Richard looked at me with the closest thing to gentleness I’ve ever seen in his face. “We cannot be without a monarch,” he said. “My mother is incapacitated. The power must be vested in me.”

Night rolled over London. As we stood in history’s limbo, the city beneath us blazed with its second life—the headlights of black cabs, the warm glow of bars and restaurants bustling with people, and the juxtaposition of mighty landmarks with the absurdly theatrical modern buildings that sit cheek by ancient jowl with them. One by one, three concerned-looking government ministers trundled in sporting a variety of evening wear, Edwin minutes behind them in a pair of overalls. And as I stared out at my adopted homeland, through a backlit window that showed me London through my own reflection, one by one they signed the document that heralded the dawn of Richard’s regency.

And maybe of his reign.

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER NINE

Everything that happened before Eleanor’s stroke felt like it existed in another universe—and in a way, I suppose it did. As soon as Richard’s regency became official, Barnes alerted the BBC, and journalists countrywide—as half-drunk as the pints they ditched—fled the pubs to try to catch us on the way out of The Shard. Fortunately, we were long gone, hustled home in private cars so no newspaper could lead its coverage with tearstained royal faces. Grief is a normal human impulse, but a monarchy is not a normal human thing, and so its opacity had to remain in place.

The world, however, promptly lost its shit at the idea of Queen Eleanor being on death’s gangplank. The news, ironically, achieved the one thing she had wanted most earlier in the summer, when she’d cried wolf: pushing speculation about me and Nick and Freddie onto the back burner. Reporters camped out in front of Buckingham Palace for the first two weeks and stayed there, reporting all day every day, as if they could tap straight into her IV drip.

But every single one of those reports said the same thing: The stroke had left the Queen in what the royal doctors called a minimally conscious state, so as to sound slightly more optimistic. The truth was a shade more dire: She had not shown any awareness, so even though six weeks hence she was still with us, they were no closer to knowing when or if she would come out of it. The longer Eleanor remained not dead, but neither wholly alive, the more everyone had been forced to ponder what a different world it would be without her. The country was littered with items that would need rebranding (for lack of a better word) when Richard took the throne for real, from cash to the postboxes with ER insignias on them to the pile of mail that arrived every day from well-wishers, covered in stamps bearing Eleanor’s profile.