On a summer evening in 1997, a woman on a small Scottish island sealed another envelope and sent it south. She had been writing letters to her daughter all summer, and all summer they had come back unopened. The daughter was Diana, Princess of Wales, and they never spoke again. On the thirty-first of August, Diana died in a Paris hospital.

Her mother had not heard her voice for about four months. Almost thirty years earlier, the same mother had lost the same child in a custody case. The witness who helped the father win was her own mother, a lady in waiting to the Queen Mother. Society had a word for her: the bolter.

So did Francis Shand Kidd hate her daughter? Or did each of them spend a lifetime believing the other had left first? The house where it began stood on the edge of the royal estate at Sandringham. On the twentieth of January 1936, a baby girl was born at Park House, and about a mile away, a king was dying.

King George V died that same day at Sandringham House, the great country retreat of the royal family in Norfolk. The baby was born at home in a house that stood on his own estate. Her name was Frances Ruth Roche. Decades later, her son would write it down with a kind of wonder.

“Coincidentally,” he wrote, “on the very same day she was born, King George V died one mile away in Sandringham House. ” It was a strange first day for anyone. For this child, it was a fitting one. Frances would spend her whole life close to the crown, sometimes warmed by it, sometimes burned.

Park House was a large, solid country house built by the royal family for the use of the royal household. Edward, Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII, had it raised in 1863 while he was remaking the Sandringham estate. Its first tenant was General Sir William Knollys, the comptroller of the Prince’s household, the officer who ran his affairs. For decades afterward, it served the court in the same way: a house near enough to the great house to be useful, a short walk across the park.

The Roche family rented it from the crown. To hold the lease on Park House was to be trusted, liked, and kept close. It was a gift that could not be banked, only enjoyed, and only for as long as the favor lasted. The man who held the lease was Frances’s father, Maurice Roche, the fourth Baron Fermoy.

A baron sits on the lowest rung of the British peerage. He sat in the House of Commons as the member of Parliament for King’s Lynn. More important, he was a friend of the Duke of York, who would one day reign as George VI. The two men shot together at Sandringham.

When the Duke became king, the friendship held. It held to the end. On the fifth of February 1952, George VI went out shooting at Sandringham. On what would prove to be the last full day of his life, Maurice Fermoy was in the party.

Frances’s mother was a different kind of person altogether. Ruth was born on the second of October 1908 at Belhevie in Aberdeenshire, in the northeast of Scotland. She was a gifted pianist. As a young woman, she had studied in Paris under Alfred Cortot, one of the most celebrated teachers of the age.

She married Maurice Roche on the seventeenth of September 1931 and became Lady Fermoy. She did not give up music. In 1951, she founded the King’s Lynn Festival, but her true stage turned out to be the court. In 1956, she became an extra woman of the bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, and in 1960, she was made a full woman of the bedchamber.

These were the ladies who attended a queen in person, her companions and confidantes. Ruth would hold that place for about thirty-three years. She became one of the Queen Mother’s closest friends. The honors followed the friendship.

In 1966, Ruth was made a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, and in 1979, a Dame Commander of the same order, the sovereign’s own reward for personal service to the royal family. Few women outside the family itself stood nearer to the Queen Mother than Ruth Fermoy. Consider the arithmetic of the house the new baby was born into. Park House had been standing for seventy-three years.

Her father was about fifty, born in 1885. Her mother was twenty-seven, born in 1908, and had been married a little over four years since 1931. The dying king lay one mile off across the park. Ahead of Ruth lay some thirty-three years at the side of a queen.

The girl in the cradle was the second child of three, between an elder sister, Mary, born in 1934, and a younger brother, Edmund, who would follow in 1939. As the daughter of a baron, Frances was styled the Honourable Frances Roche. She grew up in the rhythms of the estate: the shooting seasons, the royal Christmases, the comings and goings of the household. Her schooling took her away to Downham School.

Otherwise, her world was small, grand, and very close to the throne. She was sixteen when her father shot with the king on his last full day and when the young queen came to the throne. She was eighteen when that queen came to watch her marry. It was also a world with firm rules, and Ruth kept them more firmly than most.

She believed deeply in the sanctity of marriage. A marriage, in her view, was a duty to be kept whatever it cost the people inside it. For most of Frances’s girlhood, that belief was only a quality of her mother’s character, the kind of thing a daughter hardly notices. It would matter a great deal later.

On the one day her daughter needed her most, Ruth’s loyalty would run to the marriage and to the world she served ahead of the child she had raised. On the first of June 1954, a girl of eighteen left a house in Wilton Crescent on her father’s arm, bound for Westminster Abbey. A press photographer caught the moment. The caption called it the wedding of the year.

The Honourable Frances Roche, eighteen-year-old daughter of Lord and Lady Fermoy, was leaving her home for her wedding to Viscount Althorp, and the Queen and members of the royal family were attending the ceremony. Her father walked beside her. He would be dead within two years. The groom was John Spencer, known to everyone as Johnny.

He held the courtesy title of Viscount Althorp, the name the eldest son of an Earl Spencer carries while he waits to inherit. A viscount ranks above a baron and below an earl, and one day, when his father died, Johnny would become the eighth Earl Spencer and take possession of Althorp, the family seat in Northamptonshire. He was thirty years old. He had already spent years in royal service.

From 1950 to 1952, he had been an equerry to King George VI, and from 1952 to 1954, an equerry to the young Queen Elizabeth II. An equerry is an officer who attends a monarch in person, arranging the day, riding in the car, standing a pace behind at every public moment. Johnny had been born on the twenty-fourth of January 1924. He was a man formed by duty and by the habits of his class, with a courtier’s discretion and the settled expectation that the Spencer line would pass through him to a son of his own.

He was, by the reckoning of the day, a fine catch. The girl he married had been a child in the schoolroom while he was already standing behind a king. The royal family came to see it done. The Queen was there, and the Duke of Edinburgh, and the Queen Mother, and Princess Margaret, and other members of the family besides.

The service was taken by Percy Herbert, the Bishop of Norwich. The reception afterward was held at St. James’s Palace. The bride wore the Fermoy tiara.

One account of the day describes her gown as faille, the colour of a camellia, embroidered with hand-cut diamonds, sequins, and rhinestones. Frances was eighteen. By one reckoning, she was the youngest woman to marry in Westminster Abbey since 1893. The claim is repeated in the standard accounts of her life, though the record behind it is thin.

