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He could not speak – he, the calm, the precise one, found that words choked him.

She was happy to lie there holding his hand, dreaming of the future. They would have children. Perhaps she had not taken enough care. Next time it would be different. She would make him understand this when she was stronger.

Now she would have him put his head on the pillow beside her. ‘I feel happier that way,’ she said.

And they stayed like this for some minutes when suddenly she cried out.

‘It’s a pain, Leopold … such a pain …’

Leopold ran from the room to call the doctors.

The doctors were round the bed. The Princess’s body was as cold as ice and they could not bring warmth back to it. They gave her hot wine and brandy; they applied hot flannels and bottles of hot water, to no effect.

Leopold stood by the bed gazing at her in an agony of distress. Charlotte’s eyes never left him and now and then she made as though to stretch out her hand to him.

She said to Sir Richard Croft: ‘Am I in danger?’

‘If you lie still and remain calm there will be none.’

She smiled wanly. ‘I think I know what you mean,’ she said, and she thought: This is the end then. This is where it all stops. My divided love for my parents, my destiny … I will never be like Queen Elizabeth now. All the time Fate was mocking me. I was learning to be a queen who never would be. And Leopold … who made me happy at last, my dearest Leopold will be all alone.

She wanted him to know what he had done for her, how he had brought her that security of love for which she had striven all her life … twenty-one years of living. Leopold, she thought, I am leaving you now.

She stretched out her hand. He took it and murmured her name.

But she could scarcely see him now.

Leopold, gazing at her, saw the glazed expression in her eyes, heard the death-rattle in her throat.

Time was playing strange tricks. He was in the Pulteney Hotel; he was handing her into a carriage, she was laughing at him, teasing her Doucement. Hundreds of pictures of Charlotte, anything to shut out the Charlotte he was seeing now.

Sir Richard Croft laid his hand on his shoulder.

‘Your Highness,’ he said, ‘it is over.’

And Leopold threw himself on to his knees, frantically kissing her hands as though by so doing he could bring her back to life.

Bibliography

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