The Heir Affair

kid, I assume,” she said. “That’ll turn the tide. Come to think of it, Marj might also file that under Crisis Management.”
“My brand is crisis,” I sighed. “But hopefully we can keep my uterus out of it for a while. I am nowhere near ready for a baby. Its uncle isn’t even speaking to us.”
Freddie had seemed energized by ribbing the two of us at Hampton Court, but he’d shut down again as soon as we left. He hadn’t set foot inside Apartment 1A, and we’d learned nothing more about the mysterious Hannah beyond what we saw a week later in the papers, after he got papped hustling into Soho House with a brunette in a coat and pulled-down hat.
“Do you think we’re ever going to meet her?” I asked Nick one night as we clambered into the Den of Secrets.
“Do you think she’ll last long enough?” Nick asked, flopping down on his favorite pillows and pulling out a crossword. He liked doing them up there by candlelight (LED, so as not to burn down the monarchy in a literal sense).
“He’s definitely handling this differently, so maybe it’s serious.”
“That’d be a first,” Nick snarked. He rolled onto his stomach. “Can we please leave Freddie and all his bullshit downstairs?”
“But if you need to—”
“I don’t, Bex.” His forcefulness seemed to surprise even him. He softened. “And Sex Den is our time.”
I laughed off the tension. “It’s Den of Secrets, not Sex Den.”
“That seems like semantics,” Nick said. “But we should sort that out before I have the sign made.”
I watched him start to work on his crossword, as if the cloud had never passed over us. Since we’d come back, his resistance to discussing anything deeper than Georgina’s cavalcade of artifacts had only increased. If I pushed, he might freeze me out completely; if I let it go, I might miss a window. At a loss for answers, I started opening cabinets willy-nilly, as if the solution would fly out at me.
“Oooh, a feather boa.” I tossed it at Nick, who wrapped it around his neck without even looking up from his crossword. I picked up a small hardbound book that had fallen out along with two silk scarves and a loafer, and flipped through the pages. It appeared to be a diary.
“Hot damn,” I said. “Georgina lives.”
I opened to a random page near the middle, and read aloud:
is SO tiresome. Ellie and I teach ourselves more from reading the newspapers. And today when we asked to go outside to run about a bit because it had FINALLY stopped raining, he said that nice young ladies don’t run, and yesterday he told Ellie that princesses don’t need opinions which I think is MOST disrespectful. MY opinion is that he’s a cow-faced BORE and so I drew him that way while his back was turned to do some maths on the board and Ellie laughed out loud and we both nearly got our ears boxed. And later Ellie felt really guilty because Granny always tells us not to speak rudely about people (even though Granny speaks rudely about people all the time!!!!) but I told her we weren’t speaking about him at all and I think she felt better because she fell right to sleep. I don’t know what Ellie would do without me. She is still snoring terribly though and it’s driving me mad. It’s going to be very embarrassing for her when she gets married.
Nick burst out laughing. “That is amazing,” he said. “It’s odd to hear Gran referred to as Ellie.” He gestured for me to throw him the book, and caught it deftly. He flipped through its pages. “Crikey. She wrote loads. This book is full up.”
“I wonder if there are more of these anywhere,” I said. “Maybe they’ve all already been sent to the official royal archives.”
Nick shook his head. “We’d have heard,” he said. He gnawed on his pen cap. “All my ancestors apparently kept massive diaries. Am I ruining things for future historians by not doing that? It sounds exhausting to document every detail of every minute of every day.”
“We don’t need it,” I said. “Historians will have our text messages.”
Nick pulled a face. “I hope not,” he said, giving me back the journal. “Some of them are highly inappropriate. I should have sent you proper love letters.”
“It’s not too late to start,” I said. “I’ve enjoyed writing to Lacey. We get a little deeper. When we’re texting or talking, it turns into teasing.”
“Maybe you should be our official diarist,” Nick suggested. “When you put it all on paper, please make sure I come across as very muscular.” He tugged at his hair. “And with more of this, please.”
I dropped the journal and stared at Nick. “Put it in writing,” I said. “That’s it. That is it.”
Nick looked pleased. “Am I a genius?”
“Don’t get cocky,” I said. “But you just might be.”
*  *  *
The next morning, when I arrived at Eleanor’s chambers for what she surely intended to be another day of pretending I was inanimate, I came prepared.
Marta greeted me with her usual poke of the cane. “I don’t think I care much for this Clive person,” she said.
“Welcome to the team,” I said. “What pushed you over the edge?”
She crossed her arms. “He uses too much alliteration. I don’t trust it.”
“He’s a cow-faced bore,” I said with a chuckle, mostly to myself, but then I looked up and saw Marta staring at me as if I’d spoken in tongues. “Sorry. That phrase makes me laugh. It’s from an old diary of Georgina’s that we found last night. She did not like one of her tutors.”
Marta stood her cane on one end and tapped it as if considering coming to her feet. “How curious.”
“It’s super charming,” I said. “I’ve learned more about Georgina from the stuff in that house than even Google can tell me. She seems like she was very feisty.”
“She was, for most of her life.”
“What changed?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Marta said. “She simply