What is certain is how young she looked beside him, and how much older the world she was marrying into was than she was. What did the marriage require of her? In her world, the answer was simple and unspoken. The great families of England passed their titles and their land to the eldest son.

The system had a name—primogeniture—and it had a single merciless demand. An earldom needs an heir. A daughter could not inherit the title. Only a boy would do.

Frances was expected to provide him. Her whole value to the house of Spencer, in the cold arithmetic of the system, rested on that one task. It was never written into the marriage settlement. It did not need to be.

In 1955, her father died. Maurice Roche had been born in 1885, and he did not live to see his first Spencer grandchild grow. His death loosened one of the ties that held Frances to her childhood. Her mother, now a widow, remained at court, and her place there only grew.

The young couple set up home in a house Frances knew better than anyone. The Althorps took the lease on Park House. The bride went back to the rooms where she had been born on the edge of the park, a short walk from the Queen’s own door. The first two answers the house received were both girls.

Lady Sarah Spencer was born on the nineteenth of March 1955, nine months and a few weeks after the wedding. Her sister, Lady Jane, followed on the eleventh of February 1957. Both were healthy. Both were loved, by every account.

Neither could inherit. Frances was nineteen when she first became a mother, and twenty-one at the birth of her second. She was living the life her upbringing had promised her. She was also living under a question that was never asked out loud and never went away.

When would there be a son? In January 1960, the question seemed to be answered. On the twelfth of that month, Frances gave birth at Park House to a boy. He was named John for his father.

He was the heir the family had waited nearly six years for. He lived for about ten hours. Accounts of what was wrong with him vary. The biographer Andrew Morton, who wrote with Diana’s help, described him as a baby so badly deformed and sickly that he survived for only ten hours.

A later newspaper account spoke of a defect of the lungs. One profile of Frances calls him stillborn, which does not fit the hours that the other records give him. What they share is the ending. He was born, and on the same day he died.

What happened to his mother in those hours is darker still, and it rests largely on her own words and on those who later retold them. Frances did not see her son. She is reported to have said it plainly many years afterward. “My baby was snatched away from me,” she said.

“And I never saw his face, not in life, not in death. ” The writer Tina Brown, in her book The Palace Papers, gives the scene its full weight. She struggled from the bed, Brown writes, and banged frantically on the locked doors of the nursery to which he had been snatched away. A reviewer of her son’s memoir, published in September 2026, summarizes his explanation.

Frances never got to meet the boy because the doctors and Johnny thought it would upset her too much. That was the thinking of the time and of the class. Grief was to be managed, spared, closed behind a door. The mother lying in the bed was not asked.

Then came the part that turned grief into humiliation. According to Morton, the family began to ask what was wrong with the mother. Frances, still only in her early twenties, was sent to various Harley Street clinics in London, the street of the grandest private doctors in the country, to be examined. The examinations were meant to find out why she had not produced a healthy son.

Morton calls it a humiliating and unjust experience. The possibility that the fault, if there was one, might not be hers, does not seem to have been raised. Her son Charles, not yet born when any of this happened, later gave Morton his own verdict. “It was a dreadful time for my parents,” he said, “and probably the root of their divorce because I don’t think they ever got over it.

”

How many times did she carry a child in those years? The sources do not agree. The family record shows five babies born in nine years, from Sarah in 1955 to the last child in 1964. Tina Brown puts it more harshly.

“In order to produce a male heir,” she writes, “Johnny made Frances go through six pregnancies in nine years, of which only four were carried to term, and he resented her having any independent life. ” Brown’s arithmetic and the family’s do not match, and the gap is never explained. Either way, the numbers describe a young woman’s body put to work for a title. Eighteen months after John’s death, in the summer of 1961, Frances gave birth once more in the house where she herself had been born.

It was another girl. Diana was born at Park House on the first of July 1961, in the same house where her mother had been born. She was the fourth child and the third daughter. She was christened Diana Frances, carrying her mother’s name in the middle of her own.

From the beginning, she knew, or came to believe, exactly what her arrival had meant. Years later, speaking into a tape recorder for Andrew Morton’s book, she put it without softening. “I know I was the girl who was supposed to be a boy,” she said. She went further.

“The child who died before me was a son, and both of them were crazy to have a son and heir, and there comes a third daughter. What a bore,” she imagined them thinking. “We’re going to have to try again. ” It is impossible to know whether either parent ever said such a thing aloud.

What matters is that the child believed it. The son came at last on the twentieth of May 1964. He was named Charles, and he would one day be the ninth Earl Spencer. His mother was twenty-eight.

In a photograph he shared in April 2026, taken at Park House, he wrote the fact down with a note of disbelief. “She was only 28 when she had me, her fifth child. A different time. ”

The children who remember Frances from those years describe a mother of real spirit.

At her funeral, her son would call her fearless, a woman more interested in truth and fun than in convention, with a sharply infectious sense of humour. By the middle of the 1960s, the woman who had married at eighteen had grown up inside the marriage, and she had grown into a person her husband’s world had no room for. With Charles, the task was done. The biographer Penny Junor, speaking in a television documentary about Diana in 2021, framed what followed in striking terms.

“Once Frances had fulfilled her contract,” Junor said, “she began to plot an escape route for herself. ”

Diana carried one memory from those years that she never let go of. “I remember seeing my father slap my mother across the face,” she told Morton. “And I was hiding behind the door and she was crying.

” Morton wrote it as a scene: a small girl peeking from her hiding place behind the drawing-room door during a violent argument between her parents. Penny Junor went further than the single memory. Johnny could be violent, she said, and Frances felt she and her children would be safer out of the home. The writer Lady Colin Campbell, in a book published in 1992, went further again, describing him as a man with a vicious temper and a cruel streak.

Her words circulate widely. They remain her allegation. Others have painted a softer man. Tina Brown called Johnny a bully, not a batterer.

She recorded a dinner at Park House, remembered by one of the guests, Lady Sarah Spencer-Churchill, at which he was so offensive to his wife that Frances was outraged and humiliated and stormed off. There is also the matter of when these memories were spoken aloud. Diana gave her account of the slap on tape for a book published in 1992, when she was about thirty and her own marriage was breaking apart in public. The girl behind the door had been no more than six.

Memory at that distance is real, and it is also shaped by everything that came after. It belongs to her, and it should be heard as hers. And in September 2026, Charles Spencer published a new book about his sister, Swan Song. By one reviewer’s account, he now calls their father a gentle soul and disputes the claims that he was abusive.

