“And what was Henry Vane’s reaction to this?” Freddie asked.
Eleanor glanced at his photo beside her bed. “I wasn’t there. Mummy and Grandmummy spoke to him,” she said. “When he came home that night, he put his arms around me and said, Thereto I give thee my troth. From our wedding vows. That was all he said, and it was all I needed to hear. We were bound together by those, and now by this lie. So I said nothing.” She sighed. “I regret that now. We should have spoken. I should have thrown a vase at his head. But I kept thinking, He’s not lost. He always comes home. And I needed that to be true. So I let it go.”
“I can’t fathom how you pulled this off,” Nick said. “With not even a palace mole in sight.”
“It was easier to fake a pregnancy in my day,” she said. “There was no internet. No way for people to scrutinize me in slow motion. No message boards for crackpots to exchange clues. I was only third in line at that point, so the public wasn’t as fussed about me yet. We limited access to my quarters to one trusted and well-compensated maid, and the few times I did need to go out, we used padding. Georgina didn’t start to show much until she was almost six months along, so she did extra appearances while she could, and then claimed she was nursing me through medical bed rest for my last trimester.”
“I don’t understand why you didn’t make Agatha the heir,” Richard said.
Eleanor glared at him. “I tried,” she said. “It was a different time. Changing the primogeniture laws was not something people took seriously in the fifties. Once Agatha was born, people simply thought, Well, she’ll have a boy eventually, and to change them when I allegedly had another baby coming who might have been a boy…that would have raised too many eyebrows.” She gestured at my belly. “It’s a new world now, so that’s done and dusted for Nicholas’s children. But back then, we just hoped that you would be a girl.”
“And what a disappointment I was,” Richard said. He half turned. “Is that why nothing I do has ever pleased you? Is that why I hunted and pecked for every scrap of affection? Because you never wanted me? Because you were forced to pretend to love me as yours, and forced to put me in line for a throne I didn’t deserve?”
“You were not a disappointment,” Eleanor told him urgently. “And I never had to pretend to love you. When they put you in my arms, a son, a king in waiting, you didn’t belong to her or him or me. You belonged to the United Kingdom, and you were perfect. Untouched by all of this, innocent in a way none of us were. I was determined to make you stronger than your father. Better than your mother. You would never be weak, or needy. You would rise above the mess of your birth and the wreckage it left behind.”
“And if I didn’t want that?” he asked.
Eleanor threw up her hands. “It was done,” she said. “The play had been performed.”
“And Georgina…what, left town?” I probed.
“Not immediately,” Eleanor said. “She moved into 1A. Kept to herself. I thought we had put it behind us, but once again, I was wrong.” She curled the letter in her fist slowly. “He’d been sneaking you over to see her,” she told Richard. “For a year. He took the child I agreed to raise as mine, and the three of them played house, an afternoon at a time. Georgina and I had a roaring fight when I found out. She told me he wanted to leave me, that she was waiting for him, that all this could end if I would only see reason. And I looked her square in the face and told her she had him all wrong. That the man who hadn’t even had the courage to acknowledge his love child to me, his wife, would never upend his life for it. Stop fucking my husband, and go find your own, I told her.”
Freddie let out a gasp. Swiftly Eleanor threw the balled-up paper into her fire.
“Yes, it was quite an exit,” she allowed. “And I presume what followed between the two of them resulted in this letter. But in the end, I was right. Henry lacked the strength to follow his passion any further than a few kilometers down the road. He came back to me, as I knew he would, and we had Edwin, and he never saw Georgina like that again. We had peace, for a time.” The sadness in her face deepened. “We tried. He loved his children. I even had that portrait painted—the one you three unveiled. It was from a photo he took of me. He was so proud of it. But Georgina grew increasingly erratic. Every year on your birthday, Richard, she would call, sobbing. Mummy even had her hospitalized once in Switzerland. And it tore at Henry. He’d go riding. All day. The year you turned five, it was blustery and wet, and I begged him not to go. He didn’t care. And he got pneumonia, and…” She drummed her fingertips on her knees. “He gave up, I think. Georgina didn’t speak to me for a year, and then she became…what she became. Traveling around the world, trying on different men, too, trying to outrun her past. But then Richard had her grandchildren, and it was just too much. She completely shut down. I suppose history comes for us all, eventually.”
“Would it have, though?” Nick wondered. “This secret stayed
