“Bex will schedule the tiara test,” Nick said smoothly, but I didn’t miss that his glance darted between me and Freddie.
Richard turned back to his pile of papers, but I had been addressed directly, and I decided I shouldn’t miss my chance. “Is there anything else I can do to help?” I asked.
His lips curled coldly. “How are you at napkin folding?”
“I meant…in general. During this horrible time,” I said. Nothing. “I am proud to be part of your family, and I’d really like to help shoulder the load.” Silence. Agatha cleared her throat. “Anyway…keep me in mind, I guess, if it would make anything easier for…anyone.”
“It would certainly be the first time.” Richard pointedly turned the page on his packet. The staple immediately came out with it and flew across the room. He looked pained. “Now, let us start with a brief primer on the dignitaries in attendance…”
“That was sweet, dear,” Elizabeth murmured, looking as if she felt sorry for me.
Nick pressed his thigh to mine. “I’ll see what I can do,” he whispered under Richard’s droning.
And when he got home, much later that night, I was waiting for him on the stairs, wearing nothing but the Lyons Emerald and a diaphanous robe.
“Hello. To what do I owe the honor?” he asked, bemused.
“Yourself,” I said. “And your hot, hot awesomeness.”
He dropped everything he’d been holding and pawed at the knot in his tie. “This cannot be just because I’m full of irresistible trivia about clogs now.”
“That’s part of it,” I said. “But I also got a phone call this afternoon from Marj. I’m off the bench. And I am…” I tugged at the belt on my robe. “…really happy about it.”
Richard had tasked Nick and Freddie and me with unveiling a new portrait of Eleanor—well, technically, an old portrait of a young Eleanor—that had been donated to the National Portrait Gallery by the dead artist’s family. Apropos to my warm welcome, the painting in question had once been considered scandalous: Eleanor, my age but already a mother of three, was seated with her back to the viewer, wearing a strapless gown partially unzipped and shooting what could only be called a come-hither gaze over her shoulder. She’d commissioned it for her husband, but it had hung in his dressing room for merely a month before his untimely death—at which point Eleanor shipped it back to the artist with a letter blessing him to do with it what he chose. He’d plonked it over his own dining room table until he died, and then when Eleanor had her stroke, his family decided it had a higher calling. I was thrilled, both to be part of its public debut and to have something to do that didn’t involve wallpaper samples.
“The prince feels your presence will draw a direct line between Eleanor and your position as the future queen,” Marj had said when she called.
“Interesting,” I said. “Considering he’s been openly hostile to the concept of me as queen ever since I’ve known him.”
Marj coughed lightly. “Far be it from me to question the prince’s reasoning,” she said. “But I suppose I did hear him discussing the event with Nicholas, and the duke used, shall we say, strong tones when they talked about whether or not you ought to be present.”
Bless my beautiful husband, who had now given up on his tie in favor of trying to kick off his tightly laced oxfords.
“I can’t believe you turned the tide in one afternoon,” I said. “You work fast.”
His second shoe flew across the foyer and hit a table. “You would know,” he purred. Then he paused. “Wait, I think I just insulted myself.”
“Think of it as sexual efficiency.” I dropped the robe. “It means we can fit in twice as much in the same amount of time.”
“Goodness,” he said, yanking anew at his tie. “If I’d known it meant this much to you, I’d have talked to Father ages ago, and why the bloody hell is this knot refusing to come undone?”
“Leave it on,” I said, slinking over and tearing open his dress shirt. “It’s not in the way.”
We fell together ravenously, rolling around on the marble floor, laughing about what a horrible idea it is to have sex on a marble floor, and then adjourning to defile the living room furniture (though we only made it as far as the carpet). At one point we knocked a small wooden dog off a table and onto Nick’s back. He paused long enough to retrieve it, and then tenderly sat it down on top of my chest.
“Listen, Spot,” he said. “Sometimes, when two people love each other very much…”
We burst out laughing, which turned into kissing, which meant poor Spot got the heave. It was the most in tune we’d been in weeks; such a small, perfect moment, one that I knew even then to hold close to my heart for the times when everything around us would get darker.
Once we were actually at the gallery, face-to-sultry-face with the portrait, I wondered if it had yielded the same result for Eleanor—a happy surprise, and a memory she later could carry through the coldness of grief.
“Crikey,” Nick said, as he studied it. “That’s…suggestive.”
“It seems so unlike her,” I said. “Do you think she’d care that people will see her like this?”
“I suppose if she objected, she wouldn’t have told him he had free rein with it,” Nick said. “She’s got a keen eye. She must have known it was that good.”
It was. Eleanor’s face was young and vulnerable and seductive, and this was the first time I’d seen her captured as a real woman and not a supercilious figurehead. It was hard to reconcile it with either the imperious woman I knew or the shy, almost fretful girl of her sister’s photographs, with the weight of a nation beginning to press on her shoulders. I also couldn’t imagine how that girl had grown into the kind of passionate adult who’d give something this
