‘Actually, I don’t know, Aunt Frances! I’ve come straight from Yorkshire. What did you write?’

Aunt Frances frowned. She had hoped that Quin would come prepared and joyful. ‘That I’ve invited the Placketts. Verena and her mother.’ And as Quin remained silent: ‘I knew Lady Plackett as a girl — surely she told you? We were together at finishing school.’

She looked at Quin and felt a deep unease. The signs of displeasure were only too familiar to her after twenty years of guardianship: Quin’s nose was looking particularly broken, his forehead had crumpled into craters of the kind seen on pictures of the moon.

‘Verena’s one of my students, Aunt Frances. It would be very wrong for me to treat her in a way that is different from the rest.’

Relief coursed through Aunt Frances. It was fear of seeming to single Verena out that was holding him back, nothing more.

‘Well, of course I see that, and so does she. In fact she’s said already that she expects no special treatment while you are working out of doors, but Lady Plackett is a friend — it would be very strange for me to refuse to entertain her daughter.’

Quin nodded, smiled — and the devastated features recomposed themselves into that of a personable man. Already he felt compunction: Aunt Frances must have been lonelier than he realized if she could contemplate entertaining the Placketts. Perhaps it had all been a mask, her unsociability, her stated desire to be alone — and he wondered, as he had not done for a long time, just how hurt she had been over her rejection on the Border all those years ago.

‘That’s all right, I’m sure it’ll all work out splendidly. I’d better go and change.’

But before he could make his way to the tower, he heard, somewhere above him, a cough. It was not a shy tentative cough, it was a clarion cough signalling an intention — and Quin, searching for its source, now saw a figure standing on the upstairs landing.

Verena, who had read so much, had also read that no man can resist the sight of a beautiful woman descending a noble staircase. She had watched Quin’s arrival out of her bedroom window and now, gowned simply but becomingly in bottle-green Celanese, she placed one hand on the carved banister, gathered up her skirt, and while her mother waited unselfishly in the shadows, began to make her way downstairs.

The descent began splendidly. Not only the long back, the long legs of the Croft-Ellises came to her aid, but the training she had received before her presentation at court. Verena, who had kicked her diamanté-encrusted train backwards with unerring aim as she retreated from Their Majesties, could hardly fail to walk with poise and dignity towards her host.

The first flight was accomplished and Quin stood as she had expected, his head thrown back, watching. She was not quite ready yet to utter the words she had prepared, but almost. ‘You cannot imagine what a pleasure it is to be in Bowmont after all we have heard of it,’ was what she planned to say.

But she didn’t say it. She didn’t, in fact, say anything coherent. For someone — and Aunt Frances was beginning to suspect the second housemaid whose father was a Socialist — had once more opened a door.

The puppy was not primarily interested in Verena, it was Aunt Frances that he desired, but as he passed the staircase, the mountaineering thirst which had sent him dashing at the running board of the Buick reasserted itself. With a growl of aspiration, he gathered himself together and leapt, managing to reach the bottom step at the same time as Verena completed her descent.

Verena did not tread the puppy underfoot, nor did she fall flat on her face. Anyone else would have done so, but not Verena. She did, however, stumble badly, throw out an arm, stagger — and land in disarray on her knees.

Quin, of course, was beside her in an instant to help her up — and to lead her to a chair where, being a Croft-Ellis, she at once made light of her mishap.

‘It is nothing,’ she said, as brave British girls in school stories have said for generations, spraining their ankles, biting their lips as they are carried away on gates.

But about the puppy it was more difficult to be charitable, especially as she had torn the lining of her dress, and Lady Plackett, hurrying down to aid her daughter, did not even make the attempt.

‘What an extraordinary creature!’ she said. ‘Does it belong to one of the servants?’

Miss Somerville, mortified, said the puppy was going to the village carpenter on the following day and tried to catch it, but it was Quin who seized the little dog, upended it, and examined it with the intensity which zoologists devote to a hitherto undescribed species.

‘Amazing!’ he said, grinning at his aunt. ‘Those abdominal whiskers must be unique surely? Does Barker know that he is to be the most fortunate of men?

Miss Somerville, not amused by his levity, said Barker was behind with repairs to the pews in the church and would presumably know his duty, and carried the dog from the room.

In spite of this inauspicious beginning, dinner went off well and Miss Somerville, reviewing the evening in the privacy of her bedroom, had every reason to be satisfied. Perhaps Quin’s chivalry had been aroused by Verena’s unfortunate descent; at any rate he was attentive and charming and Verena said everything that was proper. She admired the portrait of the Somervilles, even declaring that the Basher’s face was full of character; she was able to be intelligent about farming, for her uncle in Rutland not only bred Border Leicesters but had a prize herd of Charolais cattle. And when Miss Somerville mentioned — trying to make a joke of it — Quin’s intention of making the house over to the Trust, the Placketts had been as incredulous and aghast as she had hoped.

‘You cannot be serious, Professor!’ Lady Plackett had exclaimed. And Verena, risking a somewhat outspoken remark said: ‘Forgive me, but I would feel as though I was betraying my unborn children.’

In fact Verena, throughout the evening, said all the things that Frances had been thinking. Verena was sound on the subject of refugees and had, when Quin was out of the room, expressed satisfaction that an Austrian girl in her year would not be coming up with the others later that night. She was able to trace a connection between the Croft-Ellises and the Somervilles, distant but reassuring, and what she said about the puppy was exactly what Miss Somerville herself had been thinking — it really was kinder in cases of this sort to drown the little things at birth.

