25 March 1919
London

Philippe sat at the desk beside the window, barely noticing the hotel room’s opulence. Staff had drawn the heavy curtains for the night but the faint clop of harnessed horses could still be heard in the street outside, mingled with the chug of earlymodel cars and overladen buses taking office workers home. London was beginning to reopen in the lee of the Great War, the world at an uneasy peace as the terms of Germany’s surrender were thrashed out in what would become the Treaty of Versailles.

But Philippe’s mind was elsewhere this night, head bowed in concentration and pen poised over a sheet of hotel stationery, excited and yet uncertain about what he should write.

He was normally a man of supreme self-belief, even though others had prevented him from attaining what he considered his birthright. Philippe d’Orleans, ‘pretender’ to the French throne, had lived most of his life in exile from his Paris home, a fate he regarded as worse than a prison sentence. He was locked outside rather than locked within.

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