“No, the other thing—wait, what is this?” I held up a small silver bowl with a snug lid and a small hole in the top.

“I think it’s an inkwell,” Nick said, “but if we don’t know what it is, we don’t need it.”

“What if later we decide we really need an inkwell?”

Nick rolled up Nick Nolte into a megaphone. “Rebecca,” he boomed. “If you change your mind, someone will go into storage and fetch you the inkwell.”

“Antiques Roadshow has given me anxiety that I’ll trash something priceless,” I told him. “What’s this about a job?”

“It might not help your anxiety,” Nick said, “but it seems we’re on the docket for an engagement with Freddie. Our first as a trio. We’re going to Hampton Court to unveil a new tapestry. Or, I guess, technically an old tapestry that they found in a hole and restored.”

“Of course. Nothing says, ‘Behold our marital bliss!’ like Henry the Eighth,” I said.

“Does it make you feel better that this tapestry was commissioned for the wife he liked best?” Nick asked. “Although nine days later she died. Maybe that’s why it got chucked in a hole.” He sighed. “I haven’t been to Hampton Court in ages. Mum took us as kids and I pretended to roast Freddie on the giant spit in the kitchen.”

“Gee, I wonder who’ll get roasted at this one,” I muttered.

I wasn’t kidding. We were going to be scrutinized within an inch of our lives, from our body language to whether or not the boys’ ties held some kind of hidden message, to how many times I smiled and at whom; I couldn’t cling to Nick, but neither could I keep my distance, and I had to maintain a paradoxical friendly disinterest in Freddie—all while pretending the reporters trailing us hadn’t just spent weeks calling me Duchess Degenerate. It was a high-wire act with no room for mistakes, especially with suspicion of me and my motives at an all-time high. Everyone knew that we knew that they knew that we knew that they knew what was at stake. To get through it, I had to believe in it. I had to put my faith in the notion that the sooner Nick and Freddie and I convinced the public that everything was fine—there was that word again—the sooner it actually would be.

*  *  *