Eleanor tapped her open palms on the wings of her chair. “Everyone has a weakness,” she continued. “And paranoia is mine. When she died, I let myself into her apartment on the pretense of identifying the more obscure heirlooms, and I tore it apart. I found piles of diaries, everywhere. I’m amazed she had time for all those men, with the amount she wrote.” She smiled coldly. “It was the last fire ever lit in her hearth.”
A memory flashed across my mind of the first day we walked into Apartment 1A, and noticed that even the fireplace hadn’t been properly cleaned. “The ashes were still there when we moved in,” I said, disbelieving. “You literally sent history up in smoke.”
“Yes, I bloody well did,” she said. “And you’d do the same. If Nicholas had been journaling about you, and Freddie, and the parentage of those babies…”
“Leave our situation out of this,” Nick snapped. “It is not the same.”
“But it is, in so many ways,” Eleanor said. “Consider the things you’ve already done in the name of changing the narrative. Imagine knowing there was written proof of your worst secrets. Imagine it falling into Clive’s hands. Or anyone’s.”
Nick turned pale and said nothing.
“Precisely,” Eleanor said. “But then Rebecca started jabbering about some journals she found, and I realized I might not have been as thorough as I thought. I needed to know more. I needed her to want to tell me.”
“So, you played me,” I translated. It was my turn now to feel a twisting in my gut. She was an incredible manipulator. In another life, she could’ve been Britain’s greatest trial lawyer. “You wanted me to trust you, so you pretended we were developing a relationship. You acted as if you liked me, and wanted me around, and like a goddamn fool I ate it up.”
“God bless you, Rebecca,” Eleanor said. “You’ve never come across a juicy bit of intel that you kept to yourself. I told you selective truths when I needed to, in the hopes that you’d stop digging, and after a time I thought I’d won the day.”
“This isn’t a game,” Nick said desperately. “This is our lives. Father and I have been driven toward a throne that isn’t even ours, and which I don’t even want, all in the service of a lie.”
“Don’t be childish, Nicholas,” Eleanor clucked. “Why on earth wouldn’t you want to be king?”
“That’s the part you forgot, Mother,” Richard said harshly. “You said it yourself, how you sacrificed so many opportunities to prepare for this. Wouldn’t you have preferred free will? With this, or with that, or with anything? Everything I’ve ever done has been colored by my destiny to give myself up in service of Crown and country. And it isn’t even mine. It was never mine. It was for nothing.”
“It most certainly was not for nothing,” Eleanor threw back at him. “You have been raised to be king, and king you shall be. I’m sorry you had to find out about this, Richard. I would have taken it to my grave.”
“That’s why you told Marta you’d never forgive her,” I said. “Because she helped manipulate you into a situation that tainted everything that came after it, and you hated her for it. How could you do the same thing to them?”
“My dear,” Eleanor said, not unkindly. “I’ve told you before that I learnt at her knee. People can bend. The key is knowing how to trust which ones won’t break.”
“You may have backed the wrong horse there,” Nick said hotly. “Every time you scolded us, or used my birthright and protocol and duty to get your way, you were using something you knew didn’t belong to me. It makes me so angry I could scream it from the rooftops.”
Eleanor made a fist, then flexed it. “But you won’t,” she said. “This news will die with all of us, one by one.”
“Or, we’ll stop lying to the British people, and the throne can pass to Edwin, where it belongs,” Nick said.
“Don’t be fools,” Eleanor said, but she sounded worried.
“He’s right,” Richard said. He had begun pacing in time with Nick. “If you love this country, how can you bake a deception like this into its DNA?”
“Not you, too,” she said. “Right, would you like me to give the throne to King Edwin, then? He doesn’t even take himself seriously. How could he possibly represent the United Kingdom with the kind of dignity that I have for nearly sixty years?”
“Because it’s his birthright. Not ours,” Nick argued. “Perhaps he’d surprise you.”
“Richard,” Eleanor said, turning to appeal to him. “You surely understand. You are of royal blood. You were raised for this. You are passionate about duty and—”
He held up a hand. “Stop it, Mother,” he said. Then his lips curled. “Mother. A word I’m not sure you deserve.”
That hit her in the gut.
“You may not have been my child, but you are my son,” Eleanor all but whispered. “I fed you. I changed you. I gave you a family. I am the one who came when you called. That is all that matters.”
“That’s just it, Your Majesty,” he said, stopping by the doorway. “I’m not sure it is anymore.”
Seconds later, the door slammed behind him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Richard did not simply leave the room. He left London. He might have left the country. The only person he spoke to before he vanished was Barnes, and if that toupee knew anything, it certainly wasn’t talking. But he must have been given instructions, because the day after Richard’s disappearance, we were delivered a note on a silver tray—not a formality that was customary in our house—that read simply, You had yours. Now it’s my turn.
“His turn to what?” I asked.
“Disappear, I suspect,” Nick said, tapping the note against his left hand and then abruptly ripping it into pieces. “The tit-for-tat would be funny, under other circumstances. What if he doesn’t come back?”
“He will,” I said. “We did.”
“Out of duty,” Nick
