Freddie turned his face into one of the floor pillows and yelled into it. Then he jerked away. “This is their little place, isn’t it?” he gasped. “Father might have been conceived in this very room. I can’t. This is madness. Are we absolutely certain…?”
He pulled the box over to his lap and started sorting through the knickknacks Nick and I had already seen. Georgina had hung on to everything, from shards of paper scribbled with hasty words of longing to lengthier missives written in Henry’s sloping cursive, waxing rhapsodic about how long he’d loved Georgina from afar, and how agonizing it was to play out their dreams in hiding, how they dreamed of a different future.
It brought new clarity to the collection of family photos. In many of the early ones, Henry stood between his wife and his lover, all three of them smiling, Eleanor more primly and Georgina as if she held a dazzling secret. Which, of course, she did. I imagined her and Henry’s pinkies secretly touching, connecting them, the way Nick and I would sometimes try to do. But in photographs after Richard, they were as far apart as possible; Eleanor’s smile a bit more assured, Georgina’s strained and missing its light.
“Right,” Freddie finally said. “We’re pretty bloody certain.”
Nick was staring at a small black-and-white photo of Henry and Georgina, close up, slightly blurry—the focal inaccuracies of trying to take, in essence, a selfie in the non-digital age—in which they blissfully nuzzled. “These are my grandparents,” he said. “Imagine what would’ve happened if…”
He picked up one leather baby shoe, which must have belonged to Richard. I tilted my head back and looked at the books. Of course she kept all her girlhood favorites hidden away up here. She’d saved them in secret for him. Or for someday. My free hand drifted to my belly as I tried to imagine what it would be like to hand the twins over to Daphne to raise, knowing that I would have to pretend for the rest of my life that they were not mine, that they didn’t grow in my body, under my heart; that I hadn’t built them out of love for their father and brought them into this world myself. Thinking about it made my skin sear.
“Poor Georgina,” I said. “No wonder she stayed away.”
“And we never bothered to come find her,” Nick said, rubbing at his face. “I feel awful. She had grandchildren who treated her like a weird old bat. I can count on one hand the number of times we spoke.”
“We wouldn’t have if we’d known,” Freddie said.
“But that’s just it,” Nick said. “Someone could have encouraged us to reach out to her, to make sure she had any semblance of a relationship with us. Gran or Great-Gran could have found a way for us to know her. But they never did.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Her reclusiveness seems like a choice. Maybe it hurt too much for her to be any closer to you than she had to be.”
“So many choices, and none of them ours,” he said.
“I feel responsible for this,” I admitted, rubbing my temples. “Georgina hid all of this away for a reason and I should’ve let it stay there.”
Freddie shook his head. “No,” he said. “This isn’t your fault.”
“How could you have known?” Nick said, spreading his hands wide. “We just thought she was eccentric. And if you’d stopped and let things molder up here, we’d never have found out.”
“We were never supposed to find out,” I argued.
Nick chewed on his fingernail. “Do we think…is there any chance Father knows?”
We fell quiet. I searched every interaction I’d ever had with Richard. He was nothing if not dutiful to the Crown; it sometimes felt like he was more attached to The Firm than to his family. I had never really thought about why; it was just the way he was. Was he driven by the need to earn a place he knew wasn’t his, or by the desire to earn the one he thought was? There was no way to tell.
“All we can do is guess,” I said. “I doubt there are any answers up here.”
Freddie pulled out his vibrating phone, the lit screen revealing an unanswered string of texts. “Daphne,” he said, dropping it back onto the pillows.
“She’s going to worry,” I said. “She already is. You should answer her.”
“What can I even say?” He let fly an angry laugh. “Hey, babe, turns out we’re all Lyons bastards! Surprise!?” He picked up the phone and scrolled through her messages, then shook his head. “I can’t even write a complete sentence right now. God, Nick, it could have been so different. We could have been so different.”
“You could have been career military, if you’d wanted,” Nick said.
“And you could have been…”
“Someone who knows what the end of that sentence ought to be,” Nick said very quietly.
“No pressure to be anything other than ourselves,” Freddie said. “We could have been normal.”
Nick pressed his fists against his forehead. “I don’t know how to unpack this,” he said, his voice rough with emotion. “How do we even begin?”
“Well,” Freddie said slowly. “Bex is right about one thing. All we have left are questions, and most of the players aren’t around anymore for us to ask them.”
“Except for one,” I said.
* * *
We’d had to call ahead to see if Eleanor was even at the palace, and her equerry Murray must have alerted her to a strain in Nick’s tone because we walked into a very careful presentation indeed. The Queen was at her dressing
