The Secret Countess

2

He came down by car, driving himself in the old black Daimler that had been his father’s and as the familiar landmarks appeared, his apprehension increased.

Rupert had neither wanted nor expected to inherit Mersham or the burdens of the title. It was George who had had all the makings of a landowner and a country gentleman: outgoing, debonair George, whose bones now lay deep in the soil of Flanders. Rupert had seen his beautiful home as a place of refuge to which he might occasionally return, but his ambitions had lain elsewhere: in scholarship, in music — above all in travel. The high, wild and undiscovered places of the world had been the stuff of Rupert’s dreams all through his childhood. That being so, it had been no hardship to grow up in his brother’s shadow. Shadows are cool and peaceful places for those whose minds are overstocked with treasure.

Rupert’s three years at Cambridge had seemed a glorious preparation for just such a life. He took a First in history and was invited by his tutor, a brilliant madman who specialized in North Asian Immortality Rites, to join him in a field trip to the Karakorum.

Instead, the autumn of 1914 saw Rupert in the Royal Flying Corps, one of a handful of young pilots who took off in dilapidated BE2s from airfields conjured up in a few hours out of fields of stubble, bivouacked between flights in haystacks and ditches. Two years later, when George was killed at Ypres, Rupert was in command of a squadron flying Camels and Berguets against Immelmann and the aces of the German Reich. The chance that he would survive to inherit Mersham seemed so remote that he scarcely thought of it.

Then, in the summer of 1918, returning alone from a reconnaissance, he was set upon by a flight of Fokkers, and though he managed to dispatch two of them, his own plane was hit. The resulting crash landed him in hospital, first in St Omer, then in London. Some time in the months of pain that followed they gave him the DFC for bringing his plane back across the lines in spite of his wounds, but his observer, a moon-faced kid called Johnny, died of his burns, and the manner of his dying was to stay with Rupert for the rest of his life.

And while he lay in hospital, tended by a series of devastating VADs, the war ended and Rupert found himself still alive.

Alive, and Seventh Earl of Westerholme, owner of Mersham with its forests and farms, its orchards and stables. Owner, too, of the crippling debts, the appalling running costs, the mortgage on the Home Farm.

It was only the memory of George on the last leave they’d spent together, that prevented Rupert from instructing his bailiff to sell then and there. George, his eyes glazed, his uniform unbuttoned after an evening of conventional debauchery at Maxim’s, turning suddenly serious. ‘If anything happens to me, Rupert, try and hang on to Mersham. Do your damndest.’ And as Rupert remained silent, he had added a word he seldom used to his younger brother. ‘Please.’

So Rupert had promised. Yet as he pored over the documents they brought to him in hospital he saw no way of bringing the estate, so hopelessly encumbered, back to solvency. And then, suddenly, this miracle… this undreamt of, unhoped-for chance to make Mersham once again what it had been and see that all the people in his care were safe.

Thinking with an upsurge of gratitude of the person who had made this possible, his apprehension lifted and, stepping on the accelerator, he turned in past the empty gatehouse, drew up on the wide sweep of gravel and braced himself against the onslaught of the lion-coloured shape now tearing down the steps towards the car.

He was home.

‘Welcome home, my lord,’ said Proom, coming forward to greet him. ‘I trust you had a comfortable journey?’

‘Very comfortable, thank you, Proom,’ said Rupert. He broke off: ‘Good heavens!’

Proom followed his master’s gaze. On either side of the grand staircase with its Chinese carpet and crystal chandeliers, stretching upwards like ranking cherubim, were Rupert’s footmen in livery, his housemaids in brown, his kitchen maids in blue, his scullery maids and hall boy and housekeeper and cook. Compared to pre-war days they were a mere handful, but to Rupert, accustomed now to the simplicities of wartime living, they seemed to reach to infinity.

‘As you see, I’ve assembled the indoor staff, my lord,’ said Proom somewhat unnecessarily. ‘It was their wish to greet you personally after your ordeal.’

