By the time Balmoral’s portly clock tower and leaf-covered façade slid into view, Nick’s body must have burned a million calories from tensing every muscle. The car careened up the drive and parked next to five others that had been left haphazardly on the gravel. It was eerily tranquil. Nick and I were ushered inside a side door and up a red-carpeted staircase that felt like a mini-version of Buckingham Palace’s, although the overall vibe of this residence was more that of an expensive hunting lodge, all rugged wood beams, tartan accents, and aggressive taxidermy. That none of the imposing buck heads hanging above us as we ascended the stairs took that moment to drop off and impale us, I interpreted as an encouraging sign that Eleanor herself was not yet haunting the place.

A wordless staffer led us to Eleanor’s private quarters, then bowed and withdrew. Nick took my hand. Then dropped it. Then took it again.

“I don’t know what we’re going to see,” he said, as much to himself as to me.

“Want me to go first?”

“No,” he said, taking a deep breath. “I can do it.”

He pushed open the door. As we crept through Eleanor’s sitting room toward her bedroom, we heard a clutch of voices getting louder and louder.

“Nicholas,” barked an unmistakable one when we came into view. “You need a haircut.”

Eleanor wasn’t dead.

Eleanor wasn’t even unconscious.

Eleanor, in fact, looked absolutely fine.

CHAPTER FOUR

Well, well. Clearly two months of playing peasant stimulates the follicles.”

The Queen was in bed, but propped up on a pile of silk pillows, a rosy glow in her cheeks. Her hair was done. She was wearing lipstick. Someone had even had the presence of mind to pin a starburst-shaped diamond brooch to her blue bed jacket.

I’d been in Eleanor’s chambers in Buckingham Palace, and by comparison, these looked exactly like what they were: the bedroom of a glorified summer cottage, sparsely decorated, with a no-frills bedframe and a dated green floral bedspread that mirrored the one my aunt Kitty had at her actual cottage in Michigan. To Eleanor’s right was a brown leather Eames chair—clearly an original—in which her mother, Marta, napped, snoring lightly; to her left stood Richard, wearing what I assumed was his hunting outfit. (My first clue was his actual rifle, which he was leaning on, barrel end down, like a cane.) The whole tableau was so surreal—the opposite of what we’d braced ourselves for—that Nick and I could only gape.

I felt rather than saw Nick’s fury. The temperature around him seemed to rise ten degrees.

“Protocol, Nicholas,” Richard said, his lips compressed into a pale white line.

Nick obliged with a bow, something I wasn’t even aware a person could do sarcastically until I saw it, and I stumbled through the most dignified curtsy I could manage. It’s hard to be graceful when you’re simultaneously shocked, relieved, enraged, and still in your running clothes.

“I wish I could say the life of a fugitive suited you,” Eleanor said. “But now that you’ve come to your senses, we can repair this mess, including that hair situation on your face.”