We all exchanged glances, and sat back, waiting.
“Henry believed me, and seemed to let her go. He and I began spending more time alone together,” she said. “He looked at me differently, touched me differently, a lingering hug here, a brushed hand. He knew the demands being made on me. And he was the only one who ever really listened to me. We could talk to each other. My parents paraded other dreadful titled men past me, and each was more grasping than the last. None of them saw me as an actual person. Only as the Crown. A prize for them to possess. The prize.
“And then Grandmummy fell ill, and everyone panicked. The old bat ended up living another two years, of course. Sometimes I wonder if she was faking it to move me along.”
Nick, leaning against the fireplace, snorted at this, and Eleanor glared at him.
“Regardless,” she continued, “it began to feel as if time were of the essence. Henry took me out on the lake one afternoon in the spring, and we agreed we should get married.”
“Romantic,” Richard said sarcastically.
“I think maybe it was,” I said to him, before turning to Eleanor. “You told me before that Henry wouldn’t necessarily have chosen this life for himself. He did it for you.”
“I needed him. And he needed me. I shielded him against his family’s disdain for his academia and lack of political ambition, and he shielded me from my family’s lack of affection or concern for my well-being. He did love me,” Eleanor said stubbornly. “Passion is not everyone’s endgame. A person can contain many kinds of love, and none is more valid than the other.”
My eyes flicked to Freddie, who was staring at the flames in the hearth. I forced them back to Eleanor.
“What happened when Georgina came home?” I asked.
Eleanor’s jaw tightened. “The specifics, I’m afraid, died with her and Henry,” she said. “I thought it was over before it began. Georgina was still Georgina, maddening but my best friend, all at the same time. Henry and I got married. We had Agatha. We were happy.” Her voice caught. “I believed we were happy.”
Richard tapped his fingers against the bedpost. “Until I came along,” he said.
Eleanor looked up at him, half a century of sorrow all over her face. “Yes,” she said. “And no.” She pursed her lips. “Henry was a terrible liar. He could never hide anything, even if he tried. And he did try. But I told myself I could live with it. I told myself I didn’t need all of him; I told myself I had parts of him she never would. I was, after all, his wife. I was stronger than this. Until…”
Richard pushed off the bed and walked to the window, leaning against it and staring into the gardens. The evening sun set them aglow, as if they, too, were burning.
Eleanor took a deep breath. “Agatha had just turned a year old,” she said. “She’d had her bath, and the nanny had brought her to me for some hugs before bedtime. Mummy marched Georgina right in, practically shoved her at me, and that’s when my sister told me she was four months pregnant with Henry’s child. While I was holding mine. I will never…” She put a hand to her chest. “She told me with so much hope in her face that she and Henry had been in love for ages, and that my wedding had been a regrettable mistake. A mistake, she called it, in front of my child that had come from it.” Her voice dripped with emotion. “Georgina actually took my hands and begged me to let them be together. The way it was meant to be, she said. And I will never forget how she sounded. As if this were such a fair suggestion. As if it would be so reasonable for me to step aside and give her what she wanted. You can’t imagine how it felt. It was—”
“Like the air was gone from your body,” Nick finished. “Like you were a ghost and you might blow away.”
“I have never felt…less,” Eleanor said thickly. “She was the spare by birth, but I was the spare in every other way. The extra part. The backup.”
“Quite,” Freddie said. I had to stop myself from reaching for his hand.
“Mummy put a stop to that silly fantasy, of course, with help from my grandmother,” Eleanor barreled on. “Queen Victoria II was legendary for many reasons. One of them was that her disapproval, when it came, and it came often, was crushing. I still want to shrivel into myself when I think about how she looked at Georgina after we told her. I think if she could have left her in a nunnery for eternity, she would have. But instead she told us that Georgina would have the baby, and Henry and I would raise it as ours. It is the royal child of a princess and a duke, she said, and it shall remain so.
“Georgina came undone, naturally. She screamed, and collapsed as though someone had cut her off at the knees. And our grandmother walked up to my sister and pulled her up off the ground and said, Foolish child. It is already done.” Eleanor snapped her fingers. “Just like that. As if I were being given her bedroom, and not a child.”
“This is insanity,” Nick said.
“It did feel it, in the moment,” she allowed. “But in 1957, this was not entirely uncommon among aristocratic women who found themselves pregnant outside of wedlock. Georgina was never going to be allowed to keep him. It would have ruined her reputation. Especially given that the baby’s father was…” Her voice trailed off. “It was an elegant answer to an inelegant problem.”
“Our specialty,” Freddie managed.
Nick looked doubtful. “You really got no say? In taking on another child?”
“What was I meant to say?” Eleanor shot back at him. “The Crown is bigger than I. It is
