Inside the palace, George had dressed in his admiral’s uniform. ‘Has Mary arrived?’ he asked May anxiously. ‘I so want Mary to share in this moment with us, even though the boys can’t.’

‘Mary is here, and so is Uncle Arthur.’

Uncle Arthur was Daisy Connaught’s father.

She, too, would have liked the boys to have been able to step out onto the red and gold-draped balcony with them, but in the end the Armistice had been so sudden that none of them had been able to reach London in time. David was with his regiment. Bertie, who had transferred from the Royal Navy to the Royal Air Force, was completing pilot training at St Leonards-on-Sea. George was at naval college, Henry was at Eton and their disabled youngest son, John, was with his nurse at Sandringham.

From beyond the open windows came the deafening roar: ‘We want the King! We want the King! We want the King!’

‘What a day,’ George’s Uncle Arthur said emotionally, dabbing at his eyes with a huge purple handkerchief. ‘There’s never been one like it in history! Never!’

Shouts of ‘We want Queen Mary!’ had now joined the shouts of ‘We want the King!’

‘I think it’s time, darling,’ George said.

‘Yes.’ She was bare-headed and had slipped a fur coat around her shoulders. ‘I’m ready, George.’

With Arthur and their daughter behind them, they stepped out onto the balcony and, amidst a sea of waving Union Jacks and streamers, the world erupted into a maelstrom of deafening cheers and whistles and the singing of the national anthem.

They had survived, and so – no longer Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, but Windsor – had their dynasty.

‘I think,’ George said, under cover of the tumult and for the first time in their long married life, ‘that I love you with all my heart, May Teck.’

‘Yes, George.’ Her face was radiant. ‘I know.’

Acknowledgements

Huge thanks are due to my life-enhancing publisher, Wayne Brookes, and to my editor, Alex Saunders. Without Alex’s constant support The Summer Queen might never have been finished and certainly wouldn’t have been as much fun to write. Thanks are also due to copy editor Mandy Greenfield, desk editor Sam Sharman, my eagle-eyed proofreader, Marian Reid, and to my agent at Curtis Brown, Sheila Crowley, and her assistant, Abbie Greaves.

Select Bibliography

Theo Aronson, Crowns in Conflict (John Murray, 1986)

E. F. Benson, The Kaiser and English Relations (Longmans, 1936)

Gordon Brook-Shepherd, Royal Sunset (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987)

Deborah Cadbury, Queen Victoria’s Matchmaking (Bloomsbury, 2018)

Miranda Carter, The Three Emperors (Penguin Books, 2009)

Christopher Clark, Kaiser Wilhelm ll: A Life in Power (Penguin Books, 2009)

Virginia Cowles, The Last Tsar & Tsarina (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977)

Christina Croft, Queen Victoria’s Granddaughters (Hilliard & Croft, 2013)

Anne Edwards, Matriarch: Queen Mary and the House of Windsor (Hodder & Stoughton, 1984)

Carolly Erickson, Alexandra: The Last Tsarina (Robinson, 2003)

Greg King, The Last Empress (Aurum Press, 1994)

Elizabeth Longford, Victoria R. I. (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964)

Diana Mandache, Dearest Missy (Rosvall Royal Books, 2011)