Surely the last he would live to see and perhaps— who knew?—the last occasion when a constellation of kings, princes, and grand dukes, garnished, gilded, splendidly mounted, and serenely untroubled in their Godgiven right to occupy the centre of the world’s stage, would use the passing of one of their number as an occasion to catch up on family gossip and practise a little harmless skulduggery on one another once the royal corpse was decently below ground at Frogmore.There was no logical reason why he should view it in this cryptic manner, or none save that slight stir of uneasiness somewhere near the bottom of his rib cage, the pulse he had sometimes referred to as “the little feller in here” when expressing undefined doubts about a project. This was no cause, however, for foregoing the occasion to celebrate (for that was how Henrietta regarded it) his own longevity and go posting up to town to bribe or bully one or other of his old cronies to find him a place on a balcony or a window overlooking the funeral march.He saw it as a rally of the privileged, most of them stemming, in one way or another, from the loins of that gloomy German chap Albert.
