She turned a freezing fish eye upon me. ‘I do not understand you,’ she said coldly. It felt like the return of an old friend.

‘I meant if Dagmar was anxious to marry.’

‘She was not “anxious” to marry. She just felt that it was time.’ Having settled this, the Grand Duchess relaxed and, after her brief outing, vanished back inside the chipper, little pensioner. ‘William wanted what Dagmar could bring him. Damian did not. That’s all there was to it.’ She glanced in my direction. ‘I know you didn’t like him by the end.’ I said nothing to contradict her. ‘Dagmar told me about that business in Portugal.’ Someone told everyone, I thought wryly. ‘But it blinded you to what he was and what he could be. By the time Damian left our life, even I could see he was an unusual man.’ I wonder now if she wasn’t enjoying herself, discussing these events with someone who had been there when they were all taking place. Especially as I was an old friend, or at least I was a person she had known for a long time, which after a certain point is almost the same thing, and in all probability we would not meet again. I had provided her with an unexpected chance to make sense of those years and those distant decisions. I would guess they were not much talked of in the usual way of things and she wanted to make the best use of me. I cannot otherwise explain her next comment. ‘William never had Damian’s imagination,’ she said. ‘Nor his confidence in what the future would bring. Whatever his faults, Damian Baxter was a visionary in his way. William was just a tedious, vulgar social climber.’

‘That doesn’t mean he didn’t love your daughter.’ I saw no reason why we couldn’t give him the benefit of some doubt.

But she shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. She made him feel important, that’s all. That’s why he resents her now. He can’t bear the thought that he ever needed her to flatter his little ego.’ I said nothing. Not because I disapproved of her disloyalty. If anything, I was honoured by the trust implicit in her indiscretion. But I had nothing I felt I could usefully add. She looked at me and laughed. ‘I can’t stand him, really. I don’t think Dagmar can, but we never talk of it.’

‘There’s no point. Unless she’s going to do something about him.’

She nodded. The rightness of this comment made her sad. In fact, the whole conversation had taken her into a strange, uncharted territory and I could see a light coating of glycerine beginning to make her eyes shine. ‘The thing is, I don’t know how we’d all manage. He’d find some way to give her nothing if they separate, some shyster lawyer would savage her claims and then what?’ She sighed wearily, a hard worker in life’s vineyard who deserved more rest than she was getting. There was the distant noise of an engine and her eyes looked up to find it. ‘It’s Simon, at last. Good.’ The distraction had pulled her back from the cliff edge. She was probably already regretting what she had revealed.

A gleaming car of some foreign make was spinning down the drive towards us. As I watched it, I felt a sudden surge of longing. Let this man be Damian’s son, I thought. Please. I cared about it in a way I had not cared with Lucy. In their scatterbrained way, the Rawnsley-Prices would shake out some sort of future, juggling Philip’s demented schemes, surviving on luck and others’ charity, but here, today, I felt as if I had been visiting old friends trapped in some hideous, third world prison for a crime they did not commit. Like all her kind, the old Grand Duchess was more frightened of poverty than it was worth. It would only be comparative poverty, genteel poverty, after all, but at a distance even that seemed unacceptable to her. I suppose she felt she had seen enough change and we must surely forgive her for that. This is always a delicate subject where the British upper classes and most Royalty are concerned, if they are facing poverty when they are used to living well. Most of them dread not only the coming discomfort but the loss of face that attends the loss of income, and they will submit to almost any humiliation rather than have to reduce their circumstance in public. Of course, there is another smaller group among them that doesn’t give a damn either way. They are the lucky ones.

I thought again of the delivery from suffering that might be coming down the drive towards us. A quick DNA test and they would all be free of this horrible despot and their miserable existence. Dagmar and her mother and the other children would escape into a new land, where they would do just as they liked, and William would sit alone at his table, grumbling and fuming and insulting his servants to the end of his days. I wondered how we were going to get Simon to agree to a test. Would he worry about William’s feelings? Did William have feelings? Dagmar had dropped back to stand by me. Her mother and her husband were a little way in front of us, waiting for the car as it drew nearer. ‘It’s been so lovely seeing you again,’ I said. ‘And your much-mellowed mama.’ I wanted her to think of me as a friend. Because I was one.

She acknowledged my words with a quick smile, but then grew serious. Clearly, she’d deliberately manoeuvred a last moment with me out of earshot of the others. ‘I hope you won’t pay too much attention to what I was saying before. I can’t think what came over me. It was just self-pity.’

‘I won’t mention it to anyone.’

‘Thank you.’ The crease of worry faded away. On the sweep before the house the shiny car had stopped and a man in his late thirties climbed out. He turned with a wave to face us.

And in that moment Dagmar’s fate was sealed, as all my fantasies of playing Superman to this lost family came crashing down. But for their ages, he could have been William’s identical twin. There wasn’t a trace of his mother in him. Eyes, nose, mouth, hair, head, figure, manner, gait, they were like two peas in a pod. Dagmar saw me looking at him and smiled. ‘As you can see, he was William’s son after all.’

‘Clearly.’ We had reached my car by this stage and I opened the door.

‘So everything worked out for the best,’ she said.

‘Of course it did. It often does, despite what they tell us on television,’ I replied, climbing into the vehicle, taking her better, happier future with me. For a moment it seemed she was going to say something more, but then she thought better of it. So I said it for her. ‘I’ll give your love to Damian when I see him.’

She smiled. I had guessed right. ‘Please do. My best love.’ She looked round. ‘Are you sure you won’t stay and say hello to Simon?’

‘Better not. I’m late and he’ll be tired. I shall just enjoy you as a loving family group while I drive past.’ Dagmar nodded, with a certain irony in her expression. I know she was glad to see the back of me that day and no wonder. I had committed the sin of reminding her of a happier time. Worse, I had made her admit to truths about her present life that she preferred to keep buried even from herself. I had my reasons, but it was cruel all the same.

At any rate, without further protest she stepped back, politely attending my departure, and a moment later I was on my way.