The Heir Affair

geography?” Nick asked.
“Probably not,” I said.
He closed his eyes. “I’ve taken every assignment, every crap job, spent hours in the basement filing meaningless papers at Clarence House.”
“You’ve been rock solid,” I said. “It’s just one patronage.”
“It’s puppeteering,” Nick said. “He couldn’t control me after the wedding, and it killed him, so he’s finding a way now. By using Freddie.” He rubbed the top of his head. “And people love it,” he marveled. “That’s the magic I apparently don’t have. Freddie worked his way out of the doghouse in, what, two months? And I’m still on the leash.”
I rubbed his back, trying to look as passively affectionate as possible while our faces were turned firmly away from any amateur lip-readers.
“So what can I do, love?” I asked. “What can we do?”
Nick picked at the railing. “I always knew, my whole life, how I fit in here,” he said. “My role was defined for me. But then this all happened, and…” He let out a harsh breath through his nose. “Freddie is the reason Clive had anything to write at all, and somehow he’s become the hero in this story, and I don’t understand why. I didn’t do this. I am so confused. I know how I’m supposed to fit in here, but do I, anymore? Did we go too far? Is there any coming back from this?”
I had wondered if I’d know a wobble when I saw one, but there was no mistaking it. Nick was metaphorically teetering on the edge of his future, as Eleanor had feared, and I didn’t know if I should yank him back to her idea of solid ground or let him fall into whatever fantasy was playing in his mind and see if it caught him. I wanted to be the patient advisor I knew he needed, but if Nick was wobbling, how much of it was because my actions had pushed him to it?
Before I mustered a reply, I spotted a small barnyard animal floating toward us.
“Barnes, incoming, my three o’clock,” I said, under my breath. “His toupee is extra tonight.”
Richard’s longtime secretary appeared at our elbows. “Follow me. Now.”
His tone was deadly. A switch flipped in me and Nick, and we joined hands and followed Barnes to the staff elevator. His finger trembled as he punched the button for floor sixty-five, and the ten seconds felt like they swelled into ten minutes. When the doors sprang open, we saw a glass conference room with Richard and Freddie pacing white-faced near the windows.
“Go in,” Barnes said, and he glided back into the elevator.
My mind raced as I tried to read their expressions. When the door clicked shut behind us, Richard punched a button on his cell phone and placed it in the middle of the table.
“I don’t know what could be so important that you’d put me on hold, Dickie,” came Agatha’s bitter complaint.
“I was playing Maids and Milkmen,” Edwin protested, and I assumed this was some weird British children’s game that never made it to Iowa until I heard Elizabeth purr, “I’m here to collect your delivery, sir.”
Richard appeared to fight the urge to spit bile into the phone, and instead said, “London Bridge may be falling.”
Agatha’s gasp was guttural. Freddie groped for a chair, while Nick swayed in place. They’d obviously been briefed on the code, though it didn’t take a wizard to guess.
“She suffered a severe stroke,” Richard said. “She is still with us, but her future is uncertain.”
Nick and I had lived this moment once before, wringing ourselves out during four torturous hours in a car, only for it not to be true. Now that it was not a drill, I had no idea how to feel, other than empty. Nick, too, looked hollow, as if the first scare had drained him dry.
Richard drew his mouth into a thin line. “I’ve called the ministers here. Edwin, you’ll need to come at once. No time to change.” He paused. “Depending on what you’re wearing. I cannot act as a Counsellor of State in this instance, so you and Frederick must be the two who make it official.”
I took several shallow breaths. “Make what official?”
Richard looked at me with the closest thing to gentleness I’ve ever seen in his face. “We cannot be without a monarch,” he said. “My mother is incapacitated. The power must be vested in me.”
Night rolled over London. As we stood in history’s limbo, the city beneath us blazed with its second life—the headlights of black cabs, the warm glow of bars and restaurants bustling with people, and the juxtaposition of mighty landmarks with the absurdly theatrical modern buildings that sit cheek by ancient jowl with them. One by one, three concerned-looking government ministers trundled in sporting a variety of evening wear, Edwin minutes behind them in a pair of overalls. And as I stared out at my adopted homeland, through a backlit window that showed me London through my own reflection, one by one they signed the document that heralded the dawn of Richard’s regency.
And maybe of his reign.

CHAPTER NINE
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