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of the morning; where Mirabella was concerned, he had a feeling there might be more sighs to come. Unlike Amy, he picked up the message of the piece - from 'cheet-her' to 'I'll never give him up' — perfectly well. It was bad news, not so much that Mirabella was talking to the Press, something she had never been averse to doing, her career in a manner of speaking demanding it, but that she was now condescending to gossip columnists. Unlike Amy again, Ferdel had never heard of Little Mary, she of the Daily Exclusive who was alleged to double as Miss Mouse of the Mousehole column in Jolly Joke; but he recognized trouble when he read it.
    Trouble. Royal Trouble, to adapt the words of the gossip column's headline. There was more than one kind of royal trouble this morning. Ferdel took a letter from the pocket of his silk dressing-grown and then put it back. Where women were concerned, he decided that he was inclined to suffer from a sense of guilt first thing in the morning, a kind of emotional hangover; it might therefore be better to ponder this particular missive a little later on, say after the first Bloody Mary of the day at noon. Besides, threats were so tiresome, especially threats from women, when Ferdel was precluded from stifling them - the threats, that is - by a well-established method. This consisted of a quick immediate telephone call, a short passionate declaration, a more prolonged passionate embrace at a date to suit both parties, followed by a handsome gift bestowed by Ferdel. By the time this ritual was completed, the subject of the threat was quite forgotten; so that the threatener seldom noticed that Ferdel had not actually succumbed to it.
    He could not carry out any of these steps now. Could he not? No, he really could not. Not even the first one? Not even the third one, followed discreetly by the fourth one? No, he really could not. Under the circumstances it might be better to throw the letter away, after the others, and forget about it. Probably Amy was too busy chatting on the telephone to her innumerable English girlfriends to read this diatribe from the so-called Little Mary. Ferdel took the letter out of his pocket and threw it, barely crumpled, into the wastepaper basket. He gave no thought as to what might become of the letter; that would have been as uncharacteristic as wondering who washed up his breakfast things, still standing on the heavily polished table before him.
    'Trouble,' said Taplow, the English butler/chauffeur of Ferdel's absent aunt, when he later retrieved the letter from its resting place and flattened it again without difficulty. (It was Taplow who had cleared the Prince's breakfast table and re-polished the heavy table.) 'She's still writing to him. That's the third this week. Horrible, the things she says. I told you there'd be trouble.'
    'She's foreign,' commented Mrs Taplow without looking at him. She was polishing the silver, a task which traditionally fell to the butler; but in the case of the Taplows, it had sometimes been commented upon by employers that Mrs Taplow was really the more masculine of the two. Although she referred on occasion briefly to 'Jossie', most people assumed unthinkingly that the Taplows were childless. Certainly Taplow, a big, soft, stately man, had something of the feminine about him; there was thus an impression, only a vague one, but vaguely disquieting, that there was some kind of sex reversal in their relationship.
    'A foreign spitfire,' added Mrs Taplow after a pause.
    'Spitfires aren't —'
    'I was quoting the paper, Kenneth,' Mrs Taplow narrowed her eyes and inspected her handiwork. 'She loves him, that's all. She has a foreign way of putting it.'
    'She loves him, does she? God knows why.'
    'He's got what it takes. I'm quoting the papers again, Kenneth.' There was something disagreeably coy about her expression. 'Did you read the Sunday Exclusive? What she said, Mirabella. "All night passion"; that was the story.' Mrs Taplow picked up