Murder Most Royal

They had all lived at Ladybridge Hall together, along with Georgina’s younger sisters and her dashing little brother, Patrick, and Ned had been Ned Longbourn until the age of eight when Paul, or possibly Simon, divorced Georgina and fled to Greece, where he painted and drank until the drink finally killed him and young Ned inherited the studio flat in Hampstead and the captain’s house on Corfu. It was questionable whether Georgina noticed. She was always more interested in her horses and helping her father look after the estate. After the divorce, she reverted to her maiden name and Ned took it too. He’d inherited his mother’s red-gold hair and Roman nose, her charisma, her love of fast cars, her occasional temper, her charm . . . The two properties were the only things his father ever gave him, as far as they knew.

‘After her father died, Georgina bought Abbottswood,’ Philip explained, ‘Nice Regency villa. Not on the scale of Ladybridge, obviously. The Yanks had had the place during the war and the house was a wreck, but the grounds were good. Designed by Repton, apparently.’ Philip’s knowledge of the house and its surroundings surprised no one at the table. If he was interested in something he tended to know everything about it, and local architecture was one of his hobbies. ‘Georgina retired there like something out of Dickens, though she was only in her forties. Only rode to hounds and hardly spoke to anyone. She never forgave her cousin Ralph for casting her out of Ladybridge when her brother died and he inherited instead. Though what else he was supposed to do, God knows.’

‘Couldn’t she have lived on the estate somewhere?’ one of the younger princesses asked.

The Queen shot her husband a look.

‘What kind of person was he?’ Camilla wanted to know.

‘Ned? Wayward,’ Charles said with some disdain.

‘Headstrong,’ added Philip.

‘They’re saying he was a visionary in the servants’ hall,’ Sophie Wessex suggested, which caused all heads to look at her. ‘That’s what Mrs Maddox was telling me. He’d started this new project to turn Abbottswood into a nature refuge. He was planning to make it a centre for endangered species.’

‘Oh?’ Philip said, frowning. ‘I hadn’t heard.’

‘It was a recent thing. Mrs Maddox sounded quite excited. As I say, I think she’s a fan.’

Beatrice, sitting across the table from the Queen, looked confused. ‘If he lived quite close, how come Eugenie and I never met him?’

‘Or me?’ Harry agreed.

‘We rather lost touch over the years,’ the Queen said vaguely.

‘Ha!’ Philip said. ‘You mean, he dropped us like a hot potato.’

‘He grew up as Little Lord Fauntleroy at Ladybridge, then, after he and Georgina got chucked out, he went off to Greece, had an ersatz epiphany and came back a bloody communist. He saw us as fuddy-duddies. Too straight down the line for his bohemian tastes. He loved your great-aunt Margaret. We preferred Ralph’s son Hugh. Dull but stable. You know Hugh. Dresses like a scarecrow, farms sheep and writes about John Donne. It was Lee, his wife, we were particularly fond of, mind you. Very attractive blonde from Yorkshire. Green-fingered girl. She died in the summer. Much too young.’

‘My age,’ Charles observed, swilling his claret around his glass before finishing it in a gulp and gesturing for a refill. ‘We shared a birthday. We always used to send each other a basket of hyacinths.’ He looked wistful. ‘Ned introduced her to Hugh, I think. Thank God she didn’t end up with him.’

‘Didn’t you say Ned tried to go out with you, Mummy?’ Peter Phillips asked Anne.

‘Gosh!’ Beatrice was impressed.

‘Mind you, he settled down eventually,’ Anne said. ‘The last time I saw him was at a country fair a couple of years ago, looking at vegan dog food.’

‘I heard his disappearance might be to do with drugs,’ Eugenie suggested. ‘That was on the news, too.’

‘Well, it wouldn’t be him taking them,’ Anne said firmly. ‘One of his best friends overdosed in Greece and Ned became evangelical about it. He made Abbottswood a sort of rehabilitation centre for a while.’

‘Until one of the inmates practically burned the place down,’ Charles reminded her.

‘He sounds interesting,’ Beatrice said with a grin.

‘How very Freudian,’ the Queen said, fairly certain that this was the correct use of the term, and also that it might encourage Philip to drop the subject at last.

Luckily, the dining room doors opened at precisely this moment to allow a procession of footmen to deliver towering individual chocolate soufflés dusted with icing sugar and decorated with filigree chocolate holly leaves. There were suitable noises of appreciation and conversation moved on to other things. This meal was one of the Queen’s favourites of the year, and finally she could get on with enjoying it.

The following morning the Queen felt worse.

Her head hammered.