By the time Balmoral’s portly clock tower and leaf-covered façade slid into view, Nick’s body must have burned a million calories from tensing every muscle. The car careened up the drive and parked next to five others that had been left haphazardly on the gravel. It was eerily tranquil. Nick and I were ushered inside a side door and up a red-carpeted staircase that felt like a mini-version of Buckingham Palace’s, although the overall vibe of this residence was more that of an expensive hunting lodge, all rugged wood beams, tartan accents, and aggressive taxidermy. That none of the imposing buck heads hanging above us as we ascended the stairs took that moment to drop off and impale us, I interpreted as an encouraging sign that Eleanor herself was not yet haunting the place.
A wordless staffer led us to Eleanor’s private quarters, then bowed and withdrew. Nick took my hand. Then dropped it. Then took it again.
“I don’t know what we’re going to see,” he said, as much to himself as to me.
“Want me to go first?”
“No,” he said, taking a deep breath. “I can do it.”
He pushed open the door. As we crept through Eleanor’s sitting room toward her bedroom, we heard a clutch of voices getting louder and louder.
“Nicholas,” barked an unmistakable one when we came into view. “You need a haircut.”
Eleanor wasn’t dead.
Eleanor wasn’t even unconscious.
Eleanor, in fact, looked absolutely fine.
CHAPTER FOUR
Well, well. Clearly two months of playing peasant stimulates the follicles.”
The Queen was in bed, but propped up on a pile of silk pillows, a rosy glow in her cheeks. Her hair was done. She was wearing lipstick. Someone had even had the presence of mind to pin a starburst-shaped diamond brooch to her blue bed jacket.
I’d been in Eleanor’s chambers in Buckingham Palace, and by comparison, these looked exactly like what they were: the bedroom of a glorified summer cottage, sparsely decorated, with a no-frills bedframe and a dated green floral bedspread that mirrored the one my aunt Kitty had at her actual cottage in Michigan. To Eleanor’s right was a brown leather Eames chair—clearly an original—in which her mother, Marta, napped, snoring lightly; to her left stood Richard, wearing what I assumed was his hunting outfit. (My first clue was his actual rifle, which he was leaning on, barrel end down, like a cane.) The whole tableau was so surreal—the opposite of what we’d braced ourselves for—that Nick and I could only gape.
I felt rather than saw Nick’s fury. The temperature around him seemed to rise ten degrees.
“Protocol, Nicholas,” Richard said, his lips compressed into a pale white line.
Nick obliged with a bow, something I wasn’t even aware a person could do sarcastically until I saw it, and I stumbled through the most dignified curtsy I could manage. It’s hard to be graceful when you’re simultaneously shocked, relieved, enraged, and still in your running clothes.
“I wish I could say the life of a fugitive suited you,” Eleanor said. “But now that you’ve come to your senses, we can repair this mess, including that hair situation on your face.”
“Come…to my senses?” Nick choked. “We’re talking about my senses here?” He started to wipe at his eyes with his T-shirt sleeve. “You let us think you were dying. I can’t believe this.”
He turned to hide his face from them and started tugging at his hair. “We came back because you were fucking dying,” he repeated.
“Language,” Richard snapped. Eleanor might have been fine, but Richard looked like he was about to have a rage aneurysm.
“I cannot believe you faked a heart attack to call us to heel,” Nick spat over his shoulder.
“I did no such thing,” Eleanor said. “There was…a flutter. Fortunately, the doctors believe it’s not significant. They’ll sort out my pharmaceutical cocktail and I’ll be back to work.” She shrugged. “Perhaps my condition may have been exaggerated to you, but I cannot control that.”
“That’s bollocks and you know it,” Nick said, turning back to face them.
“What’s ‘bollocks’ is you two running off like petulant children,” Richard snarled.
“This entire exercise was unnecessary,” Eleanor said. “Honestly, Nicholas. Wigtown?” She said the word as if it hurt the inside of her mouth.
“And to think, we were about to come back of our own accord,” Nick said. “Now I can’t fathom why.”
Eleanor raised one penciled brow. “I know Richard didn’t raise you to think abdication of duty was acceptable,” she said. “Frederick has been doing yeoman’s work in your absence.”
Her eyes went to another corner of the room. It was only when I followed her gaze that I noticed another person had been sitting there the whole time, tucked in a tufted leather wing chair as if he wished to disappear into it.
Freddie.
I had missed him, but precisely how much didn’t hit me until I saw his face. His thicket of red-brown hair was still barely this side of unkempt, and he had the rosy cheeks of a very pale person who’d been spending more time than usual outside. His roguish handsomeness was still potent—doubly impressive because he was dressed in an outfit that matched Richard’s exactly: green hunting jacket, sturdy loafers, socks over trousers. I wanted to run over and hug him, but if he had any urge to approach us, he was suppressing it, so I did, too.
Nick turned and they looked at each other for a beat longer than seemed natural. “You could’ve warned us,” Nick finally said.
“I assumed you’d chucked your phone, since you never used it,” Freddie said airily.
“This was beneath you all,” Nick said, to Richard this time, as if it were easier to blame the person he already disliked the most.
“You can hardly get on your high horse about false pretenses when you’ve been living under them for the past two months,” Richard said. “This farce ends today. Start acting like a man and do your duty by the rest of
