‘Stop it! Stop it, Anna!’ Rupert reached out, took her by the shoulders. A mistake… More of a mistake than he would have believed possible. He dropped his arms, stepped back. ‘Please, for heaven’s sake, Anna. It wasn’t because I wasn’t satisfied with your work. Your work is excellent. It was because I met someone who’d stayed with you in Petersburg.’

He recounted his conversation with Mr Stewart, to which Anna listened with growing amazement.

‘You wished to dismiss me because Petya had cut his teeth on the Crown of Kazan?’

‘All right, I know it sounds absurd but—’

‘Absurd? It is crazy! Sergei has always said that the English aristocracy have brains like very small aspirins and now I believe it. In any case, the Crown of Kazan was very heavy. Niannka was always angry with Mama when she wore it because it gave her a headache.’

‘Niannka? Is that the lady with the mummified finger?’

Anna dimpled, but her eyes were sad, for Niannka’s desertion had hurt more than anything in the dark days of the revolution. ‘Yes. It was the finger of St Nino, who lived in the monastery at Varzia, where she was born. He has many fingers, that one, perhaps three thousand — the monks are such rogues!’

‘You’ve been there?’

She nodded. ‘We stayed with Niannka when Mama took the waters at Borzhomi. It was very beautiful. We ate with our fingers and slept on the ground and washed in the Kuru, which is very cold and green and runs down from the Caucasus, and the men had great moustaches and got drunk and fell out of their caves,’ said Anna, her face lighting up at the memory. ‘Only the chickens I did not like,’ she added, turning her thumb to reveal a white scar across its base.

‘And it’s certain that she robbed you?’

Anna shrugged. ‘Kira’s aunt saw her on the Anchikov Bridge, laughing with some soldiers of the Red Guard after we had fled. It is natural, perhaps. She was a woman of the people.’

‘She undoubtedly seems to have been that,’ said Rupert reflectively. Then returning to the attack: ‘Anna, you must see how unsuitable it is, your being here.’

‘No, I do not see it.’ Her eyes kindled. ‘I know. It is because I am a woman! It is all right for Sergei to be chauffeur to an amazingly stupid duchess, though he has seize quartiers and his grandfather was a grand duke, and it is all right for Colonel Terek to drive a taxi though his family has owned three-quarters of the Kara Kum, but I… I may not work. Naturally. In a country where women must be trampled to death by ’orses before they are permitted to vote one would expect this.’

‘No, Anna, you’re wrong. I worked with women in the war — I know very well what they’re capable of.’

‘Then why? Just because we are rich in Petersburg?’

‘Not only rich — Oh, Anna try to understand. In Russia they probably wouldn’t have allowed me over your doorstep.’

‘Pas du tout.’ She dimpled up at him. ‘Mama was extremely democratic. Earls with large estates and many Christian names were frequently admitted. By the front door, even.’

‘Oh, God.’

They had begun to walk between the fragrant bushes, drawn by the remembered perfection of Mr Cameron’s new rose.

‘You really like it here, don’t you?’ said Rupert wonderingly. ‘Though we work you half to death, though your hands are raw and chapped, though you’re cruelly short of sleep…’

They had reached the rose. ‘Yes,’ said Anna so quietly that Rupert had to bend his head to hear. ‘Yes, I like it here. I like Mrs Park, who is so gentle and so good, and James, who has struggled and struggled to make himself strong. I like the courage of your mother, who is so patient with the spirits who plague her, and I like your uncle, who hears music as if each time it had been just composed. I like the warriors on your roof and your foolish dog and the catalpa tree that leans into the lake… And this rose, I like,’ she said, bending in reverence to Mr Cameron’s masterpiece. ‘Yes, very much I like this rose.’

She fell silent. (And if I were to take the secateurs, thought Rupert, and cut each and every blossom from this incomparable bush and pour them in her lap, what then?)

Anna looked up at him. Her face crunched into its monkey smile. ‘And the appendix of Mrs Proom,’ she continued, ‘ah, that I truly love!’

Rupert lifted his hands in a mocking gesture of surrender. ‘Then stay,’ he said, ‘heaven forbid that I should come between you and Mrs Proom’s appendix,’ — and left her.

The dowager was tired. She had spent the morning in the village, comforting Mrs Bunford, who was still very much upset at having been asked to make neither the wedding gown nor any of the dresses for the bridesmaids and, to console the widow, had ordered her own outfit of powder blue wild silk. To give Mrs Bunford wild silk to ruin was the act of a lunatic and the dowager was already regretting it. Then as she walked to her brougham she was accosted by tiny, tottery Miss Frensham who had played the organ in Mersham Church for forty years. Miss Frensham, rheumy-eyed and quavery, wanted to know if it was true that Miss Hardwicke wanted neither ‘The Voice That Breathed O’er Eden’ nor the ‘Lohengrin March’ like they always had, but something modern that Miss Frensham was almost sure she wouldn’t be able to play since she couldn’t see too well nowadays to read new music. Because if so, perhaps they’d like to get someone else to play, though it wouldn’t be easy not to see Master Rupert married, not after she’d read him every single page of The Prince and the Pauper when he had the measles, because he always noticed when you missed a bit out, not like other children…

By the time the dowager had soothed Miss Frensham she was late for her appointment with Colonel Forster at the Mill House and must, she realized, have made a mess of explaining why she had to move into the Mill House immediately without waiting for the improvements that the Forsters were so kindly putting in for her, because Colonel Forster had looked at her very strangely and Mrs Forster had patted her hand in quite the wrong way when she left. And when at last she had gone home and sat down for a moment to rest, there had been the usual psychic vibrations and the voice of Hatty Dalrymple had come through as clearly as if she were still beside her in the dormitory all those years ago at school. Hatty, who had passed over as the result of a boating accident at Cowes, had always been a gusher and the information that she could see rays of aetheric ecstacy emanating from Rupert and his lovely, lovely bride did little for the dowager, remembering the look in Rupert’s eyes these days.

