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No matter how pleasant the holiday, a summons from the king is a sure way to end it. Lord Charles Sheridan is enjoying pottering around in search of fossils, and his spouse, Lady Katherine, is experimenting with her photography equipment and ruminating about possible sites for the next novel by Beryl Bardwell, her alter ego/best selling author. The Sheridan's are summoned to Glamis Castle, where Charles is given the rank of brigadier with a sizable contingent of soldiers, all commissioned to find Prince Albert Victor, known as Prince Eddy, who, under the name of Lord Osborne, has been a resident of Glamis Castle for about ten years. Prince Eddy had committed the worst sin, he says. He embarrassed the royal family. First, he secretly married a Catholic commoner and had a child with her. Rumors arose that he was actually the notorious Jack the Ripper, and there was further scandal when he was involved in a male brothel. That he was the successor to the throne was a huge problem for the royal family, so they "staged" his death and spirited him off to Glamis Castle, where he has been living in comfortable exile, with only the royals -- and now Charles -- aware of his real identity. At times, Prince Eddy pretends to be Bonnie Prince Charlie, a fiction reinforced by the fact that one of his attendants is named Flora MacDonald, namesake of the woman who spirited the Bonnie Prince to the Isle of Skye and then to France. Two events end the orderly life at Glamis. Flora's mother, Hilda, is murdered, and Prince Eddy disappears. One theory about the disappearance is that Prince Eddy has been seized by German spies, to be brought to Germany and revealed to be alive, to the embarrassment of King Edward, the Kaiser's hated cousin. In fact, Prince Eddy escaped his kidnappers and is found by Flora, who secretes him in a deserted part of the castle. She plans to follow the route of the Bonnie Prince and bring Prince Eddy to the Isle of Skye, where her MacDonald relatives will surely give them a haven. Charles Sheridan finally untangles the web of treachery and proposed treachery to solve the murder of Hilda and the disappearance of Prince Eddy, as well as the murders of the assistant gamekeeper and Hilda's nephew. Paige does a very fine job of evoking the atmosphere at the turn of the century. Those of us who follow "Law and Order" appreciate the difficulty the police had sharing information with those in other jurisdictions. Fingerprints had just been introduced. There was no swift way of passing a picture on. Photography itself was in its infancy as was the typewriter. Most entertaining are the denizens of the local pub, who pass around information and misinformation gleaned from a wife's cousin's sister, who's a maid at the castle or from some other wildly questionable source. There is one egregious error that even rudimentary fact checking should have caught. Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (born at Glamis Castle) was not the wife of George V, who is identified in the book as the father of Queen Elizabeth II. The "Queen Mum," as she came to be called, was the wife of George VI, who was the father of Elizabeth II. George V's wife was the colorful May of Teck, who had a habit of "helping herself" to "souvenirs" from the stately homes she visited.
Reviewed by Mary Elizabeth Devine, May 2003
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