Masked Ball at Broxley Manor

forever.
I wanted to say that I didn’t intend last night to be any more than harmless fun. I didn’t intend to have feelings for you. And since I am not in a position to offer you a palace or a crown, then it is better that we part this way. Still I hope our paths might cross some time in the future. You never know.
Your devil companion,
    And under this was written three letters that looked like
DOM
.
    * * *
    And in the next day’s
Times
there was a small paragraph on page two:
    Attack on German Prince Foiled.
     
An attack on visiting Prince Otto of Prussia by a bomb-wielding terrorist was thwarted by the gallant efforts of a young guest attending a ball at Broxley Manor. The young man in question wrestled the bomb away from the man, believed to be a communist agitator, and hurled it away from the building, where it exploded harmlessly. He then helped subdue the man but declined to give his name and disappeared when the man was taken off to the police station. It was hinted that he was actually working for British secret service and was assigned to guard the prince, although Whitehall has denied this allegation. Prince Otto was unhurt and returns home to Germany tomorrow.
    * * *
    And so I put the incident from my mind. I was never invited to Broxley Manor again and understood that Prince Otto finally married a cabaret singer from Berlin, much to the disapproval of his family. It never occurred to me that I would ever be involved with danger and acts of terrorism again, or that some day in the future it would be my own detecting skills that thwarted a similar plot against our own king and queen. And it was only several years later that I rediscovered that letter in bold black script and realized that the initials on it stood for Darcy O’Mara.

 
    Keep reading for a special excerpt from Rhys Bowen’s next Royal Spyness Mystery . . .
    THE TWELVE CLUES OF CHRISTMAS
     
    Available in hardcover November 2012 from Berkley Prime Crime!

Castle Rannoch
    Perthshire, Scotland
    December 14, 1933
     
    Weather: cold, dreary, bleak.
    Atmosphere here: cold, dreary, bleak.
    Outlook: cold, dreary, bleak. Not in a good mood today. I wonder why. Could it have something to do with the fact that Christmas is coming and it will be utterly bloody?
    Ah, Christmas: chestnuts roasting; Yule logs crackling merrily; tables groaning under roast goose, turkey, mince pies and flaming plum puddings; carols and mistletoe, goodwill to all men. I’m sure there were some houses in Britain where this was going to be the case, in spite of the depression—just not at Castle Rannoch, on the bleak Scottish moors, where I was currently trapped for the winter. No, I was not snowed in or being held prisoner. I was there of my own volition. I happen to be Lady Georgiana Rannoch, sister to the current duke, and that bleak castle is my family home.
    There is actually no way to make Castle Rannoch festive even if one wanted to. Firstly it would be impossible to heat those cavernous great rooms no matter how many Yule logs you piled on the fire, and secondly my sister-in-law, Hilda, Duchess of Rannoch, commonly known as Fig, was in full austerity mode. Times were hard, she said. The country was in the grip of a great depression. It was up to us to set an example and live simply. We even had to endure baked beans on toast as our savory at the end of dinner, which shows how dire our situation had become.
    It is true that times are hard for the Rannochs, even though we’re related to the royal family and my brother inherited Rannoch Castle and a London house in Belgravia. You see, our father lost the last of his fortune in the great crash of ’29, then went up on the moors and shot himself, thus saddling poor Binky with horrendous death duties. I had my allowance cut off on my twenty-first birthday and have been struggling to keep my head above water ever since. Not that our situation is as dire as those poor wretches in the soup lines. I was supposed to marry well, to one of those chinless, spineless and half-imbecile European princes, or, failing that, become lady-in-waiting to an elderly royal aunt.
    So far I had chosen neither of the above, but as Christmas approached and the wind whistled down the hallways of Castle Rannoch, either option began to seem more desirable than my present situation. You might wonder why I stayed in such dreary surroundings. It had started through the famous Rannoch sense of duty that had been rammed down our throats