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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
S.J. Bennett
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January 21 - February 18, 2025
They don’t understand our place in the world. They’re worried about inflation. They don’t know what’s coming next.’
We’re making things and selling them like never before. We like to grumble, ma’am, but I remind them we’re heading for a state of prosperity we’ve never seen before. Most people have never had it so good.’
You pretentious panderer. Don't Infantilize her.
Ten years ago, the very dark days of the war had given way to the giddy optimism of peace. Perhaps that was around the corner again, though it was hard to imagine it.
Since the breakthrough from Buenos Aires, there had been talk of little else in the Chelsea police station beyond the activities of the nefarious Rodriguez around the edge of the Mediterranean and the Arabian Sea.
‘His name’s O’Donnell and his dad owns a boatbuilding company,’ Woolgar explained. ‘They travel a lot. Fancy places. And his dad was saying that last summer he ran into Lord Seymour at a spa in Switzerland.
‘Lord Seymour was putting it about that he’d recently won a million francs on blackjack in a casino in Monte Carlo.
Seymour asks for a girl who looks like Grace Kelly, Princess Grace, as she now is. He gives her the tiara; there’s no way it was stolen from that safe of his. He was the client, not Rodriguez – but he has some hold over the agency, so he gets them to tell us it was the victim who booked the girl, in the name of Perez, and they get Beryl White to lie about it too. I mean, it’s obvious she wasn’t telling the whole truth, sir.’
He didn’t leave the Houses of Parliament until after Rodriguez arrived in Cresswell Place.’
Mr O’Donnell Junior of Harvard, Boston, USA, didn’t know about the witness suppression, but Woolgar had tacked it on of his own accord.
Seymour booked the girl, gave her the incriminating diamonds, got surprised by Rodriguez somehow, killed them both single-handed in self-defence, left the diamonds on her head, then escaped in full view of everyone and bribed or blackmailed whoever it took, to feed me lies about what happened, or not to talk to me at all?’ Woolgar paused to think. ‘Um, that’s about it, sir.’
Philip didn’t accompany her, because while he was an excellent rider himself, he wasn’t interested in the endless display of other people’s horses.
Her mother, meanwhile, loved horses of all descriptions. The elder Elizabeth had a slight preference for jump racing over the flat, but was knowledgeable about it all. Margaret loved the opportunity to wear dresses that showed off her tiny waist, and hats that showed off her rich, dark hair. She had worried that wet weather wouldn’t allow her to wear the outfit she’d chosen, but in the end the sun beamed fiercely, and she was content.
Where’s Mummy?’ ‘Oh, I left her downstairs, talking to the Dean of Bath. Clement Moreton – d’you remember? He’s the one with the tart in the tiara.’ The Queen was horrified. ‘The man’s a suspect in a murder case!’
Margret!
According to his cousin Cecily, he’s really not doing very well. Mummy was pleased to see him out and about.
‘Unlike the Minister for Technology. You know, the one who bought the tiara. He looks absolutely dire.’
I imagine the men were sympathising with each other. It must be awful to have the whole country assuming you committed a horrific murder. Even if one of them probably did.
The Queen wondered whether her mother had been led into some sort of trap.
‘I was talking about the Highlands with Clement Moreton and Stephen Seymour, and then your press secretary popped up and collared a man with a very large camera, and persuaded him not to take any pictures.
She forcefully suspected Jeremy and his brother of being behind the plot, and yet here her press secretary was, doing the job he was paid for. It was hard to read anything into it but helpfulness.
‘And Stephen Seymour is thinking of buying a castle on the west coast, so I was recommending a few I know of whose owners would be thrilled with the cash.’
How does one buy a castle?
As a daughter of the Earl of Strathmore, growing up in Glamis Castle, home to Macbeth, her mother found Scotland perfect in every way. She couldn’t imagine anyone not wanting to cut themselves off in a draughty, windswept medieval building overlooking nothing but moor and sea, and the foothills of rain-clad mountains.
Personally, I’d have recommended a bandeau, but taste in tiaras is very personal, isn’t it?’
I wonder where he got his penchant for tarts and other men’s wives.’
Haha!
He’s famously unfaithful. Men are so very complicated, aren’t they?’ ‘I always thought they were rather simple,’ the Queen said.
There were times, especially when the Queen was reminded of her victories by the Racing Post, when she began to wonder whether she had imagined treachery and sabotage after all.
