Sense & Sensibility

1

From their windows – their high, generous Georgian windows – the view was, they all agreed, spectacular. It was a remarkable view of Sussex parkland, designed and largely planted two hundred years before to give the fortunate occupants of Norland Park the very best of what nature could offer when tamed by the civilising hand of man. There were gently undulating sweeps of green; there were romantic but manageable stretches of water; there were magnificent stands of ancient trees under which sheep and deer decoratively grazed. Add to all that the occasional architectural punctuation of graceful lengths of park railing and the prospect was, to the Dashwood family, gathered sombrely in their kitchen, gazing out, perfection.

‘And now,’ their mother said, flinging an arm out theatrically in the direction of the open kitchen window, ‘we have to leave all this. This – this paradise.’ She paused, and then she added, in a lower voice but with distinct emphasis, ‘Because of her.’

All three daughters watched her, in silence. Even Marianne, the middle one, who had inherited in full her mother’s propensity for drama and impulsiveness, said nothing. It was clear to all of them, from long practice, that their mother had not finished. While they waited, they switched their collective gaze to the scrubbed top of the kitchen table, to the spongeware jug of artless garden flowers, randomly arranged, to their chipped and pretty tea mugs. They were quite still, scarcely breathing, three girls waiting for the next maternal tirade.

Belle Dashwood continued to gaze longingly at the view. It had been the girls’ father – their recently, appallingly, dead father – who had called their mother Belle. He said, in his emotional, gallant way, that, as a name, Belle was the perfect fit for its owner, and in any case, Isabella, though distinguished, was far too much of a mouthful for daily use.

And so Isabella, more than twenty years ago, had become Belle. And in time, quietly and unobtrusively, she had morphed into Belle Dashwood, as the wife (apparently) of Henry Dashwood, and (more certainly) the mother of Elinor and Marianne and Margaret. They were a lovely family, everyone remarked upon it: that open-hearted man; his pretty, artistic wife; those adorable girls of theirs. Their charm and looks made them universally popular, so that when Henry had had a fairy-tale stroke of luck, and was summoned, with Belle and the girls, to share the great house of a childless old bachelor uncle to whom Henry was the only heir, the world had rejoiced. To be transported from their happy but anxiously threadbare existence to live at Norland Park, with its endless bedrooms and acres, seemed to most of their friends only a delightful instance of the possibility of magic, an example of the occasional value of building castles in the air.

Old Henry Dashwood, uncle to young Henry, was himself part of that nostalgic and romantic belief in the power of dreams. He had been much beloved, a kind of self-appointed squire to the whole district, generous to the local community and prepared to open the doors of Norland to all manner of charitable events. He had lived at Norland all his life, looked after by a spinster sister, and it was only after she died that he realised the house needed more human life in it than he could possibly provide by himself. And that realisation was swiftly followed by a second one, a recollection of the existence and circumstance of his likeable if not particularly high-achieving heir, his nephew Henry, only child of his younger and long-dead sister, who was now, by all accounts, living on the kind of breadline that old Henry was certain that no Dashwood should ever be reduced to. So young Henry was summoned for an audience, and arrived at Norland with a very appealing companion in tow, and also, to old Henry’s particular joy, two little girls and a baby. The family stood in the great hall at Norland and gazed about them in awe and wonder, and old Henry was overcome by the impulse to spread his arms out and to exclaim, there and then, that they were welcome to stay, to come and live with him, to make Norland their home for ever.

‘I will rejoice’, he said, his voice unsteady with emotion, ‘to see life and noise back at the Park.’ He had glanced, damp-eyed, at the children. ‘And to see your little gumboots kicked off by the front door. My dears. My very dears.’

Elinor, watching her mother now, swallowed. It didn’t do to let her mother get too worked up about anything, just as it didn’t do to let Marianne get over-excited, either. Belle didn’t suffer from the asthma which had killed Elinor’s father, young Henry, and which made Marianne so dramatically, alarmingly fragile, but it was never a good thing, all the same, to let Belle run on down any vehement track, in case she flew out of control, as she often did, and it all ended in tears. Literal tears. Elinor sometimes wondered how much time and energy the whole Dashwood family had wasted in crying. She cleared her throat, as undramatically as she could, to remind her mother that they were still waiting.

Belle gave a little start. She withdrew her gaze from the sight of the huge shadow of the house inching its way across the expanse of turf beyond the window and sighed. Then she said, almost dreamily, ‘I came here, you know, with Daddy.’

‘Yes,’ Elinor said, trying not to sound impatient, ‘we know. We came too.’

Belle turned her head sharply and glared at her oldest daughter, almost accusingly. ‘We came to Norland’, she said, ‘because we were asked. Daddy and I came here, with you all, to look after Uncle Henry.’ She stopped and then she said, more gently, ‘Darling Uncle Henry.’

There was another silence, broken only by Belle repeating softly, as if to herself, ‘Darling Uncle Henry.’

‘He wasn’t actually that darling,’ Elinor said reasonably. ‘He didn’t leave you the house. Did he. Or enough money to live on.’

Belle put her chin up slightly. ‘He wanted to leave both to Daddy. If Daddy hadn’t—’ She broke off again.

‘Died?’ Margaret said helpfully.

Her older sisters turned on her.

‘Honestly, Mags—’

‘Shut up, shut up, shut the f—’

‘Marianne!’ Belle said warningly.

Tears immediately sprang to Marianne’s eyes. Elinor clamped an arm round her shoulders and held her hard. It must be so awful, she often thought, to take everything to heart so, as Marianne did; to react to every single thing that happened as if you were obliged to respond on behalf of the whole feeling world. Holding her sister tight, to steady her, she took a breath.

‘Well,’ she said, in as level a voice as she could manage, ‘we have to face what we have to face. Don’t we. Dad is dead, and he didn’t get the house either. Did he. Darling Uncle Henry didn’t leave him Norland or any money or anything. He got completely seduced by being a great-uncle to a little boy in old age. So he left everything to them. He left it all to John.’

Marianne was quivering rather less. Elinor relaxed her hold and concentrated instead on her mother. She said again, a little louder, ‘He’s left Norland Park to John.’

Belle turned to look at her. She said reprovingly, ‘Darling, he had to.’

‘No, he didn’t.’

‘He did. Houses like Norland go to heirs with sons. They always have. It’s called primogeniture. Daddy had Norland for his lifetime.’

Elinor dropped her arm from her sister’s shoulders. ‘We’re not the royal family, Ma,’ she said. ‘There isn’t a succession or anything.’

Margaret had been fiddling, as usual, with her iPod, disentangling the earpiece flex from the complicated knot she was constantly, absently, tying it in. Now she looked up, as if she had just realised something. ‘I expect,’ she said brightly, ‘that Dad couldn’t leave you anything much because he hadn’t married you, had he?’

Marianne gave a little scream.

‘Don’t say that!’

‘Well, it’s true.’

Belle closed her eyes.

‘Please …’

Elinor looked at her youngest sister. ‘Just because you know something, Mags, or even think it, doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to say it.’

Margaret shrugged. It was her ‘whatever’ shrug. She and her school friends did it perpetually, and when they were asked not to, they held up their splayed fingers in a ‘w’, to demonstrate the ‘whatever’ shape instead.

Marianne was crying again. She was the only person Elinor had ever encountered who could cry and still look ravishing. Her nose never seemed to swell or redden, and she appeared able just to let huge tears slide slowly down her face in a way that one ex-boyfriend had said wistfully simply made him want to lick them off her jawline.

‘Please don’t,’ Elinor said despairingly.

Marianne said, almost desperately, between sobs, ‘I adore this place …’

Elinor looked about her. The kitchen was not only almost painfully familiar to her, but also represented the essence of their life at Norland, its great size and elegant Georgian proportions rendered welcoming and warm by Belle’s gift for bohemian homemaking, her eye for colour and fabric and the most beguiling degree of shabbiness. That room had seen every family meal, every storm and tantrum, every celebration and party, almost every line of homework. Uncle Henry had spent hours in the patchwork-covered armchair, a whisky tumbler in his hand, egging the girls on to divert and outrage him. Their father had spent as many hours in the carver chair at the head of the huge scrubbed table, drawing and reading and always available for interruption or consolation or diversion. To be without this room, and all its memories and capacities, seemed violently and abruptly unendurable. She said, tensely, to her sister, ‘We all do.’

Marianne gave a wild and theatrical gesture. She cried, ‘I feel as if – as if I’d been born here!’

Elinor repeated, steadily, ‘We all do.’

Marianne clenched both fists and beat them lightly against her collarbone. ‘No, I feel it here. I feel I belong at Norland. I might not be able to play away from Norland. I might never be able to play the guitar—’

‘Course you will!’

‘Darling,’ Belle said, looking at Marianne. Her voice was unsteady. ‘Darling …’

Elinor said wearily, as a precaution to Margaret, ‘Don’t you start too.’

Margaret shrugged again, but she didn’t look tearful. She looked, instead, mildly rebellious; but at thirteen, she often looked like that.

Elinor sighed. She was very tired. She’d been tired for weeks, it seemed, months, tired with the grief of old Uncle Henry dying and then the worse grief, and shock, of Daddy, rushed into hospital after what had at first appeared just a familiar kind of asthma attack, the kind that his blue inhaler usually sorted. But not this time. This time had been terrible, terrifying, seeing him fighting for breath as if someone were holding a pillow over his face, and then the ambulance dash to the hospital, with them all driving behind him, sick with fear, and then a bit of relief in Accident and Emergency, and a bit more in a private room where he could gasp out that he needed John to come, he needed to see his son John, and then after John’s visit, another attack when none of them were there, an attack by himself in that plastic, anonymous room among all the tubes and monitors and heart machines, and the hospital ringing Norland at two in the morning to say that he hadn’t made it, that they couldn’t help his worn-out heart any more, that he was dead.

They’d all convened in the kitchen then, too, after a last necessary, pointless visit to the hospital. In the dawn, all four of them grey with misery and shock and fatigue, had huddled round the table with mugs of tea clasped in their hands, like lifelines. And it was then that Belle had chosen to remind them, using the sort of faraway voice she used when reading fairy tales aloud, how she and Daddy had run away together, away from his first marriage – well, if facing facts, as Elinor preferred to do, his only marriage – and how, after too many struggling and penurious years, Uncle Henry had taken them in. Uncle Henry was, Belle said, an old romantic at heart, an old romantic who had never married because the girl he wanted wouldn’t have him, but who loved to see someone else’s adventure turn out to have a happy ending.

