We laughed even harder, and I was overcome with the sensation of having something returned to me, or finding the last missing piece of a jigsaw I’d been doing for weeks.
“I miss you,” I blurted out.
Freddie didn’t react; he just handed me his snooker cue. “Break?”
“I don’t know how to play.”
“Easily fixed.” Freddie began lining up the red balls in the triangular rack. “Knickers might not like this, either, you know.”
“He ought to be past that by now. We all should,” I announced boldly. “I want my friend back. And I want to meet your girlfriend.”
Freddie pulled a pink ball out of the corner pocket and spun it in his palm before gently setting it on a dot on the felt. “About that,” he said. “She’s not in the picture anymore.” He scooped up other balls and laid them out in their designated spots. “It would seem that dating the third in line to the throne, or the second, or whatever I am right now, is not very appealing to a person who’s trying a case against ISIS at the UN next week.”
“She broke up with you?”
He nodded ruefully. “Didn’t want the publicity,” he said. “She told me she’d worked too hard for this job to gamble it on me. Said nobody at work would respect her anymore.”
I whistled low and long. “Damn. She didn’t exactly let you down easy.”
“It seems I am drawn to women who don’t pull their punches,” Freddie said.
I took the cube of chalk and rubbed it on the tip of my cue. “I’m sorry, Freddie. You seemed to like her.”
“I did,” he said. “She kept me on my toes. She was brilliant. I liked the idea that maybe, in the view of a person like that, I was worth being with.”
“You are,” I said. “Of course you are.”
“Not to her, apparently,” he said, and the sadness gnawing at the edges of his tone also ate away at me.
“Well, she’s just one person,” I said. “We are not giving up.”
“We?” he laughed. “Thanks for the support, Killer, but I’d better sort out my sex life on my own this time.” He paused. “I suppose it’s too soon to make jokes like that.”
“Probably,” I said. “But you can have that one for free.”
He grinned, and straightened. “Right,” he said. “As long as we’re in the cone of silence, let me confess that I haven’t ever properly learnt how to play this bloody game and I don’t understand why they show so much of it on the telly. I was only coming in here earlier because there is a stash of excellent brandy in the bar that Father forgot he left here, and I like to save it for special occasions. Like being dumped.”
A bolt of tension passed through us as I wondered, without wanting to, whether he’d come in here on another night, looking for that same brandy.
“I suppose I have you to thank in a way,” he added, aiming for lightness. “I never took women or dating particularly seriously before, but I’ve realized that I want to, and I can.” He gave me a tentative smile. “Can we drink to that?”
I glanced at my watch. “It’s happy hour somewhere, as they say.”
“I’ll pour the hooch if you’ll Google the snooker rules.”
As he turned toward the liquor cabinet, I wrestled my conscience. Deep down I knew that Nick wouldn’t love this. But Freddie and I weren’t the same people we had been that night in my Chelsea flat. He’d found the beginnings of love elsewhere, however briefly, and Nick and I had formed a united front in Scotland. And none of us could hide from each other forever. We had no chance at fixing this if one of us didn’t make the first move. With any luck, Nick would understand if that person was me.
CHAPTER TEN
Good morning, Rebecca.”
To my great surprise, Agatha—who’d never had much time for me in the past—appeared and perched next to me on a tufted bench outside the locked Chinese Dining Room. As if she were practicing a new social interaction, she patted me awkwardly on the hand.
“How are you getting on with it all?” she said.
Nick’s often-persnickety aunt was an inveterate whiner and hand wringer—the outmoded primogeniture laws that passed the throne through her to Richard had bred in Agatha a bone-deep sense that she was always being wronged—and she had doubted me from the start. This, in fact, might have been the first time she initiated a conversation with me.
“We’re muddling through,” I said. “It’s so surreal. I thought she’d be around forever. She’s still relatively young.”
“Still young?” Agatha blinked. “My dear, you do know that she’s dead?”
“Wait,” I said, a numbness rolling over me like a cloud. “Who’s dead?”
“Auntie Georgina,” Agatha said. “What did you think, that we hid her in the attic?”
I tipped back my head in relief and grabbed her arm instinctively. “You scared me for a second,” I said. “I thought you were referring to the whole Eleanor…situation.”
Agatha disentangled her arm with a curl of the lip. “Obviously that situation is horrible,” she said. “I was merely making polite conversation about your redecorating.” She looked around as if hoping for someone to save her. “I assume Georgina’s collection is as robust as I remember.”
“It is. Maybe even more so,” I said. “Were you two close?”
“I was the only one in this family Georgina liked,” Agatha announced. “She often went on about how unfair it was that Mummy didn’t get primogeniture sorted so that I would be Queen. It infuriated her, actually.” Agatha glowed a bit at the memory. “I felt very seen by my auntie for much of her life. Until she stopped seeing any of us at all, anyway.”
“Why did she shut herself off?” I asked. “Did she ever tell you?”
Agatha stared up at the ceiling for a moment. “It would have been rude to ask,” she said.
