She must go back to Ahlden.

That stay in Celle had affected George William deeply. He had felt cut off from his wife and daughter and because Sophia Dorothea was in her old home, because he heard the sound of voices in her old apartments – and sometimes laughter – he brooded on the happiness of the long-ago days when there was no one in his life who mattered to him but his wife.

She was beautiful still – but how remote. He remembered how her eyes used to shine when she smiled at him. Now her gaze was cold. She had said she would never forgive him for the manner in which he had behaved towards their daughter, and she meant it. He felt lonely. Ernest Augustus, the brother for whom he had had a special affection, was dead; and as the years passed he saw how much happier he would have been if he had behaved differently. No longer did he discuss with Eléonore the affairs of Celle; she was aloof and expressed no interest in them. For days he never saw her, yet he was deeply aware of her; and some occasions when he felt particularly old and weak and the melancholy settled on him, he wished that he could go back to that birthday morning now more than twenty years ago when because of his weakness he had ruined his own happiness and that of his wife and daughter.

Bernstorff was still his chief minister yet George William had never learned that he was in the pay of Hanover; he still listened to him; he could still be persuaded. He was too old, he believed, to change his ministers now.

But he turned more to his wife; and although he would not admit his remorse he spoke of their daughter.

‘Poor child,’ he said. ‘My poor little girl.’

Eléonore turned to him eagerly but he knew that it was not his friendship, his companionship, his love that she wanted; it was only his help for their daughter.

He added a codicil to his will and showed it to his wife.

‘When I die,’ he said, ‘our daughter will be one of the richest heiresses in the world.’

‘It will do her little good while she is a prisoner,’ was Eléonore’s answer.

He grasped his wife’s hand and looked at her pleadingly. ‘I am going to do everything I can to bring about her release.’

He saw the pleasure in her face; he wanted to put his arms about her; he wanted to see her joy because everything was going to be between them as it had been when they were young.

But he knew that she was not thinking of him; this change in his attitude pleased her only because of the good it could bring to Sophia Dorothea.

He would visit Ahlden. He would go to his daughter; he would tell her that he had failed her as a father and that was all changed now.

Bernstorff pleaded with him. Was it wise? Should he not first consult with Hanover? Not only would George Lewis be against him but the Duchess Sophia.

George William hesitated. He was feeling ill, for he was after all an old man, being seventy years old.

‘Wait at least, Your Highness, until the weather is more clement.’

‘I will wait a while,’ said George William. ‘But I am determined to free my daughter.’

Bernstorff bowed his head. Hanover did not want interference from Celle. He reported to George Lewis. The Countess von Platen was of no importance now; she was at Monplaisir, never seen abroad, suffering it was said from a terrible illness which racked her body with pain and which had already blinded her. He had heard that she walked about her house through the rooms in which she had once entertained so lavishly, murmuring the name of Königsmarck.

George William never went to his daughter. While he was planning his visit he caught a chill; he became very ill and Eléonore nursed him.

He died begging her forgiveness for his weakness.

She kissed his cold face and thought of the handsome lover he had once been, of the long-ago happy days, and she was overcome with grief, not so much for him, she realized, but for the loss of an ideal and the knowledge that her daughter had lost all that the long-denied support of her father could have given her.

Shortly afterwards Clara died. For weeks before the end she lay in her bed at Monplaisir and although she was totally blind she cried out that she could see Königsmarck at the foot of her bed. His face was pale, his clothes blood-stained and he was calling her ‘Murderess’.

She must tell everything, she cried. She must tell the story of that night for that was what the ghost of Königsmarck was urging her to do.

So she told the story – of hatred and jealousy, of cruel revenge, missing nothing; and those about her bed remembered it and some wrote it down that the mystery of what happened on the night Königsmarck disappeared might be solved.

So died Clara.

It is all deaths and marriages, thought Sophia Dorothea. That was because when each day was like another although the days seemed long, the years flew by. It was her mother who came to tell her that her son George Augustus had married Caroline of Ansbach and that Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia had fallen in love with little Sophia Dorothea and although his father did not approve of the marriage, Frederick was determined to have her.

‘Good matches, both,’ said the Duchess of Celle.

Twenty years after the night of Königsmarck’s murder the Duchess Sophia died, her great wish ungranted. She had said that she would be prepared to die if only it could be as Queen of England. All through the last years of her life she had studied the news of England; she had read of the illness of Queen Anne; she had sat at Herrenhausen hoping that every messenger who came to the castle brought news from England.

But death came instead; and two months later Queen Anne herself died and George Lewis of Hanover became George I of England.

Now she, Sophia Dorothea, was the Queen of England, but she remained the prisoner of Ahlden.

The last years were made a little happier by her daughter who wrote to her and would have visited her had she been allowed to.

It was comforting to know that her children remembered; and she herself was growing old now.

The greatest tragedy of those years was the death of her mother, and Sophia Dorothea herself lived only three years longer.

On a misty November day in the year 1726, she took to her bed, and in her delirium she talked of the past.

She thought she was sixteen and it was her birthday and that she was sacrificed to a monster like a child in a fairy tale.

Her hair, now streaked with white, fell about her shoulders; her eyes were wild.

‘No,’ she cried. ‘Don’t let me go to him. He will kill me. He will destroy me …’

Then she began to weep pitiably.

‘George Lewis,’ she cried. ‘How dared you condemn me. You will never forget … though I am gone.’

Those about her bed shivered. The curse of a dying woman was to be feared.

Then she rambled again, called to her mother, to the Confidante, to her dearest Philip, to her babies… .

The mist from the marshes crept into the palace like a grey ghost, like death.

And she lay back on her pillows in the room which had been her prison for more than thirty years; when she had come to it she had been young and now she was an old woman of sixty.

It was a wasted life, said those about her bed. Poor cruelly treated lady.

In the village of Ahlden the bells began to toll and the people wept openly and told their children how she used to ride about the countryside with her black hair streaming over her shoulders and the diamonds gleaming in it and about her throat – the fairy prisoner Princess of Ahlden who was in truth not only the Duchess of Hanover but the Queen of England.