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Edward, getting to his feet, 'shall we begin? Mother? Mr Yardley?' There was a general rising from the table, but it was only when they were out in the hallway that Hobsbawn realised James was heading in the other direction, and asked him in surprise, 'Why, sir, do you not come with us?’
    James smiled and said lightly, 'The steward's room will not hold more than five comfortably.' Then, seeing his mother frown in disapproval, and Hobsbawn about to make further enquiries, he added firmly, 'My mother and brother attend to the business, sir. I know I may trust them to take care of my little Fanny's interests.' This went down well, but he spoiled the effect by adding cynically, 'I can have nothing to contribute to the discussion. I own nothing but my horse and my clothes.' With that he bowed deeply and made his escape to the stables.
    He spent the day at the Maccabbees Club in Stonegate, sitting over the fire with a bottle of brandy. When he arrived back at Morland Place, he found his servant, Durban, waiting for him in the yard. Durban came up quickly to take Nez Carré's head, and shot his master a look of mingled enquiry and warning.
    ‘ Where is everyone?' James asked. 'Have I been missed? Are search parties abroad for me?'
    ‘ I believe your absence was noted, sir,' Durban said. 'The dressing bell has gone, and everyone is upstairs. The coast is clear for the moment, sir.’
    James dismounted, and patted Durban's arm in acknow ledgement of the sympathy. The house was before him, waiting, but today his childhood home looked forbidding in the fading light. It contained his unloved wife and her sharp- eyed father, his anxious mother and cynically amused sister. It threatened him. Everyone wanted something from him, he thought, clenching his fists in frustration. Why would they not just leave him alone?
    ‘ I think I'll walk in the gardens first,' he told Durban. 'It may clear my head a little.'
    ‘ Very good, sir,' said Durban, but the non-committal words held a clear note of warning.
    In the Italian garden, there was privacy. It had been laid out more than a century ago, and was too dark and formal for modern taste, with high, carefully clipped yew hedges, narrow gravelled paths, and gloomy alcoves containing marble benches and statues brought back from Italy by some long-dead Morland from his Grand Tour. Its coolness was sometimes sought on hot summer days, but the servants shunned it, especially after dusk. There was one place where the grass grew differently, and the story was that Lord Ballincrea fell there, run through by his step-brother in a duel: his blood soaking into the ground was said to make the grass come up discoloured, and his ghost was thought to haunt that spot.
    James was not afraid of the Ballincrea ghost, and the effect of drinking brandy all day while eating nothing was to produce a mood of such gloom and depression that the atmosphere of the Italian garden could hardly deepen it. He sat down on a bench, sank his chin in his hands, and gave himself up to reflection.
    His life seemed to him to have gone wrong from the very beginning. He had been isolated as a child between the two extremes of the family, with no companion but the chaplain- tutor, Father Ramsay, a man of strange humour and a satur nine turn of mind, who had influenced James intellectually, without being able to give him the warmth and affection the boy's nature craved. James had grown up thoughtful, reserved, inward-looking, too lonely to be happy, too sensitive to be able to ask for love where there was any chance of rejection.
    His passion for Mary Loveday, some years his senior, and her subsequently arranged marriage to John Skelwith, had confirmed him in his view of the world. When she bore his child, she refused to leave her husband and run away with him, and his share of the shame and scandal had been unrelieved by any share in her love or that of their son.
    And then he had met Héloïse. He lifted his head and stared