‘Can’t begin to tell you how happy I am, May, that you will soon be my sister-in-law. Granny Queen has plagued Eddy for years about the necessity of marrying. Although he quite rightly has always held out not to marry someone he didn’t feel he could genuinely learn to love. How long till the wedding? Six weeks? Seven? It doesn’t matter. Either way I’ll be fully fit by the twenty-seventh of February and will make a quite presentable best man.’

‘That’s a huge relief, Georgie.’ May hugged him. ‘It’s impossible to imagine our wedding with anyone else as best man.’

‘And equally impossible to imagine my ever needing a best man.’ As well as looking pale and weak, Georgie looked distinctly glum. ‘Not that my getting married has the same urgency as it’s had for Eddy.’

Despite having known him all her life, May could only remember having had one personal conversation with Georgie, and that had been when he had told her of wanting to marry Julie Stoner, the daughter of his mother’s lady-in-waiting, and of his distress at being unable to do so. As a child and a young adult she had been in the habit of avoiding him, as Georgie took after his father in his love of playing unkind jokes on people. Once, when she had been eight and reading a book, he had dropped a mouse into her lap; and when she had been fourteen and proudly wearing a new dress to an afternoon party in Windsor Castle’s gardens, he had squirted her with dirty water from a bicycle pump.

Putting such memories behind her and seeing how despondent he was, she said, trying to cheer him up, ‘Of course you will be married before too long, and of course Eddy will be your best man. You’re third in line to the throne, and that makes you very eligible.’

Georgie didn’t look remotely cheered. ‘It didn’t make me very eligible in Aunt Marie’s eyes. Or Missy’s. Aunt Marie reacted as if I was a baker’s boy, when I asked for Missy’s hand in marriage. And Missy didn’t attempt to change her mother’s mind. She simply told me she was about to become officially engaged to that long streak of uselessness, Nando Hohenzollern. I thought she felt about me the way I felt about her, but she obviously never did. And that’s the trouble with girls, Cousin May. A fellow can’t possibly tell what’s going on in their heads. They give you encouragement and then make you look an utter ass, when you mistakenly think they feel the same way about you as you do about them.’

‘Not all girls, Georgie. That wasn’t the case with Julie. You didn’t read Julie wrongly.’