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dove in, hale and hearty, shouting back for me to join her. Jeremy rolled his eyes at my hesitancy and plunged on ahead. Standing on the shoreline, Great-Aunt Penelope assured me that I didn’t have to, but finally I flung myself in, gasping, my hypersensitive skin turning bright red. I swam a bit, but the water never felt any warmer, as it did back home on our side of the Atlantic.
    Afterwards I ran out of the chilly sea and dashed, blue-lipped, teeth chattering, back to the blanket on the sand, peering wistfully at a fairly cloudy sky that made the wind feel colder. Jeremy’s mother, Aunt Sheila, saw me emerge, and she told Jeremy to run and get more towels and dry me off before I caught pneumonia. He was always an obedient kid on the surface, with blameless manners, yet subversive the moment the adults’ backs were turned.
    In this case he promptly ran off to get the towels, but when he saw that the grown-ups had lost interest and were deep into their boring gossip, he flung the towel around me in a fairly vigorous rubdown, and when I protested, he told me that I was being a weak, “whingeing” Secret Agent who’d just parachuted into an Arctic river and must avoid hypothermia.
    Then as we sat there I taught him how to play poker, although he declared that I was totally unable to keep a “poker face.” He taught me Morse code. This took awhile, but once I caught on, it came in rather handy when we returned to the house and sat down to dinner. Uncle Peter had put on some droning, fusty old music from his “era,” and Jeremy found it so excruciatingly unbearable that he began to tap out a message to me on the table leg.
    Crummy music , he tapped. Startled, I stared at him, but he just gave me our Secret Agent look. He was teasing me for my frequent use of the word “crummy.”
    B-l-o-o-d-y b-o-r-i-n-g , I agreed, tapping back with his favorite phrase. Individually we were both pretty well-behaved kids, but we seemed to bring out the mischief in each other.
    “What’s that noise?” my mother said, looking up from across the table. I glanced away innocently. Jeremy cleared his throat. Uncle Peter shot him a suspicious look. I held my breath. We ate more, and the adults resumed their conversation.
    Jeremy waited until the music swelled louder, then tapped again. I hate peas.
    I couldn’t believe his audacity. I lowered my head so that the sight of his smirk wouldn’t make me snort with laughter. Before I could tap out a reply, however, Jeremy’s mother cocked her head.
    “I heard something, too,” she said. Grandmother Beryl looked around, perplexed.
    But Aunt Penelope had been glancing knowingly from Jeremy to me, and now she smiled and said in a noncommittal way, “Oh, it’s probably just a pair of little mice again.”
     
    Even now, years and years later, as I snuggled into my enormous bed in my hotel room, listening drowsily to the muffled sound of London’s traffic in the street below me, I found that childhood memory as vivid as if it had happened yesterday. Time is like that.Whole years whiz by into oblivion, yet certain moments seem eternal. I drifted into the first deep and decent sleep I’d had in months, and I did not move a muscle until breakfast—and Jeremy—arrived together the next morning.

Chapter Five
    B LUE-SUITED AND CARRYING AN ATTACHÉ CASE, LOOKING VERY SERIOUS and important, Jeremy entered the sitting room ahead of the butler. I received them both regally, seated on the sofa that was pulled up to the dining table. Actually I’d scurried there in order to hide behind the table so that they couldn’t see too much of me in my silk nightgown and robe.
    Jeremy strode right up to me, and, as if he were my husband coming home from a business trip, he bent to kiss my cheek, with more warmth than you’d kiss an old aunt, yet nothing to suggest more than cousinly affection. I got a quick whiff of some clean male scent, something suggesting bergamot, lemon, salty sea air, and