Murder Most Royal — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

That is, my body’s inside it, I can’t fit my feet in. Georgina came here to write too, I gather. I pray nobody comes to this end of the tower to find me. You wouldn’t believe the bitter day I’ve had. I wish, wish, wish I had never heard of Ladybridge.

Maddeningly, Lee then went on to say that she couldn’t bring herself to burden ‘Your Majesty’ with her ‘disaster’. Only that she ‘could hardly bear to be in her own skin’, that it had all started because of ‘a simple trip to hospital, a silly thing, really’, and that she must ‘get Valentine away from here’.

At the time, she was planning to send the children to stay with a friend across the county. Another line caught the Queen’s attention:

At least it’s a secret between us here. One man can ruin everything. I wish him such tremendous harm I can’t begin to tell you. I dream that he’s dead and the nightmare is, that I wake up and he’s still alive. You won’t tell anyone, will you? I trust you implicitly. I think I might be going mad.

The next letter was all about Flora’s first day on the jumps at Pony Club.

It must have been out of sequence, because the final one in the bundle was an apology for the priest-hole letter, and was an attempt at reassurance, although the Queen wondered how reassuring her mother would have found it.

I’m not mad at all, simply wounded. V. is with the Allenbys and very happy. He’ll join them at prep school next term and is very excited after all their tales of midnight feasts and camp fires. Meanwhile I feel like the fallen raven I rescued last year, battered and bruised, but slowly recovering the use of my feathers.

Hugh will mend in time too. That is the most important thing.

Moira’s coming next week to wrap me up in cotton wool, although knowing Moira she’ll probably take me for several bracing walks and remove all fat from my diet. Perhaps that’s what I need. Not the diet, but the walks. The green grass and hazy, bee-buzzed air can mend anything, can’t they? Even a broken heart.

The Queen looked up.

Moira had been mentioned once or twice in the other letters. She knew several Moiras, but only two who were old enough to have been confidantes to Lee St Cyr in the late 1970s, and one of them lived in the Bahamas. The other lived in a Georgian manor house, half an hour’s drive due east of Sandringham. She was Moira Westover, the mother of Astrid, who had so recently got engaged to Ned St Cyr.

She picked up the phone and explained what she needed to Lady Caroline.