That brief addition to Philip’s Danish schedule had been no accident. Somebody wished her, and her marriage, harm.
but suffice it to say they are rude to the point of treachery, not just about you, but about the whole fabric of the court and …’
She was a good person, he surmised, but surrounded herself with ‘tweedy sorts’ (no wonder Sir Hugh was apoplectic) and failed to connect with her people.
The trouble was, in August there was little real news to fill the front pages.
The line about her losing her ‘bloom of youth’ one day lingered in a particularly sour fashion.
Rude.
Trade unionists and socialists were out of the question, but should she try to replace Sir Hugh and his ilk with thrusting young ‘executives’ who had no experience of monarchy or tradition, or any of the myriad unique aspects of her job?
It wasn’t only Altrincham’s article she worried about, but whether it fitted into the larger pattern of disturbances.
The problem for Darbishire wasn’t his use of subordinate clauses, or grubby thumbprints from ten minutes spent catching up with the Evening Standard, but the fact that his report essentially said nothing.
At least he’d had reasonable success tracing Nico Rodriguez’s movements in the months before the murders. As well as his stints in Egypt, Oman and the watering holes of Morocco and Monaco, he had come in and out of London three times in that period, under the guise of delivering trade samples of some kind of industrial plastic. Darbishire suspected that almost certainly, he was smuggling small quantities of drugs or arms, or working out how to do it. When in London, he stayed at the Marlborough, which wasn’t a bad hotel, even if it wasn’t quite the Dorchester. He won big on the horses and
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Gina Fonteyn’s fellow tart either really did know nothing about the reasons for luring Rodriguez to Cresswell Place that night, or she was too terrified of the consequences of telling.
The scenery was mesmerically beautiful – purple islands on the horizon and silver sand beaches for family picnics.
Radnor-Milne was caught between the disloyalty of agreeing that she should share the blame, and the rudeness of suggesting she was their puppet. He couldn’t find a way around it.
‘Your aunt!’ Radnor-Milne said, with a curl of his lip. ‘I really don’t think we all need to know what Joan’s aunt in Bow thinks about Her Majesty.’ ‘No, I very much want to know,’ the Queen said with a frown.
Burn.
‘She said you’re a working woman, and a mother,’ Joan said. ‘She works, and she’s got three children herself. But she doesn’t feel the same connection with you.
‘He wants you to do nothing, ma’am. And so does Miles Urquhart, by the way.’ ‘When it seems that “nothing” might be a dangerous course of action.
Part of Philip’s rudeness – she knew he could be rude, even to her sometimes, though he fiercely berated anyone else who was – came from the fact that he was often two steps ahead of whoever he was talking to. He was a man who lived in the future, while she clung, a little too tightly sometimes, to the past.
Daphne was the wife of Philip’s much-loved head of household, General Sir Frederick Arthur Montague Browning – ‘Boy’ to friends and family – who was a hero of the First World War. In the second, he had helped found the First Airborne Division and led his men through the horrors at Arnhem in ‘forty-four. He was sociable, organised, military to his core … perhaps the last person one would expect to be married to a sensitive novelist like Daphne.
One had to be brave. If one didn’t take on difficult challenges, and overcome them, how could one possibly ask one’s people to do the same?
Marriage was a daily act of faith, she realised.
‘We’ll pay for this tomorrow. They’ll be impossible to get to bed, and then irritable in the morning. Charles especially. Anne’s indestructible.
Anne was his favorite.
Apparently, the pasta grew on trees. Several people in the palace believed it implicitly – it was the BBC, after all – until it was announced to be an elaborate April’s fool joke.
night. I was in tucked up safe in bed by eleven. I only have my security detail and Her Majesty to plead my case. His security detail were famously discreet. And who would question a queen?
The inspector had noted in the first report that the witnesses’ evidence didn’t entirely make sense, but he hadn’t followed up on it in any subsequent update. Why?
Joan knocked on his office door and opened it in one smooth movement – a manoeuvre she had perfected over the last few months, hoping to catch him in the act of doing something underhand. He hated her for it, but was too polite to say so. She was happy to take advantage of his good manners.
Haha!
I remember signing a card last week. She’s turning forty-five, I think … not that one should ever ask a woman her age. I suppose she’ll be retiring soon.
Did women just retire super early in the 1960s?
