Laking’s voice was nearly as unsteady as Bertie’s. ‘Sandringham, nine-thirty a.m. Due to symptoms of great gravity, his Royal Highness the Duke of Clarence is critically ill.’

May felt as if all the air had been sucked from her lungs. There was no hint in Dr Laking’s summing-up of Eddy’s condition that, having reached a critical point, the next stage was slow, but certain recovery. She clenched her hands so tightly together that the knuckles were white. Eddy had to get better. He had to. Any other prospect was too horrific even to think about.

That afternoon he became delirious, shouting for Fuller, his childhood valet, as if he was in the room, and holding a conversation with his grandmother as if she, too, was with him.

Fuller was summoned urgently to Sandringham. Queen Victoria, who earlier had stated her wish to be at Sandringham at this time of great anxiety, and who had been persuaded not to make the long journey, was not there.

‘Dear God, no,’ Bertie had said when it had been suggested that the Queen should be sent for. ‘It would only ratchet up the distress levels even higher.’

With Toria and Maudie now having recovered from flu and, like their mother and Looloo, either sitting in the hastily fashioned sitting room or in the sickroom itself – and all constantly in floods of tears – May didn’t see how the distress levels could rise any higher.

Throughout that night she alternated two hours on and two hours off with the nurse. Toria, who felt she should now be the one to take on a nursing role with Eddy, gave vent to her feelings by saying waspishly that Hélène and her family should have been summoned to Sandringham, once it had been realized how dangerously ill Eddy was.

‘It isn’t,’ she said to anyone who would listen, ‘as if May loves Eddy as poor, dear Hélène loved him, and I’m sure it isn’t May of Teck whom Eddy wants to see at his bedside. I’m sure he wishes it was Hélène sitting there.’

No matter what Toria might say, May knew differently. For in the early hours of the following morning, Eddy turned his head on the pillow and, looking towards her, said without the least trace of delirium, ‘There you are, May. Sweet May. Lovely May.’

And then Manby and Broadbent bustled in, as did the nurse in order to take over from her. Exhausted after nights of broken sleep and certain that Eddy was at last on the road to recovery, May went into the sitting room. Curling up in one of the room’s easy chairs, she fell into the first restful sleep she’d had in days.

She was woken four hours later by Georgie, saying, ‘Eddy’s delirious again, May.’ His face was sheet-white. ‘He doesn’t recognize anyone – not even Papa and Motherdear.’