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After his discharge from the army, Harry had taken to walking around the streets of London to exercise his injured leg. One early morning he had been in Covent Garden market, watching the porters carry in great baskets of vegetables when one of them collapsed and sent the contents of the basket of potatoes he had been carrying spilling across the cobbles.
    ‘Bleedin’ milksop,’jeered one porter. ‘Leave him lie, Bert. Ain’t nuthin’ but a shyster.’
    Harry had picked Becket up and supported him into a nearby pub and had bought him a brandy. Then, realizing by the man’s emaciated form that he was starving, he’d ordered him breakfast. Becket had fallen on the food, shovelling it desperately into his mouth.
    ‘I’ve been hungry like that,’ thought Harry with compassion, a picture of lying under the hot sun on the African veld swimming into his mind.
    When the man had finished eating, Harry questioned him. Becket, too, had been a soldier, and having left the army found it hard to get work. He had a thin, sensitive white face, straight brown hair combed severely back, pale grey eyes and a thin mouth. He said he’d been in the army since he was a boy but would offer no further clue to his background.
    On impulse, Harry explained that he, too, had recently returned from the wars and was on a small budget, but if Becket liked to follow him home, he would find work for him.
    And so Becket had fallen into the role of manservant. He could read and write and studied books on how to be the perfect gentleman’s gentleman. He only spoke when spoken to, never complained, even when his wages were late.
    As Harry did not like people asking him questions, particularly about the Boer War, he respected his servant’s reticence.
    Although Becket was expected to eat the same food as his master, he was still thin and pale, but apart from that seemed healthy and strong enough.
    Harry, resplendent in new morning dress and silk hat, arrived finally at Stacey Magna, to be met by the earl’s coachman and two footmen who bore them off in a well-sprung carriage to Stacey Court.
    Stacey Court was a Tudor mansion, built of red brick and with many mullioned windows which flashed and twinkled in the summer sun as the carriage bowled up a long drive under an avenue of lime trees. Harry was surprised to think of Lady Rose in such an antique setting. He had pictured her in a stately Georgian home with portico at the front and long Palladian windows.
    Brum, the butler, was on the steps to meet them. Two footmen followed the butler with the luggage up an old oak staircase and then along a corridor which seemed to be full of steps up and steps down and threatening overhead beams, in places so low that the captain had to duck his head.
    The room Harry was ushered into had a magnificent four-poster bed. A small adjoining room had been allocated to Becket. Somehow Harry was glad that his manservant was to be close at hand and not confined to the servants’ quarters, although Becket would be expected to take his meals in the servants’ hall. Harry was told the earl expected him in his study as soon as he had freshened up after the journey. There was a spot of soot on his shirt-front. Becket changed him into a clean shirt and bent down and gave his master’s shoes a polish.
    ‘What will you do?’ asked Harry after he had rung the bell to be conducted to the earl’s study.
    ‘I will go down to the servants’ hall, sir.’
    ‘Get on all right, will you? I mean, you haven’t been with other servants before.’
    ‘I am sure I shall manage.’
    Harry looked at him doubtfully, wondering how his manservant would cope with the rigid class system that existed among servants in large houses.
    A footman appeared and Harry followed him along the corridor and then back down the stairs under the gaze of family portraits to the hall, where Brum was waiting to take over. He led Harry across the hall and into the study on the ground floor.
    ‘There you are