‘He said to me,’ Belle told them, turning her mug slowly in her hands, ‘Norland was so huge and so empty that it reproached him every day. He said he didn’t give tuppence for whether we were married or not. He said marriage was just a silly old convention to keep society tidy. And he told me that he loved seeing people do things he’d never quite had the nerve to do himself.’

Was it nerve, Elinor had thought, trying to comprehend what her mother was saying through the fog of her own shock and sorrow, to live with someone for years and never actually get round to marrying them – or was it carelessness? Was it an adventure not to leave a responsible will that would secure the future of the person you’d had three daughters with – or was it feckless? And was it really romantic to risk being the true beneficiary of a wealthy but deeply conventional old uncle by remaining unmarried – or just plain stupid? Anyway, whatever Dad had done, or not done, would Uncle Henry always have left everything to John in the end, simply because John had had a son and not daughters?

She was still angry with Dad, even now, even though she missed him every hour of every day. No, she wasn’t angry precisely, she was furious. Plain furious. But it had to be a silent fury because Ma couldn’t or wouldn’t hear a word against Dad, any more than she would accept responsibility for never giving a moment’s thought to the possibility of her own future without him. He had been an asthmatic, after all! The blue inhalers were as much a part of the Dashwood family as the members of it were. He was never going to make old bones, and he was living in a place and a manner that was entirely dependent on the charity and whim of an old man who liked his fantasies to be daring but his facts, his realities, to be orthodox.

Of course Belle would not allow for any mistakes having been made, either on her part or on Dad’s. She even insisted for weeks after Dad died, that he and John, his only child and son by that long-ago marriage, had had a death-bed reconciliation in Haywards Heath Hospital, and that they had both wept, and John had promised faithfully that he’d look after his stepmother and the girls.

‘He promised,’ Belle said, over and over, ‘we can stay at Norland for ever. And he’ll keep his word. Of course he will. He’s Daddy’s son, after all.’

And Daddy, Elinor thought, not without a hint of bitterness, is not only safely dead and thus unanswerable, but was perfect. Perfect.

But what had actually happened? Well, what had happened was that they had reckoned without John’s wife, hadn’t they? In the unbearable aftermath of Dad’s death, they had almost forgotten about Fanny. Elinor glanced now across the kitchen to the huge old Welsh dresser, which bore all their everyday mugs and plates, and also holiday postcards from friends and family photographs. There was a framed photograph of Fanny up there, in a girlish white broderie anglaise dress, holding Harry, when he was a baby. Elinor noticed that the photograph had been turned to face the wall, with its back to the room. Despite the distress of the day, Elinor couldn’t help an inward smile. What a brilliant little gesture! Who had done it? Margaret, probably, now sitting at the table with her earphones in and her gaze unfocused. Elinor stretched a foot under the table and gave her sister a little nudge of congratulation.

When John had first brought Fanny to meet them, Elinor had thought that nobody so tiny could represent any kind of force. How wrong she’d been! Fanny had turned out to be a pure concentration of self-interest. She was, apparently, just like her equally tiny mother: hard as nails and entirely devoted to status and money. Especially money. Fanny was mad about money. She’d come to her marriage to John with some money of her own, and she had very clear ideas about how to spend it. She had, in fact, very clear ideas about most things – and a will of iron.

Fanny had wanted a man and a big house with land and lots of money to run it and a child, preferably a boy. And she had got them. All of them. And nothing, absolutely nothing, was going to stand in the way of her keeping them and consolidating them. Nothing.

It was outrageous, really, how soon after Dad’s death that Fanny came bowling up the drive in her top-of-the-range four-by-four Land Cruiser with Harry in his car seat and the Romanian nanny and the kind of household luggage you only bring if you want to make it very, very plain who’s the boss round here now. She brought a bunch of garage forecourt flowers – they even had a sticker on the cellophane wrapping saying 20 per cent more for free – for Belle and then she said would they mind awfully just staying in the kitchen wing for a few hours as she had her London interior designer coming and he charged so much for every hour that she really wanted to be able to concentrate on him.

So they’d taken Harry and the nanny, who had blue varnished nails and a leopard-print miniskirt stretched over her considerable hips, into the kitchen, and tried to give them lunch, but the nanny said she was dieting, and would only have a smoke, instead, and Harry glanced at the food on the plate and then put his thumb in, and closed his eyes in disgust. It was three hours before Fanny, her eyes alight with paint-effect visions, had blown into the kitchen and announced, without any preliminary and as if it would be unquestionably welcome news, that she and John would be moving in in a fortnight.

And they had. So silly, Fanny said firmly, as if no one could possibly disagree with her, so silly to go on paying rent in London when Norland was simply standing waiting for them. She seemed entirely oblivious to the effect that she was having, and to the utter disregard she displayed for what she was doing to the family for whom Norland had been more home than house for all their childhood years. Her ruthless determination to obliterate the past life of the house and to impose her own expensive and impersonal taste upon it instead was breathtaking. Out with the battered painted furniture, the French armoires, the cascading and faded curtains in ancient brocades, and in with polished granite and stainless steel and state-of-the-art wet rooms. Out with objects of sentimental value and worn Persian rugs and speckled mirrors in dimly gilded frames, and in with modern sculptured ‘pieces’ and stripped-back floors and vast flat television screens over every beautiful Georgian fireplace.

It was all happening too, it seemed to Belle and her daughters, with an indecent and brutal haste. Fanny arrived with John and Harry and the nanny, and an army of East European workmen, and took over all the best rooms, all the rooms that had once been Uncle Henry’s, and the house resounded to the din of sawing and hammering and drilling. Luckily, Elinor supposed, it was summer, so all the windows and doors could be opened to let out the inevitable dust and the builders’ smells of raw wood and plaster, but the open windows also meant that nothing audible could be concealed, especially not those things which Elinor grew to suspect Fanny of absolutely intending to be overheard.

They’d heard her, all the last few weeks, talking John out of any generous impulse he might have harboured towards his stepmother and half-sisters. Fanny might be tiny but her voice seemed to carry for miles, even when she was whispering. Usually, they could hear her issuing instructions (‘She never says please,’ Margaret pointed out, ‘does she?’) but if she wanted to get something out of John, she wheedled.

They could hear her, plainly, in their kitchen from the room she had commandeered as a temporary sitting room – drawing room, she called it – working on John. She was probably on his knee a lot of the time, doing her sex-kitten thing, running her little pointed fingers through his hair and somehow indicating that he would have to forgo a lot of bedroom treats if she didn’t get her way.

‘They can’t need that much, Johnnie darling. They really can’t! I mean, I know Mags is still at school – frightfully expensive, her private school, and really such a waste of money when there’s a perfectly adequate state secondary, in Lewes, which is free – but Elinor’s nearly qualified and Marianne jolly well ought to be. And Belle could easily go back to work, teaching art, like she used to.’

‘She hasn’t for yonks,’ John said doubtfully. ‘Not for as long as I can remember. Dad liked her at home …’

‘Well, darling, we can’t always have what we like, can we? And she’s had years, years, of just wafting about Norland being all daffy and artistic and irresponsible.’

There was a murmur, and then John said, without much conviction, ‘I promised Dad—’

‘Sweetness,’ Fanny said, ‘listen. Listen to me. What about your promises to me? What about Harry? I know you love this place, I know what it means to you even if you’ve never lived here and you know I’ll help you restore it and keep it up. I promised you, didn’t I? I promised when I married you. But it’s going to cost a fortune. It really is. The thing is, Johnnie, that good interior designers don’t come cheap and we agreed, didn’t we, that we were going to go for gold and not cut corners because that’s what a house like this deserves?’

‘Well,’ John had said uneasily, ‘I suppose …’

‘Poppet,’ said Fanny, ‘just think about us. Think about you and me and Harry. And Norland. Norland is our home.’

There’d been a long pause then.

‘They’re snogging,’ Margaret said disgustedly. ‘She’s sitting on his lap and they’re snogging.’

It worked, though, the snogging; Elinor had to give Fanny credit for gaining her ends. The house, their beloved home which had acquired the inimitable patina of all houses which have quietly and organically evolved alongside the generations of the family which has inhabited them, was being wrenched into a different and modish incarnation, a sleek and showy new version of itself which Belle declared, contemptuously, to resemble nothing so much as a five-star hotel. ‘And that’s not a compliment. Anyone can pay to stay in a hotel. But you stay in a hotel. You don’t live in one. Fanny is behaving like some ghastly sort of developer. She’s taking all this darling old house’s character away.’

‘But’, Elinor said quietly, ‘that’s what Fanny wants. She wants a sort of showcase. And she’ll get it. We heard her. She’s got John just where she wants him. And, because of him, she’s got Norland. She can do what she likes with it. And she will.’

An uneasy forced bonhomie hung over the house for days afterwards until yesterday, when John had come into their kitchen rather defiantly and put a bottle of supermarket white wine down on the table with the kind of flourish only champagne would have merited and announced that actually, as it turned out, all things being considered, and after much thought and discussion and many sleepless nights, especially on Fanny’s part, her being so sensitive and affectionate a person, they had come to the conclusion that they – he, Fanny, Harry and the live-in nanny – were going to need Norland to themselves.

There’d been a stunned silence. Then Margaret said loudly, ‘All fifteen bedrooms?’

John had nodded gravely. ‘Oh yes.’

‘But why – how—’

‘Fanny has ideas of running Norland as a business, you see. An upmarket bed and breakfast. Or something. To help pay for the upkeep, which will be’ – he rolled his eyes to the ceiling – ‘unending. Paying to keep Norland going will need a bottomless pit of money.’

Belle gazed at him, her eyes enormous. ‘But what about us?’

‘I’ll help you find somewhere.’

‘Near?’

‘It has to be near!’ Marianne cried, almost gasping. ‘It has to, it has to, I can’t live away from here, I can’t—’

Elinor took her sister’s nearest hand and gripped it.

