Agatha stared up at the ceiling for a moment. “It would have been rude to ask,” she said. “Georgina was a capricious woman, so I rather thought that it was just a phase. Perhaps it would have been, but then she got sick.” She looked sad. “I was the only person she’d still speak to on the phone, but it was very one-sided. She only wanted to tell the same stories about her boyfriends, and which of them adored her the most. I couldn’t get a word in about Nigel. I doubt she even knew his name.”

Barnes rounded the corner with a ring of keys in his hand. “And that’s enough of that,” Agatha said, standing and brushing off her skirt. “No sense in dwelling on the past with so much happening in the present.”

At long last, Richard had been forced to include me at a Conclave, and I had the Dutch to thank: My participation in December’s state dinner was critical, and he could no longer ice me out for sport. He was begrudging about it, making a big show of thanking Barnes for the extra effort required to make a sixth dossier, but it counted.

Eleanor had put this event on the docket the day after our wedding to, as Richard often reminded us, “wash out the stain from that debacle as quickly as possible.” They’d concocted a barely plausible historical hook—an anniversary of a tulip that was named after William of Orange, the Dutch English king who, in the manner of so many of Nick’s male relatives, died after his horse tripped in a mole hole. The truth was much simpler: The Dutch wouldn’t make this hard. King Hendrik-Alexander and Queen Lucretia—the press whimsically referred to them as Hax and Lax, and therefore so did everyone else—were low pressure, congenial, and happy to do Eleanor a solid during her time of PR need. And Prince Dick had been waiting to take the reins for a lifetime, so he refused to cancel this, regardless of whether anyone felt weird about ceremonial folderol while the monarch lay unconscious.

He opened the Conclave by distributing to each of us a ream of papers so thick, the staple barely poked through the other side.

“It is imperative that this go off without a hitch,” he said. “The public and the press need to be confident that the changeover will be seamless, if indeed any permanent transfer of power is en route.”

Only Richard would call death a “permanent transfer of power.” I took a bite of my scone instead of my tongue, and resisted the urge to spit it out; it was awful, just as Freddie had always complained. I met his eyes across the table. His expression said, I told you so.

“May I ask a question?” I said, half raising my hand. “What exactly happens at a state dinner?”