In The Secret Guests, BW Black – AKA Benjamin Black, AKA Irish novelist John Banville – gussies up a wartime rumour of royal jiggery-pokery into a fanciful yarn that has just enough plausibility to see it home. Time was when such speculative mischief might have given them conniptions at the palace; nowadays the royals are surely too busy tearing their own reputation apart to notice a mere commoner having a dig.
The story opens in London 1940 as a young girl at a tall window watches bombs fall over the city. This turns out to be the 10-year-old Princess Margaret (“she hated being 10”), at home in Buckingham Palace. Such is the danger from the blitz that Margaret’s parents decide that she and her 14-year-old sister, Elizabeth, should be secretly packed off to a safe house till the coast is clear. Some bright spark chooses neutral Ireland as their bolt-hole, specifically Clonmillis House in darkest Tipperary, home of their distant relative the Duke of Edenmore.
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