In his grandmother’s eyes, the only contenders of flawless pedigree were two of Cousin Willy’s sisters, Moretta and Mossy. Neither of them aroused enthusiasm in him. It had been common knowledge for years that Moretta was infatuated with one of the Battenberg brothers and, when permission for them to marry had been refused, she had publicly announced that as she couldn’t marry him, she was going to kill herself. She hadn’t, of course. Even so, he had no desire to marry someone who had once felt such strong passion for someone else, and quite possibly still did.

That left Mossy. He liked Mossy. She was nice and uncomplicated. Unfortunately she was also extremely plain and, with the best will in the world, he knew he would never, in a million years, feel the remotest spark of desire for her. As this was a situation that underpinned the vast majority of royal marriages, no one was going to think his lack of physical desire a justified reason for not proposing to her. One did one’s duty by marrying in a suitably dynastic and politically acceptable way and, when it came to love, one found it with a mistress. It was what kings and their direct heirs had always done.

It wasn’t, however, what Eddy wanted to do. He wanted to love the girl he married, and he wanted to be loved in return. And that was the crux of his dilemma, because someone who married him because it had been arranged by others that they should do so was as unlikely to be in love with him as he was to be in love with her.

With luck, of course, the person in question would like him, and he knew cousin Mossy liked him, just as he liked her. But liking wasn’t love, and it was love that he craved. His family loved him, of course, but ever since he could remember, Eddy had known it was a love laced heavily with disappointment in him and, where his father was concerned, often with barely disguised dislike.

Folkestone harbour came into view and he stared unseeingly at it through a late-afternoon mist, recalling the way that both he and Georgie had always suffered from their father’s ‘chaffing’ – the cruelly barbed taunts and the humiliating, confidence-destroying name-calling that their father thought great sport. Georgie, blessed with little sensitivity, had always been more resilient to their father’s verbal attacks than Eddy had been and, more than capable of a little bullying himself, had grown up as their father’s favourite.