‘A cottage,’ John suggested.

‘A cottage!’

‘There are some adorable Sussex cottages.’

‘But they’ll need paying for,’ Belle said despairingly, ‘and I haven’t a bean.’

John looked at her. He seemed a little more collected. ‘Yes, you have.’

‘No,’ Belle said. ‘No.’ She felt for a chairback and held on to it. ‘We were going to have plans. To make some money to pay for living here. We had schemes for the house and estate, maybe using it as a wedding venue or something, after Uncle Henry died, but there wasn’t time, there was only a year, before – before …’

Elinor moved to stand beside her mother.

‘There’s the legacies,’ John said.

Belle flapped a hand, as though swatting away a fly. ‘Oh, those …’

‘Two hundred thousand pounds is not nothing, my dear Belle. Two hundred thousand is a considerable sum of money.’

‘For four women! For four women to live on forever! Four women without even a roof over their heads?’

John looked stricken for a moment and then rallied. He indicated the bottle on the table. ‘I brought you some wine.’

Margaret inspected the bottle. She said to no one in particular, ‘I don’t expect we’ll even cook with that.’

‘Shush,’ Elinor said, automatically.

Belle surveyed her stepson. ‘You promised your father.’

John looked back at her. ‘I promised I’d look after you. I will. I’ll help you find a house to rent.’

‘Too kind,’ Marianne said fiercely.

‘The interest on—’

‘Interest rates are hopeless, John.’

‘I’m amazed you know about such things.’

‘And I’m amazed at your blithe breaking of sacred promises.’

Elinor put a hand on her mother’s arm. She said to her brother, ‘Please.’ Then she said, in a lower tone, ‘We’ll find a way.’

John looked relieved. ‘That’s more like it. Good girl.’

Marianne shouted suddenly, ‘You are really wicked, do you hear me? Wicked! What’s the word, what is it, the Shakespeare word? It’s – it’s – yes, John, yes, you are perfidious.’

There was a brief, horrified silence. Belle put a hand out towards Marianne and Elinor was afraid they’d put their arms round each other, as they often did, for solidarity, in extravagant reaction.

She said to John, ‘I think you had better go.’

He nodded thankfully, and took a step back.

‘She’ll be looking for you,’ Margaret said. ‘Has she got a dog whistle she can blow to get you to come running?’

Marianne stopped looking tragic and gave a snort of laughter. So, a second later, did Belle. John glanced at them both and then looked past them at the Welsh dresser where all the plates were displayed, the pretty, scallop-edged plates that Henry and Belle had collected from Provençal holidays over the years, and lovingly brought back, two or three at a time.

John moved towards the door. With his hand on the handle, he turned and briefly indicated the dresser. ‘Fanny adores those plates, you know.’

And now, only a day later, here they were, grouped round the table yet again, exhausted by a further calamity, by rage at Fanny’s malevolence and John’s feebleness, terrified at the prospect of a future in which they did not even know where they were going to lay their heads, let alone how they were going to pay for the privilege of laying them anywhere.

‘I will of course be qualified in a year,’ Elinor said.

Belle gave her a tired smile. ‘Darling, what use will that be? You draw beautifully but how many architects are unemployed right now?’

‘Thank you, Ma.’

Marianne put a hand on Elinor’s. ‘She’s right. You do draw beautifully.’

Elinor tried to smile at her sister. She said, bravely, ‘She’s also right that there are no jobs for architects, especially newly qualified ones.’ She looked at her mother. ‘Could you get a teaching job again?’

Belle flung her hands wide. ‘Darling, it’s been forever!’

‘This is extreme, Ma.’

Marianne said to Margaret, ‘You’ll have to go to state school.’

Margaret’s face froze. ‘I won’t.’

‘You will.’

‘Mags, you may just have to—’

‘I won’t!’ Margaret shouted.

She ripped her earphones out of her ears and stamped to the window, standing there with her back to the room and her shoulders hunched. Then her shoulders abruptly relaxed. ‘Hey!’ she said, in quite a different voice.

Elinor half rose. ‘Hey what?’

Margaret didn’t turn. Instead she leaned out of the window and began to wave furiously. ‘Edward!’ she shouted. ‘Edward!’ And then she turned back long enough to say, unnecessarily, over her shoulder, ‘Edward’s coming!’

2

However detestable Fanny had made herself since she arrived at Norland, all the Dashwoods were agreed that she had one redeeming attribute, which was the possession of her brother Edward.

He had arrived at the Park soon after his sister moved in, and everyone had initially assumed that this tallish, darkish, diffident young man – so unlike his dangerous little dynamo of a sister – had come to admire the place and the situation that had fallen so magnificently into Fanny’s lap. But after only a day or so, it became plain to the Dashwoods that the perpetual, slightly needy presence of Edward in their kitchen was certainly because he liked it there, and felt comfortable, but also because he had nowhere much else to go, and nothing much else to occupy himself with. He was even, it appeared, perfectly prepared to confess to being at a directionless loose end.

‘I’m a bit of a failure, I’m afraid,’ he said quite soon after his arrival. He was sitting on the edge of the kitchen table, his hair flopping in his eyes, pushing runner beans through a slicer, as instructed by Belle.

‘Oh no,’ Belle said at once, and warmly, ‘I’m sure you aren’t. I’m sure you’re just not very good at self-promotion.’

Edward stopped slicing to extract a large, mottled pink bean that had jammed the blades. He said, slightly challengingly, ‘Well, I was thrown out of Eton.’

‘Were you?’ they all said.

Margaret took one earphone out. She said, with real interest, ‘What did you do?’

‘I was lookout for some up-to-no-good people.’

‘What people? Real bad guys?’

‘Other boys.’

Margaret leaned closer. She said, conspiratorially, ‘Druggies?’

Edward grinned at his beans. ‘Sort of.’

‘Did you take any?’

‘Shut up, Mags,’ Elinor said from the far side of the room.

Edward looked up at her for a moment, with a look she would have interpreted as pure gratitude if she thought she’d done anything to be thanked for, and then he said, ‘No, Mags. I didn’t even have the guts to join in. I was lookout for the others, and I messed up that, too, big time, and we were all expelled. Mum has never forgiven me. Not to this day.’

Belle patted his hand. ‘I’m sure she has.’

Edward said, ‘You don’t know my mother.’

‘I think’, said Marianne from the window seat where she was curled up, reading, ‘that it’s brilliant to be expelled. Especially from anywhere as utterly conventional as Eton.’

‘But maybe,’ Elinor said quietly, ‘it isn’t very convenient.’

Edward looked at her intently again. He said, ‘I was sent to a crammer instead. In disgrace. In Plymouth.’

‘My goodness,’ Belle said, ‘that was drastic. Plymouth!’

Margaret put her earphone back in. The conversation had gone back to boring.

Elinor said encouragingly, ‘So you got all your A levels and things?’

‘Sort of,’ Edward said. ‘Not very well. I did a lot of – messing around. I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d paid more attention. I’d really apply myself to it now, but it’s too late.’

‘It’s never too late!’ Belle declared.

Edward put the bean slicer down. He said, again to Elinor, as if she would understand him better than anyone, ‘Mum wants me to go and work for an MP.’

‘Does she?’

‘Or do a law degree and read for the Bar. She wants me to do something – something …’

‘Showy,’ Elinor said.

He smiled at her again. ‘Exactly.’

‘When what you want to do,’ Belle said, picking up the slicer again and putting it back gently into his hand, ‘is really …?’

Edward selected another bean. ‘I want to do community work of some kind. I know it sounds a bit wet, but I don’t want houses and cars and money and all the stuff my family seems so keen on. My brother Robert seems to be able to get away with anything just because he isn’t the eldest. My mother – well, it’s weird. Robert’s a kind of upmarket party planner, huge rich parties in London, the sort of thing I hate, and my mother turns a completely blind eye to that hardly being a career of distinction. But when it comes to me, she goes on and on about visibility and money and power. She doesn’t even seem to look at the kind of person I am. I just want to do something quiet and sort of – sort of …’

‘Helpful?’ Elinor said.

Edward got off the table and turned so that he could look at her with pure undiluted appreciation. ‘Yes,’ he said with emphasis.

Later that night, jostling in front of the bathroom mirror with their toothbrushes and dental floss, Marianne said to Elinor, ‘He likes you.’

Elinor spat a mouthful of toothpaste foam into the basin. ‘No, he doesn’t. He just likes being around us all, because Ma’s cosy with him and we don’t pick on him and tell him to smarten up and sharpen up all the time, like Fanny does.’

Marianne took a length of floss out of her mouth. ‘Ellie, he likes us all. But he likes you in particular.’

Elinor didn’t reply. She began to brush her hair vigorously, upside down, to forestall further conversation.

Marianne reangled the floss across her lower jaw. Round it she said indistinctly, ‘D’you like him?’

‘Can’t hear you.’

‘Yes, you can. Do you, Elinor Dashwood, picky spinster of this parish for whom no man so far seems to be remotely good enough, fancy this very appealing basket case called Edward Ferrars?’

Elinor stood upright and pushed the hair off her face. ‘No.’

‘Liar.’

There was a pause.

‘Well, a bit,’ Elinor said.

Marianne leaned forward and peered into the mirror. ‘He’s perfect for you, Ellie. You’re such a missionary, you’d have to have someone to rescue. Ed is ripe for rescue. And he’s the sweetest guy.’

‘I’m not interested. The last thing I want right now is anyone else who needs sorting.’

‘Bollocks,’ Marianne said.

‘It’s not—’

‘He couldn’t take his eyes off you tonight. You only had to say the dullest thing and he was all over you, like a Labrador puppy.’

‘Stop it.’

‘But it’s lovely, Ellie! It’s lovely, in the midst of everything that’s so awful, to have Edward thinking you’re wonderful.’

Elinor began to smooth her hair back into a ponytail, severely. ‘It’s all wrong, M. It’s all wrong at the moment with all this uncertainty and worrying about money, and where we’ll go and everything. It’s all wrong to be thinking about whether I like Edward.’

Marianne turned to her sister, suddenly grinning. ‘Tell you what …’

‘What?’

‘Wouldn’t it just completely piss off Fanny if you and Ed got together?’

