Although it had attracted comment, he hadn’t attended her wedding. At any family get-together where Ella and Sergei were expected to put in an appearance, he had not done so. She had captured his heart when she had been little more than a child, and when he had been a student in a city so near to Darmstadt that it had been only natural he should visit relations who were living there. No other girl had ever affected him as Ella had then and, in the years since, neither had any other woman.

Not that there had been many women. He had always found sex a laborious and unsatisfactory business. There had been a handful of brief love affairs before his marriage to Dona, because it was what was expected of him. For him not to have had love affairs would have aroused comment. There had even been a couple of love affairs since his marriage, and mainly for the same reason. It was what was expected of a man at the peak of his virility – and he’d be damned before he’d be seen as being anything else.

‘And nor will you be,’ his closest and much-loved friend, Phili, had said reassuringly. ‘With five sons already in the palace nursery, you have more than done your duty where securing the succession to the throne is concerned. Women are not as important in a man’s life as they like to think. How can they be, when they are incapable of focusing on the loftier things in life, things such as music and literature and, dare I say it, the mysteries of the occult?’

Remembering that conversation, Willy underwent one of his fast-as-light mood changes and bellowed with laughter. Phili had known he could say such a thing, because ever since Phili had been introduced to him, nothing had ever arisen between the two of them that wasn’t permissible. Phili was Count Philipp zu Eulenburg. At the time of their introduction he had been a lowly diplomat in the Prussian legation. Now, thanks to Willy’s intervention, Phili was an envoy, next in status to an ambassador.

‘Male camaraderie, Your Majesty,’ Phili had said to him in the early days of their friendship, ‘and with friends of a like individuality – that is where the true pleasures of life are to be found.’

It was a sentiment Willy fully agreed with and, faced with the delicious decision as to whether to wear an ornate military uniform, Clan Stewart Highland dress or the costume of a war-like Norse god in his portrait sittings with Thaddeus Jones, he strode off in the direction of the Audience Room, surrounded by a posse of long-limbed, blond-haired Hussars.