Nick had made a beeline for his mother’s serene seaside home, and then…stayed there. The week between Christmas and New Year’s was traditionally quiet for the royals, but Nick must have asked Richard to keep him busy, because two engagements in that neck of the woods suddenly found their way onto his diary. He communicated this only in the most basic of texts, giving me a hearty dose of what it must have been like for everyone else during our summer of hiding; I felt disregarded and terrible, and retroactively ashamed of myself.

Now, on New Year’s Eve, he’d used geography as an excuse to keep hiding. He’d attended vespers at the abbey in Bath, then “decided to make an appearance” at Annabelle Farthing’s bash.

Off south again to Portsmouth in the morning, he’d texted me. Makes sense to use one of her guest rooms and stay off the roads.

It didn’t escape my notice that he hadn’t invited me to join him. Neither had Annabelle. Worse than that, though, was that it wouldn’t have been that impractical, or taken much effort, for Nick to come home. He just must not have wanted to. Not enough. When I told him to go, I hadn’t realized I needed to worry about whether he’d come back.

Marta poked at me with her cane. “I assume it’s to do with Frederick,” she said. She tapped her temple. “You all think I don’t see things because I’m old, but I could tell. It’s not my first foxtrot, you know.”

“How did you deal with it?” I asked. “With Eleanor and Georgina, I mean.”

She looked at me sharply. “Eh?”

“The journals I found,” I said. “In their girlhood, she and Eleanor come off like Nick and Freddie, a bit. They were clearly very close. But it obviously didn’t stay that way. What happened?”

Marta’s expression grew distant. I had forgotten to consider whether it was too painful to discuss her daughters this way, given that she’d long outlived one, and might yet survive the other. But then she spoke.

“It wasn’t easy when we realized Eleanor was going to be queen,” she said. “Heavy is the head, and all that. Georgina is little more than a footnote now, and I wonder…” She closed her eyes. “Some wounds are too deep to heal.”