She smoothed her hair. “If you must know, I’m bored. Richard still has my job. The doctors won’t let me ride. The stables are very far away and I haven’t made it all the way there without getting winded,” she said. “I have too much time to think, cooped up in here, being forced to lift those weights over and over again. Exercise is tedious, Rebecca. And the baseball! All we do is win, win, win. It’s not even hard.”

“A century of Cubs fans just felt a tremor in the force,” I said, knocking on the wood end table next to me. “Seriously, it’s so typical that the year I get you to watch is a year where they’re not ripping our hearts out with their bare hands.” I paused. “Yet.”

“I need something to look forward to other than this guttural postseason heartbreak you keep promising me,” she said. “In the olden days, you know, queens put people in prison. They didn’t live in one.”

“Going to a wedding reception in some random Cambridge pub is probably strictly against doctors’ orders,” I pointed out. “Isn’t your blood pressure still unstable?”

“Perhaps what’s making it unstable is being queen without being the queen,” she retorted. “It’s unacceptable.”

“Have you talked to Richard about it?” I asked. “He’s king without being the king, which doesn’t sound all that great, either.”

She shot me a look of disbelief. “What’s not to love? All of the power, and nobody died. He’s buzzing from all the papers applauding his scrupulous devotion to duty,” she said. “The only one on my side is Xandra Deane, bless her.”

Xandra, bless her twice, had turned the fire hose of her indignation onto Richard, calling him Prince Peacock and snarling that her “palace sources” suggested he was shoving Eleanor out of the spotlight to satisfy his ego. God save the Queen, so she may in turn save us from a king who puts position over patriotism, had been the kicker in her most recent column. Richard had been furious. Eleanor had ordered four more copies.

But I couldn’t imagine this going on much longer without Eleanor showing her face. Vanity had carried her this far—Eleanor, from a long line of rulers whose queens were proudly hardier than its kings, cared too much for that legacy to appear in public any less than her best. That was clearly wearing off, though. The clock on Richard’s regency was approaching midnight, and the question wasn’t whether Eleanor would turn him back into a pumpkin but when.

*  *  *