further than a few kilometers down the road. He came back to me, as I knew he would, and we had Edwin, and he never saw Georgina like that again. We had peace, for a time.” The sadness in her face deepened. “We tried. He loved his children. I even had that portrait painted—the one you three unveiled. It was from a photo he took of me. He was so proud of it. But Georgina grew increasingly erratic. Every year on your birthday, Richard, she would call, sobbing. Mummy even had her hospitalized once in Switzerland. And it tore at Henry. He’d go riding. All day. The year you turned five, it was blustery and wet, and I begged him not to go. He didn’t care. And he got pneumonia, and…” She drummed her fingertips on her knees. “He gave up, I think. Georgina didn’t speak to me for a year, and then she became…what she became. Traveling around the world, trying on different men, too, trying to outrun her past. But then Richard had her grandchildren, and it was just too much. She completely shut down. I suppose history comes for us all, eventually.”
“Would it have, though?” Nick wondered. “This secret stayed dead with them for so long.”
Eleanor tapped her open palms on the wings of her chair. “Everyone has a weakness,” she continued. “And paranoia is mine. When she died, I let myself into her apartment on the pretense of identifying the more obscure heirlooms, and I tore it apart. I found piles of diaries, everywhere. I’m amazed she had time for all those men, with the amount she wrote.” She smiled coldly. “It was the last fire ever lit in her hearth.”
A memory flashed across my mind of the first day we walked into Apartment 1A, and noticed that even the fireplace hadn’t been properly cleaned. “The ashes were still there when we moved in,” I said, disbelieving. “You literally sent history up in smoke.”
“Yes, I bloody well did,” she said. “And you’d do the same. If Nicholas had been journaling about you, and Freddie, and the parentage of those babies…”
“Leave our situation out of this,” Nick snapped. “It is not the same.”
“But it is, in so many ways,” Eleanor said. “Consider the things you’ve already done in the name of changing the narrative. Imagine knowing there was written proof of your worst secrets. Imagine it falling into Clive’s hands. Or anyone’s.”
Nick turned pale and said nothing.
“Precisely,” Eleanor said. “But then Rebecca started jabbering about some journals she found, and I realized I might not have been as thorough as I thought. I needed to know more. I needed her to want to tell me.”
“So, you played me,” I translated. It was my turn now to feel a twisting in my gut. She was an incredible manipulator. In another life, she could’ve been Britain’s greatest trial lawyer. “You wanted me to trust you, so you pretended we were developing a relationship. You acted as if you liked me, and wanted me around, and like a goddamn fool I ate it up.”
“God bless you, Rebecca,” Eleanor said. “You’ve never come across a juicy bit of intel that you kept to yourself. I told you selective truths when I needed to, in the hopes that you’d stop digging, and after a time I thought I’d won the day.”
“This isn’t a game,” Nick said desperately. “This is our lives. Father and I have been driven toward a throne that isn’t even ours, and which I don’t even want, all in the service of a lie.”
“Don’t be childish, Nicholas,” Eleanor clucked. “Why on earth wouldn’t you want to be king?”
“That’s the part you forgot, Mother,” Richard said harshly. “You said it yourself, how you sacrificed so many opportunities to prepare for this. Wouldn’t you have preferred free will? With this, or with that, or with anything? Everything I’ve ever done has been colored by my destiny to give myself up in service of Crown and country. And it isn’t even mine. It was never mine. It was for nothing.”
“It most certainly was not for nothing,” Eleanor threw back at him. “You have been raised to be king, and king you shall be. I’m sorry you had to find out about this, Richard. I would have taken it to my grave.”
“That’s why you told Marta you’d never forgive her,” I said. “Because she helped manipulate you into a situation that tainted everything that came after it, and you hated her for it.