with Georgina, and there it was. I saw the way she looked at him, and I saw it start to have an effect on him. The same effect she had on everyone, our entire lives. That old Georgina charm,” she said. “I hadn’t thought she would bother with Henry. He was very nearly too old for me, and she was only seventeen. But seventeen felt more mature back then, I suppose, and Georgina certainly always thought of herself as sophisticated. I remember looking at them and thinking, I cannot lose him. Not to her.
“I never let on that I’d spotted anything. When she went back to school, I wrote, telling her all about Henry’s attentions to me, his tenderness, his kindness, what a fine partner he might make for me as I navigated all of this.” She waved a hand at the trappings of the Crown that sat around us. “I thought she’d accept that and move along. To this day, I still don’t know if she loved him for him, or because I told her how I felt and it made her want him for herself.”
Her tear ducts filled. “But I saw it in his face, whenever her name came up. His eyes always gave him away.” She blotted at her own. “I suppose I undertook some manipulations of my own. I told Henry she’d met someone while she was at school, and was practically betrothed, that it was very hush-hush. A clandestine romance.”
“You stole him,” Richard said.
“He wasn’t hers to steal, and I took nothing he didn’t freely give,” Eleanor snapped. “Georgina was no saint. Anything that came to me, she wanted. Toys. Clothing. Attention. Even the Crown itself. I did everything I could to impress Grandmummy, to make my father proud, to ready myself to take this on. I prepared. I behaved. Georgina had charm, but she didn’t realize how much of that was because she had the freedom to be charming. When my role increased, and attention shifted necessarily to me, Georgina became barbed with me in a way she wasn’t before. They prioritized me, for once, and she never forgot it, even if it was because there was never a real choice in the first place.”
“That doesn’t mean she went after Henry as revenge,” Nick argued.
“She would have hurt him, or tired of him. Both, once the intrigue was over,” Eleanor said vehemently. “And I never would have. I never did. Despite all of this.”
“She thought the world of you, though,” I said. “She looked up to you. It’s all over her diaries.”
“The ones you read. You didn’t see the rest of them. Things changed between us. She changed them,” Eleanor said. “She made herself the star of her own romance. But this is my story.”
We all exchanged glances, and sat back, waiting.
“Henry believed me, and seemed to let her go. He and I began spending more time alone together,” she said. “He looked at me differently, touched me differently, a lingering hug here, a brushed hand. He knew the demands being made on me. And he was the only one who ever really listened to me. We could talk to each other. My parents paraded other dreadful titled men past me, and each was more grasping than the last. None of them saw me as an actual person. Only as the Crown. A prize for them to possess. The prize.
“And then Grandmummy fell ill, and everyone panicked. The old bat ended up living another two years, of course. Sometimes I wonder if she was faking it to move me along.”
Nick, leaning against the fireplace, snorted at this, and Eleanor glared at him.
“Regardless,” she continued, “it began to feel as if time were of the essence. Henry took me out on the lake one afternoon in the spring, and we agreed we should get married.”
“Romantic,” Richard said sarcastically.
“I think maybe it was,” I said to him, before turning to Eleanor. “You told me before that Henry wouldn’t necessarily have chosen this life for himself. He did it for you.”
“I needed him. And he needed me. I shielded him against his family’s disdain for his academia and lack of political ambition, and he shielded me from my family’s lack of affection or concern for my well-being. He did love me,” Eleanor said stubbornly. “Passion is not everyone’s endgame. A person can contain many kinds of love, and none is more valid than the other.”
My eyes flicked to Freddie, who was staring at the flames in the