The next day, Edward borrowed Fanny’s car and asked Elinor to go to Brighton with him.

‘Does she know?’ Elinor said.

He smiled at her. He had beautiful teeth, she noticed, even if nobody could exactly call him handsome. ‘Does who know what?’

‘Does – does Fanny know you are going to Brighton?’

‘Oh yes,’ Edward said easily, ‘I’ve got a huge list of things to pick up for her: bath taps and theatre tickets and wallpaper samples from—’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ Elinor said. ‘I meant, does Fanny know you were going to ask me to go with you?’

‘No,’ Edward said. ‘And she needn’t. I have her great bus for the day, I have her shopping list, and nothing else is any of her business.’

Elinor looked doubtful.

‘He’s absolutely right,’ Belle said. ‘She’ll never know and it won’t affect her, knowing or not knowing.’

‘But—’

‘Get in, darling.’

‘Yes, get in.’

‘Come on,’ Edward said, opening the passenger door and smiling again. ‘Come on. Please. Please. We’ll have fish and chips on the beach. Don’t make me go alone.’

‘I should be working …’ Elinor said faintly.

She glanced at Edward. He bent slightly and, with the hand not holding the door, gave her a small, decisive shove into the passenger seat. Then he closed the door firmly behind her. He was beaming broadly, and went back round to the driver’s side at a run.

‘Look at that,’ Marianne said approvingly. ‘Who’s the dog with two tails?’

‘Both wagging.’

The car lurched off at speed, in a spray of gravel.

‘He’s a dear,’ Belle said.

‘You’d like anyone who liked Ellie.’

‘I would. Of course I would. But he’s a dear in his own right.’

‘And rich. The Ferrarses are stinking—’

‘I don’t’, Belle said, putting her arm round Marianne, ‘give a stuff about that. Any more than you do. If he’s a dear boy and he likes Ellie and she likes him, that is more than good enough for me. And for you too, I bet.’

Marianne said seriously, watching the car speeding down the faraway sweep of the drive, ‘He wouldn’t be good enough for me.’

‘Darling!’

Marianne leaned into her mother’s embrace.

‘Ma, you know he wouldn’t do for me. I’m not looking for a nice guy; I’m looking for the guy. I don’t want someone who thinks I’m clever to play the guitar like I do, I want someone who knows why I play so well, who understands what I’m playing, like I do, who understands me for what I am and values that. Values me.’ She paused and straightened a little. Then she said, ‘Ma, I’d rather have nothing ever than just anything. Much rather.’

Belle was laughing. ‘Darling, don’t despair. You only left school a year ago, you’re hardly—’

Marianne stepped sideways so that Belle’s arm slipped from her waist. ‘I mean it,’ she said fiercely. ‘I mean it. I don’t want just a man, Ma. I want a soulmate. And if I can’t have one, I’d rather have nobody. See?’

Belle was silent. She was looking into the middle distance now, plainly not really seeing anything.

‘Ma?’ Marianne said.

Belle shook her head very slightly. Marianne moved closer again.

‘Ma, are you thinking about Daddy?’

Belle gave a small sigh.

‘If you are – and you are, aren’t you? – then you’ll know what I’m talking about,’ Marianne said. ‘If I didn’t get this belief in having, one day, a love of my life from you, who did I get it from?’

Belle turned very slightly and gave Marianne a misty smile. ‘Touché, darling,’ she said.

From her bedroom windows – three bays looking south and two facing west – Fanny could see across the immense lawn to the walled vegetable garden, whose glasshouses were so badly in need of repair, never mind the state of the beds themselves, or the unpruned fruit trees and general neglect visible everywhere. And there, in the decayed soft-fruit cage, with its sagging wire and crooked posts, she could see Belle, in one of her arty smock things and jeans, picking raspberries.

Of course, in a way, Belle was perfectly entitled to pick Norland raspberries. The canes themselves probably dated from Uncle Henry’s time, and in their well-meaning, amateur way, Belle and Henry had tried to look after the garden all the years they had lived at Norland. But the fact was that Norland now belonged to John. And because of John, to Fanny. Which meant that everything about it and pertaining to it was not only Fanny’s responsibility now, but her possession. Staring out of the window at her husband’s (by courtesy, only) stepmother, it came to Fanny quite forcibly that Belle was, without asking, picking Fanny’s raspberries.

It took her three minutes to cross her bedroom, traverse the landing, descend the stairs, march down the black and white floored hall to the garden door and make her way at speed across the lawn to the kitchen garden. She let the door in the wall to the kitchen garden close behind her with enough of a slam to alert Belle to the fact that she had arrived, and with a purpose.

Belle looked up, slightly dazedly. She had been thinking about something quite else, mentally arranging the furniture in a cottage she had seen, for rent, near Barcombe Cross, which she had thought might be a distinct possibility even though Elinor insisted that they couldn’t possibly afford it, and she had been picking almost mechanically while she dreamed.

‘Good morning,’ Fanny said.

Belle managed a smile. ‘Good morning, Fanny.’

Fanny stepped into the fruit cage through a torn gap in the netting. She was wearing patent-leather ballet slippers with gold discs on the toes. She looked round her. ‘This is in an awful state.’

Belle said mildly, ‘The raspberries don’t seem to mind. Look at this crop!’

She held her bowl out. Fanny gave a small dismissive sniff. ‘You’ve got a huge amount.’

‘We grew them, Fanny.’

‘All the same …’

‘I’d be happy to pick some for you, Fanny. I offered some to Harry – I thought he might like to pick them with me, but he said he didn’t like raspberries.’

Fanny said carefully, ‘We are very – selective in the fruit we give Harry.’

Belle resumed her picking. ‘Bananas,’ she said, over her shoulder. ‘Only bananas, we hear. Can that be good for him, not even to eat apples?’

There was short, highly charged pause. Then Fanny said, ‘Isn’t Elinor helping you?’

‘You can see that she isn’t.’

‘Because she isn’t here,’ Fanny said.

Belle said nothing. Fanny threaded her way through the raspberry canes until she was once again in Belle’s sightline.

‘Elinor isn’t here,’ Fanny said clearly, ‘because she is in my car, isn’t she, being driven by my brother, on her way to Brighton.’

‘And if she is?’

‘I wouldn’t want you to think I hadn’t noticed. I wouldn’t want you to think I don’t know. I wasn’t asked. I saw them. I saw them drive away.’

Belle said defiantly, ‘Edward invited her!’

Fanny leaned forward to pick a large, ripe raspberry very precisely out of Belle’s bowl. ‘He may have done. But she had no business accepting.’

Belle stepped back so that the bowl of raspberries was just out of Fanny’s reach. ‘I beg your pardon!’ she said indignantly.

Fanny looked at the raspberry in her fingers and then she looked at Belle. ‘Don’t get any ideas,’ she said.

‘But—’

‘Look,’ Fanny said. ‘Look. My father came from nowhere and ended up somewhere very successful, all through his own efforts. He was ambitious, quite rightly, and he was ambitious for his children, too. He’d be thrilled about Norland. But he wouldn’t be thrilled at all about his eldest son being – being ensnared by his son-in-law’s illegitimate half-sister with not a bean to her name. Any more than my mother would be, if she knew.’ Fanny paused, and then she said, ‘Any more than I am.’

Belle stared at her. ‘I cannot believe this, Fanny.’

Fanny waved the hand holding the raspberry. ‘It doesn’t matter what you can or can’t believe, Belle. It doesn’t matter a jot. All that matters is that when Elinor gets back from her jaunt in my car with my brother, you have just two words to say to her. Two words. Hands off. Do you get it, Belle? Hands off Edward.’

And then she dropped the raspberry on to the earth, and ground it down under her patent-leather toecap.

Edward held out a crumple of white paper. ‘Have another chip.’

Elinor was lying on her back on Edward’s battered cotton jacket, which he had spread for her on the shingle. She waved a hand. ‘Couldn’t.’

‘Just one.’

‘Not even that. They were delicious. The fish was perfect. Thank you for holding back on the vinegar.’

Edward put another chip in his mouth. ‘I have a thing for vinegar.’

Elinor snorted faintly.

‘I mean,’ Edward said, laughing too, ‘I mean vinegar in vinegar. Not in people.’

‘No names then.’

He lay down beside her, slightly turned towards her. He said comfortably, ‘We know who we mean, don’t we? And you haven’t even met my mother.’

Elinor stretched both arms up and laced her fingers together against the high blue arc of the sky. ‘Talking of mothers—’

‘Did you know,’ Edward said, interrupting, ‘that when you talk, the end of your nose moves up and down very slightly? It’s adorable.’

Elinor suppressed a smile. She lowered her arms. ‘Talking of mothers,’ she said again.

‘Oh, OK then. Mothers. What about them?’

‘Mine is so sweet, really—’

‘Oh, I know.’

‘—but she’s driving me insane. Insane. Almost every day she goes off to look at some house or other. She must be on every agent’s books in East Sussex.’

Edward put out a tentative finger and touched the end of Elinor’s nose. He said, ‘But that’s good. That’s positive.’

Elinor tried to ignore his finger. ‘Yes, of course it is, in theory. But she’s looking at stuff we can’t begin to afford. They may technically be cottages but they’ve got five bedrooms and three bathrooms and one even has a swimming pool in a conservatory thing. I ask you.’

‘But—’

Elinor turned her head to look at him, dislodging his finger. ‘Ed, we can’t actually even afford a garden shed. But she won’t listen.’

‘They don’t.’

‘You mean mothers?’

‘Mothers,’ Edward said with emphasis. ‘They do not listen.’

‘You mean yours won’t listen to you either?’

Edward rolled on his back. ‘Nobody listens.’

‘Oh, come on.’

He said, ‘I applied to Amnesty International and they said I wasn’t qualified for anything they had on offer. Same with Oxfam. And the only reason for having anything to do with the law is that Human Rights Watch might – might – give me a hearing with the right bits of paper in my hand.’

Elinor waited a moment, and then she said, ‘What are you good at, do you think?’

Edward picked a pebble out of the shingle beside him and looked at it. Then he said, in quite a different, more confident tone of voice, ‘Organising things. I don’t mean how many cases of champagne will two hundred people drink, like Robert. I mean quite – serious things. I can get things done. Actually.’

