The connection, Susan maintained, came down the female line and led back to Charlotte Stuart, whose mother Clementina Walkinshaw had been Charles Edward Stuart’s mistress – the pair having first met during the rebellion of 1745 when he was unsuccessfully battling the English to regain the British throne for his father, James Stuart, the ‘Old Pretender’. Charlotte had been the only one of the couple’s illegitimate children to survive infancy, herself eventually dying young at the age of thirty-six. Her relationship with her biological father had been a difficult one, but the Bonnie Prince eventually legitimised her in 1784 with the title of Duchess of Albany, whereupon she more or less abandoned her own three children and spent most of her remaining years caring for the elderly prince, by now a physically decrepit alcoholic and a far cry from the glamorous image of the heroic, albeit failed, defender of Scottish glory.

Charlotte’s children had been raised in anonymity, their identities hidden behind aliases to protect them from scandal. The trail was obscure, but by a convoluted process of deduction Susan Johnson had come to the unwavering conclusion that she was personally descended from Charlotte’s elder daughter Marie-Victoire Adelaide, born 1779, who had found herself in Poland following the outbreak of the French Revolution and there married a Polish nobleman by the unwieldy name of Paul Anthony Bertrand de Nikorowicz, with whom she had a son; and on it went.

In short, it was a complicated business. Young Peter hadn’t quite been able to keep track of it all, but never doubted his mother’s claim. And when a young boy grows up believing that royal blood runs in his veins, it can have a profound effect.

In Peter’s case, it had been a mixed one. He’d worked extremely hard academically and, to his parents’ joy, at seventeen had gained a place at Cambridge to study economics. But it hadn’t been an easy path for him. At university he’d often felt inferior to the wealthier students, suspecting that they resented this comprehensive school kid from Edinburgh and didn’t consider him as one of their peer group. By the end of his first year, he’d become hardened to the class division he felt existed between them, and developed an aggressive chip on his shoulder. What had kept him going was the thought of the day when they’d all find out that he, Peter Johnson, was the descendant of a genuine true-blue prince. Let all those toffs eat shit for having snubbed him. One day, he was going to rub their snooty fucking noses in it.