I was still dressed in my visiting-the-palace clothes so I set off again, scouring Mayfair for the right sort of domestic agency. I didn’t dare return to the one that had supplied me with Mildred once before. The proprietress was so impossibly regal that she made the queen look positively middle class. I wandered along Piccadilly and up to Berkeley Square. Luckily the rain had slowed to a misty drizzle. I finally found what looked like a suitable agency on Bond Street. The woman behind the desk was another dragon—perhaps it was a requirement of the profession.

“Let me get this straight, my lady. You wish to employ a lady’s maid to accompany you to Romania?”

“That’s right.”

“And when would this be?”

“Next week.”

“Next week?” Her eyebrows shot upward. “I think it would be highly unlikely that I could find you the right sort of young woman to fill this position within one week. I can think of one or two who might be persuaded, but you’d have to pay her a premium.”

“What sort of premium?”

Then she named an amount that I should have thought sufficient to run Castle Rannoch for a year. She must have seen me swallow hard, because she added, “We only handle the highest caliber of young women, you know.”

I left in deep despondency. My brother could never find that sort of money, even if Fig would ever let him hand it over to me. It would have to be Belinda or nobody. As I walked through the growing twilight I pictured Belinda and all the sort of things that could go wrong with that arrangement. I was doomed whatever I did. Then I heard a newsboy calling out the headlines of the day in broad Cockney. That immediately made me think of the one person I had not yet turned to. My grandfather always had an answer for even the toughest problems. And even if he couldn’t conjure a maid out of thin air, it was like a tonic just to see him. I almost ran to the Bond Street tube station and was soon speeding across London into darkest Essex.

I suppose I should explain that whereas my father was Queen Victoria’s grandson, my mother had started life as the daughter of a Cockney policeman. She had become a famous actress and left her past behind when she married my father—only to bolt from him again when I was two.