Elinor felt herself glow unwillingly pink. She said irritably, ‘He’s just nice to me.’

‘Nicer, dear,’ Abigail Jennings said, ‘than that useless Ferrars boy of yours is.’

‘He’s not useless.’

‘No?’

Elinor said, more indignantly than she intended, ‘He may be a bit weak but he isn’t cruel, like Wills. He isn’t selfish and – and venal …’

Charlotte and her mother rolled their eyes at one another. ‘Oooh!’

Elinor said more calmly, ‘And he’s not mine! He’s nobody’s. He’s his own person. Like – like Bill is. And – and I am.’

Charlotte moved sideways and poked Elinor in the ribs. ‘Every cloud has a silver lining, Ellie!’

‘Oh, my dear,’ Mrs Jennings said, laughing, ‘almost platinum, in his case!’

‘Please,’ Elinor said, in sudden, real distress. ‘Please. Marianne’s ill.’

‘But she’ll get better. Of course she will! A bit more sleep, Gordon said, and a quiet life—’

The bell from the street door storeys below rang loudly. Without reference to her mother, Charlotte ran to the intercom on the wall and snatched up the receiver. She said excitedly into it, ‘Bill? Bill! We’re expecting you! Kettle on! Come on up, top floor, welcome mat out!’ She put the handset back in its cradle and turned to face the room again. ‘D’you suppose’, she said, ‘anyone at Delaford showed him the YouTube clip?’

‘I had to get you out of there,’ Bill Brandon said. ‘You looked as if you were about to commit murder.’

Elinor looked across the cold, sunny spaces of Hyde Park. She hunched her shoulders inside Mrs Jennings’s borrowed fur-collared padded jacket. She said, ‘Mrs J. has been so wonderful, really, so supportive and generous. But she has a complete tin ear for anything sensitive. And Charlotte has two.’

Bill said, slightly self-consciously, ‘Marianne looked so lovely, didn’t she, lying there asleep.’

‘I’m so thankful she’s asleep.’

‘Was – was she desperately upset?’

Elinor put her hands in the pockets of her jacket. ‘She woke at three. And cried till five. It’s coming to terms with what he really is that’s going to be so hard. If she could believe him to be basically decent, it would be different, but there is nothing to be said for him, nothing. And she’s got to face the fact that she fell utterly for someone like that.’

Bill let a small silence fall and then he said, ‘It’s the “utterly” quality in her that I can’t resist.’

Elinor darted a quick look at him. ‘I know. It’s always been like that with her. Absolutely all or absolutely nothing. And you risk humiliating yourself if you’re like that.’

Bill paused by a bench at the edge of the path they were following. He said, ‘Will you freeze if we sit down?’

Elinor indicated her jacket. ‘Not in my Mrs Jennings insulation.’

He waited courteously for her to sit first. He had driven from Somerset that morning and he looked as clean and organised as if he had started the day ten minutes ago. Elinor said, ‘You’re so nice to come.’

He sat down beside her and put his elbows on his knees. He said, ‘I wanted to. I had to. The very thought—’

‘Better sooner than later, maybe,’ Elinor said. She looked down at the toes of her boots. ‘I mean, with hindsight you could see this disaster coming, you could see it had hopeless written all over it, but Marianne was so sure, so sure …’

‘Elinor.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve got something to tell you.’ He half turned and looked at her. ‘Not a nice story. But you need to know. You need to know she’s well out of it.’

Elinor stared at him. ‘What?’

Bill looked away from her again, across the cold, bleached winter grass. ‘I don’t know where to start.’

‘At the beginning?’

There was a silence, and then Bill said, ‘His father knew my father. And Jonno’s.’

Elinor let another small pause elapse, and then she said, ‘Is that the beginning?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No. Sorry. The beginning was – was a girl.’

‘Yes.’

He linked his hands and stared on, into the distance. ‘A sort of cousin. My father had a soft spot for her mother, I suspect, and when her mother died of cancer, very young, Eliza came to live with us.’

‘Us?’ Elinor said.

‘My family. My parents and my brother, and me. She grew up with us. She was fair, not dark, but … but she was so like Marianne. Just – just the same eagerness and passion and energy. Just the same – carelessness about what people thought.’

Elinor waited.

Bill said slowly, ‘We – we all adored her. Me especially. I’m afraid my brother just adored being adored. And he was such a daredevil and she was sort of mesmerised by him. She really liked me, trusted me, maybe loved me, even, but my brother was such an exciting challenge. To do her justice, my mother never thought they should marry, but my father was all for it. Thought it would tame him and that her money would mend Delaford. I was a basket case on their wedding day. Thank God for the army, frankly; it gave me somewhere to go, something to do. I didn’t actually want to be in touch after they were married, but our parents both dying soon after – they were heavy smokers, the pair of them – meant that I couldn’t avoid knowing that the marriage was catastrophic from the get-go, and then, of course, she left him.’

He stopped and looked down at the path between his feet. Elinor said awkwardly, ‘Did – did you …’ And couldn’t finish her sentence.

He sat up straighter and put one arm along the back of the seat behind her.

‘I didn’t go and find her, if that’s what you mean. I should have, and I didn’t. I was so involved in what to do about Delaford, which was now my brother’s, and he was pretty well an alcoholic by then.’

‘Was?’

‘He was killed,’ Bill said, ‘in a car crash. In fog. About four times over the limit. That’s why I’ve got Delaford.’

Elinor glanced at him. It came to her that Bill Brandon, sitting beside her in the cold, bright winter sunshine, looked very much more satisfactory as older-brother material than John Dashwood. She said gently, ‘And then?’

‘And then,’ Bill said, ‘after George’s death, I went to look for Eliza.’

‘And?’