And now she really had to make up her mind whether or not to send a wedding invitation to the Herrings.

Mr and Mrs Melvyn Herring and their twin sons, Donald and Dennis, were not so much herrings as sheep, and extremely black ones at that. The dowager came from an old Irish family whose pedigree was excellent, but whose upbringing, on a wild and lovely estate in County Down, had been unconventional and lacking in discipline. As a result, when the dowager’s youngest sister, Vanessa, fell passionately in love with the extremely handsome hairdresser who came to prepare her glorious, golden ringlets for her coming-out ball, she had put lunacy into action and eloped with him. For this attack of passion, poor Vanessa Templeton paid dearly, coming round, so to speak, a few months later — to find herself pregnant, penniless and desperate. Whether she died of a broken heart or puerperal fever following the birth of her son, Melvyn, it would be hard to say. Whatever the reason, there now began the long process of dumping Melvyn on anyone who would have him which was to take up so much of his father’s life. For Vanessa Templeton’s love child was one of nature’s genuine abominations: a deeply unpleasant child who grew in deceit, temper and general sliminess into the kind of adult who can empty a room within minutes of entering it. Melvyn’s sojourn at the Templetons’ estate in County Down was burned into the marrow of every one of its inhabitants, from Lady Templeton herself down to the obscurest scullery maid. The dowager, inviting him to Mersham in his early adolescence, had been harrowed by this resemblance and by the fact that he looked like a smeared and blotched version of her own Rupert. During this visit, Melvyn had (at the age of fourteen) got the stillroom maid pregnant, lamed George’s favourite hunter with an air gun and stolen a hundred gold sovereigns from her husband’s desk. During a second visit, at the age of sixteen, he had started a fire in the morning room with an illicit cigarette and left with his aunt’s favourite Meissen figurine, which he sold to a dealer before it could be traced. Fortunately, Nemesis overtook him in the form of a waitress called Myrtle who, finding herself pregnant by him, got him to the altar. The birth of Dennis and Donald squared the account for the twins, growing from pimpled, puking and overweight blobs of dough into pallid, whining mounds of flesh, finally put the Herrings beyond the social pale. No one felt able to invite four horrible Herrings to their house and, after an abortive attempt by the Templetons to ship them off to America, Australia — anywhere — the Herrings dropped into obscurity in a Birmingham suburb.

But Rupert’s wedding… The dowager, remembering her lovely, youngest sister, dangerously allowing sentiment to overcome reason, made up her mind.

‘I’ll ask them,’ she decided. ‘After all, Melvyn is my nephew.’

And so the gold-embossed invitation bidding Mr and Mrs Melvyn Herring and Donald and Dennis Herring to the wedding of Muriel Hardwicke with Rupert St John Oliver Frayne, Seventh Earl of Westerholme, in the church of St Peter and St Paul on the 28 July at 12.30 and afterwards at Mersham, dropped on to the threadbare linoleum of the Herrings’ hall in 398 Hookley Road, Birmingham — with consequences which no one, at this stage, could possibly have foreseen.

The wedding preparations now accelerated towards their climax. Carriers drew up, continuously, delivering antique wine coolers, famille vert bowls, ormolu clocks and a set of matching beermats showing views of the Hookley Road, which the Herrings, enchanted to be taken up again by their grand relations, had pilfered from their local pub. The Rabinovitches, exceeding even their usual generosity, sent a six-hundred piece armorial dinner service decorated in sepia and gold. Muriel moved among her wedding gifts with great efficiency, acknowledging everything meticulously as soon as it arrived and personally instructing Proom as to its display in the ante-room to the gold saloon. Old Lord and Lady Templeton wrote that they would come from Ireland. Minna Byrne most nobly offered to accommodate the Duke and Duchess of Nettleford and their four younger daughters, leaving only the Lady Lavinia to sleep at Mersham. The dowager wrote a friendly note to Dr Lightbody and his wife and was relieved, though surprised, that Muriel apparently had not one living relation who would wish to see her married.

But of course the bulk of the work fell on the staff. The influx of house guests for the wedding meant the opening up of rooms in the north wing and, once again, the maids were up at dawn, blackleading and dusting, washing the wainscot, taking curtains down and carpets up. Over the wedding breakfast itself, the dowager had made a stand. This was to be her last occasion as hostess at Mersham and there were to be no taboos. Only the best champagne and the choicest dishes would be served and, though there might be a few special alcohol-free dishes for Muriel and Dr Lightbody, everything else would be as fine as Mrs Park could make it. So there was singing again in the kitchen as the gentle cook broke thirty-three eggs into her big bowl for the wedding cake and Win’s round face beamed with relief, seeing her adored Mrs Park restored to happiness.

As for Rupert, he now did what troubled human beings have always done — he buried himself in work. Fortunately, there was enough of it. The estate had been neglected for years. Freed, now, from financial restraints, Rupert spent hours with his foresters, his farm manager, his bailiff. The new earl’s capacity for listening, his high intelligence and quick concern, were a boon to the men who worked for him. They brought him their plans and hopes, their troubles and their prejudices. As he walked through his forests, pored over drainage plans, discussed cropping programmes and roofing materials, Rupert was content. Only at night, in the little room in the bachelor wing which he still preferred to his now spring-cleaned master suite, did the facade crack and into the landscape of his earlier nightmares there entered a new figure: a still, dark-eyed girl who stood with bent head, waiting — and when he reached for her, was gone.