It was Potter who found Anna on her return from Maidens Over. He came across her in the stables, one arm flung round the white mare’s neck, her head pressed against the horse’s shoulder. Anna’s hat lay where it had fallen and she was still as stone.

Potter looked at the girl and proceeded to remove her. Had she been suffering from spavins or a slipped stifle, he would have been happy to deal with her himself. Anna, however, did not have spavins and whatever ailed the girl was clearly a matter for Mrs Park or Louise. And retrieving her hat from the straw, he led the dazed and aquiescent girl back to the house.

The head groom’s lack of interest in current hairstyles was absolute. It was therefore with surprise and irritation that he saw Anna, on entering the kitchen, become surrounded by a bevy of excited and chattering girls. However, he soon put a stop to this fuss and clatter.

‘She’s had a bit of a shock, I’d say,’ he said aside to Mrs Park.

But the kind cook had already seen. ‘Now that’s enough noise, everyone,’ she admonished them. ‘Mildred, get the kettle on.’ She pulled out a chair. ‘Come along, dear, and sit down. What you need is a nice cup of tea.’

Supper in the servants’ hall was a silent meal that night. Everyone was behaving very well: not a reproach, not a question had crossed their lips — and indeed only a professional sadist would have found it possible to reproach Anna in the state she was in. Still, it was a disappointment, no good pretending that it wasn’t. As for Anna, she sat between Peggy and Louise, very carefully chewing up pieces of roast beef and equally carefully swallowing them because Pinny had said that no food must be left uneaten on the plate and making, in the intervals of this arduous task, conversation of a quite devastating politeness. Even Proom, sitting magisterially at the head of the table, was unnerved by his housemaid’s reversal to her early upbringing. It had never been necessary for Anna to ‘make’ conversation before, it had bubbled from her in a never-ending spring. To silence Anna had been Proom’s problem, and he now sat frowning and exchanging glances with Mrs Park, whose concerned and caring gaze had hardly left Anna’s face since the girl’s return.

Painstakingly, Anna exhausted the topic of the peace celebrations in London, the question of Home Rule for Ireland — and embarked on a discussion of the weather. Occasional convulsive movements of her narrow throat indicated the end point of another piece of successful mastication.

‘It will rain tomorrow, I think?’ said Anna.

And Louise, curbing for once her acerbic tongue, agreed that most probably, tomorrow, it would.

While the servants were at supper, Muriel was preparing to address her fiancé on a topic of considerable importance.

For some time, Muriel had been wondering when best to disclose to Rupert certain things of an intimate nature which Dr Lightbody, during their recent lunch at Fortman’s, had most tactfully explained to her. And it had occurred to her that on his return from Maidens Over, reminded by his solicitor of her financial generosity, he would be in a suitably receptive mood.

Rupert, however, had not yet come in and it was to an empty chair that Muriel, determined to be word-perfect before his arrival, addressed her opening remarks.

‘Dearest,’ she began, ‘I have something… a little personal to say to you.’ Pausing for the imagined look of eager interest directed at her by Rupert, she resumed the rehearsal. ‘It is about our intimate life together,’ she continued. ‘I want—’ She broke off. ‘We both want, do we not… to have perfect children? Children who will be worthy of their great inheritance?’

Another pause for Rupert’s enthusiastic concurrence.

‘Well, it so happens,’ Muriel’s lips curved into a beguiling smile, ‘that Dr Lightbody has studied the matter in great detail and he has explained to me that it would be wrong — indeed disastrous — if you were to approach me at any time. Like an animal.’

As if on cue, Baskerville, patiently awaiting his master in the corridor, gave a loud and desperate moan. Muriel frowned. Where was Rupert? Surely he must be back by now?

She cleared her thoat. ‘There are times, you see, connected with the waxing of the moon which are… favourable. And it’s during those times alone that one may expect to conceive a totally unflawed human being. Whereas—’

Another moan from Baskerville. Muriel, her irritation mounting, tried once more. If that wretched animal would shut up she’d get it right.

‘Whereas at other times… merely, I mean, to gratify the lower instincts and—’

But Baskerville’s loneliness and frustration had become uncontainable. Raising his head, he shattered the silence with a howl of such pain and anguish as would have done credit to King Lear. And suddenly unable to control her fury, Muriel opened the door and, as the dog turned his entreating, bloodshot eyes towards her, she kicked out at him hard with the heel of her spiky shoe.

Anna had finished with the rain, its possible effects on the begonias of Mr Cameron, the likelihood of subsequent flooding. Looking down at her plate she perceived that the unfocused splodges she had been devouring were, in fact, vegetables and meat. Another whole course to go, then…

‘Soon it will be time to begin the grouse shooting, will it not?’

A sudden, violent thump against the door of the servants’ hall interrupted her. A second and louder thump achieved its objective. The door burst open and, in concerted amazement, the staff looked up at the figure thus revealed.

‘That I should live to see the day!’ said James. ‘That great, drooling snob showing his face down ’ere!’

Torn between despair and embarrassment, between loneliness and shame, the earl’s dog stood before them, his great head raking the room. He had done it, the unspeakable thing. The degradation, the horror of it, was behind him — and now where was she? Had it all been in vain; the debasement, the agony, the choice?

But no, it was all right. He’d seen her. She was there. She would make whole what was broken, console him for his master’s absence, would understand his imperative need to be scratched now, this minute, and for a long time in that special place behind his ear. To show too much joy in a place such as this would be unseemly but, as he padded towards her, his tail was extended in a manner which would make wagging possible should all go as expected. Anna just had time to pull back her chair before he was upon her, butting and blowing, letting his head sink, at last, with a moan of relief on to her lap.

