course, saw the potential long ago, but I had given up on it coming to fruition.”
“Nothing is coming anywhere,” Freddie had insisted, exasperated. “Bollocks, that sounds awful. What I meant was—”
But Richard hadn’t even heard him. “A power union,” he’d said. “I knew you had it in you, Frederick.” And he’d clapped a fatherly hand on his son’s back as Freddie gazed up at him in surprise.
Since then, the tenor of Freddie’s denials about Daphne had shifted into careful non-denials, wherein he only reassured us that we shouldn’t worry—without actually clarifying what, or whom, he thought we might worry about.
“I don’t think Freddie knows what he’s doing right now, but I’m a little concerned that the power of suggestion won out,” I said to Bea. “And if it did, then it definitely means more to her than to him. I don’t want her to get caught in the crosshairs of whatever he’s exorcising right now.”
“Noted,” Bea said. “I’ll keep a close watch, with extreme discretion, of course.” She cleared her throat. “The good news is that we have plenty of work to distract you. The Clarence Foundation’s patronage count is ticking up nicely, and now that the New Mentality partnership is official, I’m working on setting up events where you and Nick can visit local secondary schools to talk about the importance of…you know. Talking,” she said. “Next week, there’s the event with the succulent enthusiasts—don’t forget, we need your hair up for that, we can’t have you getting your head stuck on a cactus—and then your portrait unveiling is in six weeks.”
“About time,” I said. “I was beginning to think I was unpaintable.”
“Nonsense,” Bea said. “That first artist was just unemployable.”
I had sat for that guy multiple times over the course of a year, at tedious length, with no even half-finished painting in sight. Eventually, he bailed, penning Richard a letter explaining that he simply couldn’t compromise his wildlife portfolio and his “unconventional worldview” by branching into “staid human portraiture.” This had annoyed Richard sufficiently that he’d tabled the whole thing until the end of his regency, when ennui bumped it back onto his to-do list. He’d made a few calls, then given up and hired the person who did Edwin’s, which, yes, made him look like a walrus, but that was not entirely without realism. He’d been polite, and professional, and a tad perfunctory, keeping our sessions to a brisk thirty minutes, and I would be seeing the fruits of his labor for the first time on the wall of the hallowed halls it would grace forever.
“I’ll be glad to have that over with,” I said. “I’d prefer to be at the easel than on it.”
“On that tip, you’ll like this news,” Bea said. “Richard’s office has asked that you sit in for him at a Paint Britain board meeting on Tuesday—”
“Really?” I asked, elated.
“It’s in the calendar,” she said, smiling. “In permanent marker. I’m working on ways to get that under the foundation umbrella as well.” She gave a satisfied breath. “It’s so much nicer having more of this under my control.”
“Our control,” I said.
“That’s what I said.” She looked put out. “And speaking of control, your eyebrows are fresh out of it. Kira takes one vacation and you turn into a woolly mammoth.”
* * *
By the time of the portrait unveiling, my eyebrows had at least been wrangled back into shape, but internally I was a mess from the nonstop IVF roller coaster. We were waiting for my blood test results to find out if we’d managed lucky number three, but if the royal show had gone on even while the Queen was in a coma, it definitely wasn’t pausing for this.
“I hope I don’t look like a walrus,” I fretted to Nick as our car pulled up outside the Piccadilly Theatre, on the back side of the National Portrait Gallery. “What if walruses are his only talent?”
“You’re not going to look like a walrus,” Nick promised, extending a hand to help me up and out of the car. We put on our Pleasant Walking Faces as we entered the museum through its gift shop, before switching to our Pleasant Greeting Faces as we shook hands with the gallery director. My palms were sweaty. The painting was already on the wall, and the artist was currently standing next to it, providing the press scrum with solo shots and offering preapproved sound bites about how sensational and breathtaking yet also easy and normal I had been throughout