The son who lived with him for years after the mother had gone remembers a different man from the one his sister remembered from behind the door. In 1966, at a dinner party in London, Frances met a man who made her laugh. Peter Shand Kidd was an unusual figure to walk into the Althorps’ world. He was born on the twenty-third of April 1925, which made him a little younger than Johnny and about eleven years older than Frances.

He had served in the Royal Navy. He had been to university. His family money came from trade, a word that still carried a faint chill in the drawing rooms of the aristocracy. His father, Norman Shand Kidd, had built a fortune in wallpaper, and the family were said, in the words of his obituary in the Daily Telegraph, to have invented flock wallpaper, the kind with a raised velvety pattern.

Peter had tried his hand at farming sheep in Australia. By the time he met the Althorps, Morton writes, he had recently returned to Britain after selling a sheep farm there. Morton’s description of him has a warmth that none of the accounts of Johnny ever manage. He calls Peter an amusing bon viveur with an attractive bohemian streak.

He was also married. He had married Janet Munro Kerr in 1952. She was an artist from a Glasgow shipping family, and together they had three children: Angela, Adam, and Johnny. What did Frances see in him?

Her own answer, given years later and attributed to an interview with the Telegraph, is modest and very human. “It wasn’t love at first sight,” she said. “But I do remember we made each other laugh. ” And then a second sentence, which carries more weight than the first.

“If Johnny and I had had a strong marriage, it wouldn’t have happened. ” That sentence is the nearest thing in the record to her own account of why she left. The marriage came apart in stages, and the first stage was quiet. In September 1967, the two eldest girls, Sarah and Jane, went away to boarding school at West Heath in Kent.

Morton notes that the move coincided with the collapse of what he calls the Althorps’ fourteen-year marriage. The parents agreed on a trial separation. Frances left Park House and took a rented flat in Cadogan Place in Belgravia, in central London. She did not go alone.

The two youngest children, Diana and Charles, came with her. Diana was six years old, Charles three. Diana was enrolled at a girls’ day school in London and Charles at a kindergarten nearby. Years later, Frances explained how she had understood the arrangement at the time.

In 1982, the Daily Express, drawing on the writer Gordon Honeycombe’s book The Year of the Princess, set out her account. The separation, she said, had been mutually agreed. Diana and Charles would move to London with their mother and go to school there. The older girls stayed at their boarding school.

During term, Diana and Charles went back to Park House most weekends to see their father. It sounds almost orderly. Diana did not remember it that way. When she came to speak of those months on tape, she used a phrase that has followed her mother ever since.

“The biggest disruption,” she said, “was when Mummy decided to leg it. ” To leg it is British slang for running off, fleeing in a hurry. “That’s the vivid memory we have,” she went on. “The four of us.

People took sides. ” And then of herself and her brother: “For my brother and I, it was a very wishy-washy and painful experience. ”

Two women remembering the same autumn used words that could hardly be further apart. One said the separation was agreed.

The other said her mother ran. Both were telling the truth as they had lived it. At Christmas, the children went home to Park House, and their mother went with them. Frances described that Christmas in words Andrew Morton later printed.

“It was my last Christmas there,” she said, “for by now it had become apparent that the marriage had completely broken down. ” Over the holiday, Johnny told his wife that the children would not be going back to London with her. In Morton’s words, Viscount Althorp insisted, against his wife’s fierce objections, that the children return permanently to Park House. Frances gave her own version in 1982 through the Daily Express and Honeycombe’s book.

Her husband, she said, now insisted that Diana and Charles should be sent to school in King’s Lynn. He refused to let them return in the new year to London. That last sentence is the heart of her case, and she held to it for the rest of her life. So over that Christmas, the children stayed.

Diana and Charles were enrolled at a school in King’s Lynn. Their life at Park House resumed without their mother in it. Frances went back to London alone. The weekends now ran the other way.

Instead of coming home to Park House to see their father, the children went to London to see their mother. Morton records one of those scenes in a single line of dialogue. The children would find their mother upset. “What’s the matter, Mummy?

” they would chorus. And she invariably answered, “I don’t want you to go tomorrow. ” Charles carried an even earlier picture. His first memory, Morton writes, is of playing quietly on the floor with a train set while his mother sat sobbing on the edge of the bed.

He was three or four years old. Diana’s own summary of those months, given to Morton years later, is almost clipped. “Parents were busy sorting themselves out,” she said, “always seeing my mother crying. Daddy never spoke to us about it.

We never asked questions. ” That last line is the key to the whole house. Nobody explained. Diana’s memory of her mother’s going is the most quoted image of all.

In Morton’s telling, she remembered the sound of a car engine revving and then slowly fading as her mother drove through the gates of Park House and out of her life. Diana was six years old. It is a powerful picture, and it may be exactly what she heard. It sits a little awkwardly beside the rest of Morton’s own account, in which the children soon followed their mother to London and lived with her there for a whole autumn.

A child’s memory does not keep a calendar. Several departures may have folded into one sound in her mind. However it happened, that was what she kept. For a few weeks after that Christmas, there was still a chance that the adults might settle things between themselves.

Then the matter moved out of the family and into the law. Frances later described how even the simplest arrangement slipped out of her hands once the lawyers were involved. Her words are said to come from her own diary, as quoted in the biography written with her cooperation by Max Riddington and Gavin Naden, and they reach us third-hand through later retellings of that book. “Johnny and I would agree on an arrangement for the children,” she wrote.

“Our respective lawyers would advise that this should be documented, and by the time they’d used their professional languages, a friendly agreement seemed to be complicated beyond all measure, and this would invariably result in an argument. Not surprisingly, it would then be the children who suffered. ” Frances wanted her children back. She had no power to take them, and her husband would not give them.

There was only one place left to ask. She went to court. In the England of 1968, a marriage could only be ended if one of the two was found to be at fault. Under the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1965, the grounds for divorce were few and hard.

A husband or wife could divorce a spouse for adultery. They could divorce for desertion without cause for at least three years. They could divorce for cruelty. And they could divorce a spouse of incurably unsound mind.

A couple who had simply stopped loving each other had no ground at all. In the eyes of that law, a wife who had fallen in love with another man and left the marital home was the guilty party before anyone had said a word. The question of the children was supposed to be separate. Since the Guardianship of Infants Act of 1925, English courts had been bound to regard the welfare of the child as the first and paramount consideration.

