In the summer of 1997, a woman on a small Scottish island kept writing letters to her daughter, and the letters kept coming back unopened. The daughter was Diana, Princess of Wales, and they never spoke again. On the thirty-first of August, Diana died in Paris. 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, and 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 Frances Shand Kydd hate her daughter? Or did each of them spend a lifetime believing the other had left first?

On the twentieth of January 1936, a baby girl was born at Park House, and about a mile away, a king was dying. The king was George V, and he 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. That arrangement tells you almost everything about where they stood. 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, the ranks of nobility that carry a hereditary title. 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. 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 Bielside 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 confidants. 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.

When she spoke, she spoke with the authority of that closeness, and the people around her knew it. 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. On the one day her daughter needed her most, Ruth’s loyalty would run to the marriage she served ahead of the child she had raised. That day was still more than thirty years away. In the 1950s, the Roche girls were being prepared for the only future their world offered them: a good marriage made young.

Frances was eighteen when the time came, and the man chosen was twelve years older, a former servant of two monarchs and the heir to one of the grandest earldoms in England. The wedding would be held in Westminster Abbey, with the queen herself in the congregation. 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. 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. 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, 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. So this was a match made inside the court. The bride’s mother was a close friend of the Queen Mother, and within two years she would join her household.

The groom had served the queen and her father before her. The bride had been born on the royal estate, and her father had shot with the late 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.

She was eighteen. By one reckoning, she was the youngest woman to marry in Westminster Abbey since 1893. What did the marriage require of her? 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. If she gave Johnny only daughters, the line he had been raised to carry would stall with him. The weight of all of that rested quietly on a bride of eighteen. 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. Her children would be born there, too. Diana would be born there and would live there until she was fourteen.

The first two answers the house received were both girls. Sarah arrived in March 1955 and Jane in February 1957, and each time the house waited for a boy. Frances was nineteen when she first became a mother, and twenty-one at the birth of her second. She was 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 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. What the accounts share is the ending. He was born, and on the same day he died. Frances did not see her son.

“My baby was snatched away from me,” she is reported to have said many years afterward. “And I never saw his face, not in life, not in death. ” 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.

The reason, according to a reviewer of her son’s memoir: 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 in her early twenties, was sent to various Harley Street clinics in London 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. Frances’s 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.

”

She never stopped counting the boy. More than forty years later, in December 2002, Frances made a public appeal after thieves had stolen her jewelry. Among the pieces were a bracelet and a pair of earrings, and she described them in a way that startled people who heard it. They were, she said, “tangible links to my deceased children.

” Children in the plural. By then, she had buried a daughter as well. But the first of the dead she carried with her was the boy who lived for about ten hours at Park House in January 1960, the son she was never allowed to see. 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, 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. “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. A girl who grows up feeling she was the wrong answer to a question learns early to watch faces, to read rooms, to work for love.

Diana would spend her life doing all three. 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 twenty-eight when she had her fifth child. A different time. With Charles, the task was done. By the middle of the 1960s, the marriage run on duty had begun to fail.

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. ” 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. Lady Colin Campbell, in a book published in 1992, described him as a man with a vicious temper and a cruel streak. Tina Brown called Johnny a bully, not a batterer, and recorded a dinner at Park House at which he was so offensive to his wife that Frances stormed off.

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. Tina Brown, reviewing it the week it came out, found the author clearly on his father’s side. Another reviewer found in the same pages a sympathetic portrait of the mother.

The Spencer marriage still divides the people who study it, nearly sixty years after it ended. In 1966, at a dinner party in London, Frances met a man who made her laugh. The Althorps met Peter Shand Kydd and his wife Janet at a dinner party in London, and the four of them went skiing in Switzerland. Two married couples meet over dinner.

They get on. They plan a holiday together in the snow. Somewhere between the dinner and the slopes, one husband and one wife begin to look at each other differently. By the time the couples came home, the holiday had become the turning point.

Peter Shand Kydd was an unusual figure to walk into the Althorps’ world. Born on the twenty-third of April 1925, he was a little younger than Johnny and about eleven years older than Frances. He had served in the Royal Navy. 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 Kydd, had built a fortune in wallpaper, and the family were said to have invented flock wallpaper. Peter had tried his hand at farming sheep in Australia. Morton describes him as an amusing bon viveur with an attractive bohemian streak. He was also married.

He had married Janet Munro Kerr in 1952, and together they had three children: Angela, Adam, and Johnny. When the time came, the Telegraph would record the fact without decoration. He left his wife and three children. What did Frances see in him?

“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. ”

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. 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.