‘Like today.’

‘Well …’

‘Today,’ Elinor said, ‘you drove well, you parked without fuss, you got the bathroom people to find the right taps, you were firm with that useless girl at the box office over Fanny’s tickets, you insisted on the right wallpaper books, you knew just where to get the best fish and chips and exactly where to be on the beach to get out of the wind.’

‘Well – yes. Only very small things …’

‘But significant. And – and symptomatic.’

Edward raised himself on one elbow and looked at her. ‘Thank you, Elinor.’

She grinned at him. ‘My pleasure.’

He looked suddenly sober. He said, in a more serious voice, ‘I’m going to miss you.’

‘Why? Where are you going?’

He glanced away. Then he raised the arm holding the pebble and threw it towards the wall at the back of the beach. ‘I’m not going, I’m being chucked out.’

‘Chucked out? By whom?’

‘By Fanny.’

Elinor sat up slowly. ‘Oh.’

‘Yes. Oh.’

‘You know why?’

‘Yes,’ Edward said, looking straight at her. ‘And so do you.’

Elinor stared at her raised knees. She said, ‘Where’ll you go?’

‘Devon, I should think.’

‘Why Devon?’

‘I know people there. I was there at the crammer, remember? I can always hang out there. In fact, I can ask, in Devon, if there’s anywhere for you to rent, shall I? It’s bound to be cheaper, in Devon.’

Elinor said sadly, ‘We can’t go to Devon.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s too far. Margaret’s school, Marianne going up to the Royal College of Music, me finishing my training …’

‘OK then,’ Edward said, ‘but I’ll still ask. You never know.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Ellie?’

‘Yes?’

‘Will you miss me?’

She didn’t look at him. ‘I don’t know.’

He moved slightly, so that he was kneeling beside her. ‘Please try to.’

‘OK.’

‘Ellie …’

She said nothing. He leaned forward and put his hand on her knees.

‘Ellie, even though I probably taste of grease and vinegar, would it be OK if I did what I’ve wanted to do ever since I first saw you, and kissed you?’

And now, weeks later, here he was, back at Norland and getting out of the kind of car that Fanny would hate to see on her gravel sweep: an elderly Ford Sierra with a peeling speed stripe painted down its dilapidated side.

Margaret waved wildly from the kitchen window. ‘Edward! Edward!’

He looked up and waved back, his face breaking into a smile. Then he ducked back into the car to turn off some deafening music, and came loping across the drive and then the grass to where Margaret was leaning and waving.

‘Cool car!’ she shouted.

‘Not bad, for two hundred and fifty quid!’

She put her arms out so that she could loop them round his neck and he could then pull her out of the window on to the grass. He set her on her feet. She said, ‘Has Fanny seen you?’

‘No,’ Edward said, ‘I thought she could see the car first.’

‘Good thinking, buster.’

‘Mags,’ Edward said, ‘where’s everyone?’

Margaret jerked her head towards the kitchen behind her. ‘In there. Having a major meltdown about moving.’

‘Moving! Have you found somewhere?’

‘No,’ Margaret said. ‘Only hopeless places we can’t afford.’

‘Then …’

Margaret looked past him at the offending car. ‘Fanny’s throwing us out,’ she said.

‘Oh my God,’ Edward said.

He stepped past Margaret and thrust his head in at the open window.

‘Ta-dah!’ he said.

‘Oh Edward!’

‘Oh Ed!’

‘Hi there.’

He put a leg over the sill and ducked into the room. Belle and Marianne rushed to embrace him. ‘Thank goodness!’ ‘Oh, perfect timing, perfect, we were just despairing …’

He put his arms round them both and looked at Elinor. ‘Hi, Ellie.’

She nodded in his direction. ‘Hello, Edward.’

‘Don’t I get a hug?’

Belle and Marianne sprang backwards. ‘Oh, of course you should!’

‘Ellie, oh, Ellie, don’t be so prissy.’

Edward moved forward and put his arms round Elinor. She stood still in his embrace. ‘Hello, you,’ he whispered.

She nodded again. ‘Hello.’

Belle said, ‘This is so lovely, you can’t think, we so needed a distraction. Come on, kettle on, cake tin out.’

Edward dropped his arms. He turned. ‘Yes please, to cake!’

Marianne came to put her arm through his. ‘You look horribly well. What have you been up to?’

He grinned down at her. ‘Loafing about. Sailing a bit.’

‘Sailing!’

‘I’m a good sailor.’

Margaret came scrambling through the window. She said, ‘Fanny’s seen your car.’

‘She hasn’t!’

‘She has. She’s kind of prowling round it. Perhaps she’ll think it belongs to one of the workmen.’

Edward said to Belle, ‘Will you hide me?’

‘No, darling,’ Belle said sadly. ‘We’re in enough trouble as it is. We’re about to be homeless. Can you imagine? It’s the twenty-first century and we aren’t penniless but four educated women like us are about to be—’

Edward said, abruptly, cutting across her, ‘You needn’t be.’

‘What?’

Even Elinor dropped her apparent lack of interest and looked intently at him. ‘What, Edward?’

He glanced at Elinor. He said, ‘I – I mentioned I might ask about, while I was in Devon. If anyone knew anywhere for rent. Going cheap. And, well, it happens that – well, someone I know down there is sort of related to someone who’s related to you. So I told them about you. I told them what had happened.’ He looked at Belle. She was staring at him, and so were all three of her daughters. Edward said, ‘I think there might be a house down there for you. It belongs to someone who’s some kind of relation, even. Or at least someone who knows about you.’ He paused and then he said, ‘It’s – it’s a sort of grapevine thing, you know? But I think there really is a house there, if you’d like it?’

3

Sir John Middleton liked to describe himself as a dinosaur. In fact, he said, he was a double dinosaur.

‘These days,’ he’d say, to anyone who would listen, ‘it’s out of the Ark to inherit a house, never mind a bloody great pile like Barton. And as for being a baronet – I ask you! The definition of antediluvian, or what? There isn’t even a procedure for renouncing your title if you’re a baronet, would you believe? I am stuck with it. Stuck. Sir John M., Bart., to my dying day. Hah!’

His father, another Sir John, had been born in the house, which he left, without a penny to run it, to his son. It was a handsome William and Mary house in Devon, set in dramatic wooded country above the River Exe, to the north of Exeter, and the household, in young Sir John’s childhood, had grown used to the corridors being scattered with buckets placed strategically under leaks in various ceilings, and to draughts and damp and extremely intermittent hot water, provided by an ancient boiler in the basement which devoured industrial quantities of coal to very little consistent effect.

Sir John’s father had minded none of these things. He had been a boy at the outbreak of the Second World War, and was absolutely indifferent to bad weather, bad food and chilblains. He inherited just enough money to continue living at Barton Park in increasing discomfort, but still able to indulge to the full his passion for field sports. He shot and fished anything that moved or swam, preferred his gun room and game larder to any other parts of his house and, after his wife unsurprisingly left him for a property developer in Bristol, spent any available cash on trips to slaughter snipe in Spain or sharks in the Caribbean. When he died – as he would devoutly have wished to do – big-game hunting on a private estate in Kenya, he left his son the run-down wreck of Barton Park, the title and a locked cabinet of beautifully kept, perfectly matched pairs of Purdey shotguns.

Sir John the younger was entranced to inherit the Purdeys. He had also inherited his father’s passion for field sports – indeed all his local friends were distinguished by having subscriptions to the Shooting Times and freezers full of braces of pheasant that their wives were sick of cooking – but he had also profited from the childhood and adolescent years spent living with his property-developer stepfather, in Bristol.

It had been made plain to Sir John, from a young age, that the luxury of making choices in life simply did not exist without money. Money was not an evil, Charlie Croft said to his stepson, it was the oil that greased the practical wheels of life. It was foolish to the point of silliness to think you could do without it, and it was asinine to fear it. Money was there to be harnessed, to work for you.

‘And if you want to keep that old barrack going that your dad left you – and I’, Charlie Croft said, ‘would pull it down in a heartbeat and build some practical, properly insulated executive houses there, if I had my way, because it’s a cracker of a site – then you’ll have to make it earn its keep.’ He’d eyed his stepson. ‘Furthermore,’ he went on, ‘I’ll be very interested to see how you do it.’

For most of his twenties, Sir John had had little success in making Barton Park work for itself. After a short commission in the Army, in his father’s footsteps, he camped in a set of three rooms situated just above the antediluvian boiler, and commuted to a day job in Exeter, as managing director of a small company on an industrial estate making specialist pumps for desalination plants. The company had only hired him, he was well aware, because his title was useful in attracting the attention of overseas customers, who might initially be impressed by it. He actually performed quite competently, spent the winter weekends blasting the Purdeys into the skies, and hosted parties for which he became locally famous, to which everyone came dressed for the Arctic and played uproarious, childish, upper-class games that involved stampeding through the echoing rooms of Barton Park and lighting fires all over the house as randomly and recklessly as squatters.

Then, when even he, with his sociable and sanguine temperament, was beginning to despair of moving Project Barton Park even a millimetre forward, he had a stroke of luck. Panting down a passage at one of his own parties in the course of an eccentric treasure hunt, he came across a figure huddled, shivering and sniffing, on one of Barton Park’s deep windowsills. The figure turned out to be a girl, a very pretty girl called Mary Jennings, who had come to the party because of a man who had invited her and then abandoned her for someone altogether heartier, and who was cold and miserable and had no idea where she was, or how to find her way back to Exeter and a train to London.

He had helped her off the windowsill, discovered that under the old blanket she had wrapped herself in – ‘Good God, you can’t have that thing anywhere near you, you really can’t, it’s what my dogs sleep on!’ – she was wearing an enchanting but wholly inappropriate little chiffon dress embroidered with spangles, and borne her off to the least disordered of the rooms above the boiler, where he had given her a glass of brandy and also the most reputable of his ancient but quality cashmere jerseys.

