None of us dared move. Eleanor stared into the fireplace, visibly fighting to compose herself. “When you’re my age, of course, you realize that people can recover from anything. But I didn’t understand that then. My heart didn’t feel like it would ever work properly again, and I told myself loving anyone that much was too painful a risk to take twice. But then Henry put me back together, and I realized I’d already reinvested myself in him. Trust. Affection. Love. And need. I did not think I could do this job without him.

“Then one day I found him out in the gardens playing croquet with Georgina, and there it was. I saw the way she looked at him, and I saw it start to have an effect on him. The same effect she had on everyone, our entire lives. That old Georgina charm,” she said. “I hadn’t thought she would bother with Henry. He was very nearly too old for me, and she was only seventeen. But seventeen felt more mature back then, I suppose, and Georgina certainly always thought of herself as sophisticated. I remember looking at them and thinking, I cannot lose him. Not to her.

“I never let on that I’d spotted anything. When she went back to school, I wrote, telling her all about Henry’s attentions to me, his tenderness, his kindness, what a fine partner he might make for me as I navigated all of this.” She waved a hand at the trappings of the Crown that sat around us. “I thought she’d accept that and move along. To this day, I still don’t know if she loved him for him, or because I told her how I felt and it made her want him for herself.”

Her tear ducts filled. “But I saw it in his face, whenever her name came up. His eyes always gave him away.” She blotted at her own. “I suppose I undertook some manipulations of my own. I told Henry she’d met someone while she was at school, and was practically betrothed, that it was very hush-hush. A clandestine romance.”

“You stole him,” Richard said.

“He wasn’t hers to steal, and I took nothing he didn’t freely give,” Eleanor snapped. “Georgina was no saint. Anything that came to me, she wanted. Toys. Clothing. Attention. Even the Crown itself. I did everything I could to impress Grandmummy, to make my father proud, to ready myself to take this on. I prepared. I behaved. Georgina had charm, but she didn’t realize how much of that was because she had the freedom to be charming. When my role increased, and attention shifted necessarily to me, Georgina became barbed with me in a way she wasn’t before. They prioritized me, for once, and she never forgot it, even if it was because there was never a real choice in the first place.”

“That doesn’t mean she went after Henry as revenge,” Nick argued.

“She would have hurt him, or tired of him. Both, once the intrigue was over,” Eleanor said vehemently. “And I never would have. I never did. Despite all of this.”