In 1982, the Daily Express 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. During term, they went back to Park House most weekends to see their father.

It sounds almost orderly. Diana did not remember it that way. “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. The four of us, people took sides. ” For her brother and herself, she said, “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. A mother who moves into a London flat with her two youngest children believes she is keeping her family close. A girl of six, taken from the only house she has known, sees her mother leave her father.

For one autumn at least, Frances had what she seems to have wanted most: her freedom and her two youngest children together in the same few rooms in Belgravia. It did not last beyond the end of the year. At Christmas, the children went home to Park House, and their mother went with them. “It was my last Christmas there,” Frances 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 through the Daily Express. Her husband 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. The headline over the story in 1982 put it as plainly as a headline can: Diana’s mother says she did not desert her children. So over that Christmas, the children stayed. 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. And it was on those weekends in the flat in Cadogan Place that the scenes the children remembered all their lives took place. “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. He did not know what was wrong. He only knew that his mother was crying and that he should be quiet. Diana’s own summary of those months 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. ” Nobody explained.

The father said nothing. The mother cried, and the children drew their own conclusions in silence. Diana’s memory of her mother’s going was different again, and it has become 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. A child’s memory does not keep a calendar. Several departures may have folded into one sound in her mind.

However it happened, the sound of that engine was what she kept. For Diana, the story began with a car leaving. 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.

“Johnny and I would agree on an arrangement for the children,” Frances wrote, in words said to come from her own diary, quoted in the biography written with her cooperation by Max Riddington and Gavin Naiden. “Our respective lawyers would advise that this should be documented, and by the time they’d used their professional language, 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. 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. And there was the other divorce before Frances’s own case came on. Janet Shand Kydd 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 Kydd had left his wife and three children. 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.

The law asked very little of Johnny. The children were already in his house. 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, she began the fight confident.

“Lady Althorp sued for custody of the children,” he wrote. “An action started with every hope of success. ” 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. 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 took her son-in-law’s side. The details of what she said in court do not survive in any public transcript. 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, 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 Kydd 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 wife who ran off. It was a word with contempt folded into it. It would attach itself to Frances for the rest of her life, and it came first, by this account, from her own mother.

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 Frances’s life, and one she never forgave. It was then, he wrote, that the myth of the bolter was born, the story that Frances had left her husband and deserted her four children. 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. Whether Ruth ever regretted what she said that day is simply not known. The man who won did not come out of it happy, either. “He was really miserable after the divorce,” Charles Spencer said of his father.

“Basically shell-shocked. He used to sit in his study the whole time. ”

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 Kydd. By then, Diana was seven and Charles was four. Four children remained in the care of their father.

“I lost the case,” Frances said years later, “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. “While she was packing her stuff to leave,” he said, “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, 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, and the mother in it is a woman who promised to come back and did not.

Frances would have told it differently. She had promised and she had been refused. The girl on the step was waiting for her. She, on the other side of the law, was waiting for them.

Asked whether her father had ever explained where her mother had gone, Diana hesitated. “Well, she no, she had to go away,” she said. “The court said, if I remember right, she had to go away. ” 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.

At weekends, the journey ran to London: Charles and Diana took the train with their nanny from Norfolk to Liverpool Street Station, 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, Charles and Diana were given the catalogue of Hamleys and told to tick whatever they wanted.

While both parents showered their children with expensive presents, Morton writes, this wasn’t accompanied by the affectionate cuddles and kisses the children craved. 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 favoritism.

” A girl of seven or eight had learned that choosing a dress was choosing a parent. The nights were the hardest part. 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 told the same story from the other side of the wall. Diana, he said in 2020, could hear him crying down the corridor, but was too scared of the dark to come to him. Two small children in a big house, a few yards apart, one crying, the other listening, neither able to cross the dark between them.

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. ”

In 1970, at nine, Diana went to board at Riddlesworth Hall near Thetford.

“If you love me,” she told her father, “you won’t leave me here. ” He 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. ”

In 1975, Johnny Spencer became the eighth Earl Spencer, and the family left Park House for Althorp in Northamptonshire. Diana was fourteen.

She lost Park House, the only home she had ever had, the house on the royal estate where she and her mother had both been born. Althorp came with a change the children had not been warned about. Their father was about to marry again. Her name was Raine, 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. “Sarah rang me up,” Diana said on the Morton tapes.

“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. ” Charles, aged twelve, sent Raine what Morton calls a vile letter. The children gave her a name that stuck for decades: Acid Raine. Then in 1978, their father suffered a severe stroke.