Mary Jennings turned out to be, in old-fashioned parlance, an heiress. She was heiress to a company founded by her father, a country-clothing company which had had immense success in the 1960s and 70s with members of organisations like the Country Landowners’ Association, so that when Mr Jennings died, he was able to leave his widow not just a penthouse flat in London, but also a considerable capital sum to be shared between her and his two daughters. Mary Jennings had come down to Exeter because of the man who had abandoned her, and she stayed because of the man who rescued her. Mary Jennings of Portman Square became Lady Middleton of Barton Park, and West Country Clothing relocated from its factory in Honiton – originally chosen by Mr Jennings for the relative cheapness of its labour costs – to the stable blocks and outbuildings that Sir John had almost despaired of finding a use for.

Sir John himself turned out to be an admirable entrepreneur. His mother-in-law, who shared his joviality and enjoyment of company, was delighted to allow him to modernise the company. He hired a new designer, researched modern methods of weatherproof and thornproof fabrics, and produced catalogues full of colour and energy, using his friends and their dogs and children as models. The turnover of the company doubled in three years, and tripled in five. Barton Park acquired a new roof and a central heating system that was a model of modern technology. Sir John and Lady Middleton themselves produced four babies in the same five years, and embarked upon a lifestyle that Sir John said he would make no apologies for. ‘My friends,’ he told an interviewer from the Exeter Express & Echo, ‘call me the Robber Baron. Because of our pricing. But I call our pricing aspirational, and it works. Ask the Germans. They love us. So do the Japanese. Just take a look at our order books.’

He had been in his office that morning, his office converted out of an old carriage house and ablaze with ingenious and theatrical modern lighting, when his mother-in-law came to find him. He was fond of his mother-in-law to a point when he almost prided himself on that affection, and genuinely welcomed the amount of time she cheerfully spent at Barton Park. She liked the same things in life that he liked, she had given him a free hand with the company, and had provided him with a good-looking wife who never interfered in the business or objected to his boisterous pleasures as long as her children’s welfare was paramount and nobody questioned the amount of money she spent on them, the house, or on her own wardrobe.

‘Frightful,’ Abigail Jennings said, blowing into the office in a plump whirl of capes and scarves. ‘Frightful wind this morning. Awful portent of autumn, even for me with all my very own insulation.’ She regarded her son-in-law. ‘You look very jolly, Jonno.’

Sir John looked down at his terracotta cords and emerald sweater. He said, gesturing at himself, ‘Bit bright? Bit brash?’

‘Not a bit of it. You look splendid. All this creeping about in black and grey that girls do in London. Ghastly. Funereal. Jonno dear. Have you got a moment?’

Sir John glanced at his computer screen. ‘I’ve got a conference call with Hamburg and Osaka in fifteen minutes.’

‘I’ll be ten.’

He beamed at her. ‘Sit yourself down.’

Abigail wedged herself into one of the contemporary Danish armchairs that Mary had chosen for the office and unravelled a scarf or two. She said emphatically, ‘Something extraordinary …’

‘What?’

‘I was in Exeter yesterday, Jonno. Giving lunch to that goddaughter of Mary’s father’s. And her sister. Sweet pair. So grateful. Lucy and Nancy Steele; their mother was—’

‘Abigail, I only have ten minutes.’

‘Sorry, dear, sorry. The trouble about my age is that one thing constantly reminds me of another and then that thing of a further thing—’

‘Abi,’ Sir John said warningly.

Abigail leaned forward a little over her bosoms and stomachs. ‘Jonno. Do you have relations in Sussex?’

Sir John looked startled. ‘No. Yes. Yes, I think I do. Cousins of Dad’s. Well, mine too, I suppose. Near Lewes. Another idiotic great monster like Barton or something.’

Abigail held up a plump hand winking with diamonds. ‘Dashwood, dear. They’re called Dashwood. Lucy and Nancy had heard about them from a boyfriend of theirs or something – I couldn’t quite work out who, you know what these girls are like. But it’s a terrible story, truly awful!’

‘Could you possibly tell it quickly?’

‘Of course.’ Abigail laid her hand on the edge of Sir John’s immense, sustainably sourced modern oak desk. ‘There are four of them, the mother and three girls, two grown up, one at school. And because of various deaths, including the girls’ father, and some antediluvian inheritance laws, this poor family finds itself out on its ear with very little money and nowhere to go. Nowhere.’

Sir John drew a rough circle on the pad on the desk in front of him and added a moustache and a smile. He said, doubtfully, sensing another appeal to his good nature coming up, ‘Perhaps they could rent?’

‘Don’t behave like everyone else, Jonno,’ Abigail said firmly. ‘These are four members of your family, shocked by the death of their father and husband and being thrown out of a way of life which is the only one they know. And you are not exactly short of property, dear, now are you?’

There was a small silence, and then Sir John said, ‘D’you know, I think I remember Henry Dashwood. Nice fellow. A bit head in the clouds but decent. Hopeless shot. He came for a hens-only day, one January, forever ago. It’s his widow and daughters, you mean?’

‘It is.’

Sir John added ears to his circle. He said with sudden resolution, ‘Abigail, you were quite right to come to me. Quite right.’ He beamed at her again. ‘I have an idea. I’ll set about it the moment I’ve dealt with the distributors. I do have an idea! I do!’

It was Elinor who saw his car arrive. She had been looking out for it because she didn’t want Fanny snaffling him and dragging him into her lair in order to subtly dissuade him from making whatever kind of offer he’d driven all the way from Devon to make. Even if he was quite a forceful man – and he’d sounded pretty forceful in a cheerful kind of way, on the telephone – you never could quite count on anyone to be proof against Fanny if she wanted to bend you to her will.

So when Sir John’s green Range Rover slid to a halt in the drive, Elinor raced from the kitchen to the front door to greet him and to thank him most earnestly for insisting on coming to see them, but also to indicate to him, somehow, that the startling renovations instituted by the new mistress of Norland Park – whose costly designer mood boards were propped prominently around the entrance hall – was not to be perceived in any way as indicative of any of the rest of the Dashwood family’s own tastes, wishes or manners. It was Elinor’s aim, flinging open both the leaves of the great front door, to get Sir John through the hall and along to their own unreconstructed sitting room as fast as she could. Only when he was safely ensconced by the fire that Belle had lit especially, alongside the jug of Michaelmas daisies that had been cut from the borders on a day when Fanny was in London, would she quite relax. Sir John looked, Elinor thought, like one of the good-hearted characters from a Dickens novel: broad and healthy, with a ready smile and clothes in optimistic colours. He kissed her warmly, and fraternally, collected a laptop and a bottle of champagne from the boot of the car, and followed her into the house, talking all the way.

‘Of course I remember your dad. Lovely man. Useless with a gun. I say, this is elegant. Look at this floor! We aren’t quite as formal as this at Barton, though Mary would love us to be, but of course, the house is earlier. You’ll love our library. I am very proud of our library. God in heaven, will you look at that staircase! I suppose you lot slid down the bannisters when you were little. Lethal, when you think about it, with a marble floor waiting at the bottom. Mary’s put seagrass over foam rubber in our hall so the ankle-biters don’t smash their skulls. I say they should take their chance, but she won’t have it. As I’m a relation, dear girl, I’m free to tell you that you’re really attractive. I mean that. And I hear that your sisters—’

‘Are much prettier,’ Elinor said quickly.

‘Can’t be. Simply can’t be. I never saw your mother but your dad implied that she was a corker.’

‘She still is,’ Elinor said. She opened the door to the sitting room and stood back for him to enter. ‘See for yourself.’

Belle and Marianne and Margaret all rose from the chairs where they had been waiting, and smiled at him.

‘Golly,’ Sir John said. ‘Golly. Have all my Christmases come at once? Or what? Aren’t you all gorgeous?’

‘Look,’ Sir John said later, expansive with tea and three of the scones that Belle had made that morning, ‘look, I said to Mary, family’s family, and we’ve been bloody lucky.’

He was settled deep in the armchair that Henry used to use, his tea mug in one hand. ‘Bloody lucky,’ he repeated. ‘We are able to live in a great place, employ local people, educate the nippers, have good holidays and a very respectable standard of life. And, I said to Mary, what’s Belle got? No home, no money, Henry dead and those girls. Listen, I said to Mary, blood’s thicker than water. I’d never forgive myself for watching my old pa’s cousins struggling while I book a chalet for Christmas in Méribel. No thank you, I said to Mary. Not my way.’

He took a final swallow from his tea mug and reached to park it on the nearest side table. ‘And here we come to the crunch. I can’t neglect you and your situation while Barton Cottage stands empty. I just can’t. And we can use you girls in the business, I’m sure we can.’ He winked at Marianne. ‘You’d be fantastic in the catalogue.’

‘I hate being photographed,’ Marianne said distantly, ‘I believe those people who think that the camera steals your soul.’

Elinor gave a little gasp. ‘Oh, M, really—’

‘Listen to her!’ Sir John said, roaring with laughter. ‘Just listen. Don’t you love it?’

He beckoned to Margaret. ‘Pass me my laptop, there’s a good girl.’

She came slowly across the room and handed the laptop to him. And then she stood beside him and waited while he fussed over the keys. She said, wearily, ‘Shall I help you?’

He grinned at the screen. ‘Cheeky monkey.’

‘It’d be quicker.’

‘There it is!’ Sir John shouted suddenly. ‘There they are! Pictures!’

Margaret bent.

‘How’s that!’ Sir John exclaimed. ‘A slide show! A slide show of your new home! Barton Cottage. It’s a charmer. You’ll love it.’

Slowly, the four of them formed a semicircle behind the armchair. Sir John made a tremendous show of clicking and flicking until a photograph of an uncompromisingly small modern house on a slope, backed by trees, filled the screen.

‘But,’ Marianne cried in disappointment, ‘it’s new!’

‘I’ve just built it,’ Sir John said with satisfaction. ‘Planning was a complete nightmare but I battled through. I was going to use it as a holiday let.’

‘It’s – lovely,’ Belle said faintly.

‘Perfect spot,’ Sir John said, ‘amazing views, new bathroom, kitchen, utility, the works.’ He glanced at Marianne. ‘You wanted roses round the door?’

‘And maybe thatch …’

‘Marianne, honestly! So ungrateful.’

‘No, she isn’t,’ Sir John said. ‘Just honest. And it’s a comedown after this place. I can see that.’ He looked back at the screen. It now showed an astonishing view down a wooded valley, dramatic and startlingly green.

