Murder Most Royal

’

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.