But she wouldn’t heed him. ‘And what of her? Do you think she was so feeble? Do you think she didn’t want it? She was brave — look at her face. She wanted a child. Not for Bowmont, not for your father. She wanted one because a child is a marvellous thing to have. Why do you patronize women so? Why can’t they risk their lives as men do? They have a right, as much as any man.’

‘To jump into the sea for a half-grown mongrel?’ he jeered.

‘Yes. For anything they choose.’ But she bent her head, for she knew she had risked not only her own life, but his and perhaps Sam’s — that his cruelty down there on the boat had had a cause. ‘I’m a mongrel too,’ she said very quietly. ‘And anyway your aunt loves it.’

‘Loves the puppy? Are you mad? She’s done nothing but try to give it away.’

Again that shrug, so characteristic of the Viennese. ‘My father always says, “Don’t look at what people say look at what they do.” Why did your aunt choose the carpenter — everyone knew his wife had asthma and she wasn’t allowed to have pets? Why the publican when his mother was attacked by an Alsatian when she was little and she was terrified of dogs?’

‘How do you know all this?’ he said irritably. How did she know, in a week at Bowmont, that Elsie was interested in herbalism, that Mrs Ridley’s grandmother knew the Darlings? It was infuriating, this foible of hers: this embarrassing ability to go in deep. Whoever married her would be driven mad by it. Heini would be driven mad by it. ‘Anyway, my father never recovered. He carried the guilt and wretchedness for the rest of his life. It probably killed him too — he volunteered in 1916 when there was no need to do so.’

‘There you go again. The English are so melodramatic! A bullet killed him.’

‘What’s the matter with you?’ asked Quin, not accustomed to being deflated by a girl whose emotionalism was a byword. And amazed by what he was about to do, he went over to the desk, unlocked a drawer, and took out a faded exercise book with a blue marbled cover.

‘Read it,’ he said. ‘It’s my father’s diary.’

The book fell open at the page he had read a hundred times and not shown to a living soul, and Ruth took it and moved closer to the lamp.

‘I came back from Claire’s funeral, she read, and Marie brought me the baby, as though the sight of it could console me, that puce, wrinkled creature with its insatiable greed for life. The baby killed her — no, I killed her. I was cleverer than the doctors who told me she musn’t bear a child. I knew better, I wanted a son. I wanted to bring the boy back to Bowmont and show my father that I had produced an heir — that he need despise me no longer. Yes, I who hated him, who fled Bowmont and turned my back on the iniquities of inheritance and wealth, was as tainted as he was by the desire for power. Claire wanted a baby; I try not to forget that, but it was my job to be wiser than she.

Now I have to try and love the child; he is not to blame, but I have no desire to live without her and no love left to give. If I have a wish it is that he at least will relinquish his inheritance and go forth as a free man among his equals.

Ruth shut the diary. ‘Poor man,’ she said quietly. ‘But why do you embalm him? You should grow radishes, like Mishak.’

‘What?’ For a moment he wondered whether her brain had been affected by the accident.

‘Marianne didn’t like radishes. His wife. He never grew them when she was alive. When she died, he said, “Now I must grow radishes or she will remain under the ground.” He meant that the dead must be allowed to move about freely inside us, they musn’t be encapsulated, made finite by their prejudices.’ She paused, moving her hair out of her eyes in a gesture with which he was utterly familiar. ‘He grows a lot of radishes and I don’t like them very much as it happens, but I eat them. All of us eat them.’ She paused. ‘Perhaps it’s right to give Bowmont away; I don’t know about that, and it’s none of my business — but surely it must be because you want to, not because of what you think he might have wanted? He would have grown and changed and seen things differently perhaps. Look how you hated me this afternoon — but you have not always done so and perhaps one day you will do so no longer.’

Quin looked at her, started to speak. Then he took the diary and locked it up again in the bureau. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘I think it’s time you met the Basher.’

He took his old tweed jacket off the peg behind the door and put it round her shoulders. As he led her downstairs, he made no attempt to be unheard, switching on lights as he came to them, walking with a firm tread. He knew exactly what he would do if they were discovered and that it would cause him no moment of unease.

They made their way down the corridor that connected the tower with the body of the house and as he steered her, one hand on her back, through the rooms, she touched, here and there, the black shabby leather chair, the surface of a worn, much-polished table, learning Quin’s house, and liking what she learnt. Inside the fortress was an unpretentious home, and the hallmark of the woman who had been its curator was everywhere. Aunt Frances, who had left Quin alone, had left his house alone also. There was none of the forbidding grandeur Ruth had imagined; only a place waiting quietly for those who wished to come.

But this was a journey with a particular end, and by the far wall of the library, Quin stopped. In Aunt Frances’s flannel nightgown, Quin’s jacket hanging loose from her shoulders, Ruth stared at the portrait of Rear Admiral Quinton Henry Somerville in his heavy golden frame.

The Basher had been seventy when the portrait was commissioned by his parishioners and the artist, a local worthy, had clearly done his best to flatter his sitter, but his success had been moderate. The Basher’s cheeks, for which a great deal of rose madder had been required, showed the broken veins caused by the whisky and the weather; his short, surprisingly snub nose was touched at the tip with purple. In spite of his grand dress uniform and the bull neck rising from its braided collar, Quin’s grandfather, with his small mouth, bald pate and obstinate blue eyes, resembled nothing so much as an ill-tempered baby.

