Murder Most Royal — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

‘Socially, d’you mean? Oh, goodness, it varies. We entertain them a few times a year,’ Hugh said. ‘It was always more Lee’s domain than mine. “Hearts and minds”, she called it. Like the army, you know. Oh, look, up there.’ He pointed across the meadow, above the river, where a heron was gliding silently on outstretched wings. ‘Some are friends and some are absolute bastards.’

‘Herons?’ she asked.

‘No, tenants. I’m sure you find the same thing. They all loved Lee, though,’ he added softly. ‘And I’m sure they’ll come round to Flora, too.

She only wants the best for Ladybridge.’

They kept walking around the moat until they were level with the buildings at the other end of the hall from the drawbridge, where the works on Flora’s future cake shop were evident from missing window frames and loose tarpaulins at ground level, one of which flapped forlornly in the breeze.

‘It’s like the Forth Bridge,’ Hugh commented. ‘Never finished.’

‘And yet always itself,’ Lady Caroline said. ‘I’m sure St Cyrs have been thinking it wasn’t quite done from the moment they moved in, don’t you?’

Hugh grinned.

‘You’re probably right.’

Back in the saloon, the family were clustered in front of the television set, watching the inauguration of the forty-fifth president. He was seventy, as commentators felt it necessary to mention – the same age as Ned, yet obviously with much life ahead of him and much to do. Not all of it popular, if the protests taking place around the world and the lack of famous faces in the crowd were anything to go by.

But the Queen was taken with Senator Blunt’s opening remarks about the ‘commonplace and miraculous’ tradition of a peaceful transfer of power.

People rather took that for granted these days, she thought. As a keen student of history, she was highly aware that transfers of power could be bloody and dangerous. Her namesake had lived in constant fear of it in the sixteenth century. Her distant cousin, Nicholas II, had lost his whole family to a revolution.

The War of Independence, Partition . . . the list was brutal and long, and close to home. Philip’s family in Greece had had to run for their lives. The ‘commonplace miracle’ of peaceful transfer was much to be treasured. If her own entry in the history books could say only one thing, it would be this: for three-score years and ten, as far as she could manage it, transfers of power to countries in her beloved Commonwealth had happened peacefully.