If Rupert’s heart sank, there was nothing to be seen in his face except pleasure and interest. He went forward, his hand outstretched.

‘Mrs Bassenthwaite! How well you look!’

‘And you too, my lord,’ lied the old housekeeper. They had read about him in the papers for, surprisingly, it was Rupert not George who had been twice mentioned in dispatches, had won the MC while still a subaltern and become — even before his final act of bravery — a legend to his own men. Now the old woman who had known him since his birth saw in the new lines round his eyes, the skin stretched tight across the cheekbones, the price paid by those who force themselves against their deepest nature to excel in war.

‘And Mrs Park! Well, if you’re still presiding over the kitchens it will be worth coming home.’

He walked on slowly, greeting all the old servants by name, cracking a joke with Louise, asking, with a grin, after James’s pectoral muscles, enquiring if the second footman felt his wound.

He had reached the half-landing and Proom, very much the major domo, was at his side, introducing a new maid.

‘This is Anna, my lord. She is from Russia and has joined us temporarily.’

Rupert only had time to register a pair of intense, dark eyes in a narrow, thoughtful face before the new girl curtsied.

All the girls had bobbed curtsies as he passed, but Rupert was about to encounter for the first time this weapon of social intercourse in Anna Grazinsky’s hands. One arm flew gracefully outward and up like an ascending dove, her right foot, elegantly flexed, drew a wide arc on the rich carpet — and she sank slowly, deeply and utterly to the ground.

Panic gripped Rupert. Even Proom, immune as he was to the devastating effect of Anna’s curtsies, stepped back a pace. For here was homage made flesh; here, between the bust of an obese Roman emperor and a small, potted palm, Rupert, Seventh Earl of Westerholme, was being offered commitment, servitude, another human being’s all.

Rupert instinctively looked round for the red roses that should have been raining down from the gallery, the bouquet which anyone not made of iron must surely bring in from the wings. For unlike Proom, who had merely suffered uncomprehendingly, Rupert recognized the origin of his new housemaid’s curtsy. Thus had Karsavina sunk to the ground after her immortal rendering of Giselle; thus had Pavlova folded her wings after her Dying Swan.

‘You have studied ballet, I see,’ said Rupert gravely.

Anna, delighted to have her gifts appreciated, lifted her head, said, ‘Yes, my lord,’ and smiled.

For the new earl was nice. She had thought he might be from his photograph and his dog, and he was. An intelligent, sensitive face with wide grey eyes, a high and slightly bumpy forehead and unruly, leaf-brown hair. She liked the lines etched into his face to give it maturity and strength, the courtesy with which he spoke.

And so she smiled at him — into him, he could have said — managing to combine the look of a baby monkey rendered ecstatic by the unsolicited gift of a sudden nut, with that of a guardian angel receiving uplifting tidings about the Fate of Man. Fighting desperately to turn this routine encounter with a new domestic into normal channels, Rupert said, ‘Your family all left Russia safely, I hope?’

‘My mother and brother are well, thank you. My father died at Tannenberg.’

It was only when the light in her eyes was extinguished, at the mention of her father, that Rupert realized how brightly it had burned.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said gently. ‘It was a frightful battle, that. We were very slow, I’m afraid, in realizing how horrific the Russian casualties were. But you are happy here, I hope?’

‘Oh, yes, very,’ she said, and catching Proom’s eye added belatedly, ‘my lord. Everybody is most kind to me. Only about the bathrooms am I not happy,’ she said, her ‘r’s beginning to roll badly, as they always did when discussing this most vexed of topics.

‘What is wrong with the bathrooms?’ enquired Rupert, startled.

‘What is wrong,’ said the new housemaid very seriously, ‘is that there are not any of them. Not anywhere in all the attics. Perhaps you did not know this?’

Rupert frowned. Had he known it? Had he ever been in the attics in which his servants slept? Well, this was just the sort of thing which, from next month on, would be most competently dealt with. And, remembering the good news he was bringing his mother, and resisting an urge to offer the new housemaid the use of his own bathroom in the master suite, Rupert moved on up the stairs.

