As May didn’t fancy the idea of anyone else’s company, and as the Queen wouldn’t be sketching when she had so many family members visiting, she thought a visit to the alcove as good an idea as any. Walking across the terrace and skirting the island beds of geraniums, zinnias and marigolds, she wondered if it would be a kindness or a cruelty to tell Willy that his grandmother’s plans were for Ella to marry Eddy.

By the time they were walking down the steps to the lower terrace she had decided it would be an unnecessary cruelty – especially as most royal bridegrooms didn’t marry until their early twenties, and Eddy was still only fifteen She wondered if Eddy knew of the plans his grandmother had for him and, if he did marry Ella, if he would be happy.

Because her mother gossiped with her on subjects that girls her age were usually in ignorance of, May knew that some arranged royal marriages – although not many − were happy. Willy’s parents’ marriage was a love match and a happy marriage. Her Aunt Alix’s sister’s marriage to the Tsar of Russia was also, according to her mother, happy. ‘Which is a miracle,’ her mother had said, ‘for Minny was first engaged to Tsar Uncle Sasha’s older brother, and it was only when his older brother suddenly died that she was handed on, so to speak, to Tsar Uncle Sasha.’ In those kinds of circumstances, May thought her Aunt Minnie’s happy marriage was nothing short of a miracle.

As she walked over an immaculately clipped lawn towards the belt of woodland, it occurred to her that there was another side of the coin to not being ebenbürtig. She would never be in Vicky’s position of having, for dynastic reasons, to marry a man who was not of her choice, when she was in love elsewhere – as May was sure Vicky was with Louis. But would anyone not royal, but aristocratic, marry her, when she would come to marriage without a dowry? And was marriage to someone not aristocratic out of the question, because it would simply never be allowed?

May knew that at her age she shouldn’t be worrying about her future marriage prospects in this way, but she couldn’t help it and, up to now, there had never been anyone she felt she could share her worries with. Now, however, there was. There was Cousin Willy.

He was already seated in the sketching alcove as they walked up to it, and the first thing he did, on rising to his feet, was to hand Alicky a sealed envelope with the House of Hohenzollern crest on it.