He sighed. ‘It was hideous. I can’t tell you. She’d run through her money, gone from man to man, had a baby by her first dealer—’

‘Dealer?’ Elinor exclaimed in horror.

‘Oh yes,’ Bill said. ‘I found her at last in a crack house, in east Birmingham. The baby – well, she wasn’t a baby any more, she was three – was in care. Eliza was, literally, a wreck.’

Elinor said nothing. She slid one hand out of her pocket and touched Bill’s arm. He gave her a faint smile. He said, ‘I’m afraid that’s not the end. Can you stand any more?’

She nodded.

He gripped her hand for a second with his free one, and let it go. He said, ‘I got her into hospital, before she died. It was days only. Her heart just gave out. Years of chaos, of rackety living. And then I spent the best part of the next three years persuading social services to let me at least educate little Eliza, even if she had to live with a foster family because I was deemed some unfit old pervert for even suggesting bringing her up myself.’ He gave a short, wry bark of laughter. ‘I came out of the Army about then, and set up Delaford. As a kind of memorial to Eliza, if you like. I never thought—’ He broke off.

‘What?’

‘I never thought it would serve for little Eliza, too.’

Elinor gasped. Bill leaned a little towards her. ‘Sorry about this part. Really sorry. But you have to know.’

‘OK,’ she said.

‘Little Eliza knew how and why her mother had died. She had lovely foster parents and we made a real effort that she should be under no illusions about addictions. Christ, Elinor, I even took her to the street where I’d found her mother, and even though the house wasn’t a crack den any more, it wasn’t fit for dogs to live in. And she was fine. Really fine. For years. Even with her mother’s temperament and sense of adventure, she was OK. I know it. And then she fell for someone. She met him at a club, a club in South Kensington. And he gave her her first hit. And, Elinor, you – you know him.’

Elinor felt her mouth dry, suddenly and completely, as if her tongue were being glued to the roof of her mouth. She said, hoarsely, ‘Wills?’

Bill Brandon sighed again. ‘He knew about her, because of our Somerset and Devon connections, because of all the awful stories swirling round my family. I couldn’t truthfully say he set out to corrupt her, but I would guess he thought he might have a bit of fun. Like mother, like daughter. Party girls. Up for anything. The last few years have been a repeat nightmare of what happened to Eliza. One crisis after another.’

He looked directly at Elinor. ‘That’s why I had to dash off, that day at Barton. The police had smashed down a lavatory door in a pub in Camden the night before, because little Eliza was inside, injecting into her feet.’

Elinor gave a small cry and put both hands over her mouth.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Bill said, ‘I really am. The details are so horrible, and for poor little Eliza too. She’d had an abortion, you see, and I think it drove her back on to the hard stuff. I wish you didn’t need to know. But you can see …’

Elinor nodded vehemently, unable to speak.

‘Your sister,’ Bill said, ‘your sweet, impulsive, wholehearted sister – I couldn’t bear to see another girl sacrificed just because she wasn’t worldly wise. I didn’t want to rain on anyone’s parade but I just could not stand to see that bastard making your sister believe he was worth a minute of her time. I thought, when I first saw them at Barton together, that he might be redeemable, with someone like her, but then all the Eliza business blew up, and I heard about the Callianos girl and I thought, No, sorry, same dangerous old Wills, and that you should know.’ He paused and then he said, in a lower voice, ‘I’ve been such a failure in looking out for either of them. Haven’t I?’

Elinor took her hands away from her mouth and regarded him. She looked grave, but no longer horrified. He tried to smile at her. He said, ‘So you see why I’m such a … such a sad old stick.’

She shook her head, and then she leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. ‘You are so not,’ she said. ‘You are a lovely, principled man.’

‘You can look if you like,’ Marianne said. She was lying on her side in bed, in her plaid and rosebud pyjamas, facing away from her sister. At the end of the bed, balanced against the footboard, was a stiff green department-store carrier bag. ‘It’s got everything I ever gave him in it,’ she said. ‘CDs and books and stuff. And a photo in a frame. And his ring.’

Elinor picked up the carrier bag and peered inside. The contents were in a jumble. ‘Oh, M.’

‘The ring is inside a plastic bag,’ Marianne said, not turning. ‘Just an old plastic ziplock thing, the kind you put sandwiches in. Just – dumped in there.’

Elinor put the bag down again. She said, ‘Was there a note?’

‘No.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing,’ Marianne said. ‘It was delivered on a bike. There was a boy on a bike who needed a signature from Mrs J. The bag didn’t even have a handwritten name and address on it. It was a typed label.’

Elinor sat down on the side of the bed. She put her hand on Marianne’s hip. ‘Where’s your ring?’

Marianne fumbled inside her pyjama jacket. Here.’

‘Wouldn’t you like to take it off? Especially now you know what Bill Brandon told me, and this bag has come?’

Slowly Marianne turned on to her back and sat up. There were violet smudges under her eyes, but she was breathing normally, and her skin, though pale, was no longer grey-white with lack of oxygen. She put her hands up into her hair, behind her neck. ‘I can’t undo it.’

Elinor bent forward, arms outstretched. ‘M, did you take in what I told you about Wills, and Bill’s ward?’

‘Yes,’ Marianne said. ‘I’ll be glad to get this off.’

Elinor found the ring bolt on the chain and released it. She held it up. ‘In the bag?’

‘In the bin,’ Marianne said. ‘With everything else. Put it all in the bin.’

Elinor dropped the ring and the chain into the carrier bag, and then put the bag on the floor. She said, ‘Have you told Ma?’

Marianne looked away. ‘She was on the phone almost all the time you were out. She says I shouldn’t go home. She thinks that if I’m at home I’ll only start remembering, that I’ll be reminded all the time—’ She broke off and said, in a whisper, ‘Ellie, how could he?’