‘Oh, my dear, I’m so happy for you! So terribly, terribly happy!’ The dowager’s eyes were misty as she looked at Rupert. ‘It was what I wanted for you so much, someone to share your life.’

Mrs Park, remembering Rupert’s light appetite, had sent up a meal as exquisite as it was delicate: salmon in oyster sauce, croquettes of leveret with peas, and wild strawberries which Anna had found and picked in the woods behind the lake. With it they had drunk the Leitenheimer 1904 which Proom had saved for just this day and now the family was alone, taking coffee and liqueurs in the library.

‘I know.’ Rupert smiled at his mother and tried for the fifth time to push Baskerville off his feet. ‘And I know you’ll like Muriel. I can’t imagine a more suitable mistress for Mersham. Not that she will want to oust you.’ He stretched a hand out to his mother. ‘Mersham’s big enough for both of you, heaven knows!’

‘No, dear.’ The dowager shook her head. ‘There’s no house big enough in the world for two women. But you know I’ve always meant to move into the village when either of… when you got married. Colonel Forster’s promised to rent me the Mill House and I shall be very happy there. Now tell us about Muriel. Everything. Where did you meet her?’

‘In the hospital. She was a VAD and truly, Mother, I think she saved my life. The other nurses were sweet but they all seemed to be straight out of finishing school.’ Rupert grinned ruefully, remembering curly-headed Belinda Ponsonby, who had perched on his bed half the night smoking and sobbing about her boyfriends; Fiona Fitz-Herald, who had dropped a scalding hot water bottle on to his gauze dressing and tiny, tender-hearted Zoe van Meck, who had stuck a hypodermic halfway in his arm and fainted. ‘Muriel was always so calm and efficient and in control. You’ve no idea what it meant to me.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘I didn’t dream that she had come to care for me,’ he went on, and the dowager smiled, for Rupert had always been unaware of the charm he held for women. ‘It wasn’t just that I knew she was an heiress — you know how people gossip in a hospital — but she’s also extremely beautiful. And an intellectual! She has this passionate interest in eugenics.’

‘Fair or dark?’ asked Uncle Sebastien, that life-long connoisseur of women.

‘Fair. Truly golden-haired with deep blue eyes. I don’t know if I’d ever have dared to propose with Mersham in the state it’s in, but she made it so easy for me.’ And Rupert frowned a little, trying to remember, for it had all been rather dream-like, his courtship of Muriel from his hospital bed. So much so that he couldn’t actually recall how they had got engaged. He’d just woken from a disturbed and pain-filled sleep and she’d been there beside him, holding his hand, promising to care for him and make of his beautiful home a place of which he would be deeply proud. ‘She’s so generous, too. She wants to see to the indoor running costs straight away — not even wait for the wedding. That’s why I asked you to engage only temporary staff.’

‘It all sounds delightful,’ said the dowager, ‘and of course completely explains why the sexton’s wife didn’t want him to give away his top hat. Now tell me, dear, when’s the wedding to be? And where? Because I must go at once and call on her parents.’

‘Well, Mother, that’s the point. You see, Muriel’s an orphan.’

‘Oh, my dear! The poor, poor girl.’ Though genuinely devastated, the dowager was not averse to the removal of so pushing a figure as the mother of the bride. ‘How very sad for her! How dreadful!’

‘Yes, she’s had a very lonely life. But the thing is, mother — and please say if it’s inconvenient or you aren’t up to it — we wondered whether we could be married here. In the village church.’

The dowager’s eyes glowed. ‘But of course! How lovely! Oh, Rupert there’s nothing in the world I’d love more. You can’t imagine how pleased everyone will be. And the servants too; they’ve worked so hard.’

‘You mustn’t tire yourself, of course — I know Muriel means to spare you as much work as possible. But we both feel a quiet country wedding is what we want and very soon. There’s so much to do here and nothing to wait for. In fact, we hoped we could call the banns next week and be married at the end of July.’

‘As quickly as that?’ The dowager was startled. ‘Still, I don’t see why not.’

