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evergreens. Barns and other outbuildings had been converted into sports and leisure facilities, and only the stables still served their original purpose. It had a very exclusive air, and there were numerous luxury vehicles in the parking lot.
    A uniformed doorman came to take care of her car and luggage, and Jenny immediately hurried out beneath the columned portico to hug her. “You’re here at last! Whatever happened to you?”
    “Well, thanks to your rotten directions, I managed to get lost!”
    “My rotten directions? Your rotten driving, more like,” Jenny replied, linking her arm. “Come on inside and have some tea. You must need it after driving on a day like this. Tell me, how did the audition go?”
    They went up the steps into the hotel’s spacious lobby, which had clearly once been the original house’s entrance hall. Or part of it. There was a log fire, and its warmth was welcome after the chill outside. The walls had carved oak paneling, and the stone floor was laid with a specially woven carpet patterned with a heraldic design. The receptionist, a perfectly manicured forty-year-old in a blue jacket and skirt, was spraying a bowl of snowdrops with a water atomizer.
    An archway to the left gave on to a beautifully furnished lounge—once a drawing room, perhaps—and from a door on the right came the discreet chink of cutlery as the dining room was made ready for the evening. The murmur of numerous well-spoken voices drifted from the nearby lounge bar, where guests were assembling for pre-prandial drinks. It seemed the cuisine remained sought-after even in Alun’s absence.
    A wide staircase led up beside the dining room wall, and Laura couldn’t help thinking it destroyed the symmetry of the hall. Something was wrong, for the internal design could not have been as the architect originally intended. It had something to do with the greatly reduced size of the present building.
    Lack of symmetry or not, Laura was approving. “I think I’ll condescend to stay,” she murmured.
    Jenny smiled. “Well, we might condescend to have you,” she replied.
    “Is Alun coming back soon to prepare my Meringues Laura ?”
    “I hope so. It’s not the same here without him.”
    “Ah, what it is to be in love,” Laura murmured, inspecting the carving around the stone fireplace. It included the same heraldic design she’d noticed on the carpet, a shield divided into a crescent moon on one side and a sheaf of barley on the other. “Whose is the coat-of-arms?” she asked curiously.
    “Mm? Oh, I don’t really know. Someone told my mother it was a play on the names of the man and wife who used to live here a couple of centuries ago, but I wouldn’t know. The same device appears all through the house, and in a wild flight of fancy, Mother chose to have the carpets woven to match.”
    Laura glanced at the carpet. A play on names? A cool finger touched her as she gazed at the crescent moon. Diana was the moon goddess, and another of her names was Selene, or Celina! As for the sheaf of barley, she remembered from somewhere that ‘blair’ was a Scottish word for field. Barley was grown in fields. She smiled at such flimsy but not impossible reasoning. She was reaching for straws—or barley stalks!
    Jenny linked her arm again. “Come on then, let’s have a nice cup of tea. My parents are longing to meet you.”
    It was then that Laura saw the engraving of the very mansion she’d seen from the gate, right down to the last window and flowerbed. And the stream. All that was missing was Sir Blair Deveril riding toward the pool...
    Jenny saw where her attention was directed. “Ah, yes. You asked about the original Deveril House. Well, that’s it. My father found the picture in a Cheltenham antique shop a few weeks ago. It seems we’re in the house right now, what’s left of it, anyway.”
    Laura nodded, for what other explanation was there for the uneven design of the lobby? “What happened to the rest of it?” she