On paper, that should have favoured a young mother with little children. In practice, as the senior judge Sir James Munby has written, the judges of that age carried Victorian attitudes to adultery into their decisions about custody. A mother’s conduct in the marriage could weigh heavily against her when the court came to decide where her children should live. Frances had other disadvantages, too.

Andrew Morton put his finger on one of them. Custody, he wrote, usually went to the mother unless the father is a nobleman. His rank and title give him prior claims. The heir to an earldom, with a house on a royal estate and a family seat waiting in Northamptonshire, did not look to a court of that time like a man who needed to give way.

And then there was the other divorce before Frances’s own case came on. Janet Shand Kidd divorced Peter, and in that divorce Frances was named as the other woman. The phrase went into the court papers. The wife of Viscount Althorp was now, as a matter of record, the woman for whom Peter Shand Kidd had left his wife and three children.

Timing mattered. Morton places Janet’s divorce about two months before the custody hearing. The story that would follow Frances for the rest of her life—the bolter who left her husband for another man—had its first official form. In one court, Frances was the other woman.

In the next, she would be the mother asking for her children back, with that first judgment already on the record behind her. The law asked very little of Johnny. The children were already in his house. The school in King’s Lynn was already their school.

He had only to stand still and ask the court to leave things as they were, while Frances had to persuade a judge to move them. And yet, according to Morton, Frances began the fight confident. “Lady Althorp sued for custody of the children,” he wrote, “an action started with every hope of success. ” Why would she have hoped?

Perhaps because she knew the one fact the court might weigh above the others. She was their mother. The children were small. Diana was six, Charles only three.

What she could not know as she prepared for the hearing was what the other side would bring to court. The case was heard in June 1968. The witness who did the most damage to Frances had known her since the day she was born. Ruth, Lady Fermoy, was fifty-nine years old.

She had been a widow for thirteen years. For eight of them she had been a woman of the bedchamber to the Queen Mother, and for longer than that, one of her dearest friends. She was a woman of the court, formed by its manners and its loyalties, and she believed deeply in the sanctity of marriage. When her younger daughter’s marriage broke apart, Ruth chose.

She took her son-in-law’s side. The details of what she said in court do not survive in any public transcript. The court record is closed. What survives is the fact of it, reported again and again, including by the Times when Ruth died in 1993: Ruth, Lady Fermoy, gave evidence against her own daughter, and her evidence helped Johnny keep the children.

The accounts that circulate most widely say she told the court that her daughter was a bad mother. That phrase comes from later retellings, including a television documentary about Diana, and not from any record of the hearing itself. The clearest glimpse of what Ruth thought comes from the Daily Telegraph in its obituary of Peter Shand Kidd in 2006. “Lady Fermoy,” the paper wrote, “took his side against her daughter, whom she considered to be a bolter.

” A bolter. In the language of the English upper classes, a bolter was a wife who ran off. It was a word with contempt folded into it. The result was never really in doubt.

Johnny was granted custody of the children. Most accounts say the order covered all four of them: Sarah and Jane, at their boarding school, as well as the two youngest at Park House. Frances would see her children. She would no longer raise them.

Morton, who heard the family’s account through Diana, called what Ruth did “the greatest betrayal of her life, and one she never forgave. ” He also described what the case did to Frances’s public name. “It was then,” he wrote, “that the myth of the bolter was born: that Frances had left her husband and deserted her four children. ” She was cast, in his phrase, as “the selfish villainess of the drama.

Her husband, the innocent injured party. ” A myth, Morton called it. He meant that the story was simpler than the truth. Why did Ruth do it?

The record gives only her beliefs. She held marriage to be sacred. She had spent her life in a household where duty came before feeling, where appearances were a form of loyalty, and where a scandal was the worst thing a family could bring on itself. To her, the daughter who left was the one who had broken the rule.

The son-in-law who stayed was the one who had kept it. In her world, the verdict almost wrote itself. Whether Ruth ever regretted what she said that day is simply not known. What the record does show is that the two women went on moving in the same world.

Ruth stayed at court beside the Queen Mother for another quarter of a century. Frances, the daughter she had testified against, would one day be the mother of a Princess of Wales. The man who won did not come out of it happy, either. Charles Spencer described his father in the years after the divorce to Andrew Morton.

“He was really miserable after the divorce,” he said, “basically shell-shocked. He used to sit in his study the whole time. ” The victor in the case was a man alone in a big house with four children, a title waiting for him, and a study door he kept closed. The rest moved quickly.

The hearing was in June 1968, when Frances was thirty-two. The divorce from Johnny went through in April 1969, after almost fifteen years of marriage. On the second of May 1969, about a month later, Frances married Peter Shand Kidd. By then, Diana was seven and Charles was four.

Four children—Sarah, Jane, Diana, and Charles—remained in the care of their father. Years later, she put the loss into one sentence without adornment. “I lost the case,” she said, “and the custody of the children. ”

Charles Spencer remembers his sister sitting on the front step of Park House waiting for a car that did not come.

He told the story in September 2020 in an interview with the Sunday Times, and he told it without softening. “While she was packing her stuff to leave, she promised Diana she’d come back to see her. Diana used to wait on the doorstep for her, but she never came. ” It is one of the saddest images in the whole story.

A small girl sitting on the front step of a big house on a royal estate, watching the drive for a car, waiting for a mother who had promised. It is also, like almost everything in this story, a memory. Charles was three when his mother left, though he has said he was two, and he gave Diana’s age as five when she was six. He may have seen his sister on that step with his own eyes.

He may have been told of it later by Diana herself. Either way, the picture is the one the family kept. Frances would have told it differently. She had promised, and she had been refused.

She had come to court asking for those same children and lost. The girl on the step was waiting for her. She, on the other side of the law, was waiting for them. Each of them was waiting for the other.

Diana spoke about those years herself in a set of tapes recorded with Peter Settelen in the early 1990s. Asked whether her father had ever explained where her mother had gone, she hesitated. “Well, she—no, she had to go away,” she said. “The court said, if I remember right, she had to go away.

” Settelen pressed her. Father didn’t say where? “No,” she said. So the child was not told.

She was left to work it out. And what she worked out was that a court had sent her mother away. On the same tapes, she spoke about what was missing. “My parents,” she said, “they never said they loved me.