‘Muriel was wondering if she could come down almost straight away? If it’s not correct for me to stay in the same house with her I could go over to Heslop and stay with Tom. I want him for my best man anyway.’

‘Oh, I’m sure there’s no need for that. Perhaps just the night before the wedding. Goodness, how exciting it all is! We must have an engagement party straight away so that she can meet her new neighbours. What about the bridesmaids, has she decided?’

‘She was going to ask Lavinia Nettleford, I think. I believe she nursed with her. You know her, I expect?’

The dowager frowned, trying to distinguish Lavinia among the brood of girls that the Duke of Nettleford, much to his chagrin, had fathered in darkest Northumberland.

‘Is she the eldest one?’

‘I believe so. And there’s a schoolfriend of Muriel’s: Cynthia Smythe. But Muriel says she’d be very happy for us to choose another one — maybe a little girl to act as flower girl and carry her train.’

The dowager smiled. ‘Well, we don’t have to look very far there, do we?’

‘Of course!’ Rupert was delighted. ‘Ollie! Mother, you’re a genius!’

It was close on eleven before the overjoyed dowager and Uncle Sebastien went up to bed.

‘Come,’ said Rupert, left alone with his dog, and Baskerville, still not quite believing that the bad times were over, loped after him through the French windows, his great muzzle glued to Rupert’s side.

It was a night to dream about: windless, warm and scented, with a streak of gold and amethyst still lingering in the sky. Rupert’s route took him down the terrace steps, across the lawns and through a wicket gate on to the mossy path which led around the lake. Here his ancestors had planted exotic, fabulous trees which nevertheless grew and flourished in this sheltered English valley: jacarandas and Lebanon cedars, maples and tulip trees, whose roots stretched to the edge of the now smooth and pearly water.

Baskerville left the path to chase rabbits, returned to make slobberingly certain that his master had not been spirited away again and raced back into the woods. Rupert passed the Temple of Flora, white in the gathering darkness, the gothic folly, said to be haunted by his guilty forebear, Sir Montague Frayne — and stopped dead.

He had come to a little grass-fringed bay, clear of the reeds which thronged the northern shore. A girl was standing by the edge of the lake, already up to her knees in water. She had her back to him and her dark hair fell in a loose mantle to her waist. As he watched, she bent to the water, dipped her arms in it and began a strange and curious ritual. With one arm she pulled back the mass of her hair, while with the other she rubbed her neck, her shoulders, her narrow back…

A goddess invoking in the darkness some magic rite? A gypsy girl up to some incomprehensible trick? Then, his eyes growing accustomed to the dusk, he saw in the girl’s right hand a most prosaic and familiar object; at the same time a well-remembered and tranquil smell, faint as gossamer, soothing as nursery tea, stole towards him — the smell of Pears soap.

The girl in the lake was methodically and dedicatedly washing herself. And as soon as he realized this, he knew who she was.

Chivalry now dictated, unquestionably, that Rupert should turn and move silently away. Instead, he stepped back into the shelter of a copper beech and waited.

Anna had finished washing now and, putting down the soap, she twisted her hair into a knot high on her head and began to walk slowly into the water.

She might get into trouble, Rupert reasoned with himself, for there was a place where the tree roots went deep into the lake. I’d better stay.

But there was no question of her getting into trouble; he knew that perfectly well. She swam easily and somehow, across the silent water, he caught her delight, her oneness with the dark water and the night.

It was when she finally turned for the shore that Nemesis overtook her in the form of Baskerville, finished with his rabbit, bounding over to the water and barking for all he was worth.

‘Durak! Spakkoina! Sa diss!’ She began to berate the dog in her own language, her voice low and husky and a little bit afraid, while she endeavoured to wrap herself into her towel. Baskerville, suddenly recognizing her, made matters worse by leaping up and trying to lick her face.

Rupert’s voice, curt and commanding, dissolved this tableau in an instant.

‘Here!’ he ordered. ‘At once. And sit!’

