Murder Most Royal

‘I don’t think you’re an idiot at all,’ she said, and wondered how the Queen was getting on.

The Queen was letting Lady Caroline do most of the talking again.

‘Do you know? I haven’t been here since I was eighteen. I was here with Lee. It must have been before you got married. Do you mind if we have a quick look in the Long Gallery? I remember thinking it was one of my favourite rooms in Norfolk.’

They walked down a long, panelled corridor from the hall’s east wing, where the family’s living accommodation was, past a series of large tapestries featuring knights and ladies in a mythical green landscape with a river running through it, whose banks were dotted with spring flowers.

‘Were these here before?’ the Queen asked.

‘Yes,’ Hugh said, ‘but I had them cleaned last year, for Lee. Arthur and Guinevere. Lee always loved those landscapes. She said they reminded her of her gardens. Water and flowers and so on. I had them hung in her suite when she was bed-bound. They gave her a lot of pleasure in her final weeks.’

His grief was so different from Astrid Westover’s, the Queen thought. He held it in, and held on to it. It was etched onto his face.

He guided them to the Long Gallery on the second floor of the south wing, where Elizabethans would have taken their exercise in bad weather. It was a bright, sunny space with a plaster ceiling, longer than a tennis court and lined with the family portraits Georgina St Cyr had moved to make way for her modern art collection downstairs. They stood and looked out through mullioned windows over the meadow and the riverbank beyond.

‘I remember Ned bringing me up here,’ Lady Caroline said. ‘This was where the ghostly servant walks, isn’t it? Ned tried to scare me about it. Failed miserably. I love ghosts. We rode bicycles around here like mad things. It was tremendous fun. Lee was there, too, I remember. Ned was very soppy about her. It was before you were married. Didn’t he go out with her, too?’

Hugh looked acutely uncomfortable. ‘They knew each other,’ he acknowledged gruffly. ‘Ned met her at the Agricultural College, but I knew her brother from Oxford. Once we met, we decided on marriage very quickly. I never regretted it for a day.’

‘You mentioned at Christmas,’ she said, ‘that Flora is inheriting, not Valentine.’

‘Ah, yes, ma’am.’ Hugh looked uncomfortable. ‘I should have discussed it with you first. I intended to but I was somewhat distracted . . .’

‘Does Valentine mind?’ Lady Caroline asked.

‘He’ll get the title, of course. He’s good with tenancies and financing and so on, but he’s embraced city life. He doesn’t want to while away his days in East Anglia worrying about milk yields and badgers and foot and mouth.’

‘Most sons come round eventually.’

‘Only because they have to. My father didn’t want to take over Ladybridge, you know. He’d been very happy at his law firm in Ipswich. Suddenly he was lumbered with death duties and black beetle and dry rot. It would have been easier for him if Georgina had inherited from her father, but . . . male primogeniture and all that rot.’

He turned to the Queen and laughed slightly. She murmured her agreement, to an extent, although she wouldn’t have gone quite as far as ‘rot’. Nevertheless, she and Philip had ended the system in their own family, and not only for property but for titles, too. Little Charlotte Cambridge now held her place in the succession ahead of any younger brothers she might have.

‘Valentine has other plans,’ Hugh added. ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. He and Roland are getting married. I wanted you to be among the first to know.’

‘The first man in the peerage to marry another man, you mean? Indeed. The St Cyrs are leading the way, ma’am. Another family entry in the history books.’

‘It certainly will be.’ The Queen was aware that her surprise at this decision made her sound stiff. It was true about the history books.

‘He and Roland are planning to live in New York.’

‘Exactly,’ Hugh agreed.

They walked down a wide staircase of shallow steps and through a vaulted hallway decorated with intricate patterns of crossed swords, pikes and halberds, pistols and muskets dating back to the Civil War. Outside, in a second inner courtyard near the medieval section of the house, a wheelbarrow and two large piles of stone, wrapped in plastic, suggested the new building works were not complete.

‘Is there still much to do?’ Lady Caaroline asked.

‘A little,’ Hugh conceded. ‘We’re damp-proofing the rooms where Flora’s new cake shop will go. Quite an undertaking with a moat, as you can imagine.’

As they stood in the courtyard, the sun, which had been hidden by a bank of cloud all day, suddenly fought its way through and bathed them in its pale gold, wintery light.

Lady Caroline beamed.