Eleanor leaned back against the cushions of the mint-green sofa in her sitting room and glared at me. “You don’t need to like a person to attend their wedding,” she said. “And this has at long last made her interesting to me.”
“You never did give Lacey any credit,” I said.
“When exactly did she earn any?”
“The last few years were as weird for her as they were for any of us,” I said to her doubtful face. “I think we’re all finally growing up, or at least growing out of it. People change.”
“No, they don’t,” Eleanor said. “They simply change costumes. Underneath, they’re who they always were.”
“You’re using a blender in your sitting room to make exotic margaritas,” I argued. “That’s change.”
“That’s a post-coma reawakening,” Eleanor pointed out. “Besides, you of all people should know about costumes.”
She handed me her phone, but I already knew what it would show: a blurry, blown-up photo of me and Freddie as Niles and Margot, the day we had ice cream in the park. It went viral after some random person spotted us in the background of her vacation photos and decided we looked familiar. (@KingIdrisElba had responded to her that Freddie was dressed like he “lives in a van down by the river.”) It was the first real test of the new world order in which Nick had to accept that Freddie and I had our own separate friendship, and other than a brief comment about our recklessness, he’d taken it like a champ (or at least bitten back anything else that was on his mind). But social media, as always, had its suspicions, and as I scrolled through them I ended up clicking over to the Instagram account of a guy called Duchess Dreadful, who’d used it as evidence that Freddie and I were still having a torrid affair. E! News disagreed, putting it side by side with another one of me and Freddie and pointing out all the ways it couldn’t be us; a user called GOOPSux had written, “OMG it’s not Freddie, it’s Homeless Beachy Gwyneth Paltrow.” Gwynnie herself had responded, “#goals.”
“For the most part, people seem to think it’s absurd that you two would stroll out wearing daft wigs in what is essentially the front yard,” Eleanor said. “And they are not wrong. You look as if you’re trolling the park to buy cocaine.”
“We were not,” I said. “If it’s even us, which obviously it isn’t.”
“Of course not,” she said. “Certainly, no one in this family ever needed to procure illicit drugs from strangers, outdoors.” She cackled at the expression on my face. “You should see yourself. You look positively scandalized.” Her face went distant. “I did smoke grass once on Mustique in 1968. I ate an entire block of cheddar.”
“What?” I squeaked.
“This was very risky of you two,” she continued, snapping back to attention, “but it almost worked. I should give it a go.”
“What?” I squeaked.
“I could take the tunnels out,” she mused. “Although I suppose the tunnels might have caved in by now. God knows how many lovers of Georgina’s might be buried down there.”
“What?” I squeaked.
“Perhaps I will come to your sister’s wedding,” she concluded. “I’d like to see what a truly ordinary party looks like.” She frowned at me. “Do not say what. Your conversational skills are subpar today.”
“You hit me with a lot right there,” I said. “Where is all this coming from?”
She smoothed her hair. “If you must know, I’m bored. Richard still has my job. The doctors won’t let me ride. The stables are very far away and I haven’t made it all the way there without getting winded,” she said. “I have too much time to think, cooped up in here, being forced to lift those weights over and over again. Exercise is tedious, Rebecca. And the baseball! All we do is win, win, win. It’s not even hard.”
“A century of Cubs fans just felt a tremor in the force,” I said, knocking on the wood end table next to me. “Seriously, it’s so typical that the year I get you to watch is a year where they’re not ripping our hearts out with their bare hands.” I paused. “Yet.”
“I need something to look forward to other than this guttural postseason heartbreak you keep promising me,” she said. “In the olden days, you know, queens put people in prison. They didn’t live in one.”
“Going to a wedding reception in some random Cambridge pub is probably strictly against doctors’ orders,” I pointed out. “Isn’t your blood pressure still unstable?”
“Perhaps what’s making it unstable is being queen without being the queen,” she retorted. “It’s unacceptable.”
“Have you talked to Richard about it?” I asked. “He’s king without being the king, which doesn’t sound all that great, either.”
She shot me a look of disbelief. “What’s not to love? All of the power, and nobody died. He’s buzzing from all the papers applauding his scrupulous devotion to duty,” she said. “The only one on my side is Xandra Deane, bless her.”
Xandra, bless her twice, had turned the fire hose of her indignation onto Richard, calling him Prince Peacock and snarling that her “palace sources” suggested he was shoving Eleanor out of the spotlight to satisfy his ego. God save the Queen, so she may in turn save us from a king who puts position over patriotism, had been the kicker in her most recent column. Richard had been furious. Eleanor had ordered four more copies.
But I couldn’t imagine this going on much longer without Eleanor showing her face. Vanity had carried her this far—Eleanor, from a long line of rulers whose queens were proudly hardier than its kings, cared too much for that legacy to appear in public any less than her best. That was clearly wearing off, though. The clock on Richard’s regency was approaching midnight, and the question wasn’t whether Eleanor would turn him back into a pumpkin but when.
* * *
We were notified about ten days after our Conclave that “Trafalgar still stands,”