Baskerville came, grovelled, and keeled over, doing his felled-ox-about-to-be-conveyed-to-the-slaughterhouse routine, his legs in the air. Rupert left him, picked up the bundle of clothes she’d abandoned on a flat stone and walked over to the girl.

‘You win,’ he said. ‘I’ll build some bathrooms.’

She took them, still clutching her towel. ‘Are you angry?’ she asked. ‘You should not be, because nowhere does it say in the book of Selina Strickland that one may not wash after working hours in the lake of one’s employer.’ And, as Rupert remained silent, she went on anxiously, ‘You will not dismiss me?’

‘No, I will not dismiss you. But get dressed quickly. It’s getting cold. I’ll turn round.’

It took her only a moment to slip into her brown housemaid’s dress. Still barefoot, her wet hair tumbling round her shoulders, she looked, as she came towards him, like a woodcutter’s daughter in a fairy tale. Rupert put out a hand and felt hers, work-roughened and icy. Then he took off his coat and draped it over her shoulders.

‘No!’ Anna was shocked. ‘You must not do that. It is very kind but it is not correct,’ she said, adding with devastating effect, ‘my lord.’

A faint terror lest she should begin to curtsy took hold of Rupert.

‘Do you often come out at night like this?’ he asked.

Anna nodded. ‘Housework is not uninteresting exactly, but it is very dirty. And I do not understand… I mean, in Russia my gover… in Russia we were always being bathed. Hot baths, cold baths and the English grocer in the Nevsky had seven kinds of soap. But here…’

So she had had a governess, his new housemaid. He was not surprised. Suddenly he felt, rather than saw, a new and fiercer anxiety take hold of her.

‘You have been here a long time?’ she hazarded. ‘You saw me… swimming?’

Rupert was silent, waiting for tears of indignation or the fury of modesty defiled.

Anna covered her face with her narrow, El Greco hands. Now her head came up and she peered at him through tragically splayed fingers.

‘I am too thin?’ she enquired.

And surprising himself by the fervour with which he lied, Rupert said, ‘NO!’

News of Rupert’s engagement, spreading to the servants’ hall, the outdoor staff and so into the village, was received with universal delight. Miss Tonks and Miss Mortimer, the pixilated spinster ladies who lived in Bell Cottage and had, as long as anyone could remember, done the flowers in the church, began putting their heads together, pondering on the floral decorations that should be worthy of such an occasion. Mrs Bunford, the village dressmaker, bought three new pattern books so as to be completely up to date in the event of a summons from the house, and the vicar, scholarly Mr Morland who had christened Rupert, was touched and happy at the idea of marrying him.

As for the Mersham servants, it was only when the weight of anxiety was lifted that they realized how great it had been. Proom had secretly had no doubt that they were refurbishing Mersham only to put it up for sale and, while he himself only had to hint that his services were on the market for offers to come flooding in, his mother was hardly an exportable commodity. Mrs Park’s anxiety had been for Win, her simpleminded kitchen maid. Louise, though she seldom spoke of it, was the sole support of an invalid brother in the village. So, as they drank to the health of Miss Muriel Hardwicke in the earl’s champagne, emotion and goodwill ran extremely high.

‘And if the wedding is to be at the end of July I shall still be here,’ said Anna, whose engagement had now been extended to the end of that month, ‘which I shall like very much because I have never been to an English wedding and Russian weddings are very different, with people standing under high crowns for two hours and everybody falling down and fainting.’

As for the dowager, she left her planchettes and her ouija board, drew back the curtains of her twilit boudoir and began to make lists. She made lists for Mrs Bassenthwaite about the catering and lists for Proom about the disposition of the house guests. She made lists of the relations she was going to invite to the wedding and the acquaintances she was going to inform of it, and as soon as she made the lists, she lost them. Yet out of the fluffy cloudiness of her mind and the chaos of her boudoir there emerged the design, masterly and graceful as Mersham itself, of a country wedding in high summer. A wedding in which everyone in the house and the village would most joyfully share.

The first person to call and congratulate Rupert was his friend and best man, Tom Byrne, driving over from Heslop Hall.