‘And yet,’ said Ruth, ‘there is something…’

‘There’s something all right. Pig-headedness, ferocity… in the navy he bullied his officers; he thought flogging was good for the ratings. He married for money — a lot of money — and treated his wife abominably. And when he died, every single soul in North Northumberland came to the funeral and shook their heads and said that the good times were past and England would never be the same again.’

‘Yes, I can see that it might be so.’

‘He despised my father because he liked poetry — because he liked to be with his mother in the garden. He was terrified that he’d bred a coward. Cowardice frightened him; it was the only thing that did — to have a son who was a weakling. My father was wretched at school — he went when he was seven and he cried himself to sleep every night for years. He hated sailing, hated the sea. He was a gentle soul and the Basher despised him from the bottom of his heart. He was determined that my father should go into the navy, but my father wouldn’t. He stood up to him over that. Then at fifteen he ran away to one of his mother’s relatives. She took him abroad and he joined the Diplomatic Service and did very well — but he never went back to Bowmont. He loathed everything it stood for — power, privilege, Philistinism — the contempt for the things he valued. Yet you see when it came to the point, he risked my mother’s life so that it could all go on.’

Ruth was silent, looking at the portrait, wondering why this ferocious Englishman should have a nose like Beethoven’s, wondering why she did not dislike that hard old face.

‘But you liked him?’

‘No.’ Quin hesitated. ‘I was eight when I came to Bowmont. I’d heard only awful stories about him and he was all that I had heard. He put me into the tower to sleep under the bear he’d shot, teeth and all. I was there alone, a child with a father blown to pieces in the war. I was terrified of the dark — I’d come straight from Switzerland and heard the servants talk about my mother’s death — the screams, the blood when I was born. Going to bed was purgatory. I liked the tower but I wanted a night light — I begged for one, but he said no. I wasn’t afraid of anything out of doors… climbing, sailing… I loved the sea as he did. He saw that, but he was obstinate. One day I said: “If I sail alone to Harcar Rock and back, can I have a night light?” He said: “If you sail alone to Harcar Rock, I’ll beat you within an inch of your life.” He used to talk like that, like a boy’s adventure story.’

‘Harcar? That’s where the Forfarshire went down? Where Grace Darling rowed to?’

‘Yes. Anyway, I did it. I got the dinghy out at dawn — I was small but I was strong; sailing’s a knack, nothing more. Even so, I don’t know why I wasn’t killed; the currents are terrible there. When I came back he was standing on the shore. He didn’t say anything. He just frogmarched me up to the house and beat me so hard that I couldn’t sit down for a week. But that night when I went to bed, there it was — my night light.’

‘Yes,’ said Ruth, after a pause. ‘I see.’

‘I could do it, Ruth. It’s no trouble to me to be Master of Bowmont. Physical things don’t bother me. I can find a wife —’ He checked himself, ‘a new wife — I can breed sons. But I don’t forget what it did to my father. I don’t forget that my mother died for his dynastic pride. So let someone else have it. I shall be off on my travels again soon in any case. Unless —’ But there was no need to speak to her of the war he was sure would come.

Back in the tower, he took the jacket from her shoulders, turned back the covers.

‘Tomorrow you shall go back to your friends, Rapunzel,’ he said. ‘Now get some sleep.’

The sudden gentleness almost overset her.

‘Can I stay, then?’ she managed to say.

‘Yes, you can stay.’

‘Oh, my dear!’ said Lady Plackett as her daughter turned from the mirror on the evening of the dance. ‘He will be overcome!’ — and Verena smiled for she could not help thinking that her mother spoke the truth.

Miss Somerville’s letter suggesting a party for her birthday had sent Verena to Fortnum’s in search of a suitable dress, where their chief vendeuse had suggested a simple Greek tunic of white georgette for, as she pointed out, Verena’s beauty was in the classical style.

Verena had refused. She wanted, on the night that she hoped would seal her fate, to be thoroughly and unexpectedly feminine and ignoring the ill-concealed disapproval of the saleswoman, she had decided on a gown of strawberry-pink taffeta with a tiered skirt, each tier edged with a double layer of ruffles. The big leg-o’-mutton sleeves too were lined with ruffles, as was the heart-shaped neckline, and wishing to emphasize the youthful freshness which (she was aware) her high intelligence sometimes concealed, she wore a wreath of rosebuds in her hair.

Had this been the informal dance originally planned, her toilette might have been too sumptuous, but the party, as the Placketts hoped, had snowballed to the point where the word ‘informal’ hardly applied. As Verena stepped into her satin sandal — carefully low-heeled since Quin, now past his thirty-first birthday, could not really be expected to grow any more — other girls all over Northumberland were bathing, young men were tying their black ties or putting on dress uniforms, ready to make their way to Bowmont. For after all, it had always been rather special, this sea-girt tower with its absent owner, its fierce chatelaine — and perhaps they knew what Quin knew; that Fate was knocking on the door and pleasure, now, a kind of duty.

Ann Rothley and Helen Stanton-Derby had come over early to help Frances. Helen had brought armfuls of bronze and gold chrysanthemums, of rosehips and traveller’s joy, and disappeared with rolls of chicken wire to transform the drawing room into a glowing autumnal bower while Ann had slipped upstairs to supervise Frances’ toilette. Had Miss Somerville worn anything other than her black chenille and oriental shawl, the County would have been seriously upset, but Ann could sometimes succeed where Martha failed in coaxing her friend’s hair into a less rigorous style and persuading her that a dab of snow-white powder in the middle of her nose did not constitute suitable make-up.