‘Can I have some of that?’

Elinor said, ‘Were you listening at the door?’

Marianne smiled at her. ‘Yes, I was.’

‘For how long?’

‘To hear enough,’ Marianne said. She looked at the wine again. ‘No sharing?’

Elinor regarded her. She said coolly, ‘Get a glass.’

‘Darling,’ Belle said, ‘I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up. Especially Bill’s.’

Marianne got up and went round behind Elinor’s chair to the cupboard where the glasses were kept. She said casually, ‘He’s a lovely man. A really lovely man. And you’re quite right, he’s attractive.’

‘And’, Elinor demanded, ‘Wills? Is he attractive?’

Marianne went back to her seat and put the wine glass on the table.

‘I – I can’t answer that,’ she said quietly. ‘Not yet. You shouldn’t ask me.’

There was silence. Belle pushed the wine bottle towards Marianne. She picked it up, poured, and put it down again. Then she said, more hesitantly, ‘What would make a difference to how I think about all that is just to know that I wasn’t duped, that I didn’t imagine it all, that I didn’t make something up because I so wanted it to be true. I would love to know he wasn’t cynical, on top of everything else.’

She stopped. Belle looked at Elinor. Elinor leaned towards her sister.

‘You didn’t overhear that bit, then. He wasn’t cynical.’

Marianne took a sip of her wine. ‘How d’you know?’

‘Because he came to the hospital.’

Marianne put her glass down with a small bang. Her cheeks suddenly flamed and she put her hands up against them.

‘He – he what?’

‘He dashed down from London, the day you were in hospital.’

‘But – but how did he know?’

‘Charlotte rang him. She thought he deserved to know because he’s still crazy about you. Always has been. He asked me to tell you.’

Marianne took her hands away from her face and laid them on the table. She sighed. She said simply, ‘Oh.’

Belle leaned forward. She said, ‘It’s what I always said, darling. That he wasn’t to be trusted.’

‘Ellie,’ Marianne said, as if her mother hadn’t spoken, ‘why didn’t you tell me he’d been?’

‘I was going to—’

‘Did you think it would start me up again?’

Elinor said hesitantly, ‘Well, I did wonder.’

Marianne smiled at her a little sadly. She said, ‘So you could say, like Mags, that he is just a shagbandit?’

Belle gave a little jump. ‘Where does she get such language?’

‘School, Ma.’

Belle looked round. ‘I suppose I should summon her out of her tree …’

‘In a minute,’ Elinor said. She leaned towards her sister.

‘M. M – are you OK?’

Marianne nodded vehemently. ‘I am. I am. I’m – going to be.’

‘Don’t force yourself,’ Elinor said.

Marianne said a little desperately, ‘Believing in a bastard takes a bit of getting over.’

‘Of course.’

‘But I’ll do it, Ellie. I’ll get there. It just – just shakes your self-belief a bit, doesn’t it?’

There was a flash of someone running past the kitchen window.

‘She’s coming.’

The door flew open. Margaret stood on the threshold, panting, her school tie, with its carefully uneven ends, under one ear.

‘You’ll never guess …’

‘What, Mags?’

‘I just saw Thomas,’ Margaret said. ‘He came to put that other plank in, so I’ve got more floor space, and he said he’d seen Lucy in Exeter today, all dolled up and stuff, and she flashed a ring at him, a wedding ring.’ She paused, and then looked at Elinor, and her expression was one of intense distress. ‘Ellie,’ she said, ‘Ellie, I’m so sorry. I really am – but they’re married.’

Elinor lay wakefully in the dark. Marianne had wanted to stay with her and be comforting, but Elinor had said that she needed to be alone, quite alone, and Marianne hadn’t persisted but had simply slipped back to her own room without saying anything further, just squeezing Elinor’s shoulder as she left.

So, Elinor thought, here I am, here we are, all of us, roughly where we were when we left Norland, except that Marianne has survived an adventure – or, you could say, had an amazingly lucky escape – and I have had my hopes raised and lowered so many times that now that they are finally dashed, I’m so battered by the seesaw that I hardly know what I feel. Except I do. If I’m honest, I know that I went on hoping, hoping and hoping, that Edward’s good conduct would finally see a bit of good sense too, and he wouldn’t actually marry her. Of course, she’d want to marry him, as fast as possible, in case he got away, but I really thought – no, I really hoped – that he would realise that if he went through with it, he was committing an act of utterly idiotic nobility, and the end result would be misery all round. A gigantic pratfall, and the biggest prat would be him.

I don’t want him, Elinor thought, twisting restlessly on to her side, to look a prat. I don’t want him to be miserable. I don’t want him and Lucy all mixed up with Bill and Delaford and everything, so that I can’t avoid them, and have to go on pretending I’m OK. I’m not OK. Even Ma saw I wasn’t OK tonight and made a very un-Ma-like speech about taking me for granted and how sorry she was. I don’t think I was very graceful about what she said. I think I just grunted. I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t quite summon up the energy to behave as I ought to have done. Poor Ma. I’ll say sorry tomorrow. I’ll do a lot of things tomorrow, like starting to emulate Marianne in putting loving a waste-of-space man behind me. It’s so – so disappointing. Disappointment is so hard to bear – why don’t we make more allowance for it? Dashed hopes, resigning oneself, learning to bear, to endure – why is there so much of it, all the time?

Sleep was clearly out of the question. She got out of bed and went to the window. It was completely dark at Barton at night-time, and the only lights she could see now were the security ones in the stable yard down at the Park, no doubt triggered by a passing fox. They’d been so concerned, everyone at the Park, about Marianne, sending flowers, and a basket of mini muffins, and the children had drawn pictures for her, and signed them with hearts and smiley faces. And when Elinor had gone to find Thomas at suppertime to ask him the details of meeting Lucy in Exeter, he’d looked so grave and sorry, and told her what had happened with the most profound reluctance.

