goodbye to a friend I’ll never see again,” he said. “And I don’t only mean Steve and Margot, although she was a proper vixen.”
I let my head fall against him. “Margot will never really leave. She’ll just start plucking her eyebrows again.”
He took my hand and rubbed at the spot where my ring should be. We’d left the famed Lyons Emerald back at Kensington Palace for safekeeping.
“I don’t want this,” he said. “I understand what you’re saying, but I still don’t want to do it.”
“Neither do I, but I don’t think it matters,” I replied. “I think we have to deal with a lot of stuff we don’t want to, including—”
A bracing knock came at the door, followed a second later by Nick’s cell phone blaring Taylor Swift on the nearby patio table.
“I’ll get the door, you get Taylor,” I said.
I marched back inside as I heard Nick answer the phone. With one glance through the peephole, I gasped audibly, and pulled open the door.
“Greetings, Your Royal Highness,” said PPO Stout, an apologetic look on his face. “You really shouldn’t open the door without your wig on.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked, waving him inside and closing the door. “I mean, I knew you were here, probably, but not here here…”
“I believe the duke may have some intel on that,” Stout said.
Nick appeared and shook Stout’s hand, but his face was white as a sheet.
“Gran’s had a heart attack,” he said. “It doesn’t look good.”
* * *
Eleanor tended to dash off to her home in the northeastern Scottish countryside more than was reasonable, given its distance from the monarchy’s official seat in London. Balmoral had been a royal refuge dating all the way back to the reign of Victoria I, whose husband Albert purchased it in the 1800s and built it up into a sprawling granite fairy-tale castle. Eleanor claimed to find it a welcome hideout from the honking, touristy bustle of London, but Nick suspected part of the appeal was that Balmoral was entirely hers: It was not owned by the Crown, and nothing but the majestic old ballroom was open to the public. That she’d fallen ill there meant we only had to drive four hours to her bedside, but it’s still agony to spend four hours driving toward a family you stormed away from, after learning its most important member is dying.
I stared out the window but saw none of the scenery. My heart pounded, echoing the memory of Eleanor’s heels clacking on the Buckingham Palace floors. After the disastrous procession out of Westminster Abbey on my wedding day, we had tumbled out of our carriages and hustled to the Balcony Room, per the schedule—which of course had not included a clause for what to do if a sex scandal broke during the ceremony. We’d huddled like cornered prey and listened as Eleanor’s steps grew louder, faster, closer. Unbidden, the Jaws theme had popped into my head.
And then she had appeared, resplendent in cerulean, her simple cake-shaped hat still pinned immaculately in place despite the fury on her face underneath it. My nervous laugh had died in my throat.
Everyone else filed in behind her: Nick’s father, Richard, his jaw so clenched and angular, you could use it to file metal; my ashen mother, arm in arm with Nick’s aunt Agatha; his uncle Edwin guiding his wife, Elizabeth, five months pregnant but moving like it was five years (which in a way it had been; this was their third child in about that much time), and Nick’s centenarian great-grandmother Marta. Nick’s wretched cousin Nigel was nowhere to be found, which was a relief. If anyone was likely to broadcast the fallout live on Instagram, it was him.
“Bex, my God. I had no idea,” murmured Elizabeth, drifting past to take a heavy seat in one of the silk-upholstered love seats. “Aren’t you a minx.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“Isn’t it?” This was Eleanor. “Perhaps you should educate me on what it is that I think.”
The contempt on her face was so complete, so hard and fast. If it wasn’t pure hatred, it was incestuously close. Fresh shame pounded my chest.
“It’s rich that you’re trusting the Mail, when it’s printed rubbish about every single person in this room,” Nick said. “We were duped. Clive lay in wait for years until he found a lie that was plausible.”
“A lie,” Eleanor echoed. “Frederick did not, then, make a pass at Rebecca.”
“Well…” Freddie began.
“And Rebecca’s sister did not provide voice recordings detailing what