“Precisely,” Eleanor said. “But then Rebecca started jabbering about some journals she found, and I realized I might not have been as thorough as I thought. I needed to know more. I needed her to want to tell me.”

“So, you played me,” I translated. It was my turn now to feel a twisting in my gut. She was an incredible manipulator. In another life, she could’ve been Britain’s greatest trial lawyer. “You wanted me to trust you, so you pretended we were developing a relationship. You acted as if you liked me, and wanted me around, and like a goddamn fool I ate it up.”

“God bless you, Rebecca,” Eleanor said. “You’ve never come across a juicy bit of intel that you kept to yourself. I told you selective truths when I needed to, in the hopes that you’d stop digging, and after a time I thought I’d won the day.”

“This isn’t a game,” Nick said desperately. “This is our lives. Father and I have been driven toward a throne that isn’t even ours, and which I don’t even want, all in the service of a lie.”

“Don’t be childish, Nicholas,” Eleanor clucked. “Why on earth wouldn’t you want to be king?”

“That’s the part you forgot, Mother,” Richard said harshly. “You said it yourself, how you sacrificed so many opportunities to prepare for this. Wouldn’t you have preferred free will? With this, or with that, or with anything? Everything I’ve ever done has been colored by my destiny to give myself up in service of Crown and country. And it isn’t even mine. It was never mine. It was for nothing.”

“It most certainly was not for nothing,” Eleanor threw back at him. “You have been raised to be king, and king you shall be. I’m sorry you had to find out about this, Richard. I would have taken it to my grave.”

“That’s why you told Marta you’d never forgive her,” I said. “Because she helped manipulate you into a situation that tainted everything that came after it, and you hated her for it. How could you do the same thing to them?”

“My dear,” Eleanor said, not unkindly. “I’ve told you before that I learnt at her knee. People can bend. The key is knowing how to trust which ones won’t break.”

“You may have backed the wrong horse there,” Nick said hotly. “Every time you scolded us, or used my birthright and protocol and duty to get your way, you were using something you knew didn’t belong to me. It makes me so angry I could scream it from the rooftops.”

Eleanor made a fist, then flexed it. “But you won’t,” she said. “This news will die with all of us, one by one.”