Mma Ramotswe was a royalist, of course. She admired monarchs, as long as they were respectable and behaved in the correct way. She admired the king of Lesotho, because he was a direct descendant of Moshoeshoe I, who had saved his country from the Boers and who had been a good, wise man (and modest, too-had he not described himself as the flea in the blanket of Queen Victoria?). She admired the old king of Swaziland, King Sobhuza II, who had had one hundred and forty-one wives, all at the same time. She admired him in spite of his having all those wives, which, after all, was a very traditional approach to life; she admired him because he loved his people and because he consistently refused to allow the death penalty to be exacted, always-with only one exception in his long reign, a most serious case of witchcraft murder-granting mercy at the last moment. (What sort of man, she wondered, could coldly say to another who was begging for his life: no, you must die?) There were other kings and queens, of course, not just African ones. There was the late queen of Tonga, who was a very special queen, because she was so fat. Mma Ramotswe had seen a picture of her in an encyclopaedia, and it had covered two pages, so wide was the queen. And there was the Dutch queen, of whom she had seen a photograph in a magazine, enigmatically described in the caption below the picture as the Orange Queen. And indeed she had been wearing a dark orange outfit and two-tone orange-and-brown shoes. Mma Ramotswe thought that she might like to meet that queen, who looked so cheerful and smiled so warmly (and what, she wondered, was this House of Orange in which this queen was said to live?). Maybe she would come to Botswana one day, in her two-tone shoes perhaps; but one should not hope too much. Nobody came to Botswana, because people just did not know about it. They had not heard. They just had not heard.