“What was he thinking,” Nick muttered one day over a piece about unrest in Jalalabad. “Agatha was right. You can’t cram all that training into one month.”
“He seemed ready, Nick,” I said.
“And how do you know that? Did he demonstrate it for you?” Nick snapped, and then looked surprised at himself. “Sorry. I don’t know where that came from. You didn’t ship him off.”
“Freddie wanted to go,” I said. “I think this is his Scotland.”
“Scotland didn’t involve live ammunition.” He shoved back his chair so firmly when he stood that it nearly tipped backward. I let him leave. We had drawn our boundaries, and this territory belonged to Dr. Kep.
It was helpful, emotionally, that the Palace arranged for Freddie to be extracted for two separate weekends of foreign appearances, to keep anyone from wondering where he was. First, he went to Belgium to represent the family at the hundredth anniversary of a World War I battle—the photos of which Nick examined closely before concluding his brother looked haggard—and then later to the Netherlands to open an exhibit of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British portrait artists who’d been influenced by Van Dyck. Daphne, in the know and considered a safe accomplice, had joined him in Utrecht for the opening.
Freddie seems well, but subdued, Daphne had written. I think he has found the operations to be more brutal than he imagined and I don’t press him to talk. He seems relieved by the silence.
That didn’t sound like a “well” Freddie to me, and I’d texted back and said so. Her reply: I suppose I know him differently than you do, of course.
Between worrying about Freddie, beginning to sketch out a Clarence royal foundation with Nick, placating Eleanor’s restlessness, and helping Lacey choose passed apps for her reception, I, at long last, had an extremely full plate. I have never been as grateful for baseball as when the postseason started and Eleanor could apply herself to the rigors of a multi-game series. Her Majesty actually changed her sleep schedule so she could be awake to cheer on the Cubs when they played, and hex the Red Sox, the Dodgers, and the Indians when they didn’t—basically, any team that wasn’t us that she thought looked good.
And improbably, impossibly, we did look good. Really good. We were the National League’s top seed. We took out the Giants. Booted the Dodgers. Made it into the World Series, and we hadn’t yet wet the bed. It sucked that Dad hadn’t lived long enough to experience this run, but it was also possible that the stress of it would have killed him if he had. Mom couldn’t watch; without my father’s booming asides, baseball was noise to her that woke up painful echoes. Lacey had enthusiastically accepted my updates, but preferred to gestate in Cambridge while I trudged over to Buckingham Palace at weird hours and then eventually maintained a guest room there for game nights and the subsequent mornings.
“I can’t believe I have to move in with my grandmother if I want to see you,” Nick said after we won game two. “Is this what people mean when they say they’re sports widows?”
“Yes,” I said. “And no offense, but I hope it becomes an annual problem.”
We promptly lost the next two games, both of which ended with me curled in the fetal position on the floor.
“I cannot believe you brought this idiotic team into my life,” Eleanor said, throwing the remote across her sitting room. “Wasting all that winning in August when they knew perfectly well they’d need it now. I’m finished. Forever.”
“Right,” I said. “Same time tomorrow night?”
“Be punctual,” she said. “I don’t want to miss your anthem. Everyone sings it so badly.”
I wasn’t, and we didn’t, and the guy from Staind did absolutely mangle the “The Star-Spangled Banner.” We won, and Queen Eleanor pointed at the sky in triumph while I, the Duchess of Clarence, screamed into a throw pillow that had probably once been leaned on by Queen Victoria herself. Either of them. When we took game six in Cleveland, I had to stack two cushions in front of my face during my yelling to avoid triggering a PPO panic.
Game seven. On the road. For all of it.
Richard sent Nick to Wales for something I did not have room in my brain to remember, so Lacey came in from Cambridge because she couldn’t stand the idea of me going through this without moral support. I rolled out of my nap room at 1 a.m. and threw on my hat and my Kris Bryant jersey to meet her at the porte cochere.
“Listen up, kid,” I said, talking into her belly button. “You’re going to hear a lot of words today from Auntie Bex, and you need to ignore all of them except for ‘GO, CUBS.’”
“This should be highly educational,” Lacey said. “The worst Olly ever says is ‘Oh, rats.’ He is the most adorable square.” She looked up at the foyer with a rueful smile. “This is better than the last time I was here.”
“It could hardly be worse,” I reminded her.
“You’re tempting fate.”
“Ladies.” Althorpe, Eleanor’s long-suffering Palace butler, appeared. “Change of plans. Follow me.”
Lacey gave a comical little sigh, and we followed Althorpe past the famous palace staircase and through a gilded glass-paned door. A narrow, rickety set of steps extended down, covered in thick green carpet that smelled faintly of chlorine.
“Are we going to the
