“I have news for you, Nicholas. You already did.” Bea looked down at all of us for a moment. “Marj is a wonderful woman, a very kind, very smart woman. But her fatal flaw in this position was that she had watched you grow up, and it turned into a tendency to pull her punches with you. I am not going to do that. Did you hire me to do a good job, or to blow smoke?”
“You’ve never blown smoke,” Freddie said.
“Exactly,” Bea said. “So listen up. One tawdry love triangle was bad enough. Two is a pattern. What’s the next domino? Some random tart who was at a party with you once, claiming you’re the father of her child? My job is to stanch the bleeding, and to do that, you’re going to have to swallow some compromises.”
“And the compromise involved compromising me,” Freddie said. “Fifty-third verse, same as the first. The Ginger Gigolo takes the heat off Nick again.”
“I didn’t do it,” Nick said.
“It certainly sounds like you did something,” Freddie spat back.
“You’ve done plenty over the years,” Nick shot back. “Let’s not pretend otherwise.”
“Enough,” Bea said, and she stomped her foot for emphasis. “Yes, Freddie, you were the human shield in this instance. But this ultimately is a good story for you, even if it’s false. Daphne reflects positively on you.”
“It’s not a positive for Daphne when she’s being chased back into bloody Gatwick Airport,” he argued.
“Daphne is the heir to the throne of the Netherlands, and the sooner she gets accustomed to people taking an interest in her private life, whether or not you are involved, the better,” Bea said. “I didn’t say she had to like it. But perhaps you have now done her that service, in addition to helping your brother and Bex avert a scandal they might not have been able to outrun.”
Freddie looked down at his hands and then over at me, and then at the floor.
Bea crossed her arms tightly. “There you go. Crisis averted, with very few casualties.”
“It didn’t entirely work,” I pointed out. “He still used the infertility stuff. Did you approve that?”
Bea pursed her lips. “No. I regret that I didn’t bargain harder for that, for your privacy’s sake,” she said. “But when I saw it, I may have telephoned Penelope and gone on a rant about vendettas. I see she’s turned that into a viral moment. That temporary anchor job is about to become permanent.”
“Everyone wins, except for me and Daphne,” Freddie said, standing up. The chair he was in shot backward and hit the wall.
“For the last time, it’s a positive—”
“You once said you worked for me as much as you worked for them,” Freddie said coldly, hooking his thumb in my direction. “But this isn’t working for me. This was putting them first, pure and simple. You didn’t even notify me. Or Daphne. I realize I put myself in that position when we were boys, to take the pressure off my brother. But I was used that way while they hid out in Scotland, too, and I thought I’d earned a bit more respect.” As he spoke, he turned and made for the door. “I need someone of my own in here who’ll handle my interests with an actual eye toward me. You’re fired.”
He pulled open the door. “Where’s Cilla’s office? Never mind, I’ll find it myself.”
Bea dropped down into her vacated chair, stunned as I had ever seen her.
“He probably didn’t…mean it?” I attempted.
“You and I both know he meant it,” Bea said. This time, the smile on her face was morose. “This doesn’t happen often, but that was one outcome I did not predict.”
CHAPTER NINE
It seems you forgot to mention one important thing that happened while I was indisposed,” Eleanor said that afternoon, pushing The Sun at me. Then she looked around. “I always regret it when I decide to use this room. The walls give my guests such a sickly cast.”
We were having tea in the Green Drawing Room, which had just reopened after having its eponymous silk walls recovered (a once-every-thirty-years assignment). The sofas around us were also green, as was the porcelain on the mantel, whose matching tea set was on our table. I found it festive, but even with the curtains thrown back to let in the waning afternoon light, I had to admit it gave Eleanor a nauseated pallor.
I picked up the paper once more. Clive’s story had included a grainy photo of Freddie and Daphne together back at the state dinner, with some purple prose about how long this romance had been brewing. It was an oddly banal shot; they weren’t even looking at each other in it.
“I didn’t mention it because nothing was happening back then,” I said. “He likes her well enough, and he’s lonely, but marriage is far-fetched.”
“Loneliness breeds rashness. Look at what he did with you,” Eleanor said. “We tried something like this with Georgina, you know. Thought we’d found her a lovely possibility in the old Greek line. He was very handsome. She refused to meet him. She locked herself in her rooms for the entire visit.”
I laughed. “Georgina never comes off as rude like that in her diaries. Just strong-willed.”
“Of course not,” she said. “A person is always the hero in their own story, and thus an unreliable narrator. She’s hardly going to put pen to paper to write about what an embarrassing ninny she’d been.”
I contemplated that while I chewed. “I suppose so.”
Eleanor poked at her copy of The Sun. “This may not be the worst idea I’ve ever heard, even if it is Clive Fitzwilliam’s fiction,” she said. “See, it says right here that I love her. Perhaps Frederick should consider it.”
“Even if he doesn’t love her?”
Eleanor put down her teacup with a clatter. “Rebecca, consider this,” she said. “He tried to make a go of it with all those career women.
