“But you just said you didn’t want to be a runner-awayer,” I pointed out.
“Aha! This is not running away!” His sense of triumph nearly knocked him over. “We’ve never tried a bubble where we’re also being the Duke and Duchess of Clarence. This bubble wouldn’t be running away from something. We’d be running to something.” He clapped his hands. “It’s the best of both worlds. A fresh start, doing work together that isn’t about deflecting headlines. So we’re on the job, but we can be in a bubble at the same time.” He looked at me hopefully. “It’s worth a shot, yes?”
“It’s worth every shot,” I said. “But we need to talk about Freddie. Part of the problem is that we didn’t talk about him last time.”
Nick looked contemplative. “Let’s do that part when we’re more sober.” He clambered to his feet and hauled me up gracelessly. “I solemnly swear we will not do anything rash, nor leave anything unsaid. Not again. Do we get to kiss yet?”
I took his face in my hands with a wicked grin. When we came up for air, he teased, “I hope this doesn’t scandalize Gran.”
“All due respect to Her Maj, I don’t really care.”
He swept me into another kiss that was interrupted only when Marta shouted out Daniel Craig’s name in her sleep. Nick extracted himself from our embrace to tuck a blanket up around her body, then turned to Eleanor and touched her hand.
“Happy New Year, Gran,” he said.
Eleanor’s eyes flew open and locked on mine.
CHAPTER THREE
History will likely tell it that when Eleanor came back to us, order was restored—that she woke up surrounded by her family, that her indomitable spirit had won the day, that she was undiminished and regal from the jump, that we all held hands around her bedside and offered thanks to the God that returned her to us, and that her first words were…well, anything other than what they actually were. What really happened: She awoke and started murmuring, Nick screamed and slammed his hand down on the alarm button on her nightstand, and then he called Richard while the palace medical staff elbowed us aside to buzz around her. All the while, Eleanor’s gaze flicked blearily around the room, as if clocking her surroundings and deeming them wanting.
“Mother?” Richard gasped when he arrived, white as a sheet and wearing an immaculate pin-striped suit even though it was 3:52 a.m. He leaned low over her and placed a hand on her head. “Can it be true?”
That’s when Queen Eleanor uttered her first words in months: “Fuck off.”
* * *
We’d been warned about the consequences of Eleanor’s four-month medical odyssey. Her team was stunned that she had returned to us at all, given how low the odds were, and it warned us that she would likely be physically and/or mentally different than the woman we once knew. That she’d been able to get her mouth around the words fuck off was something of a miracle, though her voice was thick with lack of use. None of us had taken her “fuck off” instructions personally, or even seriously, but we would soon learn it was a harbinger of a saltier Queen Eleanor experience.
“Good morning, Your Majesty,” I said on my first visit after she awoke, clutching a bouquet of hothouse roses I’d commandeered from the Queen’s own greenhouse. “You look great!”
“Don’t lie to me,” Eleanor grumped. “I look old.”
It was jarring to see the toll the last few months had taken. Lying there, her facial muscles inert, Eleanor had looked nearly untouched by time. Now that she was up again, her skin showed the dry, dull impact of being eighty-one years old and ailing. Her hair, usually sleek, was wild and split from overgrowth. Her mouth drooped ever so slightly at one corner, probably a permanent side effect of the stroke. Nick had told me that during his visit, she occasionally had to pause to find a word or struggled to enunciate, and I could already tell her voice hadn’t strengthened yet. Her right arm would need physical therapy. These were all small trade-offs for her life, but I could tell from the way her left hand fussed at her hair and her face that she didn’t care for them one bit.
“It’s only been a few weeks. You’re not supposed to look like nothing happened,” I said. “I’m just happy to come in here and see you sitting up and glaring at me again.”
“Glaring is my only solace,” she sighed melodramatically. “They won’t even let Fabio in to trim my ends. I’m falling apart.”
Marta barely looked up from her iPhone. “By all means keep wailing about it,” she said, then turned her phone toward us. “Your friend Clive went on Sunrise and said that if Eleanor really is fully recovered, he’ll eat his hat.”
“He’s not my friend,” I said.
“He is a reprobate of the highest order,” Eleanor said. She picked up the phone on her nightstand. “Murray,” she said. “Send Clive Fitzwilliam the largest hat you can find. Make sure it looks poisonous.”
“I don’t know if poking the bear is the best idea…” I began.
Eleanor appeared to focus very hard on spitting out the words. “Nonsense,” she said. “I’m the bear. He poked me.” She pointed toward my usual chair. “Sit. What did I miss?”
“Do you mean, like…globally?” I asked.
“Boring,” she said. “I meant gossip.”
“Uh,” I said gracefully. Eleanor had once suggested that gossip was the devil’s breath. “The Dutch seemed to have a blast at the—”
“Yawn,” Eleanor said. “Everyone who comes up here wants to talk about”—and here, she made irritated air quotes with her left hand—“‘the monarchy’ and ‘appearances’ and ‘my medical situation.’ It’s dull as a dirge. I assumed our resident American would
