However, as I say, we didn’t see much of him, or of anyone else for that matter. They kept me pretty well confined to one wing of the house, and although there must have been servants I never saw one except the old butler. There wasn’t a woman in the place, which was a dead bore, and when I suggested to Rudi that he might whistle up a wench or two to pass the evenings he just shook his head and said it was out of the question.

“Your highness must contain yourself in patience,” says he. “May I respectfully remind you that your wedding is not far off?”

“Thanks very much,” says I. “And may I respectfully remind you that I’m feeling randified now, and in no mood to hold myself in until my wedding to some young German cow who probably looks like a boatswain’s mate.”

“Your highness need have no fears on that score,” says he, and he showed me a portrait of Duchess Irma of Strackenz which I must say cheered me up considerably. She looked very young and she had one of those cold, narrow disdainful faces that you find on girls who have always had their own way, but she was a beauty, no question. Her hair was long and blonde, and her features very fine and regular; she made me think of a story I remembered from my childhood about a snow princess who had a heart of ice. Well. I could warm this one up, always assuming our enterprise got that far.

“In the meantime,” says I, “what say to some nice, hearty country girl? She could teach me some more German, you know, and I could teach her anatomy.”

But he wouldn’t hear of it.

So the weeks ran by, and I suppose that gradually the nightmare impossibility of my position must have begun to seem less incredible than it looks now, half a century after; whatever happens to you, however far-fetched, you get used to eventually, I’ve found, and when the time came to leave Schönhausen I was ready for it. I was in a fair funk, of course, but so heartily thankful to be getting out of that draughty mausoleum that even the ordeal ahead seemed endurable.

*    *    *

It must have been a week or so after the meeting with Bismarck that I’ve just described that I was summoned late one evening to his library. They were all there, Rudi, Bismarck, and the Three Wise Men, and I knew at once that something was up. Bismarck was still in his greatcoat, with the last snowflakes melting on its shoulders, and a little pool of water forming round each boot as he stood before the fire. He looked me over bleakly, hands behind his back, and then says:

“The scars are still too livid. Any fool can see they are recent.”