and I weren’t the same people we had been that night in my Chelsea flat. He’d found the beginnings of love elsewhere, however briefly, and Nick and I had formed a united front in Scotland. And none of us could hide from each other forever. We had no chance at fixing this if one of us didn’t make the first move. With any luck, Nick would understand if that person was me.
CHAPTER TEN
Good morning, Rebecca.”
To my great surprise, Agatha—who’d never had much time for me in the past—appeared and perched next to me on a tufted bench outside the locked Chinese Dining Room. As if she were practicing a new social interaction, she patted me awkwardly on the hand.
“How are you getting on with it all?” she said.
Nick’s often-persnickety aunt was an inveterate whiner and hand wringer—the outmoded primogeniture laws that passed the throne through her to Richard had bred in Agatha a bone-deep sense that she was always being wronged—and she had doubted me from the start. This, in fact, might have been the first time she initiated a conversation with me.
“We’re muddling through,” I said. “It’s so surreal. I thought she’d be around forever. She’s still relatively young.”
“Still young?” Agatha blinked. “My dear, you do know that she’s dead?”
“Wait,” I said, a numbness rolling over me like a cloud. “Who’s dead?”
“Auntie Georgina,” Agatha said. “What did you think, that we hid her in the attic?”
I tipped back my head in relief and grabbed her arm instinctively. “You scared me for a second,” I said. “I thought you were referring to the whole Eleanor…situation.”
Agatha disentangled her arm with a curl of the lip. “Obviously that situation is horrible,” she said. “I was merely making polite conversation about your redecorating.” She looked around as if hoping for someone to save her. “I assume Georgina’s collection is as robust as I remember.”
“It is. Maybe even more so,” I said. “Were you two close?”
“I was the only one in this family Georgina liked,” Agatha announced. “She often went on about how unfair it was that Mummy didn’t get primogeniture sorted so that I would be Queen. It infuriated her, actually.” Agatha glowed a bit at the memory. “I felt very seen by my auntie for much of her life. Until she stopped seeing any of us at all, anyway.”
“Why did she shut herself off?” I asked. “Did she ever tell you?”
Agatha stared up at the ceiling for a moment. “It would have been rude to ask,” she said. “Georgina was a capricious woman, so I rather thought that it was just a phase. Perhaps it would have been, but then she got sick.” She looked sad. “I was the only person she’d still speak to on the phone, but it was very one-sided. She only wanted to tell the same stories about her boyfriends, and which of them adored her the most. I couldn’t get a word in about Nigel. I doubt she even knew his name.”
Barnes rounded the corner with a ring of keys in his hand. “And that’s enough of that,” Agatha said, standing and brushing off her skirt. “No sense in dwelling on the past with so much happening in the present.”
At long last, Richard had been forced to include me at a Conclave, and I had the Dutch to thank: My participation in December’s state dinner was critical, and he could no longer ice me out for sport. He was begrudging about it, making a big show of thanking Barnes for the extra effort required to make a sixth dossier, but it counted.
Eleanor had put this event on the docket the day after our wedding to, as Richard often reminded us, “wash out the stain from that debacle as quickly as possible.” They’d concocted a barely plausible historical hook—an anniversary of a tulip that was named after William of Orange, the Dutch English king who, in the manner of so many of Nick’s male relatives, died after his horse tripped in a mole hole. The truth was much simpler: The Dutch wouldn’t make this hard. King Hendrik-Alexander and Queen Lucretia—the press whimsically referred to them as Hax and Lax, and therefore so did everyone else—were low pressure, congenial, and happy to do Eleanor a solid during her time of PR need. And Prince Dick had been waiting to take the reins for a lifetime, so he refused to cancel this, regardless of whether anyone felt weird about ceremonial folderol while the monarch lay unconscious.