Murder Most Royal

‘Possibly. But you didn’t know Georgina. She was the eldest child, the only one with any common sense, and she’d been practically running the estate for years. She’d have been staring down the new baron’s ruddy neck and second-guessing every decision he made. I’m not surprised Ralph practically bankrupted himself to get rid of her. Ned never forgave him, either. Ralph died forty years ago, but if his hand had ended up in the water . . .’

The Queen shot her husband a look.

‘What kind of person was he?’ Camilla wanted to know.

‘Ned? Wayward,’ Charles said with some disdain.

‘Headstrong,’ added Philip.

‘They’re saying he was a visionary in the servants’ hall,’ Sophie Wessex suggested, which caused all heads to look at her. ‘That’s what Mrs Maddox was telling me. He’d started this new project to turn Abbottswood into a nature refuge. He was planning to make it a centre for endangered species.’

‘Oh?’ Philip said, frowning. ‘I hadn’t heard.’

‘It was a recent thing. Mrs Maddox sounded quite excited. As I say, I think she’s a fan.’

Beatrice, sitting across the table from the Queen, looked confused. ‘If he lived quite close, how come Eugenie and I never met him?’

‘Or me?’ Harry agreed.

‘We rather lost touch over the years,’ the Queen said vaguely.

‘Ha!’ Philip said. ‘You mean, he dropped us like a hot potato.’

‘He dropped us?’ Beatrice asked. ‘Seriously?’

‘He grew up as Little Lord Fauntleroy at Ladybridge, then, after he and Georgina got chucked out, he went off to Greece, had an ersatz epiphany and came back a bloody communist. He saw us as fuddy-duddies. Too straight down the line for his bohemian tastes. He loved your great-aunt Margaret. We preferred Ralph’s son Hugh. Dull but stable. You know Hugh. Dresses like a scarecrow, farms sheep and writes about John Donne. It was Lee, his wife, we were particularly fond of, mind you. Very attractive blonde from Yorkshire. Green-fingered girl. She died in the summer. Much too young.’

‘My age,’ Charles observed, swilling his claret around his glass before finishing it in a gulp and gesturing for a refill. ‘We shared a birthday. We always used to send each other a basket of hyacinths.’ He looked wistful. ‘Ned introduced her to Hugh, I think. Thank God she didn’t end up with him.’

‘Didn’t you say Ned tried to go out with you, Mummy?’ Peter Phillips asked Anne.

‘Mmm, he did,’ Anne agreed. ‘Ned didn’t drop me. But he was very unpredictable. Mad, bad and dangerous to know and all that. Abbottswood was famous for rock concerts in the seventies. I think Led Zeppelin played there once.’

‘Gosh!’ Beatrice was impressed.

‘Mind you, he settled down eventually,’ Anne said. ‘The last time I saw him was at a country fair a couple of years ago, looking at vegan dog food.’

‘I heard his disappearance might be to do with drugs,’ Eugenie suggested. ‘That was on the news, too.’

‘Well, it wouldn’t be him taking them,’ Anne said firmly. ‘One of his best friends overdosed in Greece and Ned became evangelical about it. He made Abbottswood a sort of rehabilitation centre for a while.’

‘Until one of the inmates practically burned the place down,’ Charles reminded her.

‘Hmph!’ Philip snorted. ‘He was good at attracting acolytes; not so good at actually providing them with decent therapy. He was always trying out some hare-brained scheme and going off half-cocked. Half Don Juan, half Don Quixote. He never could see a thing through.’

‘He sounds interesting,’ Beatrice said with a grin.

‘He was interesting. Too interesting,’ Philip grumbled. ‘That was his problem. Too busy trying to impress his mother.’

‘How very Freudian,’ the Queen said, fairly certain that this was the correct use of the term, and also that it might encourage Philip to drop the subject at last.

Luckily, the dining room doors opened at precisely this moment to allow a procession of footmen to deliver towering individual chocolate soufflés dusted with icing sugar and decorated with filigree chocolate holly leaves. There were suitable noises of appreciation and conversation moved on to other things. This meal was one of the Queen’s favourites of the year, and finally she could get on with enjoying it.

Chapter 6

The following morning the Queen felt worse.

Her head hammered. She put it down to the champagne, and possibly the Zaza cocktail. She could barely open her eyes.

In the corridor outside her room, children raced up and down, triumphantly calling out ‘He’s been!’ to one another before being loudly shushed. Meanwhile, there was something the Queen needed to do. Whatever it was, she couldn’t do it.

Lying in bed, eyes closed, she tried to think. It couldn’t be down to the drink. She hadn’t overindulged, not really. Not nearly enough to feel like this, anyway. And it couldn’t be her head cold. (What was it she was supposed to be doing?) Philip was a day ahead of her in that regard and he’d looked and felt much better last night. In fact, he’d said he was looking forward to getting some fresh air this morning at the early service.