There was always a kiss there, no hugs or anything like that. ”

Life at Park House went on around the gap. The household was run by nannies, and the nannies came and went. They changed, Morton writes, with alarming frequency and ranged from the sweet to the sadistic.

Diana admitted that she did not make their lives easy. “I made life very difficult for them,” she said on the Settelen tapes. “Really nasty, spiteful stuff. ” At weekends, the journey ran to London.

Morton describes the routine. Charles and Diana took the train with their nanny from Norfolk to Liverpool Street Station in London, where their mother met them. Morton sums up those years in a single sentence that has been quoted ever since. It was a childhood, he wrote, where she wanted for nothing materially but everything emotionally.

Before Christmas, Morton records, Charles and Diana were given the catalogue of Hamleys, the great London toy shop, and told to tick whatever they wanted Father Christmas to bring. “While they showered their offspring with expensive presents,” Morton writes, “this wasn’t accompanied by the affectionate cuddles and kisses that the children craved. ” The competition could turn a treat into an ordeal. When a cousin was married, each parent bought Diana a dress for the wedding.

She had to wear one of them. “I can’t remember to this day which one I got in,” she said, “but I remember being totally traumatized by it because it would show favouritism. ” A girl of seven or eight had learned that choosing a dress was choosing a parent. There were good days, too.

Her father laid on a wonderful party for her seventh birthday. She filled her life with animals: hamsters and rabbits and guinea pigs, and a cat called Marmalade. One guinea pig, Peanuts, won a prize at the Sandringham show. At her first school, Silfield in King’s Lynn, where she went from 1968, one of her classmates noticed what made her different.

“She was the only girl I knew whose parents were divorced. Those things just didn’t happen then. ” The nights were the hardest part. Morton records that Diana, lying in her bed surrounded by her cuddly toys, could hear her brother sobbing, crying for his mother.

She never went to him. “I could never pluck up enough courage to get out of bed,” she said. Charles has told the same story from the other side of the wall. Diana, he said in 2020, could hear me crying down the corridor, but was too scared of the dark to come to me.

Charles in that same interview gave the verdict that stung his mother’s memory more than any other. “Our father was a quiet and constant source of love,” he said. “But our mother wasn’t cut out for maternity. Not her fault.

She couldn’t do it. She was in love with someone else. Infatuated, really. ” Four years later, in his memoir A Very Private School, he wrote about the same years with a longer view.

“This was in the mid-60s, when I was two and my mother left home for a man she had fallen in love with. I loved home,” he added, “even when it lacked a mother. ” And then, of the boarding school he was sent to as a boy: “I experienced abandonment before being sent off to Maidwell. ”

Diana had been sent away first.

In 1970, at nine, she went to board at Riddlesworth Hall near Thetford. She felt the wrench from her father keenly. Morton writes, “If you love me,” she told him, “you won’t leave me here. ” Her father remembered it for the rest of his life.

“That was a dreadful day,” he said, “dreadful losing her. ” Diana’s own memory of the place was lonelier still. “I always felt very detached from everyone else,” she said. “I knew I was going somewhere different, that I was in the wrong shell.

” Abandonment was the word the children used. Frances never used it. She spoke of being refused, of being hurt by the suggestion that she had deserted anyone. Between those two words—abandonment and refusal—lay the whole of what later looked to the world like hatred.

The children grew up at Park House under their father’s care. Diana stayed there until she was fourteen. In 1975, Johnny succeeded his father as the eighth Earl Spencer, and the family left Park House for good. A year later, the new Earl married again, and he told none of his children.

Her name was Raine. She was the daughter of the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland, and until recently she had been the Countess of Dartmouth, the wife of another earl. On the fourteenth of July 1976, at Caxton Hall in London, Johnny married her. He did not tell his children first.

They found out from the newspaper. Diana described the moment on the Morton tapes. “Sarah rang me up. She said, ‘Have you seen the newspaper?

Daddy’s married Raine. ’” The children’s reaction was fierce, and Diana herself confessed to the fiercest part of it. She slapped her father across the face. “That’s from all of us,” she told him, “for hurting us.

” That scene echoes the one she remembered from behind the drawing-room door a decade earlier. Then it was a man’s hand and a woman’s face. Now it was the daughter’s hand and the father’s. Charles, aged twelve, sent Raine what Morton calls a vile letter.

Diana encouraged a school friend to write her future stepmother a poison-pen letter. The children gave her a name that stuck for decades. They called her Acid Raine. Where was Frances in all of this?

A long way off, and happier than she had been in years. After their wedding, she and Peter had lived first at a house called Appledore at Itchenor in West Sussex. Then in 1972, three years after the wedding, they bought a farm on the Isle of Seil, south of Oban on the west coast of Scotland. Morton gives its size as a thousand acres.

The house at its heart was Ardencaple, an eighteenth-century farmhouse about ten kilometres from Oban. The island is joined to the mainland by a single arch of stone, the Clachan Bridge. The Shand Kidds kept a sheep farm in Australia too, near Yass in New South Wales by most accounts, and divided their time between London, Seil, and the other side of the world. In the end, it was thirty-two years on the island, nearly half of her life.

The children came to her in the holidays, and for them, Seil became something close to a paradise. Morton describes their summers there as a Swallows and Amazons idyll, after the English children’s books about sailing and camping, spending their days mackerel fishing, lobster potting, and sailing, and on fine days having barbecues on the beach. Peter, he writes, was a generous, demonstrative, and easy-going stepfather. This is the part of the story that rarely makes it into the legend of the cold mother.

For a few weeks every year on a Scottish island, the four Spencer children had a mother who took them fishing and a stepfather who made them laugh. The mother the legend describes—a woman who walked away from her children and never looked back—does not take them lobster potting every summer on her farm. The mother the record shows kept a place for them a long way off, and they came. For her eighteenth birthday in July 1979, Diana was given a flat at Coleherne Court in London, and the gift came from her mother.

It was a generous present and a telling one. The girl who had shuttled on trains between two parents now had a front door of her own, bought for her by the mother the legend said had left her. Then, in the summer and autumn of 1980, the press noticed that Lady Diana Spencer was being seen with the Prince of Wales. What followed was a siege.

The press camped on the family’s doorsteps. Diana was nineteen, with no training for any of it. Her mother wrote to the Times. The letter was a protest against the harassment of her daughter by the newspapers.

