Hugo looked suitably confused. “Can’t a chap bally well go to take a leak without having to get permission first?”

“Which bathroom did you use?” Fig demanded.

“Why this interest in my call of nature?” Hugo grinned. “In answer to that, the closest one, just off that hall to the left.”

“It was a real ghost, I know it,” the countess insisted. “Real people can’t just vanish.”

I watched Hugo as he took his place among the guests, chatting easily as if nothing had happened. He did have light hair, and he wasn’t that tall. Was this his idea of a joke or something more serious? I resolved to keep a closer eye on him. The party broke up soon after. The mood had been broken and nobody showed any interest in dancing again. Off they went and we were left with our house guests plus the Prince of Wales, who showed no intention of leaving in the near future. One by one they went off to bed, with Fritzi promising faithfully to stand guard at his mother’s bedside all night.

“Well, that was a rum do, wasn’t it?” the prince said, when the Americans and Hugo had also gone to their rooms, leaving only essentially family members. “It’s been a rum day altogether—what with that dashed great rock crashing onto my car and now this.”

“And don’t forget Binky’s foot getting caught in a trap,” Fig said, looking with concern at her husband. “One might almost think that someone is out to do us harm.”

There, she had expressed it out loud. I looked from one prince to the other, and then at the two Scottish cousins. The Prince of Wales laughed. “I don’t believe that any communist or anarchist would go to the trouble of setting traps and arranging for rocks to land on cars,” he said. “One good bullet would do the trick much more cleanly.”

He was right about that, of course. If someone did want to do away with the prince, or with the heirs in general, then these were petty accidents with small chance of success, when a bullet or bomb could be guaranteed to kill. It was being done with monotonous frequency to one European royal family after another.

“Maybe it’s all someone’s idea of a joke,” Binky suggested.

“It would have to be someone with a rather twisted sense of humor,” Fig said bitterly.