for Dior in her middle age, and had hosted Gandhi, Churchill, and Kennedy at her dinner table (albeit not at the same time). Marta’s life lent itself beautifully to hours of televised retrospectives—not least because when you’re that old, everyone has oodles of time to prepare for your exit. Every time I turned on the TV in the eight days since her death, I found a program called some variation of A Nation Pays Its Respects, or Farewell to Great Britain’s Great-Grandmother. Or, as Nick was watching now, round-the-clock news coverage, even without news to report. Marta would have had no patience for how cloying most of it was, but she would have been delighted to see Idris Elba tweet that he felt “gutted.”
“The body of Queen Marta the Queen Mother will lie in state through tomorrow, with Britons and tourists alike lining up for a chance to walk past and say bon voyage to the late queen,” Keldah said, over a shot of a sobbing woman standing in line at Westminster Hall. “For more on what to expect in the next few days, we go to our special correspondent, Clive Fitzwilliam of The Sun. Welcome, Clive.”
“Piss off, Clive,” Nick muttered.
“Thank you, Keldah. I’m delighted to be here,” Clive said, and then his face arranged itself in a sad expression. “And gutted that it’s under such mournful circumstances.”
“You take Idris Elba’s feelings right out of your mouth,” I told the TV.
“The crowds in Westminster have far outpaced the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Clarence, though, of course—you can take it from me—the Queen Mother is substantially more beloved,” Clive said. “The hope is that all well-wishers can get through before the funeral. A few lucky ones will catch the family members taking up the rotating guard posts near the casket, so there’s that to look forward to.”
“Look forward to,” Nick repeated. “Yes, there’s so much to enjoy about a wake, you simpering twerp.”
I studied Clive’s face as he yammered on about everything from the logistics of the funeral procession, to the dignitaries who were expected to attend, to our innermost feelings. His slick handsomeness had tapered into something hawkish, and his dark hair had what looked like bottle-gray strands at the temples, giving him an air of gravitas and expertise that he didn’t deserve. I hoped he’d had a miserable time trying to keep up with his royal column now that he’d lost his best sources—us—and people were accordingly starting to side-eye the accuracy of his scoops, but this was a massive all-hands-on-desks news moment, as it were, and he clearly intended to maximize it.
“…and we expect to see the Prince of Wales, his sons, and Prince Edwin standing guard over the casket together,” Clive said. “But the real headline is the public reappearance of Queen Eleanor. A nation waits with bated breath for its broadly beloved…”
Nick muted the television aggressively.
“Aren’t you curious to see what b word he was going to use for her?” I teased. “Boss lady?”
“Bloodline begetter?”
“Big cheese?”
“I dare him,” Nick said, picking up his phone in what I knew he imagined was a casual way. The only new item on his lock screen—a selfie we’d taken on the edge of a cliff in Scotland—was a news alert about the weekend’s Premier League games being rescheduled out of respect.
“Are they back yet?” I asked softly.
He turned over his phone and dropped it on the couch. “No idea.”
When Marta died, Freddie had immediately been recalled from Wherever—sincerely, we didn’t know—and Richard had gone to fetch him himself from his preferred private airfield. It was a kind gesture from someone who rarely deployed them, and it made us both anxious that he knew something we didn’t, which my inner armchair psychologist suspected was why Nick’s insomnia had him up at all hours watching the same newsreel footage of his great-grandmother repackaged by different channels. Right now, the news was showing Marta and her husband, Richard, returning from a royal tour of Australia that had gone on for eight entire weeks. I’d never seen him in motion before; he was tall and fluid, almost graceful, and smiling. He didn’t at all look like a person who would drown in an ill-advised boat outing. Eleanor and Georgina were greeting them as they disembarked from the plane, looking very young and yet also vaguely old, thanks to their ’50s hairdos. Eleanor was willowy and refined, on the cusp of leaving her teen years behind, and Georgina at sixteen was already