After all, I am neither rich, nor titled, nor famous. Nor even thin. Nor well dressed. I am not a pillar of the community. I’ve never got on the rota for church flowers or for bell-ringing, never been asked, nor even thought about joining the Women’s Institute. I’ve never entered my own home-grown sweet peas or gooseberry jam to the summer fête, and probably never will. I’ve never lingered proprietorially around the long trestle tables in the marquee upon which are grouped strange Venn diagrams of items at the fête, ready for judging: my new potatoes, sliced along the midsection; my glossy green, bristly courgettes and bulgy-flanked marrows like speckled green Zeppelins; my carrots with their tops neatly trimmed, tied with raffia; and parchment-yellow onions similarly docked, and arranged with much curly parsley.

I’ve never baked and entered my own sausage rolls, flakey with fat and golden-brown, never even made a Victoria sponge, or attempted a cheesecake, round glistening heavy discs of crushed biscuit and animal fat, violently garnished with maraschino cherries. I’ve never made my own yellow piccalilli, green runner bean chutney, lemon curd, because the children would never eat them if I made them, or preserved them in sterile jars with gingham bonnets and affixed carefully inscribed labels to the sterilized jars.

In fact, I haven’t even bothered to have my hair done for the wedding.

It is only when an elegant shape sweeps past me in a blur of ivory duchesse satin and a whoosh of expensive scent, and surges up to the bent and crouching figure of my hostess that it dawns on me, much too late, that Cath Cobb’s salutation is not recognition that I am Honeyborne royalty.

For the curtsey is not for me.

The curtsey is for the Duchess of Cornwall. Camilla! Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, is here! And Princess Michael of Kent, in shalwar kameez, and her bearded husband the Prince!

And it all clicks into place.

Camilla is why, of course, Cath Cobb did not want the whole village coming to the wedding, and why she worked off the village people, such as the Ashburtons and the Melplashes, and Ruth Wingfield, and the Brindles and so on at the ‘serf and turf party. Which could have been her fatal – and perhaps only – mistake. Though she had no idea she was perpetrating the insult, this meant that Gwenda Melplash was not invited to her own son’s wedding, and royalty was.

Ouch.

But much more woundingly, she wasn’t invited to see Serena, whom Gwenda herself had taught to ride, and taken out on her first hunt - be given away in marriage.

Now, one could frankly accuse Gwenda Melplash of many things – abrasiveness, devotion to horses and other women’s husbands, pony-napping – but one could never accuse her of 1. seeing a dumb animal suffer or 2. taking an insult lying down.