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had ever seen. He was about thirteen or fourteen, and growing out of his livery – an extraordinary outfit consisting of tunic and breeches in a complicated check pattern of green and yellow on a bright scarlet ground. The narrow neckband and cuffs were faced with plain red that should have fought with his carrotty hair, but didn’t, because of the white lace ruffles in between. It was to be years before Luke discovered that Vilia and Sorley had designed this outfit between them.
    Luke’s mother said, ‘Come in, my dear, out of the cold. Such an unpleasant day!’
    Within minutes, one of the anonymous females had been confided into Mrs Weekes’ care, the other to that of Lucy Telfer’s maid, and the page-boy had been handed to the butler. The two females, whom Luke had promptly christened The Downtrodden Duo – he was rather proud of ‘Duo’ – were haled off, murmuring, upstairs, while the pageboy was passed like some undesirable parcel to the second footman, and vanished in the direction of the nether regions.
    Luke’s father, ushering the ladies into the library, said, ‘You, too, Luke. Come along!’
    Reluctantly, he followed. Miss Cameron was already glancing at the bookshelves, her eyes smack on a level with some elderly copies of the Turf Remembrancer and the Annual Racing Calendar. The books had been bought with the house from a gentleman whose interest in horses had been disastrously matched by his lack of skill in backing them, but Luke’s father had never troubled even to have them rearranged. Although his attitude to sport was tepid, he would have admitted, if pushed, that he considered the history of Ascot a better furnishing for his shelves than the plays of Aeschylus.
    Her face expressionless, the girl turned back into the room and sat down neatly in a straight-backed chair. Now that she had shed her cloak, it was possible to see what she really looked like. With her high-necked black gown, tightly folded hands, and pale unsmiling face, she was no one’s idea of a merry little playmate. Even her long, white-gold hair looked serious-minded. Instead of tumbling down to her shoulders, as a girl’s should, it was swept into a coil at the nape of her neck, so heavy that it seemed to tilt her head backwards. In the indoor light of a November afternoon, her eyes had lost all their colour and brilliance. To Luke she appeared stiff, drab, and unapproachable.
    He paid very little attention to what was being said at first. His father, after a dutiful fifteen minutes, had made himself scarce, pleading an engagement, and his wife had seen him go with the expression of a drowning man, despairing but resigned, watching a straw being swept away on the tide. Distantly, Luke heard his mother and the girl go through all the boring details of rooms and mealtimes and servants and domestic protocol. The girl seemed to be listening carefully, and she nodded once or twice and asked an occasional question. It was a relief to discover that her voice was soft and cultured, with no accent other than a faint elongation of the ‘s’ when it came at the end of a word. Her manners were perfectly respectable, and she didn’t appear to be any more stupid than most girls. Perhaps she wasn’t going to shame them after all.
    ‘Yes,’ she said in a reply to a gently probing question. ‘I have found it necessary over the last year or two to exercise some supervision over my father’s household. His illness made him neglectful at times.’
    She sounded terribly grown up and more than a little prissy.
    Lucy Telfer’s quick sympathy was aroused. ‘You poor child! What a responsibility for such young shoulders! But you need not trouble your head about such things any longer. I know how you must be pining for your father – so sad! – but we will try what we can do to cheer you up.’
    Luke could tell, and he wondered whether the girl could, too, that the first targets for cheering up would be clothes and hair-style.
    ‘We want