Murder Most Royal

Her eyes shot open. The dull morning light was blinding.

No!

She sat up sharply, before woozily collapsing back into her pillows.

The early service! This was Sunday, and Christmas morning. She was supposed to be at St Mary Magdalene’s at nine for private worship, and back at eleven for the public service and the family walkabout. It was more than a tradition, it was a duty, and she had attended the eleven o’clock service either here or at Windsor every single year of her reign, without fail. It was simply impossible to imagine not attending. What would her grandmother, Queen Mary, say?

She sat up again and tried to call for her maid. She still had about an hour to get ready. But her voice was barely a croak and she had to ring the bell. The doctor was called by video link, swiftly diagnosed full-blown flu and forbade her to leave the house. Philip, who was already dressed and breakfasted, took one look at her and agreed, which was most disheartening. So did Charles, who was so astonished at the news of his mother being incapacitated that he had to come and see for himself. Really, her bedroom was turning into Piccadilly Circus, or something out of The Madness of King George. If she hadn’t been almost incapable of speech, she would have had quite a lot to say about it.

Eventually, after a large breakfast and a short walk for the children to burn off some energy after their stocking-opening shenanigans, the rest of the family disappeared for a blissfully quiet couple of hours to go to church and talk to the crowds. If it had been possible for the Queen to feel more dreadful than she did at the thought of letting down the visitors at the gate, who had been waiting for hours in sub-zero temperatures to see her, she would have done so, but instead she took her time getting ready, accompanied by her dresser and the sound of carols on the radio.

She took the chance to write a brief note to Moira Westover, whose daughter Astrid had so mysteriously disappeared, and to Hugh St Cyr, Ned’s cousin at Ladybridge Hall, commiserating on ‘what must be most unsettling times for you all’. She wanted to say your bereavement, but they didn’t know for certain yet that it was a bereavement. Anyway, poor Hugh had grief much closer to home to contend with, since the death of his beloved wife just short of their golden wedding anniversary. Whereas he hadn’t spoken to Ned for years, as far as she knew. Was it harder, she wondered, to lose someone who had already made themselves absent from your life? There were no heart-warming memories, no consolation of shared experience. It was easy to tell yourself that it didn’t matter, but was it true?

Later, the rector arrived to give her private communion – there were advantages to being head of the Church of England – and everyone reconvened in the dining room for a meal of roast turkey, seven types of organic vegetable from various royal farms and gardens, a flaming Christmas pudding and, for those with the stomach for it, plenty of fine wine and champagne. There were party crowns and, by tradition, the Queen was the only one who didn’t wear one. As a girl, she had found it so very funny when her father didn’t and everyone else did. They finished just in time to gather round the television set in the saloon at three, to watch the message she had recorded earlier at Buckingham Palace.

‘I looked perfectly well then,’ she said, observing herself from her vantage point on the nearest sofa.

‘That was before the little Petri dishes got going. Which one of you buggers was it?’ Philip demanded, glancing round.

‘You look lovely now,’ Sophie said gamely. You could always rely on Sophie to say the right thing, even if in the teeth of the evidence.

Familiar with what she was going to say to the nation and the Commonwealth, the Queen let her gaze drift from the television to a small gap in the panelling, marking the hidden door. The room where she had spoken to the chief constable was the one where her father and grandfather used to record their Christmas messages for the radio. They were broadcast live to an empire that seemed to power the world. How quickly that idea had become history, and both her life and her father’s had been spent managing the transition.

For a moment, she pictured him beside her again, his hand reassuringly on her shoulder. These feelings didn’t completely fade, even after so many decades. He had died in his bedroom upstairs, aged only fifty-six, and she had been far away, in Africa. Halfway across the world.

‘Mummy, are you all right?’ Anne asked.

‘It’s just this dreadful flu. Pass me my handbag and I’ll find a handkerchief.’

* * *

‘One thing you can be sure of,’ Mrs Maddox said to a select audience in the housekeeper’s sitting room a few hours later, ‘it wasn’t one of the family.’