‘A very pleasant girl,’ said Miss Somerville, as Martha came to bring her her bedtime cocoa.

A medieval monk bent on poverty, chastity and the subjugation of the flesh would have been entirely at home in Miss Somerville’s bedroom. The window was open, letting in gusts of the damp night air, the rugs on the bare floorboards were worn, the mattress on the four-poster had been lumpy when Frances came to Bowmont and was lumpy still.

Martha agreed. ‘She’s made a good impression below stairs,’ she said, not thinking it necessary to add that a Hottentot with smallpox would have done the same if it ensured that Bowmont remained in private hands and that the servants’ jobs were safe.

It was Martha who had gone with Frances to the house of her fiancé on the Border, Martha who had come back after twenty-four hours and kept her peace for forty years about what had happened there — but even Martha could go too far.

‘Why don’t you let me get you a hot-water bottle?’ she asked now, for her mistress, in spite of the success of the evening, was looking tired and drawn and the cold did nothing for her arthritis.

‘Certainly not!’ snapped Frances. ‘On December the 1st I have a bottle and not a day earlier — you know that perfectly well.’ But she allowed Martha to pick up the battered silver hair brush and brush out her sparse grey hair. ‘I take it it was Elsie who let the puppy out?’ she said presently.

Martha nodded. ‘She’s soft, that girl. It’s with Comely not having anything to do with it. She hears it crying.’

‘Well, see that it’s taken down to Barker first thing in the morning; it nearly caused a nasty accident.’

‘It’ll have to be the day after. He’s away over at Amble tomorrow. They’re breaking up a ship and he’s got some wood ordered.’

Lying in bed, her icy feet curled under her, Frances again thought how well the evening had gone — and in any case she meant to go and live in the village once Quin was married. True, Quin had not shown any particular interest in Verena, but that would come — and glad of an excuse, she picked Pride and Prejudice off the bedside table. ‘She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me,’ Mr Darcy had said when he first saw Elizabeth Bennet. Oh yes, there was plenty of time.

Unaware of his aunt’s hopes, and deeply unconcerned with the fate of Verena Plackett, Quin stood by the window of his tower room and looked out at the ocean and the moon, continually obscured by fierce black clouds. It was still raining but the barometer was rising. It had been a risk bringing the students up so late in the year, but if Northumberland did choose to lay on an Indian summer, they would find themselves most richly rewarded. The autumn could be breathtakingly lovely here.

Quin had slept in the room at the top of the tower since his grandfather had led him there at the age of eight, a bewildered orphan in foreign clothes and a pair of outsize spectacles supposed to strengthen his eyes after an attack of measles. Separated by three flights of stairs from his nurse, laid to rest each night under the pelt of a polar bear which the Basher had shot in Alaska, Quin had gone to bed in terror — yet even then he would not have changed his eyrie for the world.

The students were due any moment now: the bus hired to fetch them from Newcastle could bump its way right down to Anchorage Bay. He’d been down earlier to check that the arrangements were in order: the stove lit in the little common room, the Bunsen burners connected to the Calor gas, the blankets in the dormitories above the lab properly aired. Everything was in hand yet he felt restless, and hardly aware of what he was doing, he picked up the guitar in the corner of the room and began to tune the strings.

Quin’s guitar studies had not progressed very far. He had in fact stayed stuck on Book Two of the manual and his friends at Cambridge had always been unpleasant about his performance, putting their fingers in their ears or leaving the room. But though he could play only a few of the pieces in the book, they covered the normal range of human emotion: ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’ was cheerful and outgoing; ‘Evening Elegy’ was lyrical and romantic — and the ‘Mississippi Moan’ was — well, a moan.

It was this piece which had particularly emptied the room when he played it at college, but Quin was much attached to it. Now, as the plaintive lament from the Deep South stole through the room, Quin realized that he had not chosen the ‘Moan’ at random. He did in fact feel a sense of disquiet… of unease… and a few broken chords later, he realized why.

For it had to be admitted that he had not behaved well over Felton’s efforts to bring Ruth to Bowmont. Roger worked ceaselessly for the students and deputized willingly for him, enduring all the boredom of committees. If he had set his heart on bringing the girl to Northumberland, Quin should have helped him. It would have been perfectly simple to work something out, nor was he in the least troubled by the disapproval of the Placketts. The truth was, he had acted selfishly, not wanting to be involved in the girl’s emotionalism, her endless ability to live deep.

Well, it was done now, and the ‘Moan’ — as it so often did — had cleared the air. Putting regret behind him, Quin moved to his desk and picked up Hackenstreicher’s latest letter to Nature. Time to put this idiot out of his misery once and for all. Pulling the typewriter towards him, he inserted a clean sheet of paper.

Dear Sir, he wrote, It is perhaps worth pointing out in connection with Professor Hackenstreicher’s communication (Nature, August 6th 1938) that his examination of a single cranial cast of Ceratopsian Styracosaurus scarcely warrants a rejection of Broom’s reconstruction of evolution from a common stock. Not only was the cast incomplete, but its provenance is disputed by…

He was still writing as the bus passed the gates behind the house and bumped its way towards the beach.