Heslop was less than ten miles from Mersham, a great Elizabethan pile, sumptuous and tatty, which had harboured broods of roistering Byrnes for centuries. The Byrne children had played with George and Rupert, had ridden in the same gymkhanas, been to the same parties. It was natural that Tom, who had miraculously survived four years in the infantry without a scratch, should be Rupert’s best man, and he came now also to offer his family’s help in welcoming Muriel. But both Rupert, coming forward to greet him, and the servants, peeping out of the ground floor windows, forgot the wedding and everything else for they saw that Tom had brought no less a person than the Honourable Olive.

Ollie Byrne was just on eight years old and anyone speaking ill of her within fifty miles of Heslop or of Mersham would have found themselves lying flat in a gutter with a bloodied nose. The Byrnes had already had three lusty, red-headed sons: Tom, the eldest, Geoffrey and Hugh, when Lady Byrne, though in failing health, found herself pregnant once again. She only lived long enough to give birth to a premature and hopelessly delicate daughter before she died. The baby, hastily christened Olive Jane, spent the first year of her life in the prison-like wards of a famous teaching hospital, more as an aid to medical research than because the pathetic, screwed-up bundle seemed to have any chance of life. As for Ollie’s father, Viscount Byrne, presented with three sons to bring up and an infant daughter in distant London, he sought for a new wife with a frenzy he made no effort to conceal.

His choice fell, somewhat arbitrarily it was felt, on an American, Minna Cresswell, the daughter of a New York shipowner whom he happened to be standing next to at Goodwood. Confronted by a new stepmother, within a year of their mother’s death, Tom, Geoffrey and Hugh glared, scowled and swore eternal enmity. Minna was small, quiet and mousy-looking and seemed to have nothing but her fortune to commend her to anyone’s attention.

The new Lady Byrne made no attempt to ingratiate herself with the boys. She didn’t ask them to call her ‘Mother’, they were in no way bidden to love her, nor did she hand out expensive gifts. Her practical actions were confined to quietly modernizing those parts of Heslop which were in danger of collapse; and even this she did so discreetly that new bathrooms and radiators appeared as if by magic, without upsetting either her lord’s hunting or his meals. And every week she motored to London to breathe her will into the tiny, jaundiced bundle that was the Honourable Olive.

Within a year, the boys were rushing into the house calling ‘Mother!’ before they had even taken off their coats. When she was away, Byrne prowled his mansion like a labrador deprived of game — and Ollie, spewed up from her teaching hospital at last, decided to live. Not only to live but to conquer. At three, a pair of huge round spectacles perched on her freckled nose, she departed gallantly for weekend visits in the English manner (clutching, however, a rolled-up rubber sheet in case of accidents). At four, though still tiny, she learned to ride.

So when, at the age of five, she contracted tuberculosis of the hip, the blow was shattering. Once again, Ollie went away from home to be immured for two interminable years in a Scottish sanatorium, where she lay, her little pinched face peering above the blankets, on freezing verandas, immobilized in a series of diabolical contrivances. It was in that sanatorium that the nurses, seeing how the child bravely coped with the recurring, debilitating fever and the agony of secondary osteomyelitis, turned the meaningless prefix, ‘the Honourable’, into a badge of office — and the Honourable Olive she was destined to remain.

Once again, laying the ghosts of all the wicked stepmothers since time began, Minna travelled to and fro, read to the child, sang to her, went back to Heslop to entertain the American troops stationed nearby, saw Tom and the second son, Geoffrey, off to war.

When Geoffrey was killed at Paschendale, Minna lost her look of youth for ever. But the gods were appeased, Ollie was cured and returned to Heslop. The fact that one leg was shortened and in callipers was a small price to pay. She was alive.

Lifting her out of the Crossley and setting her down on the gravel, Rupert gathered that Muriel, in response to his call last night, had been in touch with her already. For Ollie, her big blue eyes glinting behind their round spectacles, was clearly in a state of ecstasy.

