Murder Most Royal

The turning to Ladybridge was familiar from the Queen’s childhood, when she and her sister had visited with their mother. The road took them through the village of Vickery and past the long, flint-lined walls of the estate to the Ladybridge village green with its pub and the little church of St Agnes, where Georgina St Cyr was now buried in the family vault.

Today, the Queen was travelling with Lady Caroline, while Rozie and her protection officer followed behind. The Range Rovers rounded a corner near the church and drove through a wide stone archway towards the hall itself, which was tightly surrounded by its famous moat and set among orchards and meadows leading down to a little river, with fields and farmland beyond.

The picturesque view was the happy result of failure, rather than success. The St Cyrs, as any of them would tell you, had generally been on the wrong side of history: Catholic in Elizabethan times, Royalist during the Civil War, firmly agricultural during the Industrial Revolution. They had been well respected, but never rich. Poor decisions, death duties and bad luck had chipped away at the income from their land and caused the hall itself to fall into deep disrepair at times during its five centuries of existence. But this had worked in the house’s favour in the end. Limited in space by the moat that surrounded them, the motley collection of medieval and Elizabethan buildings hadn’t been expanded, rebuilt or restyled by succeeding generations. Over the centuries their twisted chimneys, steep, sloping roofs and gothic crenellations had passed from unfashionable to out of date, to almost ruined, but the Tudor details of its weathered brick design had stayed intact. The last four generations had fought hard to preserve what they had, so that now the guidebooks to the county praised it as ‘untouched’, ‘unspoilt’, ‘a harmonious example of Elizabethan moated architecture at its finest’. Glimpsed from a distance through Norfolk mist, it could easily be an illustration from a fairy tale.

Ladybridge was, the Queen had always thought, the perfect size for a child to grow up in – a bit like Birkhall in Scotland, where her mother had spent a happy childhood. It was not so large that you would feel endlessly intimidated by it, but big enough for hide-and-seek, for endless indoor games on rainy days and larks outside on sunny ones. Each brick and stone told the story of the generations who had lived there. The grounds beyond were ripe for childish adventures. No wonder Georgina had wanted Ned to grow up here, and what a lucky little boy he had been.

The last stretch of road had once been through a cherry orchard, which the Queen Mother had always tried to visit in spring for the joy of its endless pale pink. But now, she saw, half of it was set aside as a visitor car park. A modern carbuncle on the orchard gateway turned out to be a ticket booth advertising tours of the gardens ‘Open from 1 April’. Some of the romance had been sacrificed to make what was left accessible. The Queen nodded to herself. It was a sign of survival.

The car swept across the drawbridge and into the cobbled courtyard of the main house, where three generations of St Cyrs had come out to greet them, accompanied by an assortment of spaniels, terriers and an elderly Labrador.

The baron looked as old and hunched as he had been at Christmas. He had not dressed up for her visit. Hugh’s normal style, which bordered on affectation, was a patched tweed jacket, a flannel shirt and cord trousers held up with baling twine. The Queen suspected he had seen himself as a rural character from a P. G. Wodehouse novel at some point in his more sprightly middle age, and stuck with it. Several other Norfolk landowners she knew were of similar mind, but the baling twine edged it, in her opinion.

Flora stood beside him, along with her three pretty, teenage daughters, who had not accompanied their mother to Sandringham. Their father, like Ned’s, was no longer in the picture. Somehow, men who were not St Cyrs by blood didn’t survive Ladybridge very long. Flora wore a neat jumper over a thick skirt that suggested the heating at the hall was not up to the quality of its gardens. It was impossible to tell whether the girls had made an effort. All their clothes were ripped or half-missing or very old and creased. It might be the first thing they’d pulled out of the wardrobe, but the Queen sensed it might equally be the height of fashion for their age.

‘Dad’s laid on lunch,’ Flora said, ‘but afterwards I want to show you the gardens. I know how much your mother loved them.’

Lunch was held in the panelled dining room whose windows overlooked the moat, where four white swans floated serenely by. It wasn’t quite as nice as the dining room at Sandringham, the Queen thought, but not far off. Conversation over coffee in the adjacent drawing room inevitably turned to Ned.