The Heir Affair

often at the same time.”
We started walking again.
“The apartment is a bit of a shambles, but I thought you and Nicholas might want to move in anyway,” she continued. “Unless you’d prefer to stay where you are? But as newlyweds, living so near Frederick…?”
“This morning you’d never have known Freddie was there,” I said.
“He wasn’t. He slept here,” Marj said. “I could continue having him do that, I suppose.”
I thought about the strange sensation we’d experienced in Nick’s old room last night—how it felt like the remnant of a life that didn’t fit us anymore.
“We can’t evict Freddie from his own home,” I said. “I wish he felt like he could stay there with us, but since he doesn’t, we should be the ones to go.”
“I will arrange it,” Marj said.
We rounded a corner, and I chased her up a flight of stairs before she came to a halt in front of a familiar gilt-trimmed door. “And this is where I leave you,” she said.
I nervously fluffed my hair, and Marj clearly saw the tremor in my hand.
“I cannot pretend you and the duke didn’t leave us in a pickle,” she said, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. “Most people are allowed several moments of massive immaturity in their lives. Frederick, in fact, is overdrawn on that account.” She looked me right in the eyes. “But Nicholas, because of what he will one day be, hasn’t been afforded much space for that. He gets one. He’s earned one. But only one.”
She swung open the door for me. “I’ll have a footman run over the keys to 1A.” She winked. “Chin up. She didn’t call for a firing squad today.”
Walking into Eleanor’s dark, quiet quarters felt like breaking and entering, and even though I was there by invitation, I couldn’t help but tiptoe. I was so fixated on the door of her actual bedroom sitting ajar, and at the swath of carpet that would lead me there without knocking over anything expensive, that I didn’t even look at the rest of the sitting room. I certainly didn’t expect to feel a light whack at the back of my calves.
“Since you’re up,” Marta’s voice said, “my mobile’s done charging.”
I turned to see the Queen Mum, hair in tight white curls, sitting on the couch with a frown, her cane innocently propped up next to her as if she hadn’t just used it to prod me. She waved in the direction of an end table across the room, and I obligingly went over and unplugged her phone.
“Ah,” she said. “Edwin’s made a move at Scrabble.” She peered at it. “Cat. What a twit.”
“How are you this morning, Your Majesty?”
Marta’s eyes flashed. “I’ve spent the morning in a Twitter fight with a berk who thinks we’ve killed you in secret,” she said.
I glanced at her screen. Her handle was @KingIdrisElba and she’d kept the default egg avatar.
“He’d weep if he knew the call was coming from inside the house,” she added. “I feel quite alive.” Then she nodded toward Eleanor’s room. “Don’t speak until spoken to. My daughter does love her rules.”
The bedroom loomed dead silent before me. For a harrowing second, I wondered if Eleanor had suffered another flutter and all this dead silence would prove to be literal. But once again Eleanor was sitting up in bed, backed by a pile of pillows, and sporting a silk bed jacket—today’s was pink, with a stupendous oval ruby pinned to it. She did not look up from the paper when I walked in, and my curtsy went unacknowledged. I knew that “don’t speak until spoken to” also meant “do nothing at all without permission,” so I stood and waited.
Eleanor read the entire Times. When she finished it, she folded it and laid it on her bed tray. Then she picked up The Guardian and raised it to her face without ever looking at me. Occasionally, she emitted a light mmph of interest, but nothing that could be interpreted as speaking to me.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. Eleanor lowered the newspaper and stared straight ahead with a look of supreme irritation until I turned it off. When her head vanished behind the paper again, I began glancing around the room. I’d seen the picture beside her bed of her late husband Henry, the Duke of Cleveland, but the mantel was littered with other snaps I hadn’t noticed before. One was Richard at his investiture as Prince of Wales, standing between Eleanor and Marta, whose garish feathered hat was the color of a yellow highlighter. The most interesting one looked as if it had been snapped aboard the royal yacht sometime in the late ’70s—Eleanor and her three children, in sunglasses, smiling. I wondered who took the photo. I wondered what had made them so happy. And I couldn’t ask.
Eleanor heaved a weighty sigh and cast aside The Guardian in favor of the Daily Mail. She glanced at the front-page story about Freddie and pulled it closer with an overly obvious show of interest. When she finished that one, she turned to the International Herald Tribune. And so it went. The ticking clock on her mantel chimed. My balance wavered, and the balls of my feet complained—I hadn’t worn heels since the wedding—so I shifted my weight back and forth and tried not to lock my knees. This was either a punishment or a power play. Probably both. And although I was dying to sit down, there was something admirably petty about the Queen calling me into her bedroom specifically to ignore me.
My savior arrived in the form of a nurse rolling a cart covered in medical paraphernalia. She dipped into a low curtsy.
“Good morning, Olivia,” Eleanor said.
“Good morning, Your Majesty. It’s time for me to take your vital signs.” Olivia turned to me with an apologetic smile. “Good morning, Your Royal Highness.”
“Rebecca was just leaving,” Eleanor said.
I did not miss that this wasn’t explicitly spoken to me. With a dip of my