She put up a hand to scratch him, and as she bent forward the pins, jabbed ill-temperedly back on her head by the frustrated René, loosened, sending a strand of her uncut hair forward across her shoulders.

‘Oh, Baskerville,’ said Anna — and only then began to cry.

12

Inner peace now descended on Baskerville, who found his new life of abasement below stairs a beguiling and hitherto undiscovered world of the senses. It did not, however, descend on the focus of his adoration, Anna Grazinsky.

Anna had not caught so much as a glimpse of the earl since he’d walked out of René’s shop in Maidens Over, which made her suppose that he, too, was avoiding any place where they might meet. Worked off her feet, as were all the maids, Anna had in addition to act as handmaiden to the incessant bodily horticulture with which Muriel prepared for her Great Day. Packs of oatmeal and buttermilk had to be poured over Muriel’s white limbs, purées of soft fruit to be smeared on her face. Pummice-stoning Muriel’s elbows, massaging egg-white into her scalp, applying an amazing quantity of sliced cucumber to her eyelids as she floated in the bath kept Anna in a state of bemused exhaustion from dawn to dusk. For the rest, she kept silence. Only her eyes betrayed her wonderment that love, when it came at last, should be so physical, so exhausting and so sad.

The fatigue below stairs, the anxiety above, as the dowager wondered whether Uncle Sebastien, aged by five years in the last weeks, would get to the church to give away the bride, were not echoed by Muriel herself. Muriel felt fine. With five days to go she was certain that her decision to have a quiet wedding at Mersham had paid off. Not one of her father’s disreputable relatives had shown any sign of life and soon, now, Dr Lightbody would arrive to see the completion of her journey into the aristocracy.

Yet at the very moment that Muriel was anticipating his arrival with such pleasure, the doctor was sitting in an ante-room in the Samaritan Hospital in the Edgware Road, in a state of bewilderment and shock.

‘I can’t believe it,’ he said, shaking his blond and handsome head. ‘It isn’t possible. Not Doreen.’

‘We’ve expected it for some time, Dr Lightbody,’ said the matron, who had indeed tried several times to give the obstinate man an idea of his wife’s condition. ‘She was very ill when she was admitted, as you know. It was only a matter of time.’

Alone in his lodgings that night, the doctor sank wearily into his chair. He was a widower. Doreen had done the unbelievable thing and without a word to him, without, so to speak, his permission, she had died. Really, it was quite appalling, quite unbearable.

And not only that. In two days’ time he was supposed to go to Mersham, to Miss Hardwicke’s wedding and the ball which preceded it.

He would have to cancel it, of course. But how dreadfully disappointed Miss Hardwicke would be. She had been so interested when he had hinted that he might be willing to come and work at Mersham. And how agonizing it was for him to break his word.

But would he in fact have to break it? The doctor rose and walked over to the mirror. Considering the shock he had just sustained he was looking wonderfully well. Supposing he went very quietly to the wedding? In a black armband to signify bereavement, emitting a restrained sadness which could not fail to touch Miss Hardwicke’s heart. Yes, in a sense it was his duty to go. One could, after all, be a little vague about exactly when Doreen had died.

Yes, he would go to the wedding. It was, when all was said and done, a religious ceremony. But not to the ball. People might really think it was odd if he came to the ball in a black armband. And in any case a black armband would not go at all well with the white tunic, the golden circlet of laurel leaves and the lyre of Apollo. Sighing, the doctor moved over to the wardrobe and opened it. Nathaniel and Gumsbody had done him proud — the outfit was extremely becoming, simple yet regal, and they had thrown in, at half price, a bottle of liquid make-up for his arms and legs. He had tried a little on his knees last night and the effect was excellent: sportive yet glowing. But of course a black armband would kill that. It was impossible.

For a while he stood looking at the white folds of the chiton, the finely wrought sandals. Was he perhaps being rather selfish, obtruding his grief like that? Why wear a black armband at all? Why, in fact, tell anyone that Doreen had died? To go, keeping to himself this bereavement, to pretend to laugh and dance and be merry when his heart was breaking — was not that the noble thing? Was that not what Apollo himself would have counselled? To dance with Miss Hardwicke, to hold in his arms her full-breasted, white skinned loveliness, to remind her, under cover of the music, of her procreative duties, was that not a worthier task than to sit here mourning and grieving, a victim of self-pity and despair?

Of course there was the funeral. But Doreen’s parents, with whom she had never quite cut off relations though he had begged her to often enough, would be only too happy to organize all that without interference. And a thoroughly lower-class business it would be — but that was their affair. The actual interment, after all, wouldn’t be for at least a week and he’d be back by then.

Yes, it was a hard choice, a task that would take all his self-control but he would do it. He would go to the wedding and the ball — and somehow contrive to enjoy himself. In which case, as he was going to see the florist anyway about a suitable wreath, he’d better enquire about a white carnation to go with the morning clothes he’d hired. Or would a gardenia be better? That is, if gardenias were worn at country weddings before lunch…?

The Herrings, meanwhile, had perfected their plan for getting to Mersham with a minimum of financial outlay. It was a complicated plan and though Melvyn had explained it several times to Myrtle, she was having trouble with it, her physical endowment, though generous, not being of the kind that extended to the grey matter of the brain.