Only a fragment of its wording can be quoted with confidence. It was an unusual thing for a woman of her background to do: to complain in public about the conduct of the press. It was the act of a mother standing up for her child. The woman who would later be accused of hating her daughter was, in 1980, the parent who went into print to defend her.

In February 1981, with the engagement only weeks away, Diana went to Australia with her mother and Peter for about three weeks. The press, guessing where she had gone, waited outside the Shand Kidd property near Yass. Diana was actually miles away, staying quietly in a beach house near Mollymook on the coast of New South Wales. The woman who ran the local shop remembered the quiet young visitor years later.

“She’d just buy a popper,” she said, “a little fruit juice box. ” For three weeks on the far side of the world, the future Princess of Wales was hidden by her mother in plain sight. “I then went away two days later to Australia for three weeks,” Diana told Morton, “to sort of settle down and to organise lists and things with my mother. That was a complete disaster because I pined for him, but he never rang me up.

”

The engagement was announced on the twenty-fourth of February 1981. From that moment, Frances, who had spent twelve years avoiding attention, became the mother of the future Princess of Wales. Someone else had a view on the match. Ruth, Lady Fermoy, still at the Queen Mother’s side, gave her granddaughter a warning.

“Darling,” she said, “you must understand that their sense of humour and their lifestyle are different, and I don’t think it will suit you. ” When it was later suggested that she and the Queen Mother had arranged the marriage between them, she was crisp. “You can say that if you like,” she said, “but it simply wouldn’t be true. ”

The wedding took place at St Paul’s Cathedral on the twenty-ninth of July 1981.

The royal biographer Hugo Vickers, writing her obituary, recorded that Frances took a full part in the highly popular wedding at St Paul’s, sitting with her former husband Earl Spencer opposite the royal family. Thirteen years after their custody case, the two of them sat side by side to watch their daughter marry the heir to the throne. For the wedding, Frances gave Diana a gold bracelet, and Diana wore it on the day. Diana’s own memory of her mother at the wedding was sharper.

She kept crying, Diana told Morton, and being all valiant and saying that she couldn’t cope with the pressure. “I tended to think I was the one under pressure because I was the bride. ” One retelling of her words goes further and has her saying that her mother let her down terribly and that she did not speak to her for three or four years afterward. That harder version comes second-hand, and it sits awkwardly beside the photographs that show Frances among the guests at the christening of Diana’s second son in December 1984.

In August 1982, a year after the wedding, the story of the custody case came out in print, and it came out in Frances’s own words. The occasion was a book, The Year of the Princess by Gordon Honeycombe, serialized in the Daily Express. For the first time, Frances told her side. The separation had been agreed.

The children had lived with her in London. Their father had kept them at Christmas. She had lost the case, she said, and with it the custody of her children. The paper added that she had been deeply hurt by the suggestion that she had deserted her family.

The reaction from Althorp was immediate. Earl Spencer called it cheap and hurtful. “It can only hurt Diana. Why did she do such a thing?

” And he went on. “This kind of thing opens old wounds and is very hurtful. She should have thought about the children. I will have nothing to do with this kind of cheap publicity.

” Diana, by one report, was deeply upset. There is an irony buried in that summer’s quarrel. Ten years later, when Andrew Morton published the book that Diana had secretly helped him write, it carried both women’s truths at once. It gave the world Diana’s memories: the crying, the car, the doorstep.

And it described the story of the bolter, in Morton’s own word, as a myth. The book that spread the image of the mother who ran also said in print that the image was false. From the engagement onward, by her own account, the press never really left Frances alone. In an interview in 1997, she described it with weary precision.

“The media descended here sixteen years ago,” she said, “and have never left me since. I’ve now accepted they never will. ” It was hardest, she believed, on Peter. “I think the pressure of it all was overwhelming and finally impossible for Peter,” she said.

“They didn’t want him. They wanted me. I became Diana’s mum and not his wife. ” In June 1988, the marriage ended.

“Peter and I drifted apart,” she is reported to have said. The phrase is gentle, and it leaves out almost everything. Four years later, the other adult from the custody case was gone. On the twenty-ninth of March 1992, Johnny Spencer, the eighth Earl, died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-eight.

Charles became the ninth Earl Spencer. Diana lost the father who had kept her. Frances announced the end of her second marriage through her lawyer in words chosen to close the subject. “I would like it to be known,” she said, “that my husband and I have separated, which is a great sadness to us both.

No one else is involved. ” The Scotsman, in its obituary of her years later, reported that Peter had left her for a younger woman, and that after he went, she closed the shop. Diana was deeply upset by the news. According to the reports of the time, she telephoned her mother in Scotland.

Whatever lay between them, the daughter reached for the phone when the mother’s second marriage failed. One more death closed a chapter. On the sixth of July 1993, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, died at her home at 36 Eaton Square in London, aged eighty-four. She had served the Queen Mother for thirty-three years.

She was reported to be not on speaking terms with Diana at the end, and there is no record of any late reconciliation with the daughter she had testified against a quarter of a century before. Frances was alone now in a way she had not been since girlhood. She spent those later years largely in solitude on Seil. In 1994, she was received into the Roman Catholic Church, guided by a local bishop, Roderick Wright.

From then on, the church became the centre of her life. Her son, writing in January 2026, looked back on it with gratitude. “During her last years,” he wrote, “she found great comfort after converting to Roman Catholicism until her health gave out. She would help take very unwell children on pilgrimage to Lourdes.

” The charity she worked with, the Hosanna House and Children’s Pilgrimage Trust, takes sick and disabled children to the shrine. She gave her time to the fishing communities of the West Coast as patron of the Mull and North-West Fishermen’s Association and to the Highland branch of the Search and Rescue Dog Association. She raised money too for the families bereaved by the Lockerbie bombing. That same year she joined the Iona Community Trust, which was raising money to build a Catholic house of prayer on the island of Iona, and she became its appeals secretary, writing the letters and asking for the money.

She went to Lourdes, the great shrine in the south of France, as a helper with groups of sick and disabled pilgrims. She read at Mass in the cathedral in Oban. Much later she would say simply that when Diana died, it was wonderful being a Catholic. “I believe,” she said, “that a child is a gift.

”

But the island life had its shadows, and in 1996 one of them reached a courtroom. On the fifth of April 1996, Frances was stopped while driving and arrested on suspicion of drink-driving. The case came to trial before a jury at the sheriff court in Oban. A police officer told the court that she had mumbled incoherently and staggered.

