Murder Most Royal

The autumn and early winter had been fraught with uncertainty. The Brexit referendum and the US elections had revealed deep divisions in Whitehall and Washington that it would take a very steady hand to repair. Through it all, the Queen had played host to presidents and politicians, she had been a greeter of ambassadors, a pinner-on of medals and a host for charity events – mostly at Buckingham Palace, the place she thought of as the gilded office block on the roundabout. Now Norfolk drew her with its wide-open spaces and enfolding pines, its teeming marshes, vast English skies and freewheeling birds.

She had been dreaming of it for days. Sandringham was Christmas. Her father had spent it there, and his father before him, and his father before him. When the children were small, it had been easier to celebrate at Windsor for a while, but her own childhood Christmases were Norfolk ones.

* * *

The following day the helicopter whisked the royal couple, blankets on their knees, dogs at their feet, past Cambridge, past the magnificent medieval towers of Ely Cathedral, the ‘ship of the fens’, and on, north-eastwards towards King’s Lynn. Soon, wetlands gave way to farmland that was patched with pine woods, with paddocks and flint cottages. Below them, briefly, was the shell-pink Regency villa at Abbottswood, where she was surprised to see a herd of deer ambling slowly across the lawn. Next came the stubbly, immaculate fields and scattered copses of the Muncaster Estate, whose furthest reaches bordered one of the royal farms, and then at last the fields, dykes and villages of the Sandringham Estate itself. As the helicopter made its turn, the Queen saw a glint of seawater in the distant Wash and a minute later Sandringham House appeared behind a ridge of pines, with its formal and informal gardens, its lakes and its sweeping lawns amply big enough for them to land.

The house, built for Edward VII when he was Prince of Wales, was a Victorian architect’s red-brick, beturreted idea of what a Jacobean house should be, and people who cared a lot about architecture were generally appalled by it. The Queen, like her father before her, was enormously fond of its idiosyncratic nooks and crannies. Philip, who had strong views about architecture, had once unsuccessfully proposed to have it knocked down. However, what really mattered were the twenty thousand acres of bog, marsh, woodland, arable land and orchards that made up the surrounding estate. The Queen was a natural countrywoman and here she and Philip could quietly be farmers. Not the kind who mended fences in the lashing rain and were on lambing at dawn, true, but together, they looked after and loved it because it was a small part of the planet that was theirs. Here, in north Norfolk, they could actively participate in trying to make the world a better place: for wildlife, for the consumers of their crops, for the people who worked the land, for the future. It was a quiet legacy – one they didn’t talk about in public (Charles’s experience on that front illustrated why) – but one they cared about very much.

* * *

In her office at the ‘working’ end of the house, Rozie Oshodi looked up from her laptop screen in time to see the helicopter skirt the edge of the treeline before coming in to land. As the Queen’s assistant private secretary, Rozie had arrived by train earlier that morning. For now, the suite of staff rooms, with its functional Edwardian furniture – and to an extent the whole house, and in a way, the nation – was her domain. According to Rozie’s mother it was, anyway. Sir Simon, who ran the Private Office with the combined skills of the admiral and ambassador he might have been, had gone to the Highlands for the first part of the holiday. He and his wife Sarah had been given the use of a cottage at Balmoral for the Christmas break in recognition of his sterling work over the autumn, and as a result, for two precious weeks, Rozie was in charge. ‘It’s all down to you,’ her mother had said. ‘No pressure. But think, you’re like the first black Thomas Cromwell. You’re the right-hand woman. The eyes and ears. Don’t mess it up.’ She’d never had her mother down as a big fan of Tudor history. Hilary Mantel had a lot to answer for.