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this week—we’re supplying all the wine for the ball, so I’ll be copping a day or two off keeping the client happy, right? Now, listen, to get to Kettlesheer, you need to go back to the main road, take the next left through the village, then there’s a sign to the right, and you go up a long drive. You could walk there from here, across the field, in ten minutes if you want to leave the car. Evie? Did you get all that?” he added.
    “Um, yes,” I said. I hadn’t been listening. I’d been imagining our lunch unfolding like a movie in my head. We were at sticky toffee pudding and witty banter. A dog had appeared at our feet and was gazing up at us lovingly.
    “Main road, left, then right,” he repeated.
    I made a thumbs-up sign and began turning the car round. In my rearview mirror, I watched Fraser shoulder the stag’s head as if it weighed nothing and weave his way to the front door.
    I noted as I sailed confidently down the track that Alice hadn’t let him put Banquo in his London flat. I would have done. It could have been “our” stag.
    *
    Of course, I got lost.
    Totally lost.
    The lost you can only get in the middle of nowhere, on a dark winter night, where there are
no
streetlamps and
no
signs because everyone navigates according to whose cows are in which field.
    I was nearly back in Berwick before I finally worked out where I was, using Max’s free-with-petrol atlas, and by the time I stumbled onto Kettlesheer’s twisty drive, I was wailing actual curses on the whole stupid countryside.
    They dried up instantly when I turned the final corner.
    “Blimey,” I breathed out loud, as I fell deeply and instantly in love.
    Kettlesheer rose magnificently against the wooded hillside like an eccentric grande dame, trailing ivy and turrets and weather vanes, with two crenellated wings sweeping back from a proud main elevation. Right on cue, the clouds shifted away from the moon, bathing the stone façade in white light and glittering in the pointy windows like jewels.
    I held my breath and drank in the view, my heart swelling in my chest. I
dreamed
of houses like this. Kettlesheer was exactly the sort of moss-covered ancient pile I’d always pictured when reading about Border war rescues and romances and skirmishes and shotgun weddings. It had a drive that cried out for the thunder of horses’ hooves and the rattle of a carriage pulling up posthaste from London. Turrets built for leaning out of, to catch the serenade of bagpipes.
    I gripped the steering wheel and wished violently that I’d been witnessing this romantic splendor from the window of a landau, not through the fly-smeared windscreen of a very boring Mercedes estate wagon. As a small sop, I abandoned the local radio station and tuned to some classical music for the final stretch of the drive.
    As I got nearer, I realized actual lights, not moonlight, were illuminating the long downstairs windows, and an array of cars, mostly of the rugged agricultural type, were parked on the gravel circle. Either the McAndrews had a big family, or they had company.
    I pulled up next to the shabbiest available Land Rover, and checked my reflection in the mirror. I wasn’t that happy with what I saw. I’d planned my “casual weekend look” for Fraser’s benefit, but I’d intended to stop in a lay-by to change my jeans for something more befitting a Chelsea antiques expert before I arrived at the house. Now I was late, shiny-nosed,
and
dressed for an afternoon’s light furniture removal.
    My wheelie suitcase was in the boot. I could drag on a pair of tights and a skirt … It was dark. No one would see me, if I was quick.
    I leaped out of the car, and gasped as the evening chill bit through my shirt. The air was nose-stingingly cold.
    I amended my plan to putting on a better pair of boots and covering the whole thing up with Alice’s mad but fashion-forward cocoon coat. That should give me enough time to arrive, get my wheelie case upstairs, and change