Murder Most Royal

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the centuries their twisted chimneys, steep, sloping roofs and gothic crenellations had passed from unfashionable to out of date, to almost ruined, but the Tudor details of its weathered brick design had stayed intact.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.