I have another secret, too. When Eddy and Georgie were at sea together and went on shore in Tokyo, they got themselves tattooed. Georgie’s tattoos are quite modest, but Eddy’s aren’t. He has blue-and-red dragons writhing all the way down his arms! Although he is now twenty and Granny Queen thinks it high time a suitable marriage was arranged for him, Mama insists otherwise, and for once Papa is in agreement with her. As you can imagine, Granny Queen is not best pleased.

I can’t help wondering who it is that Granny Queen has in mind for Eddy. Both Toria and Looloo think that, until Ella’s engagement to Sergei, it was Ella. I did as well. When it comes to her many grandchildren, Ella has always been Granny Queen’s number-one favourite and I think she would very much have liked Ella to be crowned Queen Consort when Eddy becomes King. We Wales girls have never been high on her list of favourites: Toria and Looloo because they always have coughs and colds (Granny Queen once offended Mama greatly by referring to them as puny), and me because she thinks I’m too much of a tomboy and not ladylike enough.

Perhaps, as Mama is reluctant for Eddy to marry until he is well into his twenties, Granny Queen will now have another of the Hesse-Darmstadt girls in mind as a future Queen of England. How old is Irène now? Seventeen? Eighteen? And if not Irène, there is always Alicky. By the time Eddy is twenty-four or twenty-five, Alicky will be of marriageable age. When it comes to who I would prefer as a future sister-in-law, I would much prefer it to be Irène. Alicky is a strange little thing. You never know what is going on inside her head.

What other news? Eddy is still at Cambridge and not, I think, enjoying it very much. In September he is to go to Heidelberg for a few months to improve his German. (Knowing Eddy, he won’t enjoy this, either, but will endure it silently and then have his tutor accuse him of being indolent and inattentive.) Georgie is still at the Royal Naval College and, as Papa has instructed that he shouldn’t leave the college except to go places that he (Papa) has first approved of, and not unless he is accompanied by a senior member of the college staff, I don’t imagine he is having much of a fun time, either.

I envy you in Florence – and a mama who allows you the freedom to make friends outside the family. How I would love to be with you when you picnic with Rowena and Belinda and Miss Light on the banks of the Arno. All I have to look forward to is an end-of-summer stay at Abergeldie and, instead of the blissful-sounding Arno, the all-too-chill River Dee.

Love always, Maudie x