“Whither Victoria and with whom The Grand Old Queen · Look for the lady in the locked room at seventeen”

The expression “Whither Victoria and with whom? The Grand Old Queen? / Look for the lady in the locked room at seventeen” is the second Penny Black riddle. Its clues point retrospectively to the chapter in which the Penny Black cover was discovered, making the riddle a compact example of the case’s distinction between solving a puzzle after the fact and receiving a warning that could have prevented the crime.

The Riddle’s Clues

The final two lines direct the reader to “Look for the lady in the locked room / At seventeen.” John Wigfull identifies seventeen as chapter seventeen of the John Dickson Carr book that Milo Motion was about to read from. That chapter is titled “The Locked-Room Lecture.”

The riddle’s first two lines invoke “Victoria” and “The Grand Old Queen.” Wigfull’s interpretation takes the lady to be Queen Victoria; the connection to the Penny Black cover then depends on the chapter reference. The clues converge not on a literal room numbered seventeen, but on the locked-room chapter in which the cover was found.

Discovery and Interpretation

Julie Hargreaves remembers the opening lines as “Whither Victoria and with whom-The Grand Old Queen?” Wigfull treats the closing lines as the real puzzle and presents the chapter reference as a coherent solution. The riddle thus works through linked references: the Queen points toward the lady, while the number and locked-room wording direct attention to the chapter and its discovery.

The cover’s location gives Wigfull’s reading its force, but also makes its timing decisive. Peter Diamond acknowledges that the interpretation makes sense while objecting that it could not have guided the investigation in advance: the police had no way to know that the stamp would appear in chapter seventeen of an old, obscure book. In his view, the rhyme becomes legible only after the event, like the first riddle.

Role in the Case

The expression turns the stamp’s discovery into an answer to a literary puzzle, linking Queen Victoria, a locked-room chapter, and the Penny Black cover. Yet its apparent precision does not amount to a usable prediction. The gap between Wigfull’s satisfying retrospective explanation and Peter Diamond’s criticism keeps the riddle’s cleverness distinct from its practical value to the police.