The reading, the court heard, was more than two and a half times the legal limit. On the twenty-second of November 1996, the jury found her guilty. She had an explanation, and it hung in the air unanswered. She said that on the day in question she had been upset by a letter that had arrived by special delivery.

Who had sent it and what it said was never disclosed. The penalty was a ban from driving for a year and a fine of £400. By one account, she left the court with a single line. “I have nothing to say to anybody at any time.

” She denied then and afterward that she had a problem with alcohol. Diana that same year was going through her own ordeal in public. Her divorce from the Prince of Wales was completed in 1996. Under its terms, she remained Diana, Princess of Wales, but she lost the style of Her Royal Highness.

Then in May 1997, Frances gave an interview to Hello magazine. She spoke about her daughter, by several reports about Diana’s divorce and about her bulimia, the eating disorder she had suffered. And when she came to the loss of the royal title, she said something that her daughter could not forgive. It was, Frances said, “absolutely wonderful” that Diana had lost the title Her Royal Highness.

What did she mean? Her own fuller explanation does not survive in the record. It is possible she meant something else: that Diana was free now, that she no longer needed the title to be herself. There is no way now to know.

What is known is how Diana heard it. She was deeply upset. The quarrel that followed was bitter, and it would turn out to be the last one. Within weeks, according to one man who said he heard it, there was a telephone call.

Paul Burrell said he was standing in his pantry beneath the main staircase at Kensington Palace when the princess called him to listen. Burrell was Diana’s butler, the man she called, among other people, her rock. Everything about the call itself rests on his word alone. No one else has ever said they heard it.

Frances herself did not live to answer him. His most careful account was given under oath at the inquest into Diana’s death on the fourteenth of January 2008. The call, he said, took place in June 1997. By his account, Diana wanted a witness, and so she let him hear.

Then he told the court what her mother had said. She called the princess—Burrell testified—and she said that she was messing around with effing Muslim men and she was disgraceful, and said some very nasty things. According to Burrell, that call was the end. Diana, he told the inquest, stopped contacting her mother.

It is a devastating story, and it must be held carefully. In later years, Burrell told it again on television and in the newspapers, and each time the words changed. In one version, Frances said she had raised a—. In another, she called Diana a prostitute.

In one, Diana answered her mother directly: “I’m going to put the phone down,” Burrell has her saying, “and I’ll never speak to you again. ” The more often he told it, the more the words hardened. There is also a problem of dates. Burrell put the call in June, but the reported silence between mother and daughter ran for about four months before Diana’s death at the end of August, which would place its beginning in late April or May, the month of the Hello interview.

The two accounts may both be partly right. The quarrel may have begun with the magazine and been sealed by the telephone, or the call may have happened, as Burrell describes, weeks into a silence already underway. No document settles it. Frances, when she had the chance, rejected the idea behind it.

In October 2002, at the Old Bailey, a lawyer put it to her that the rift with her daughter had been about Diana’s private life and the company she was keeping. She did not accept it. What is not in dispute is the silence. Frances confirmed it herself under oath at the Old Bailey.

She and Diana had been estranged for four months when Diana died. During those months, Frances kept writing to her daughter, and Diana sent the letters back unopened. She wrote from the island through the long evenings of that summer. She wrote, knowing her daughter was angry, and believing perhaps that anger passes.

And each time the envelope came back, still sealed with her own handwriting on the front, returned by a daughter who could not bring herself to read it. Diana, meanwhile, was living the most public summer of her life. Each of them was waiting for the other. The mother was waiting for the daughter to open a letter.

Seventeen years earlier, Frances had written a letter to the Times to protect her daughter from the newspapers. Now she was writing to the daughter herself, and those letters were coming back. Neither moved first. Both of them had learned long ago how to wait for someone who did not come.

On the thirty-first of August 1997, in the tunnel beneath the Pont de l’Alma in Paris, the car carrying Diana crashed. She died. She was thirty-six years old. There would be no more letters, opened or unopened.

When her own obituaries came to be written seven years later, the news agencies put the silence near the top. She had not spoken to Diana in the last four months of Diana’s life, the Associated Press reported, and Diana had returned her letters unopened. “I thank God for the gift of Diana. ” Her mother wrote in the first days after Paris.

The statement Frances issued was short, and it read like a prayer. “I thank God for the gift of Diana and for all her loving and giving. I give her back to him with my love, pride and admiration to rest in peace. ” There is no bitterness in it and no mention of the quarrel.

According to conversations she later had with the journalist Mike Merritt, reported years afterward in the Scotsman, she considered not going to the funeral at all. By another account told by the royal writer Ingrid Seward, she later said that the Queen did not get in touch after Diana’s death. Burrell too has a memory of her in those weeks, and it is the most painful thing he ever claimed. She said, according to his account in a documentary many years later, Frances asked him after Diana’s death a single question: “Surely I’ll be forgiven now, won’t I?

” It rests on his word alone, as the phone call does. She went. On the sixth of September 1997, the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, was held in Westminster Abbey. It was the same church in which Frances had married Johnny Spencer forty-three years earlier, a girl of eighteen with the Queen in the congregation.

After the service in the abbey, Diana was taken home to Althorp to be buried on an island in the lake in the grounds of the house that had been her father’s. Her mother, according to the accounts of the burial, was among the few family members there. “The last time I’d been there,” she said later, “I had walked up the aisle to marry her father. ” And then she said the thing that surprised everyone who heard it.

“In the end, strange as it may seem, Diana’s funeral was probably the proudest day of my life as a mother. ” Proud. Few people would expect that word from a woman who was supposed to have hated her daughter. She also spoke at a memorial Mass for Diana in Scotland.

And in a letter written later, she explained why. “Since my children had taken on the world in the abbey,” she wrote, “I really thought their mum should be able to do her home pitch. ” She described herself, standing up to speak, as scared, rigid. Then came the letters.

According to the Scotsman’s account of her conversations, some 31,000 letters of sympathy reached her, and she answered 7,000 of them by hand. A year later, she spoke about it on television. “With literally thousands of people comforting, sharing,” she said, “we were sharing a very deep hurt. ” And she added a thought about her daughter that sounded almost like an apology for the press that had hounded her.

“I wanted privacy for her very often when she wasn’t working,” she said. “But it wasn’t to be. ” She also spoke of how she grieved. “I’ve cried in public only once since Diana died,” she said.

