I forgot myself and covered my mouth with my hands. “El…er, Your Majesty?” I called out, wincing privately at Greevey.
“Hurry up, Rebecca, I haven’t got all day,” was her reply.
Greevey apologized in mime, and I gave him as reassuring a thumbs-up as I could; he disappeared as I glanced fruitlessly around for the hand towel I’d apparently forgotten to bring outside. I improvised with a piece of paper, and caught my reflection in the glass of the door. I’d rubbed charcoal on my cheek by accident, and my hair was a disaster. Well, I’d seen Eleanor at her most vulnerable. She could handle a little mess.
I stepped off the terrace and into my bedroom, where I found the Queen rocking a fuchsia suit—as if this were a public appearance and not simply a social call—running a finger along the dresser. She lifted it and held it close to her eyes.
“Passable,” she said, brushing off her hands. “My goodness, Rebecca, you look like a chimney sweep. And do you usually let the butler up into your chambers?” Eleanor drew her eyebrows together, then smacked a throw pillow in our plush corner chair before settling down in it. “He seems a bit gormless,” she added. “Ran out of here like I’d threatened his life.”
“With all due respect, I am pretty sure the sight of you scared the shit out of him,” I said, perching across from her in front of the bedroom fireplace on the large, tufted ottoman that we used as a coffee table. “Why didn’t you call ahead? I would at least have taken a shower.”
Eleanor shrugged. “It was a whim. I am a deeply whimsical person.” She cleared her throat. “I assume you’re recovered from…the unpleasantness,” she said, but her tone was gentle.
“Almost back to normal,” I said. “Thank you for visiting me at the palace. I was really touched.”
“Nonsense.” Eleanor waved her hand at me, as if to flick aside the gratitude. “You were on my way.”
Eleanor had come down while I was in recovery, sat by my bed for about ten seconds, and then stood up and said, “How tedious. I don’t know how you managed it with me.” I had assumed this was a Valium dream until Nick told me that she had seemed worried.
“It may not have been a big deal to you, but you were the first face I saw that didn’t give me bad news, so I appreciated it,” I told her now.
Eleanor allowed a small smile to cross her lips before glancing around with renewed interest. “If I remember correctly, this was all mustard yellow and orange,” she said.
I shook my head. “Florals. Lots of them. None of them matched.”
“She must have redecorated since I was last in here,” Eleanor said. “I suppose it was, oh, 1972.”
“That long?”
Eleanor folded her hands in her lap. Her right one still didn’t want to close all the way. “I see you kept that ridiculous monogram in the main entry.”
“I couldn’t bring myself to change it,” I said. “It felt like we’d be erasing her from existence. I don’t know what it was like here in 1972, but in 2015, it was crammed fuller than a museum. It probably could have been a museum.”
“But in the end, this was all she had, and we had to get rid of so much of it,” I said. “It felt like there should be a piece of her still here.”
Eleanor’s gaze went out the window. I wondered if she was imagining what might have been if the sisters had stayed close. If Georgina hadn’t made a play for her sister’s husband. If they’d let their differences die when Henry did.
“Do you still have those journals?” she asked suddenly.
“Of course. Do you want to see them?”
Eleanor raised an eyebrow. I walked over to my dresser and opened up the drawer where they all lived. I glanced briefly at the doors to Sex Den. The letter and the mystery key had lived up there safely since I’d hidden them, but I couldn’t very well reveal it to her by bounding through the armoire to fetch them. I itched to ask her about the key, but this house had to have two hundred locks; the odds of anyone knowing what went where were as minute and slim as the key itself. Better to keep it to myself for now. All of it.
“The letter isn’t in here. I put that in the safe,” I said,