influence. But it was mutually satisfying: Eleanor got to cross items off her Death-Cheating Fun List, and I got my own Cubs fan club inside the walls of Buckingham Palace. It tickled me knowing that the swirl of tourists and taxi drivers clogging the Mall imagined something far more refined happening inside.
“I don’t know what Trout was thinking swinging at that,” Eleanor said, licking some salt off the rim of her margarita before taking a sip. That, at least, had been an easy item to check off, and it had been a huge hit—save for one hiccup when an errant Applebee’s commercial led to her demanding a mangorita, and the kitchen couldn’t hunt down decent fruit.
I patted myself on the back theatrically. “All this and it’s only opening day. You’ll be a salty, heartbroken veteran in no time. I am a brilliant teacher.”
“No, I am a brilliant student,” Eleanor boasted. “Always was.”
“Yes, I’ve read all about it,” I told her. “Although Georgina seemed to think you were mostly applying yourself because you had the hots for Henry Vane.”
Eleanor shot me a stern look. “I did not have the hots for anyone. I was a child.”
“You know what I mean,” I said. “Lots of little girls get crushes. I had a huge one on Derek Jeter.”
“What’s a Derek Jeter?” Marta asked.
“I can assure you that our feelings developed appropriately,” Eleanor said. She tried to flex her right hand. It fought her. “Georgina got to finish her schooling in France, but I was made to stay in the country I was meant to rule. Henry was the only friend I had left. He always treated me like an equal, whether I was a little girl or the future queen. That dynamic has been rare in my life.”
“And that’s how you fell in love?” I asked. “Nick and I were friends first, too.”
“Naturally I was drawn to him,” she said. “Henry was shy, you know. Meeting people was difficult for him also. And then when his father died and he became the Duke of Cleveland, his mother expected him to try to carry on their political legacy, but he was never aggressive enough to make a success of that sort of life.”
“Their political legacy had been crap for generations by then, anyway,” Marta said.
“He ended up with a much bigger legacy,” I said. “He must have loved you very much to step into this spotlight if he was so shy.”
Eleanor had a faraway expression on her face. “He would have done anything for me. He was very protective.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet him,” I said. “Or Georgina. I live in her house, and I’ve read so many stories about her but I still feel like I don’t have the whole picture of who she was.”
Eleanor sucked on the inside of her cheek and glanced over at her mother, who was dozing off.
“My sister was everyone’s favorite,” she said. “Pretty and funny and lively. Everything that makes life easy for a person. But because of that, she thought everything else should come easily to her, too, and it made her impetuous and selfish. She had a wild imagination and a skewed perception of the world. Don’t put too much stock in those journals of hers.”
Marta’s head had dropped forward. She let out a snore.
“I did find part of a love letter recently,” I confessed.
“Georgina had many suitors,” Eleanor said. “That Elvis Presley bit is, regrettably, absolutely accurate. She once served Agatha the worst sandwich because of that man.”
“I wish this had been to him,” I said, “but she wrote it way earlier than that. There was no name on it. She must not have ever sent it? The whole thing sounded forbidden.”
Eleanor glanced at the snoozing Marta, then looked back at the Cubs. “There was one young man,” she said. “The son of one of Father’s equerries. He’d become a veterinarian. Mummy and Daddy told Georgina in no uncertain terms that he was beneath her, and sent the lot of them away. She was heartbroken.”
“That’s awful.”
“They thought it would pass, and she’d settle down, but she was always stubborn, so terribly stubborn. She shut most of us out, and spent her life chasing pleasure with an increasingly vapid series of handsome idiots,” Eleanor said. “You’ve seen the pictures. Frankly, it always made me worry about Frederick, even before that cataclysm with you. He and Georgina have many things in common, and falling for the wrong person is one of them.”