Murder Most Royal — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

A peer of the realm could have as many children as he liked, in wedlock and out of it, adopted or whatever he chose, but only the genetic child of married parents could inherit the title. It was the law, and there were forces that wanted to change it, along with the stipulation that the child who inherited should if at all possible be male, but they weren’t making much headway.

Surrogacy didn’t count because the genetic parents weren’t married, even if the legal parents were. Therefore, as it was impossible for two men, or two women, to produce a child that genetically belonged to both of them, gay married aristocrats could not pass their titles down.

Which might perhaps explain why so far there had not been a single such couple. A man might subsequently marry his gay partner, having ‘done his duty’ and created an heir within a heterosexual marriage, and no doubt that would happen in time, but it hadn’t yet. Anyway, Valentine wasn’t doing that. This would be his first wedding. In fact, he was forty-seven and until now he seemed to have been in no rush to marry at all. And under no pressure from his father to do so. All Hugh’s attention was on his daughter. This, too, was strange.

‘Hugh was quite offhand when he mentioned it,’ the Queen said.

There was a pause as they stopped to admire a couple of plump partridge stalking ahead of them up the path to the farmhouse.

‘Did you ever get a sense of Hugh’s relationship with Valentine?’ she asked.

‘Hugh used to bring him shooting when Valentine was a teenager. You talked to them then, didn’t you?’

‘I did. The boy was a top-class shot. Very coordinated, very composed. Excellent fieldcraft – better than his father’s. I always thought he’d go on to do more with it, but then he drifted off to London and never came back.’

‘And were he and Hugh close?’

Philip snorted dismissively. ‘Name me one teenager out of boarding school who’s close to his father.

’

The Queen could name several, but chose not to. ‘They weren’t unusually distant, though?’ she asked.

The Queen was struck by the word ‘disconnected’. That was it, absolutely. She had wondered if Hugh was acting his indifference. The man who had removed the wolfsbane from the poison garden all those years ago was anything but. However, something had changed since then. She didn’t put it down to Valentine’s homosexuality.