Johnny was fifty-four. He survived. 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 Appleshore 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 Kydds kept a sheep farm in Australia, too, near Yass in New South Wales, and divided their time between London, Seil, and the other side of the world. 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 easygoing 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. Frances also went into business with Peter.

She opened a gift shop in Oban, the nearest town. A baron’s daughter and an earl’s former wife was now a shopkeeper. It was in its way a good life, a quiet one, and it lasted until the week in 1980 when the newspapers discovered her youngest daughter. For her eighteenth birthday in July 1979, Diana was given a flat at Coleherne Court in London.

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. For a year or so, she was simply a young woman in London.

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. 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.

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 Kydd property near Yass. Diana was actually miles away, staying quietly in a beach house near Mollymook on the coast of New South Wales. “I then went away two days later to Australia for three weeks,” she told Morton, “to sort of settle down and to organize 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. The roles of the custody case were reversed in an odd way.

Now it was the mother who stood outside and the royal household that took the daughter in. Frances had her own feelings about that household. She had been born on its estate and married in front of it, and she had left it behind. “When I got away from that lot, it was wonderful,” she once said.

“I felt free now. ” Her youngest daughter was walking straight back into it. 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. ”

The wedding took place at St. Paul’s Cathedral on the twenty-ninth of July 1981. The royal biographer Hugo Vickers 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. Years later, Frances described it in a single sentence.

“She wore it on the day,” she said, “and it was with her for the rest of her life. ”

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.

” Either way, the pattern was set. Frances saw herself as the mother who had stood up for her daughter, written to the Times, taken her to Australia, and given her gold for her wedding day. Diana, looking back, saw a mother who wept when she herself needed to be strong. 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? 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. From the engagement onward, by her own account, the press never really left Frances alone. “The media descended here sixteen years ago,” she said in 1997, “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.

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. 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. In 1994, Frances Shand Kydd was received into the Roman Catholic Church, guided by a local bishop, Roderick Wright. The faith gave her a community she had never had in the grand houses of her youth.

Her son looked back on it with gratitude. During her last years, she found great comfort in it. She helped take very unwell children on pilgrimage to Lourdes, working with the Hosanna House and Children’s Pilgrimage Trust, which 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 for the families bereaved by the Lockerbie bombing. She joined the Colmcille Trust, which was raising money to build a Catholic house of prayer on the island of Iona, and became its appeals secretary. 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.

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 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. 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 Diana’s divorce and about her bulimia. 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. The two words stand alone, and they have been read ever since as cruelty. A mother rejoicing in her daughter’s humiliation.

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.

He has told the story of that call many times over many years. 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 a whore, 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. In later years, Burrell told it again on television and in the newspapers, and each time the words changed, growing harsher.

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. What is not in dispute is the silence.

Diana herself left no account of the call or of the quarrel. Francis 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.

Think of what that meant on both sides of the envelope. She wrote from the island through the long evenings of that summer, believing perhaps that anger passes. She wrote because writing was the only way she had left. 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.

Each of them was waiting for the other. The mother was waiting for the daughter to open a letter. The daughter was waiting, perhaps, for the mother to take back what she had said. Neither moved first.

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 Frances’s 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 and for all her loving and giving,” Frances wrote in the days after Paris. “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. 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, Diana was taken home to Althorp, to be buried on an island in the lake. Her mother was among the few family members there. “The last time I’d been there,” Frances 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. ”

She spoke at a memorial mass for Diana in Scotland. According to the Scotsman’s account, some 31,000 letters of sympathy reached her, and she answered 7,000 of them by hand.

Seven thousand replies, each written out by a grieving woman on an island to strangers who had written to say they were sorry. 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. Lady Sarah told the coroner that she and her mother had shredded sensitive documents that might be distressing to Diana’s sons. Burrell gave a larger picture. He said Frances had worked every day for a week shredding the papers from Diana’s desk.

He 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. On the twenty-fourth of October 2002, Frances Shand Kydd gave evidence at the Old Bailey in the trial of Paul Burrell. She was sixty-six.

She did not warm to the description of Burrell as Diana’s rock. “Diana called many people her rock,” she told the court. “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.

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 jewelry, all of it, to a value later put at £100,000.

None of it was insured. 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 the gold bracelet she had given Diana for her wedding.

“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 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.

By the end of 2003, her health was giving way. She died at home on Seil on the third of June 2004, sixty-eight years old, with a priest beside her. Her son’s office announced that she had passed away peacefully after suffering from a long illness. 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 traveling to Washington to represent the royal family at the 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. ” 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? 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? ”

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.