‘Rupert, she rang my mother. Muriel did. She rang Mummy and she said you wanted me for a bridesmaid and she wanted me too. It’s true, isn’t it? I’m going to be a bridesmaid, aren’t I? It’s really true?’

‘Yes, Moppet, it is,’ said Rupert, taking her hand but making no other attempt to help her up the steps to the front door. Helping the Honourable Olive with the simpler tasks of life was not a thing one did twice.

‘I’ve never been a bridesmaid before. Never,’ said Ollie. ‘There are going to be two others, Mother says, grown-up ones and me. And you know what I’m going to wear?’

‘I don’t, Ollie. But I should dearly like to know. Or is it a secret?’

Ollie sighed in ecstasy. ‘Muriel told me. Rose-coloured satin. It’s true. That’s pink, you know,’ she added obligingly. ‘And a matching rose-coloured velvet muff stitched with pearls.’ She stopped for a moment, quite overcome. ‘And in my hair — honestly, Rupert — a wreath of roses and steph… something with “steph” in it that’s white and smells lovely. And to go to the church, a white cloak lined with the same pink and trimmed with swansdown.’

Rupert looked down at the little upturned face with its mass of freckles and marigold curls and a wave of tenderness for Muriel engulfed him. She could so easily have wanted to choose someone of her own.

‘I think you’re going to be absolutely beautiful,’ he said.

Ollie, who perfectly agreed with him, nodded her head. ‘Can I go and tell Proom and Cookie and James while you talk to Tom? And Peggy and Louise?’

‘Of course. You can tell Anna too,’ said Rupert pensively. ‘She’s a new maid and she’s Russian.’

Ollie was impressed. ‘Like the ballet?’ she said. ‘Mummy likes the ballet very much. She’s going to invite them down.’

‘Very like the ballet,’ said Rupert gravely.

It was fortunate that Peggy, polishing the brasswork in the hall, had overheard this interchange so that by the time the Honourable Olive reached the kitchen and had been installed on her favourite stool beside Mrs Park, everybody was suitably primed.

‘Guess what I’m going to do!’ said Ollie, when she had had her traditional spoonful of plum jam, felt James’s brachial muscles and been introduced to Anna.

The servants looked at each other in simulated amazement.

‘Go to a birthday party?’ suggested Mrs Park.

‘No,’ said the Honourable Olive, her eyes gleaming with importance.

‘Go away on holiday?’ suggested Louise.

‘No!’ said Ollie, wriggling with excitement. ‘Better than that!’

‘Go to the pantomime?’ hazarded Proom.

‘No!’ So intense was her delight that she seemed likely to slide off the stool altogether. ‘I’m going to be a bridesmaid!’

‘Never!’ exclaimed Mrs Park.

‘Not for his lordship’s wedding?’ said James in awed tones.

‘Yes.’ Ollie’s smile shone through the kitchen like Inca gold. ‘And guess what my dress is going to be made of.’

Once again, the staff shook bewildered heads.

‘White muslin?’ suggested Mrs Park.

‘No. Better than that.’

‘Yellow organdie?’

‘No.’ She waited, holding back with an innate sense of drama while they floundered hopelessly among lesser materials and commonplace outfits. Then yielding at last, ‘Rose pink satin an’ a pink muff with pearls and a head-dress of roses and a cloak with swansdown on it!’ She paused, suddenly anxious. ‘You will be there?’ she said. ‘Won’t you? You’ll all see me?’

‘We’ll be there,’ said Mrs Park, giving her another spoonful of jam. ‘There isn’t one of us as you could keep away.’

While Ollie was holding court in the kitchen, Tom Byrne was offering his stepmother’s help in introducing Muriel to the neighbourhood.

‘She wants to give a ball at Heslop in Muriel’s honour. She thought a few days before the wedding, so that house guests could stay for both. Would Muriel care for it, do you think?’

‘I’m sure she would! I can’t imagine a greater compliment.’ Rupert was flattered and touched, for Minna, like many unassuming and self-effacing women, was a marvellous hostess.

