Nick looked doubtful. “You really got no say? In taking on another child?”

“What was I meant to say?” Eleanor shot back at him. “The Crown is bigger than I. It is bigger than you. It was bigger than Georgina and Henry’s supposedly grand romance. Do you really think my grandmother would stand for the future monarch to be abandoned? Not to mention in service of her husband disappearing with her sister? Every one of those details is unbearably tawdry, even for an ordinary family.”

“And what was Henry Vane’s reaction to this?” Freddie asked.

Eleanor glanced at his photo beside her bed. “I wasn’t there. Mummy and Grandmummy spoke to him,” she said. “When he came home that night, he put his arms around me and said, Thereto I give thee my troth. From our wedding vows. That was all he said, and it was all I needed to hear. We were bound together by those, and now by this lie. So I said nothing.” She sighed. “I regret that now. We should have spoken. I should have thrown a vase at his head. But I kept thinking, He’s not lost. He always comes home. And I needed that to be true. So I let it go.”

“I can’t fathom how you pulled this off,” Nick said. “With not even a palace mole in sight.”

“It was easier to fake a pregnancy in my day,” she said. “There was no internet. No way for people to scrutinize me in slow motion. No message boards for crackpots to exchange clues. I was only third in line at that point, so the public wasn’t as fussed about me yet. We limited access to my quarters to one trusted and well-compensated maid, and the few times I did need to go out, we used padding. Georgina didn’t start to show much until she was almost six months along, so she did extra appearances while she could, and then claimed she was nursing me through medical bed rest for my last trimester.”

“I don’t understand why you didn’t make Agatha the heir,” Richard said.

Eleanor glared at him. “I tried,” she said. “It was a different time. Changing the primogeniture laws was not something people took seriously in the fifties. Once Agatha was born, people simply thought, Well, she’ll have a boy eventually, and to change them when I allegedly had another baby coming who might have been a boy…that would have raised too many eyebrows.” She gestured at my belly. “It’s a new world now, so that’s done and dusted for Nicholas’s children. But back then, we just hoped that you would be a girl.”