Murder Most Royal

She picked the envelope off the pile. Normally ‘Thank you, Simon’ was the equivalent of ‘Goodbye’, and he knew it, and yet when she glanced up, he was hovering. She looked at him questioningly. ‘Yes?’

His own face burned with suppressed curiosity. Of course he wanted to know what was inside, and why she wanted it so badly. He couldn’t ask her outright about private letters from her own family, but he was clearly hoping she’d tell him anyway. There was a brief stand-off, while neither spoke. Eventually, he gave in.

‘That will be all, I take it,’ he said.

‘Thank you, Simon,’ she repeated firmly.

He shut the door behind him and she pulled the letters out.

* * *

There were about three dozen in all. Her mother had been a prolific letter writer, with many friends in Norfolk who eagerly wrote back. It did not take long, however, to winkle out the ones from Ladybridge Hall. They were all on the same thick cream paper, embossed with the family crest and the address in blue. Georgina’s had looked the same, the Queen remembered, but her signature had taken up half the page. These were all signed ‘Lee’, in a much smaller hand.

It was disappointing that none of her mother’s letters to the baroness were in the bundle. The Queen Mother’s writing style was warm and witty, very true to her character, and seemed to bring her back to life whenever one read it. However, there were seven letters from Lee to the queen, which was more than one could have hoped for. The bundle had come with a note from the archivist saying she always did her best to put the contents in chronological order, but it wasn’t always possible, given that so many of them weren’t dated. This proved to be true of Lee, who had a maddening habit of giving the month and day at the top of each one, but not the year.

At least her handwriting was legible. It was rounded and uneven, with curly ‘y’s and a long strike through the ‘t’ that reminded the Queen of Anne’s letters from school, in the same blue ink, but it was steady, with decent spacing, and not difficult to scan. The Queen was looking for the strong, confident ‘V’ for Valentine. Lee spoke a lot about Flora, who was learning to ride. She asked questions about the weather in Balmoral, made endless suggestions for roses and wrote several pages about a trip to the Chelsea Flower Show. She was planning a trip to America to talk to various gardening societies about her work at Ladybridge. And then, in the fifth letter, there was this:

I’m not sure Hugh will ever speak to Valentine again.

The Queen sat up straighter. She went back to the beginning. The letter began,

I write this from the priest hole. That is, my body’s inside it, I can’t fit my feet in. Georgina came here to write too, I gather. I pray nobody comes to this end of the tower to find me. You wouldn’t believe the bitter day I’ve had. I wish, wish, wish I had never heard of Ladybridge.

Maddeningly, Lee then went on to say that she couldn’t bring herself to burden ‘Your Majesty’ with her ‘disaster’. Only that she ‘could hardly bear to be in her own skin’, that it had all started because of ‘a simple trip to hospital, a silly thing, really’, and that she must ‘get Valentine away from here’. At the time, she was planning to send the children to stay with a friend across the county. Another line caught the Queen’s attention:

At least it’s a secret between us here. One man can ruin everything. I wish him such tremendous harm I can’t begin to tell you. I dream that he’s dead and the nightmare is, that I wake up and he’s still alive. You won’t tell anyone, will you? I trust you implicitly. I think I might be going mad.

The next letter was all about Flora’s first day on the jumps at Pony Club. It must have been out of sequence, because the final one in the bundle was an apology for the priest-hole letter, and was an attempt at reassurance, although the Queen wondered how reassuring her mother would have found it.

I’m not mad at all, simply wounded. V. is with the Allenbys and very happy. He’ll join them at prep school next term and is very excited after all their tales of midnight feasts and camp fires. Meanwhile I feel like the fallen raven I rescued last year, battered and bruised, but slowly recovering the use of my feathers. Hugh will mend in time too. That is the most important thing.

Moira’s coming next week to wrap me up in cotton wool, although knowing Moira she’ll probably take me for several bracing walks and remove all fat from my diet. Perhaps that’s what I need. Not the diet, but the walks. The green grass and hazy, bee-buzzed air can mend anything, can’t they? Even a broken heart.