But during the day, I shoved those thoughts aside and tried to focus on what I could control. Nick and I had made a decent dent in our house’s clutter, but the overall vibe was still more Grey Gardens than I would have liked. The royal designer sent over plans and mood boards and swatches for the interior makeover, and when I couldn’t take any more rugs and L-shaped sofas and chevron accent pillows, I wandered over to the backlog of Georgina articles that I’d bookmarked to try to understand why there was, at heart, so little out there to understand about her later years. I’d tracked down some detailed royal forums dedicated to everyone in The Firm, no matter how obscure. (I was particularly grateful to a librarian in Maryland called Roberta, who had digitized a lot of old newspaper articles during her downtime.) In the early ’70s there was an outcry over Georgina’s profligate travel spending, complete with photos of her in sunglasses and head scarves, laughing carelessly, like some that I’d seen in her living room. Hermès even named a handbag after her in 1980. But by the end of that decade, it had all just…stopped. She’d pop onto the balcony at royal occasions, always in the back, looking like someone else’s edict demanded she be there. Some pieces speculated that Georgina’s élan was snuffed out by heartbreak—she’d once caused a stir by telling a reporter at Spy, “Men are like the monarchy itself, aren’t they? Splendid to look at, occasionally fun to have around, but cruel and pointless to the end”—but no one could agree whether it was the French politician, the dashing matador, the heart surgeon from Canada, or the Welsh toy boy she’d taken to Capri. Nobody, not even Roberta, could connect the dots between the lively life of the party and the lonely lady of the manor. One article even mentioned “quietude and spiritual reflection,” as if The Firm had fed reporters that line directly. It reflected the way Nick’s mother’s condition had been recast as mere reclusiveness, with no further questions asked. But there was no evidence of any buried mental illness here; Georgina’s eventual liver cancer did lend credence to the supposition that she’d retreated because her wild life had worn her out and then turned on her, but that theory rang a little hollow to me. Better answers had to be in Apartment 1A somewhere.