Murder Most Royal

‘Well, according to Lee, he started drinking early that night. There was a certain wildness about him. He kept on ensuring her glass was topped up, too. Lee was terribly nervous, knowing that one day she would be chatelaine of Ladybridge, with the tenants, the farms and entertaining . . . and she found all that sort of thing quite terrifying at the time.

‘He’d lit the courtyard with a thousand bulbs and installed a dance floor. She danced with Hugh there, and then again in the lush grass of the pasture, just the two of them, while music drifted across the moat. She said that was one of her fondest memories. Then they went back and joined their guests and partied until it was almost dawn.’

‘It sounds delightful. But it didn’t end there, I take it,’ the Queen said.

‘Well, no,’ Moira agreed. ‘Hugh “Still Waters” St Cyr went to bed. He and Lee were being very correct. She intended to be a virgin until her wedding night even though it was the late nineteen-sixties, but lots of girls were still like that. But – oh, I remember now – she told me that with Hugh being so close, and the moon, and all that champagne, she was very tempted to say to hell with it, with only four weeks to go. She was plucking up the courage to follow him to his bedroom, when she ran into Ned in the corridor outside the billiard room where they’d been drinking, and he told her not to go. She assumed he was enforcing her original pact with Hugh, so she agreed. She was grateful, even, the silly girl. But then . . . Ned became very insistent. He was hugely charismatic, as you know. He was twenty-three and very drunk, and he went on some sort of rant about how they should make babies together, how beautiful they would be, how she had always been the only woman he had ever cared about, how their children would inherit Ladybridge following “the true line”. All sorts of rot. She said she tried to talk him out of it, but . . . he was very passionate.’

‘In what way?’ the Queen asked sharply. ‘“Passionate?”’

‘I don’t remember exactly. She said something about him being insistent. You know how men are when they know what they want.’ Moira took another drag of her metal cigarette that looked more like a lighter. ‘We were talking about this ten years later, of course, she and I. I only have her side of it. I never discussed that night with Ned and I wonder if he even remembered it, given how drunk he was. I did ask Lee what she did to fend him off and she said she just went to another place. I rather idiotically asked where, assuming she’d say she ran off to her room or something, but she said she imagined she was floating over her mother’s garden, paying attention to each plant. And that’s all she would say. Whatever it was, I think it took place in the billiard room. She very rarely entered it again, even decades later. I always saw it with its curtains closed. The next day there’s a picture of her saying goodbye to some of the guests in a pretty summer dress. She looks quite carefree. Hugh’s arm is around her shoulder. As if it never happened. Valentine was born nine and a half months later, on February the fourteenth. A honeymoon baby. Hugh chose the name and everyone was thrilled for them.’

‘Did she know?’ the Queen asked. ‘Who the father was? I suppose perhaps she didn’t.’

‘Not then, not for certain – how could she? Valentine was either two weeks early or two weeks late, but pregnancy is such a vague science, isn’t it? The doctors give you an absolute due date and you assume that’s when the baby will come, but it never does. She said she felt it, though. She didn’t know how exactly. But she said she always thought Valentine was an accident waiting to happen. I don’t think she meant “accident” so much as utter, utter disaster. Not her baby boy – she loved him very much. But . . . everything else.’

‘She was worried about Hugh’s reaction? And Valentine’s, too?’

‘Well, certainly Hugh’s. She had no intention of ever telling Valentine. This was long before the days of DNA, of course, but even now, if you don’t take a test, how would you know? And the title and the estate were at stake. She and Hugh didn’t have any other sons as time went by – only Flora. So there was the question of inheritance if it all came out and it turned out they had no legitimate male heirs. Also, Hugh adored her, and she was very worried he might do something idiotic and go to jail if he found out, and the shame it would bring on her was unthinkable.’

‘But it did come out.’

‘Yes. They were very unlucky with that blood test. It was terribly simple: Valentine cut himself quite badly on some barbed wire at the farm and developed septicaemia. They thought they might need to do a transfusion and tested him . . . and I can’t remember what the blood type was – O, I think – but it was about the only one that couldn’t be a product of Hugh’s blood type and Lee’s. Hugh stupidly checked. He should have left well alone.’