‘Well?’

Belle deliberately avoided looking at her daughters. She said, in a rush, ‘We’d love it.’

‘Ma—’

‘No,’ she said. She wouldn’t look at them. She looked instead at the next picture, of a steep hill rushing up towards a cloud-dappled sky. ‘We’d love it. It looks charming. Such a – setting.’

Elinor cleared her throat. She said to Sir John, ‘Where is Barton exactly?’

He beamed at her. ‘Near Exeter.’

‘Exeter …’

‘What’s Exeter?’ Margaret said.

‘It’s a place, darling. A lovely historic place in Devon.’

‘Between Dartmoor and Exmoor,’ Sir John said proudly.

Marianne said tragically, ‘I don’t really know where Devon is.’

‘It’s gorgeous,’ Belle said emphatically. ‘Gorgeous. Next to Cornwall.’

All three girls gazed at her. ‘Cornwall!’

‘Not as far …’ Elinor said, trying not to sound pleading, ‘I have just one more year to go at—’

‘And my music!’ Marianne cried. ‘What about my music?’

Margaret had her fingers in her ears and her eyes shut. ‘Don’t anyone dare say I have to change schools.’

Belle smiled at Sir John.

‘Elinor’s studying architecture. She draws beautifully.’

He smiled back at her. ‘I remember Henry saying you did, too. You’ll be in your element at Barton, drawing and painting away.’

‘I did figures, mostly, but I’m sure I could—’

‘And Elinor’, Marianne said loudly, ‘draws buildings. Where can she study buildings in Devon?’

‘Darling. Don’t, darling. Don’t be rude.’

John Middleton beamed again at Marianne. ‘She’s not rude. She’s refreshing. I like refreshing. My kids will adore her; they love anyone out of the ordinary. Four of them. Enough energy to power your average city, between them.’ He closed his laptop and looked up at Belle. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Well. Can I take it that you and the girls will come and live at Barton Cottage for what I promise you will be a very modest rent?’

Margaret took her fingers out of her ears and opened her eyes. She flung her arms wide in a gesture of despair. ‘What about all my friends?’ she said.

‘I wonder’, Belle said from the doorway, ‘if I could trouble you for a moment?’

Both Fanny and John Dashwood, who were watching the evening news on television with glasses in their hands, gave a little jump in their chairs.

‘Belle!’ John Dashwood said, with surprise rather than pleasure.

He leaned forward and reduced the volume on the television, although he didn’t turn it off altogether. Fanny remained where she was, holding her wine glass. John stood up slowly. ‘Have a drink,’ he said automatically, gesturing vaguely towards the bottle plainly visible on a silver tray on the coffee table in front of them.

‘I’m sure’, Fanny said, ‘that she won’t be staying that long.’

Belle smiled at her. She advanced into the room far enough to give herself authority, but not so far that she couldn’t make a quick escape. ‘Quite right, Fanny. I will be two minutes. We had a visitor this afternoon.’

Fanny continued to regard her wine glass. She said to it, ‘I wondered when you would see fit to mention that to me.’

Belle smiled broadly at John. ‘Would it be an awful nuisance to turn the television off?’

John glanced at Fanny. She made an impatient little gesture of dismissal. He picked up the remote again and aimed it at the screen.

‘Thank you,’ Belle said. She was determined to keep smiling. She folded her hands lightly in front of her. ‘The thing is, that we won’t be troubling you here at Norland much longer. We’ve been offered a house. By a relation of mine.’

John looked truly startled. ‘Good heavens.’

Fanny said smoothly, ‘But not too far from here, I hope?’

‘Actually …’ Belle said, and stopped, savouring the moment.

‘Actually what?’

‘We are going to Devon,’ Belle said with satisfaction.

‘Devon!’

‘Near Exeter. A house on an estate which is, I gather, just a fraction larger than this one. It belongs to my cousin. My cousin Sir John Middleton.’

John said, almost inaudibly, ‘My cousin, I believe. A Dashwood cousin.’

Belle took no notice. She looked directly, smilingly, at Fanny. ‘So we’ll be out of your hair by the end of the month. As soon as we can sort a school for Margaret and all that.’

‘But I was going to help you find a house!’ John said aggrievedly.

‘So sweet of you, but in the end the house came to us.’

‘So lucky,’ Fanny said.

‘Oh, I agree. So lucky.’

‘It’s too bad,’ John exclaimed.

‘What is?’

‘It’s too bad of you to make all these arrangements without consulting me.’

‘But you didn’t want me to consult you,’ Belle said.

Fanny said clearly, ‘Sweetness, you’ve given them all somewhere to live all summer, rent free, and the run of the kitchen gardens, after all.’

John glanced at her. He said with relief, ‘So I have.’

‘There we are,’ Belle said brightly. ‘All settled. You let us stay on in our own home for a while and now we’ve found another one to go to! Perfect. I’ve taken Barton Cottage for a year and, of course, it would be lovely to see you there whenever you are down that way.’

Fanny looked out of the window. ‘I never go to Devon,’ she said.

Belle paused in the doorway. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I thought not. But maybe you’ll break the habit of a lifetime. It’s odd, really, that you never went to see Edward all the time he was in Plymouth, don’t you think?’

Fanny’s head snapped back round. ‘Edward! Why mention Edward?’

Belle was almost out of the door. ‘Oh, Edward,’ she said airily. ‘Dear Edward. So affectionate. He’s going to come to Barton. I made a special point of asking him to come and see us in the cottage. And he said he’d love to.’

And then she reached for the handle and closed the door behind her with a small but triumphant bang.

4

‘Marianne,’ Elinor said, ‘will you please put that guitar down and come and help us?’

Marianne was in her favourite playing chair by the window in her bedroom, her right foot on a small pile of books – a French dictionary and two volumes of Shakespeare’s history plays came to just the right height – and the guitar resting comfortably across her thigh. She was playing a song of Taylor Swift’s that she had played a good deal since Dad died, even though – or maybe even because – everyone had told her that a player at her level could surely express themselves better with something more serious. It was called ‘Teardrops on My Guitar’, and to Elinor’s mind, it was mawkish.

‘Oh, M, please.’

Marianne played determinedly on to the end of a verse. She said, when she’d finished, ‘I know you hate that song.’

‘I don’t hate it …’

‘It isn’t much of a song. I know that. It isn’t hard to play. But it suits me. It suits how I feel.’

Elinor said, ‘We’re packing books. You can’t imagine how many books there are.’

‘I thought the cottage was furnished?’

‘It is. But not with books and pictures and things. We could get through it so much more quickly if you just came and helped a bit.’

Marianne raised her head to look out of the window. She folded both arms embracingly around her guitar. She said, ‘Can you imagine being away from here?’

Elinor said tiredly, ‘We’ve been through all that.’

‘Look at those trees. Look at them. And the lake. I’ve done all my practice by this window, looking out at that view. I’ve played the guitar in this room for ten years, Ellie, ten years.’ She looked down at the guitar. ‘Dad gave me my guitar in this room.’

‘I remember.’

‘When I got grade five.’

‘Yes.’

‘He did all the research, and everything. I remember him saying it had to have a cedar top and rosewood sides and an ebony fingerboard, a proper, classical, Spanish guitar. He was so excited.’

Elinor came further into the room. She said soothingly, ‘It’s coming with us, M, you’ll have your guitar.’

Marianne said suddenly, ‘Fanny—’ and stopped.

‘Fanny? What about her?’

Marianne looked at her. ‘Yesterday. Fanny asked me what the guitar had cost.’

‘She didn’t! What did you say to her?’

‘I told her,’ Marianne said, ‘I said I couldn’t remember exactly, I thought maybe a bit more than a thousand, and she said who paid for it.’

‘The cheek!’ Elinor exclaimed.

‘Well, I was caught on the hop, wasn’t I, because she then said did Dad pay for it, and I said it was a joint present for getting grade five from Dad and Uncle Henry, and she said, Well, that really means it belongs to Norland, doesn’t it, if Uncle Henry paid for some of it, and not you.’

Elinor sat down abruptly on the end of Marianne’s bed. She said, ‘You couldn’t make Fanny up, could you?’

Marianne laid her cheek on the guitar’s rosewood flank. ‘I put it under my bed last night. I’m not letting it out of my sight.’

‘And you still want to stay here? Even if it meant living with Fanny?’

Marianne lifted her head and then stood up, adjusting the guitar so that she was holding it by the neck. She said, ‘It’s the place, Ellie. It’s the trees and the light and the way it makes me feel. I just can’t imagine anywhere else feeling like home. I’m terrified that nowhere else ever will be home. Even with Fanny, I just – just belong, at Norland.’

Elinor sighed. Marianne had not only inherited their father’s asthma, but also his propensity for depression. It was something they all had learned to accept, and to live with: the mood swings and the proclivity for inertia and despair. Elinor thought about what lay ahead, about the enormity of this move to such a completely unknown environment and society and wondered, slightly desperately, if she could manage to accommodate a bout of Marianne’s depression as well as their mother’s volatility and Margaret’s appalled reaction at having to leave behind every single person she had ever known or been at school with in her whole, whole life.

‘Please,’ Elinor said again. ‘Please don’t give up before we’ve even got there.’

‘I’ll try,’ Marianne said in a small voice.

‘I can’t manage all of you hating this idea—’

‘Ma doesn’t. It was Ma who bounced us all into this.’

‘Ma’s on a high at the moment because she got one across Fanny. It won’t last.’

Marianne looked at her sister. ‘I’ll try,’ she said again, ‘I really will.’

‘There’ll be other trees—’

‘Don’t.’

‘And valleys. And jolly Sir John.’

Marianne gave a tiny shudder. ‘Suppose they’re the only people we know?’

‘They won’t be.’

‘Maybe’, Marianne said, ‘Edward will come.’

Elinor said nothing. She got off the bed and made purposefully for the door.

‘Ellie?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you heard from Edward?’

There was a tiny pause.

‘He hasn’t rung,’ Elinor said.

‘Have you seen him on Facebook?’

In the doorway, Elinor turned. ‘I haven’t looked,’ she said.

Marianne bent to lay her guitar down on her bed, like a child. ‘He likes you, Ellie.’

