Everything that happened before Eleanor’s stroke felt like it existed in another universe—and in a way, I suppose it did. As soon as Richard’s regency became official, Barnes alerted the BBC, and journalists countrywide—as half-drunk as the pints they ditched—fled the pubs to try to catch us on the way out of The Shard. Fortunately, we were long gone, hustled home in private cars so no newspaper could lead its coverage with tearstained royal faces. Grief is a normal human impulse, but a monarchy is not a normal human thing, and so its opacity had to remain in place.
The world, however, promptly lost its shit at the idea of Queen Eleanor being on death’s gangplank. The news, ironically, achieved the one thing she had wanted most earlier in the summer, when she’d cried wolf: pushing speculation about me and Nick and Freddie onto the back burner. Reporters camped out in front of Buckingham Palace for the first two weeks and stayed there, reporting all day every day, as if they could tap straight into her IV drip.
But every single one of those reports said the same thing: The stroke had left the Queen in what the royal doctors called a minimally conscious state, so as to sound slightly more optimistic. The truth was a shade more dire: She had not shown any awareness, so even though six weeks hence she was still with us, they were no closer to knowing when or if she would come out of it. The longer Eleanor remained not dead, but neither wholly alive, the more everyone had been forced to ponder what a different world it would be without her. The country was littered with items that would need rebranding (for lack of a better word) when Richard took the throne for real, from cash to the postboxes with ER insignias on them to the pile of mail that arrived every day from well-wishers, covered in stamps bearing Eleanor’s profile.
“I’m not remotely ready to be Prince of Wales for real,” Nick confessed to me. “I thought we had years to go at our current level. I’d like to just worry about my grandmother, full stop, rather than boning up on all the logistics of what happens when she’s gone. It’s sickening.”
He seemed to have thrown off the hurt feelings that had begun to boil over at The Shard, in favor of devoting himself to whatever duties the new family order demanded of him. Prince Dick’s coronation was becoming less theoretical with every passing day, and he was out to remind everyone that Eleanor’s direct descendants—all of them, no matter what mind games he’d been putting Nick through before—were solid. It was undoubtedly easier to build Nick back up in this regard if the woman who had allegedly cuckolded him receded from view, so Richard immediately put me on the back burner. As we got deeper into October, the Daily Mail wrote a piece complimenting Nick’s stepped-up work schedule, and when I did the math, I realized he had caught up to Freddie’s pace from earlier in the summer. This felt too specific on Nick’s part to be coincidental, and as Freddie responded in kind, his stated resolve to introduce us to his new girlfriend had eroded. We had gotten nowhere. Sometimes in bed at night, Nick’s words ran through my head on a loop: Is there any coming back from this?
But during the day, I shoved those thoughts aside and tried to focus on what I could control. Nick and I had made a decent dent in our house’s clutter, but the overall vibe was still more Grey Gardens than I would have liked. The royal designer sent over plans and mood boards and swatches for the interior makeover, and when I couldn’t take any more rugs and L-shaped sofas and chevron accent pillows, I wandered over to the backlog of Georgina articles that I’d bookmarked to try to understand why there was, at heart, so little out there to understand about her later years. I’d tracked down some detailed royal forums dedicated to everyone in The Firm, no matter how obscure. (I was particularly grateful to a librarian in Maryland called Roberta, who had digitized a lot of old newspaper articles during her downtime.) In the early ’70s there was an outcry over Georgina’s profligate travel spending, complete with photos of her in sunglasses and head scarves, laughing carelessly, like some that I’d