‘She’d have come over today to discuss it with your mother but she’s gone up to Craigston to see Hugh.’

‘How is Hugh these days? Happier?’

Tom’s young brother had paid for his happy home life with excrutiating attacks of homesickness when he first went away to school. Rupert’s last memory of him was of a small, carrot-headed boy in a brand new uniform being wretchedly sick on a clump of waste-ground behind Mersham Station.

‘Oh, he’s fine now, he’s really settled at last. He’s made a new friend this term who seems to be a paragon of all the virtues. He’s bringing him down to stay after the end of term. If the wedding’s on the twenty-eighth he should be here in time for it — and for the ball.’

‘In that case, would he like to be an usher, do you think?’

‘He’d love it, I’m sure. Thirteen’s just the age for that to be a real honour. Now tell me exactly what you want me to do. Lavinia Nettleford’s chief bridesmaid, I gather…’

The talk became practical. It was only as he rose to go that Tom, his cheerful, freckled face very serious, suddenly said, ‘I haven’t told you how very happy I am for you. Really. For all of us at Heslop there’s nothing and nobody too good for you.’

Rupert flushed. ‘Thanks, Tom. To tell you the truth, I can’t quite believe in my own luck. And knowing that it’s not just for me. That because of Muriel all the people here will be looked after.’

‘You’d have had to sell otherwise?’

‘I think so. I promised George I’d hang on, but quite honestly I saw no hope.’

‘And you’d have minded?’

‘Not for myself,’ said Rupert who had recently and regretfully refused an invitation from his erstwhile tutor to join him in an expedition to the cave monastery near Akhaltsikhe on the Black Sea. ‘Not even for Mother; she’s always said she’d be happy in a cottage. Only… when I was thinking I’d have to sell I kept remembering such silly things. Once I came back on leave and there was Proom in the pets’ cemetery — you know, that place behind the orangery where all our dogs are buried. He’d dug a new grave and he was burying a pair of unspeakable khaki socks that Mother had knitted for the troops. They were past unravelling, he said, and our soldiers had enough to contend with!’

Tom laughed. ‘Yes, Proom’s a paragon all right.’

‘And when I was still at Cambridge there was this maid — a spindly, pert little thing. Louise. She’s head housemaid now but she was very young then. I once found her coming out of Uncle Sebastien’s room with her cap all askew and it was obvious he’d been pestering her. I was really angry and I began questioning her. And she snubbed me — oh, so politely, so chivalrously. And she was right, of course, he means no harm. He just went on loving women when he should have stopped and somehow she understood this. It’s people like that I didn’t want to “sell”.’

‘Yes, I can see that. You’ll be a good master for Mersham, Rupert. Better than George though you’ll hate me for saying so.’

‘Don’t! If you knew the guilt I feel. Just to be alive…’ He broke off, seeing Tom’s face, remembering Geoffrey, Tom’s shadow, blown up at Paschendale. ‘God, what an idiot I am! Forgive me.’

Tom shook his head. ‘We’re both in the same boat, I guess. Guilt for the rest of our lives.’

‘If it teaches us humility…’

Tom smiled. ‘You don’t need teaching it, Rupert. It was always your gift. Come, let’s find Ollie.’

They found the Honourable Olive already sitting in the Crossley, in a state of evident bliss, holding a cardboard box on her knees.

‘It’s a baby hedgehog. Anna found it and she’s given it to me. She’s got it to drink milk from a saucer so it’s old enough to go out into the world, she says. She’s very nice, isn’t she? I think she’s beautiful.’

‘Beautiful?’ said Rupert, and there was something in his voice which made Ollie look at him, her brows furrowed.

‘Yes, she is. And I like the way she talks and she told me a poem in Russian because I asked her. It’s about a crocodile walking down the Nevsky something. She’s going to teach it to me next time.’

‘Who is this girl?’ asked Tom, looking curiously at Rupert.

‘A new maid.’ Rupert was still brusque.

‘I should like to meet her.’

‘You will,’ said Rupert. ‘It’s almost impossible not to meet Anna somewhere in this house.’