‘I didn’t want you to know,’ he said. He was holding the high-pressure hose he used to wash mud off Sir John’s Range Rover. ‘But I didn’t want you not to know, either.’

Elinor looked away. She said, with difficulty, ‘Did you see him?’

‘No,’ Thomas said. ‘To be honest, I was glad not to. She said he was waiting in the car. I don’t know where they were going. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know.’

Elinor wrapped her arms round herself for consolation. She said sadly, ‘Thank you for telling me.’

He sighed. He yanked out a length of hose and let it slap on to the garage floor.

‘I wouldn’t have,’ he said, ‘if she hadn’t shown me her ring. I wouldn’t have believed her. But there was the ring, and her saying – laughing, she was – that she was Lucy Ferrars now.’ He’d glanced up at Elinor. ‘Pardon my French, but he’s a bloody idiot.’

And that, Elinor thought, will be the general opinion. That gormless Ferrars boy, captured by a gold-digger. Those silly Dashwood girls, blighted by a universally hopeless taste in men. No wonder they’re single. Their poor mother. The lights in the stable yard went out suddenly and the whole valley below vanished into darkness. Elinor shivered. It might be almost early summer, but the night air was still quite sharp. Was it easier to detach yourself emotionally from a real bastard, like Wills, or from a basically lovely man who’d got so screwed up by his childhood that he persisted in doing the wonderfully right thing in the totally wrong way? Whichever, it hurt. It hurt and hurt. And she was going to have to get used to living with that hurt because she was not the kind of person who gave her heart away at all easily. Damn him. Damn them all. Instead of lecturing Marianne about facing herself rather than seeking a rescuing soulmate, she was going to have to eat her own patronising words, syllable by syllable.

She ran back across the room and leaped into bed, whirling the duvet over her head and letting it settle softly round her. ‘Serve you right,’ she said to herself in the shrouded darkness. ‘Serve you completely right, stupid, stupid Miss Sensible.’

One of the advantages of Barton Cottage was its position. Not only were there spectacular views, but you could see anyone approaching: in fact, nobody could get to the cottage by one of Sir John’s estate roads without being visible for the last mile at least. But that visibility, Belle had decided, after nine months of living without neighbours, noise or light pollution, also served to remind her how astonishingly isolated she was. She remembered once reading an interview with a man who had retreated to live on a remote Hebridean island and who, when asked if he wasn’t lonely, replied robustly that luckily he wasn’t afraid of the inside of his own head. It wasn’t that Belle was exactly afraid of what was inside her head, but more that she was rather bored by it. Life at Norland had always been busy with all those rooms and people to look after. There wasn’t a day, she reflected, without more people to feed than just the family, and if it wasn’t guests, it was the garden. The garden at Norland had been insatiable. The garden here at Barton Cottage was negligible, being laid out with holiday lets in mind, and whatever trimming or mowing needed doing was done by Thomas with a kind of park-keeper’s competence that was not at all to Belle’s taste. Sometimes – and even with a convalescent Marianne in the house – Belle would stand at her sitting-room window, between the old damask curtains brought from Norland, and gaze at Sir John’s well-maintained and virtually empty roads laid out below her in the valley, and feel an isolation so intense that she wondered that a booming voice didn’t issue from the clouds above the hills and ask her if she was all right?

‘I can’t spend all summer doing nothing,’ she said to Marianne. ‘And nor can you.’

Marianne was in a chair by the sitting-room window with her laptop balanced on her knee. ‘I’m not,’ she said, without looking up. ‘I’m checking courses.’

‘Oh, good,’ Belle said. ‘Not—’ She stopped.

‘Not checking Facebook to see what Wills is up to, you mean?’

‘Well, I—’

‘Ma,’ Marianne said, ‘I think I am pretty well over John Willoughby.’

‘Really, darling? Really?’

Marianne raised her head to look at her mother. ‘I’m over him enough to see I had quite a lucky escape, and that just fancying someone isn’t enough, especially if you can’t trust them or respect them. I can’t say I don’t still fancy him a bit, if I’m completely honest, but I do see that he was bad for me, and bad to me, and made me far more miserable than he ever made me happy. So I’ve come a long way, Ma, don’t you think? And don’t start crying. Don’t. Just tell me something nice – like what plans have you been making?’

‘Darling, I never—’

‘Yes, you do, all the time. You’re always planning something. What have you got in your little Ma mind now?’

Belle said, sniffing slightly but with an elaborate air of casualness, ‘I thought we could ask some people to stay.’

‘Like?’

‘Well …’

‘Not like Fanny and John, please, Ma.’

‘No,’ Belle said. ‘Certainly not Fanny and John. More like – Bill, actually.’

‘Bill,’ Marianne echoed, without emphasis.

‘He’d be a lovely guest.’

‘He usually stays at the Park, Ma.’

‘He’s been so sweet, ringing to ask how you are. He was horrified when you came out of hospital, you were so pale and drawn. It was pitiful to see.’

Marianne looked up, smiling. ‘Who was, Ma? Me or him?’

Belle took no notice. ‘Well, I’ve asked him to come and stay, and he hasn’t said he won’t.’

Marianne went on smiling. ‘Good,’ she said.

‘Will you be nice to him, darling?’

‘Of course. As long as you don’t watch us.’

‘Darling! Would I?’

‘Yes,’ Marianne said. She looked back at her screen.

Belle went on staring down the valley. Then she said, ‘That could, of course, be his car.’