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on her mind to be bothered with Miss Runciman’s romantic anecdotes. ‘I believe Nanny has gone upstairs now, Miss Runciman. I suspect my father would like tea brought up to the library, if that can be arranged. Some tea and toast, I think. For two.’
    She had no notion what her father had made of the evening’s events or how her grandfather’s startling announcement had affected him. She had tried to introduce the subject on the way home in the cab but her father had been curiously withdrawn. She’d had sense enough not to press him. She had sat with the envelope in her hand, looking out at the city, wondering if the sheet of cream-laid paper and the arrival of the Irish cousin were somehow connected.
    â€˜For two?’ Miss Runciman enquired.
    â€˜Yes. I’ve something to discuss with Papa and we may be some time about it. You may retire to bed whenever you wish.’
    â€˜Thank you, Lindsay,’ the housekeeper said. ‘I’ll fetch your tea first.’
    â€˜And toast,’ said Lindsay.
    *   *   *
    Outside the first-floor study there was little to indicate what Arthur Franklin did for a living. The house was comfortably appointed but had an uncluttered feel to it that her father had been careful to preserve. Lindsay suspected that the public rooms had changed little since her mother had arranged them and still reflected how the house had been when her parents had first taken occupancy twenty years ago.
    Twenty years ago! She could not imagine it. In fact, she had been completely oblivious to the passage of time until she had arrived at her first bleeding and had altered mentally and emotionally. It was as if the tide of nature had affected not just her reproductive organs – Aunt Lilias had explained the mystery very scientifically – but her brain too, her ability to perceive all sorts of things that had been hidden from her before.
    As a child she had believed that she loved Nanny Cheadle more than she loved Papa. Believed that she was Nanny Cheadle’s child and that when she was old enough the truth would be revealed. Had even imagined that she might belong to Aunt Lilias and that the woman whose oval portrait hung above the fireplace in the big, seldom-used ground-floor drawing-room was not Margaret, her mother, but some ethereal substitute who had never really existed.
    When the house had been quiet she would borrow the shell-backed mirror from Nanny Cheadle’s dressing-table and bring it down to the empty drawing-room; the room in which a fire was lighted only on the coldest of winter days; the room with the little piano in it, the peaceful, faintly dusty room that seemed to have been preserved for no other purpose than to shelter the oval portrait over the fireplace. She would stand on toe-tip on the fender and angle the mirror so that she could see her face and the face in the portrait framed side by side. She had striven to recognise herself, to be able to say, ‘Yes, this is who I am,’ but could not, and had been both mystified and frustrated when Pappy or Uncle Donald in a soft, muddled moment had brushed her fair curls and told her that she looked so like her mama that she might be her double.
    Lindsay had never been a ‘kitchen jenny’ like her smallest cousin, Pansy, who enjoyed spending time below stairs with the cook and the maids. Parlour, bedroom and library were the heart of the house as far as Lindsay was concerned and she left all domestic dealings to Miss Runciman.
    When, as a child, she had toddled into the library, her father would patiently put away his pencils and squares and lift her on to the table, plonk her down on the sheet of crisp draft paper like ballast in the ship he was designing, and would listen patiently to her little tales of woe. Later she learned to respect his need for peace and quiet and would curl up in the battered old leather chesterfield and read quietly or watch him draw, his