It doesn’t matter, I told myself. I’ll rescue Granddad, take him down to Eynsleigh and we’ll have a lovely time together. We’ll take long walks and play cribbage in the evenings. I expect he’s feeling lonely too, now that Mrs. Huggins is no more. So I set off resolutely toward the nearest Tube station at Victoria. As I crossed the King’s Road I did pause and glance in the direction of my friend Belinda’s little mews cottage at the other end of Chesham Street. I gave a little sigh. Belinda had been in Paris for a month, honing her dress designing skills with the best in the business. I missed her. I missed female companionship. To be truthful I even missed Mummy, which was saying a lot as Mummy only liked to talk about herself.

I sighed and walked on. As I came onto Buckingham Palace Road I looked in the direction of the palace and felt another pang of regret. In the past Her Majesty had summoned me to tea with her and given me various little assignments. These ranged from spying on her son the Prince of Wales to recovering a valuable snuffbox or hosting a foreign princess. Actually some of those assignments had been downright embarrassing or even terrifying but it still hurt a little that I might no longer be welcome in royal circles, now that I had officially renounced my place as thirty-fifth in the line of succession.

I pushed the thought aside. I was a married woman with my own household. I had to learn to be grown-up and get on with life. Soon I hoped to be a mother with a family of my own to occupy me. Soon . . . just not yet. I had been married for three months and still no hint of a baby. I had begun to worry whether there might be something wrong with me.

It was still a perfect day when I came out of the station at Upminster Bridge in Essex and walked up the hill toward my grandfather’s street. Leaves clung to tree branches and glowed yellow and orange against that blue sky. Some fluttered to the ground and lay in drifts underfoot. I reached the top of the hill and turned onto Glanville Drive. It was a pleasant enough little street of semidetached houses such as one sees in every suburb around London. The front garden at number twenty-two was tiny but immaculate. Most of the summer flowers had died but there were still chrysanthemums around the pocket-handkerchief-sized lawn, and the three gnomes stared at me hopefully as I opened the front gate.