“I know it doesn’t matter, but I always felt if I started, I might never stop. ” On each anniversary of Diana’s death, the Scotsman later reported, she drove alone to a deserted beach. There was practical work to be done as well. Frances was one of the executors of Diana’s will.

In the weeks after the funeral, she and her eldest daughter, Lady Sarah, went through Diana’s private papers at Kensington Palace, and some of those papers were destroyed. The details come from the inquest held a decade later. Lady Sarah told the coroner that she and her mother had shredded sensitive documents that might be distressing to Diana’s sons. Paul Burrell gave a larger picture.

He said Frances had worked every day for a week shredding the papers from Diana’s desk. By the account of the Associated Press, she herself had put the number at about a hundred documents. Burrell said he carried away half a dozen trash bags filled with shredded paper. What was in those papers is unknown, and it will stay unknown.

Lady Sarah described it under oath as protection for two boys who had lost their mother. Five years later, the private grief became public again. In the autumn of 2002, the prosecution of Paul Burrell came to trial at the Old Bailey, and Diana’s mother was called to give evidence. On the twenty-fourth of October 2002, Frances Shand Kidd gave evidence.

She was sixty-six. She had come to stand in a witness box and talk, in front of the press of the world, about her dead daughter and the man who had called himself her daughter’s rock. She did not warm to the description. “Diana called many people her rock,” she told the court.

“This was a term she used regularly and said to many people. ” And then, with a touch of dryness that her son might have recognized, she went on. “She called me her rock and star. These terms were used to many people, including him, but not only him.

It was not unique. ” She confirmed the estrangement. Yes, she and Diana had not spoken for four months when Diana died. Yes, Diana had returned her letters unopened.

When Burrell’s lawyer, Lord Carlile, suggested that Diana, like many of us, could sometimes be a little tempestuous, she agreed. When he suggested that the quarrel had turned on the princess’s romances, she disagreed. While she was in London giving that evidence, her house on Seil was burgled. The thieves were thorough.

The telephone lines were reportedly cut and the alarm disabled. They took her jewellery, all of it, to a value later put at £100,000. None of it was insured. She made a public appeal.

In December, in an appeal broadcast on the television programme Crimewatch, she described what she had lost in words that went far beyond money. “The bracelet and earrings,” she said, “were tangible links to my deceased children, as was the ring my father gave me, and the pearl choker I wore to the weddings of all my children. ” Among the stolen pieces was a bracelet with a story. “I gave the bracelet to Diana for her wedding,” Frances explained.

“She wore it on the day, and it was with her for the rest of her life. ” The gold bracelet a mother gave her daughter in July 1981, the one piece of the wedding that Diana kept with her to the end, had by then come back into its giver’s keeping. And now, while she was in court defending the truth about her daughter, it had been stolen from her house. The accounts of the burglary do not record its return.

She died at home on Seil on the third of June 2004, sixty-eight years old, with a priest beside her. The last months had been hard. The Scotsman reported that she was understood to have been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease the previous December, and that she died after a six-month battle with a debilitating brain condition. Some later accounts speak of brain cancer.

The newspapers of the time do not confirm it. What they agree on is a long illness. Death had come close in those months in other ways too. In April 2004, her stepson Adam Shand Kidd, Peter’s son, was found dead in Phnom Penh in Cambodia at the age of forty-nine.

The inquest verdict was left open. She had prepared for her own end. She had received the last rites. She had already bought a burial plot in Oban.

Canon Donald MacKay was with her when she died. Her grandsons issued a line of their own, simple and unguarded. “We are very upset by the death of our grandmother,” William said on their behalf, “and we will miss her a lot. ”

The funeral was held on the tenth of June at St Columba’s Cathedral in Oban.

Fifteen priests took part in the Requiem Mass. Prince William read from the letter to the Romans, the passage that says, “Nothing can come between us and the love of God. ” Prince Harry was there. The coffin was piped out of the cathedral.

One person who might have been expected was not. The Prince of Wales, her former son-in-law, was travelling to Washington to represent the royal family at the state funeral of the former American President Ronald Reagan. Her son gave the eulogy, and it was a portrait of a woman the legend had never allowed. “My mother was an open book,” he said, “a woman who was afraid of nothing and of nobody, somebody not interested in convention but in truth and fun.

She believed in equality and decency,” he said, “and had no time for self-pity. ” He called her first marriage a passionate and happy union, the death of her baby son a crushing blow. Her marriage to Peter, a loving relationship, and he said that her bond with Diana had always been a close one. So what was the truth about Frances and her daughter?

The record does not stand still. In 2020, her son said their mother wasn’t cut out for maternity. In 2024, he wrote of a home that lacked a mother. And in September 2026, in his book Swan Song, he returned to her again, and even the critics could not agree what he had said.

One reviewer found a useful corrective to a figure who had been publicly maligned: a mother spirited and mildly eccentric, the parent most responsible for Diana’s gifts. Another, Tina Brown, read the same book as firmly on his father’s side: the story of a wife who absconded with her lover and lost custody of her four children. By one account of the book, Frances herself would always say she had five children and not four, counting the boy who lived for ten hours. In all the words that survive from Frances, from Diana, from their family, from the court and the newspapers and the butler, there is no record of either woman saying she hated the other.

There are harsh words. There is the phrase “absolutely wonderful” and the silence that followed it. There is a butler’s memory of a telephone call, and there is a long record of grievance on both sides, each of them certain she was the one who had been left. It was never hatred.

It was grief pointed in two directions. Frances once summed up her relationship with her daughter in a sentence that sounds almost like a shrug. “Of course, we argued,” she said. “Who wants a wishy-washy mum?

” It is the voice of a woman who had been called cold, a bolter, and a bad mother, and who had decided long ago not to apologise for having a temper or a heart. Each of them was waiting for the other. On a doorstep at Park House in the 1960s, a small girl waited for a car. On an island in Scotland in the summer of 1997, a woman waited for an envelope to be opened.

Neither wait was ever answered. In her last years, alone on Seil, Frances said something about the daughter she had lost twice, once in a courtroom and once in a tunnel in Paris, and about herself. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think the only one resting in peace is Diana. ” She is buried now in Oban, a long way from the abbey and the house on the royal estate where she was born.

The letters she wrote that last summer went back to her unopened, and no one knows what they said. Whatever she wanted her daughter to read, she kept writing it until the end.