, rolling over on her side. “You’re still drunk.”

  “Well, of course I am, but that’s beside the point!” he said. He jumped out of bed and ran to his closet to throw on his nicest trousers and shiniest vest. He knew what he had to do. He kissed Martha a quick goodbye and ran past his manservant Bishop, who thrust a warm sweet bun into his grasp for good measure. He saddled Buttercup and settled his stomach with the sweet bread, steeling himself for the riot he was about to induce.

  Washington stalked silently into the back of the nondescript assembly hall that he now knew better than his own reflection. He had spent hours pacing up and down these creaky floors while listening to his colleagues yell, argue, and insult. Now the very document they had risked their lives for was resting on the front table, shining in the mornin
g light. The rest of the Convention members nervously chattered throughout the room; the air was charged with the electricity of change.

  William Jackson shuffled papers around on his secretarial table, and then banged his gavel with a resounding clang. Unlike the rowdier days of full-fledged debate, the crowd immediately silenced. Every delegate stared expectantly at Jackson, waiting for the beginning of the end of the beginning. Jackson tentatively cleared his throat.

  “Today we will be finalizing our draft of the Constitution of the United States of America,” he said with emphasis, as if expecting a gasp or two from the audience. Unfortunately, most of the men seemed as if their heads and livers had taken quite a beating the night before. When his declaration only found measured silence and a few groans of pain, he cleared his throat and continued, “Mr. George Washington, your opening remarks?”

  George nodded, rose to his feet, and felt the eyes of forty-four delegates from across the country intently trained on him. He slowly walked toward the front table, and swiveled to face the sea of expectant faces before him. He looked down at the document on the table, a truly beautiful piece of legislature. He looked back at the men eagerly awaiting his signing. He cleared his throat.

  “My brothers. I think we have made a grave mistake.”

  A chuckle or two rang out in the back, but George did not smile. The room fell into dead, terse silence. George took a deep breath.

  “Our country must be led by a king. And that king will be me.”

  His voice reverberated around the room, and for a few seconds, everyone stared silently back at him. Then, James Madison rose to his feet.

  “Get him out of here! He’s still drunk!”

  He didn’t know why people kept stating a simple truth as if it carried the weight of an accusation. But with that, the room erupted into chaos. Delegates screamed across the room at each other, and George watched silently from the front of the room. In spite of the deafening madness, a small smile spread across his lips. This was the way it was supposed to be.