Louise began to wander about her bedchamber, picking up and replacing the various statuettes, books, and drawing paraphernalia that covered most of the surfaces. “Now she has set the trend for inexorable grieving, and it’s suffocating. She is quite determined that no-one else be allowed to extract a single drop of joy from life if she cannot.”

“I hadn’t realised things were so dismal.”

Louise sat back down again. “I envy you your freedom.”

“The only freedom I have is to disappoint my mother on a daily basis now that we are under the same roof,” Margaret retorted. “If it’s not my hair, it’s my freckles or my figure. Or the way I enter a room—she says I burst in like a London bobby—or the fact that I can’t seem to retain my fan, never mind use it properly. Did you know, Louise, that one can communicate using a fan?”

“But of course.”

“Well, I didn’t.”

“Lenchen and I have our own secret language using cutlery,” Louise said with a mischievous smile. “We use it during those eternal dinners we have to endure with the queen and her entourage. It means we can make polite, tedious conversation with the inevitably polite, boring courtier sitting next to us, and at the same time hold a completely different conversation between ourselves just by rearranging a spoon or a fork.”

“No! Show me.”

“Certainly not, for you would try to use it, and your face would give you away and that would be the end of that. I shall teach you something more useful. I know—I shall give you a lesson in the etiquette of curtsying.”

“I was taught to curtsy at a very young age, when I was first introduced to your mother. You must have been three, for I was four and it was when I came to London for the very first time, for the state opening of the Great Exhibition.”

“We were thick as thieves from the start. Prince Albert never approved of our friendship, did you know that? He thought you were a bad influence on me.”

“Ha! Little did he know that it is the other way around.”

“I think you will find me a positive influence and a useful font of knowledge, when it comes to the ways of the world,” Louise said primly.

“Now that I cannot argue with. I will look to you as my guide as I am dressed up and paraded about like a bit of prime bloodstock at an auction.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, may I present Lady Margaret Elizabeth Louise Montagu Douglas Scott,” Louise intoned. “The second daughter and sixth child of the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch. What am I bid for this young woman, who has a large dowry and a most excellent lineage?”

“Don’t forget the added bonus of a mother who has proved herself a productive brood mare.”