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conversation! Florrie!’
    ‘Don’t underestimate her,’ Lady Annabel ordered. ‘Florrie is full of surprises.’
    Beatrice didn’t disagree. The latest, provoked by the arrival of a clutch of bills, had been the discovery – unbelievable
     with anyone but her sister – that Florrie had no idea one paid for utilities and thought electricity came out free from the
     wall.
    She took a deep breath and made a determined effort to return the subject to herself. ‘Er, Mummy, now the wedding’s definitely
     on, we need to think about the venue.’
    ‘Yes! St Paul’s or Westminster Abbey?’ Lady Annabel sighed happily. ‘I prefer the Abbey myself,
so
romantic, although of course we need to remember it’s a royal wedding and you can get more people in the Cathedral . . .’
    Beatrice did not reply. Her smouldering sense of resentment had become an angry blaze. It was so unfair.
    ‘And of course Florrie would look fabulous in a tiara,’ Lady Annabel wittered on. ‘But no doubt Her Majesty will want to lend
     a crown from her collection, she usually does on these occasions . . .’
    She was, Beatrice realised, going to be entirely eclipsed. A sickening sense of hopelessness swept through her. Back rammed
     against the Chinese floral wallpaper, she sank slowly down to the thick-pile beige hall carpet.
    ‘It will be so lovely to see the dear Prince of Wales again,’ Lady Annabel carried on. ‘Perhaps at Highgrove . . .’
    One of the few addresses, Beatrice knew, that the socially rocket-fuelled Lady Annabel had not wedged her foot in the door
     of over the years.
    Her mother finally rang off, but immediately the telephone shrilled again. Beatrice hesitated before answering it. A journalist,
     wanting the inside track on her possibly soon-to-be-royal sister?
    But no, it was her father. He had not yet spoken to her about her engagement. Beatrice’s heart leapt with the hope that he,
     at least, was calling to congratulate her.
    ‘Beatrice?’ Lord Whyske barked in his testy baritone, as usual dispensing with time-wasting expressions of affection.
    ‘Hello, Papa! You’ve heard about . . .?’
    ‘Florrie, yes. Is she there?’
    ‘No, Papa. Isn’t it great news about Ned, though?’
    He was speaking over her, however. ‘Busy being measured for her crown, eh?’ Self-satisfaction softened the hard edges of Lord
     Whyske’s voice.
    ‘But you have heard?’ Beatrice persisted. ‘About me getting married to Ned . . .’
    ‘Must go. Spot of trouble on the Cornish estate to sort out.’ The phone went abruptly dead at her father’s end.
    Beatrice stared miserably at the receiver. If Florrie becameroyal, what about the consequences for her? Had her parents even stopped to consider them?
    The whole point of going up the aisle with Ned Dymchurch was to show the world – and especially her parents – that she, Beatrice
     Trevorigus-Whyske-Cleethorpe was not as hopeless as everyone had always thought. She might have grown up in the shadow of
     her beautiful and beguiling sister, but she was the first to marry, and marry spectacularly well. Marry a mansion, an ancient
     title and, most of all, money. But who was going to care now?
    Nor was this all. Apart from the disaster it would be for her own nuptials, the idea that her sister could join the royal
     family was absurd. For all her gentle birth and patrician upbringing, anyone less suited than Florrie to the rule-bound rigour
     of court life was impossible to imagine. The royals had, after all, only just recovered from the last havoc-wreaking blonde.
    She needed a drink, Beatrice decided. She opened one of the many bottles of vodka that stood on the kitchen shelf, presents
     from the Pole who did the ironing. She reached into the freezer and flung some ice cubes into a tumbler. As an idea started
     to bloom in her mind, Beatrice stopped gulping the spirit and sipped thoughtfully.
    Twenty minutes later, she lifted up the phone to call the diary page of a leading tabloid