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her.’
    â€˜Couldn’t you marry somebody, Rose?’ asked Columbine. ‘You’re old enough. If you were married, we could live in your house.’
    â€˜I’m not getting married,’ said Rose, blushing furiously.
    â€˜But you
could
marry,’ Columbine insisted.
    â€˜She’d have to find somebody to marry her, stupid,’ said Clover, ‘and that wouldn’t be easy.’
    â€˜I think Mr Rose would do it.’ Columbine was dogged. ‘I mean, he looks at Rose like Gryffed looks at his dinner.’
    â€˜But Rose couldn’t end up as Mrs Rose Rose,’ Clover argued, ‘and anyway she doesn’t have fancy dresses or a corset or a crinoline or anything. She just has the Dead Girl and the statues and the Cannibal and Father Nameless, same as the rest of us, and I don’t suppose they’re much use if what you’re looking for are normal things like fashionable clothes and hair that’s pinned properly. But it doesn’t matter,’ she added hastily, seeing that Lily was about to cry. ‘Aunt Barbara will take us. I heard Mrs Snips say so.’
    â€˜You shouldn’t eavesdrop, Columbine,’ Rose snapped.
    â€˜I’m Clover,’ Clover said.
    Rose glared. ‘I don’t care which you are. You shouldn’t eavesdrop.’ She had been very touchy on the subject of Arthur Rose, the young veterinary surgeon, since Father Nameless, in terrible distress, had brought an injured thrush to the castle. Arthur, dressing a hunting wound of Gryffed’s, had invested the bird’s dying moments with grave importance and even officiated at the burial service for which Father Nameless had tolled the bell. For some reason that Rose herself did not quite understand, the bird’s death had reduced her to helpless tears and Arthur had set himself quietly to comfort her. Rose was not a fool. Though Arthur said nothing lover-like, she knew he loved her. Sheknew because whenever he was called to Hartslove, he looked for her even before his patient. She knew because he was always happy to walk down the drive in her company. Most of all, she knew by the way he said goodbye. It was this that had captured her heart. He said goodbye as though, above everything else, he wished he was saying hello.
    Arthur’s love for Rose had been obvious to all after the day with the bird, and Columbine and Clover liked to make sly references to it. It was not so much the jokes that Rose hated, it was that Clover and Columbine were right: the de Granvilles
were
too strange for anybody normal to marry, and Rose resented this. She loved Hartslove as much as any of them, but since their mother left, both castle and family felt increasingly like a shipwreck to which she was forced to cling whilst the great steamer of the world forged on without her.
    She jerked, just in time to hear Clover or Columbine say, ‘Anyway, it wasn’t Mr Rose who made the offer.’
    Lily breathed, ‘Enough, enough.’
    Yet that was true too: Rose’s only offer had not come from Arthur but from Arthur’s employer, Mr Snaffler, who, last Christmas, had impudently declared to Charles, in front of them all and Mrs Snipper, that ‘despite everything’ – this accompanied by a disparaging gesture at the castle, its ancient peculiarities and its dusty contents – he would ‘take your oldest girl off your hands and without adowry too. Best bargain of the day.’ Rose still shuddered at the thought.
    Clover and Columbine knew they had gone too far and quickly changed the subject. ‘Couldn’t the people who buy Hartslove buy us too? We could work with Mrs Snips. We could “work our fingers to the bone”. We could “drive ourselves into early graves”. We could “work until we could work no more and die at our posts, still in uniform”.’
    Rose recovered herself. ‘Where on earth do you learn such