“I wish we had a new crusade, but this is beyond even us, I think.” He glanced around at the opulent room and the ever-increasing number of men and women in it, laughing together, diamonds blazing, light on silks and pale skin, swathes of lace, shimmering brocades. His eyes hardened. “It will destroy itself… if it doesn’t see sense in the next year or two.” There was regret in his voice, and confusion. “Why can’t they see that?”

“Do you really think so?” She assumed for a moment that perhaps he was speaking for effect, a little dramatic overstatement. Then she saw the tightness of his lips and the shadow over his eyes. “You do…”

He turned to her. “If Bertie doesn’t curtail his spending a great deal”-he inclined his head momentarily towards the Prince of Wales ten yards away, laughing uproariously at someone’s joke-”and the Queen doesn’t come back into public life and start courting her people again.” There was another guffaw of laughter a few yards away.

Somerset Carlisle lowered his voice. “Lots of us suffer grief, Vespasia. Most of us lose something we love in our lives. We can’t afford to give up-stop working because of it. The country is made up of a few aristocrats, hundreds of thousands of doctors, lawyers, and priests, a million or two shopkeepers and traders of one sort or another, and farmers. And dozens of millions of ordinary men and women who work from dawn to dusk because they have to, to feed those who depend on them, the old and the young. Men die, and women break their hearts. We go on.”

Somewhere at the far end of the room the music started. There was a tinkle of glass.

“You can’t lead people from more than a certain distance away,” he went on. “She isn’t one of us anymore. She has allowed herself to become irrelevant. And Bertie is too much one of us, with his appetites-only he isn’t indulging them on his own money, as the rest of us have to!”