'You must have always known Sir Eliot a brave man?' Lady Evesham added.

'I'm afraid I'd no chance to tell. You see, he was a conscientious objector until the middle of the war.' Lady Evesham looked aghast. 'When conscription came in 1916, my husband had the choice of going either into the army or into jail. And Eliot is simply a man who develops wholehearted enthusiasm for anything he happens to find himself doing. Pacifists are the fiercest of people,' Nancy confided, 'If Bertrand Russell had provided himself with a machine-gun instead of a typewriter, there wouldn't be room on his chest for medals.'

Eliot and Dawson were walking upstairs together. The Queen was with the Prince of Wales and the Dukes of York and Kent. Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret had been packed back to Windsor, where their mother the Duchess of York was recovering from pneumonia, complicating flu caught in that winter's savage epidemic. The Duke of Gloucester was in Buckingham Palace with a sore throat. The three Privy Councillors-Ramsay MacDonald, Lord Hailsham and Sir John Simon-had the unsought adventure of a flight back to London that chilly, bright afternoon. The Prince of Wales' offer of his private plane from nearby Bircham Newton aerodrome was unrefusable. Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang, past seventy, gaitered and aproned, bald and sharp-nosed, fonder of Christians if they were kings, had arrived with vulturish timing.

Eliot wondered if Dawson resented Nancy as well being invited to Sandringham, but decided him too seasoned, too secure a courtier. Eliot had been summoned from their home in Kent by telephone at three on the Sunday morning. Dawson recognized that Eliot knew more about the heart than himself, and the King's was starting to fail. He almost killed the old boy in 1928, Eliot reflected, missing a pocket of pus hidden behind the lung until almost too late. Everyone had heard how he failed his exams as a student at the London Hospital. Dawson's skill was stagemanager of the sickbed, the impressario of dramatic illness.