There was another little pause. ‘I – know he does.’

‘I mean,’ Marianne said, ‘he really likes you. Seriously.’

‘But he’s caught—’

‘It’s pathetic, these days, to be still under your mother’s thumb. Like he is.’

Elinor said quite fiercely, ‘She neglected him. And spoiled the others. She isn’t at all fair.’

Marianne came and stood close to her sister. ‘Oh, good,’ she said. ‘Standing up for Edward. Good sign.’

Elinor looked at her sister with sudden directness. ‘I can’t think about that.’

‘Can’t you?’

‘No,’ Elinor said. ‘Today I am thinking about packing up books so I don’t have to think about giving up my degree.’

Marianne looked stricken. ‘Oh, Ellie, I didn’t think …’

‘No. Nobody does. I know I’d only got a year to go, but I had to ring my year co-ordinator and tell him I wouldn’t be back this term.’ She broke off, and then she said, ‘We were going to concentrate on surveying this term. And model-making. I was, he said, possibly the best at technical drawing in my year. He said – oh God, it doesn’t matter what he said.’

Marianne put her arms round her sister. ‘Oh, Ellie.’

‘It’s OK.’

‘It isn’t, it isn’t, it’s so unfair.’

‘Maybe’, Elinor said, standing still in Marianne’s embrace, ‘I can pick it up again later.’

‘In Exeter? Could you join a course in Exeter?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Have you told Ma?

Elinor sighed. ‘Sort of. I don’t want to burden her.’

‘Please think about telling her properly. Please think about finishing your course in Exeter.’

Elinor sighed. She gave Marianne a quick hug, and detached herself. ‘I’ll try. In due course, I’ll try. Right now … Right now I can’t think about anything except getting us all settled in Devon without losing our minds or our money.’ She paused and then she said, ‘Please come and help with these books?’

Sir John sent the handyman from Barton Park to Norland, with Sir John’s own Range Rover, to drive the Dashwoods down to Devon. He also organised a removal company from Exeter to come and collect their books and pictures, and their china and glass, and Belle had the exquisite satisfaction of seeing the Provençal plates disappearing into paper-filled boxes, and in then labelling those boxes with a bold black marker pen so that Fanny, monitoring the whole packing-up procedure, could not fail to observe the china’s departure.

John Dashwood was very uneasy around the whole process. When he returned each day from the notional job of running the Ferrarses’ commercial property empire – he was regarded as an inevitable and unwelcome nuisance by the man who actually did the work – he hovered in Belle’s sitting room or kitchen, mournfully reciting the expenses that made Norland such an exhausting drain upon his wallet and energies, and pointing out how lucky Belle was to be exchanging life at Norland for one of such carefree simplicity and frugality in Devon. Only once did Belle grow so exasperated by his perpetual litany of complaints that she was driven to point out quite sharply that the promise of generosity made in that room at Haywards Heath Hospital had never actually been adhered to. John Dashwood had been deeply wounded by her accusation that he had been other than both honourable and generous, and said so. ‘It’s too bad of you, Belle. It really is. You and the girls have had absolutely the run of the house and garden since Henry died, the complete run. It’s been really inconvenient for Fanny, having you here and having to put all her decorating plans on hold, but of course she’s been angelic about that. As she has about everything. I sometimes wonder, Belle, if Henry didn’t spoil you, I really do. You don’t seem to have the first idea about recognising or acknowledging generosity. I’m really quite shocked. I just hope poor old John Middleton knows what he’s in for, trying to help someone who appears not to have the first idea of even how to say thank you.’ He’d peered at her, cradling his whisky and soda. ‘Just a “thank you, John” would be nice. Don’t you think? It’s all I’m asking, after everything you’ve been given. Just a thank you, Belle.’

It was a relief, in the end, to see Sir John’s car. Belle climbed in beside young Thomas, the handyman, who had put on his new jeans in honour of this important commission from his employer, and the girls got into the back seat behind her, Margaret clutching her iPod, her childhood Nintendo DS and her pocketbook laptop, as if they represented her only frail remaining link to civilised or social life as she knew it. Behind the girls Thomas stacked their suitcases and, on top of that, Marianne’s guitar case, which she had held in her arms all the time she was saying goodbye to John and Fanny. Fanny had been holding Harry’s hand, as if he were a trump card that she needed to flourish at the final moment of victory. In the hand not gripped by his mother, Harry was clutching a giant American-style cookie which seemed to absorb too much of his attention for there to be any to spare for his cousins’ departure. Elinor had knelt in front of him, and smiled. ‘Bye, bye, Harry.’

He regarded her, chewing. She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. ‘You smell of biscuit.’

He frowned.

‘It’s a cookie,’ he said reprovingly, and wedged it in his mouth again.

‘Poor little boy,’ Elinor said, later, in the car.

‘Is he?’

‘Course he is. Having Fanny for a mother …’

Belle turned in her seat. She said, rolling her eyes slightly in the direction of Thomas, ‘Let’s not talk about Fanny.’

‘She didn’t wave,’ Marianne said. She gazed out of the window, as if devouring what she saw as it sped past her.

‘No.’

‘She turned her face so that I kind of got her ear when I kissed her.’

‘Yuck, having to kiss her at all …’

‘She was pretty well smirking!’

‘She’s horrible.’

‘She’s over,’ Belle said firmly. ‘Over.’ Then she turned and smiled brightly at Thomas, who was driving with elaborate professionalism, and exclaimed, almost theatrically, ‘And we are starting a new life, in Devon!’

In the bright, small kitchen at Barton Cottage, with its immediate view of a rotary washing line planted in a square of paving, Elinor surveyed the unpacked boxes. She had said that she would sort the kitchen not just out of altruism, but also so that she could have time to herself, time to try and retrieve her mind and spirit, neither of which had yet made the journey with her body, from Norland to Barton.

It had been quite a good journey for the first few hours. Everyone was slightly hysterical with the immediate relief of escaping the pressure of living in a house with other people who so openly wanted them gone, but then Marianne had gone suddenly very quiet and then very pale and when Elinor, trained by long practice to be alert to her sister’s symptoms, asked if she was OK, she had begun to wheeze and gasp alarmingly, and Belle had ordered Thomas, in a voice urgent with panic, to stop the car.

They had tumbled out on to the verge of the A31 somewhere west of Southampton, and Elinor had been intensely grateful to Thomas, who quietly established himself beside Marianne as they all crouched on the tired grass by a litter bin in a parking place, and supported her while Elinor held her blue inhaler to her mouth and talked to her steadily and quietly, as she had so often done before.

‘Poor darling,’ Belle said, over and over. ‘Poor darling. It’ll be the stress of leaving Norland.’

‘Or the dogs, miss,’ Thomas said matter-of-factly.

‘What dogs? There aren’t any dogs.’

‘In the car,’ Thomas said. He was watching Marianne with a practical eye that was infinitely comforting to Elinor. ‘Sir John’s dogs is always in the car. Doesn’t matter how often we hoover it, we never get all the hairs out. My nan had asthma. Couldn’t even have a budgie in the house, never mind dogs and cats.’

‘Sorry,’ Marianne said, between breaths. ‘Sorry.’

‘Never be sorry …’

‘Just say, a bit earlier, next time.’

‘It won’t be an omen, will it?’

Margaret said, ‘We did omens at school and the Greeks thought—’

‘Shut up, Mags.’

‘But—’

‘We’ll put you in the front seat,’ Thomas said to Marianne, ‘with the window open.’

She nodded. Elinor looked at him. He was wearing the expression of fierce protectiveness that so many men seemed to adopt round Marianne. Solicitously, with Elinor’s assistance, he lifted Marianne to her feet.

‘Thank you,’ Elinor said.

He began to guide Marianne back to the car, his arm round her shoulders. ‘Nothing to thank me for,’ he said, and his voice was proud.

The rest of the journey had passed almost in silence. Thomas drove soberly and steadily, with Marianne leaning her head back in the seat beside him, her face turned towards the open window, her inhaler on her lap. Behind them, Elinor gripped Margaret’s hand and Belle sat with her eyes closed (in a way that suggested crowding memories rather than repose) as Hampshire gave way to Dorset, and Dorset, in its turn and after seemingly endless hours, to Devon.

It was only in the last five miles or so, as the countryside grew increasingly beautiful and spectacular, that they began to rouse themselves from the aftermath of shock and exclaim at what they were passing.

‘Oh, look.’

‘This is amazing!’

‘Gosh, Thomas, is Barton going to be this good?’

It was. They left the road and turned in between stone gateposts crowned with urns that heralded a series of drives curving away around a smooth hillside crowned with trees. There were freshly painted signs planted alongside the drives, indicating the directions to the main house, to the offices, to visitors’ parking and, with a right-angled arrow, to Barton Cottage. And there, after a further few minutes, it was, as raw and new looking as it had been on Sir John’s laptop, but set on a pleasing slope, with woods climbing up behind it, and the forked valleys falling away dramatically in front. They had gasped when they saw it, as much for its astonishing situation as for its uncompromising banality of design.

Thomas had looked at it with satisfaction.

‘We never thought he’d get planning permission,’ he said. ‘We all bet he wouldn’t. But he managed to prove there’d been a shepherd’s cottage up there once, so there’d been a residence. If he wants something, he doesn’t give up. That’s Sir John.’

Sir John had left wine and a note of welcome in the kitchen, and a basket of logs by the sitting-room fireplace. Someone had also put milk and bread and eggs in the fridge, and a bowl of apples on the new yellow-wood kitchen table, and Margaret reported, after inspecting the bathroom, that there was also a full roll of toilet paper and a new shower curtain, printed with goldfish. Elinor could not think why, confronted both with the kindness of almost strangers, and a practical little house in a magnificent place, she should feel like doing nothing so much as taking herself off somewhere private and quiet, to cry. But she did – and there was no immediate opportunity, what with Marianne needing to be assisted into the house, and Belle and Margaret exclaiming at the advantages (Margaret) and disadvantages (Belle) of their new home, to indulge herself. The luxury of being alone and able to look at and begin to arrange her thoughts would have, as it so often did, to wait.

And now, here was her chance, by herself in the kitchen, with unpacked boxes of saucepans and plates. It was comical, really, the way she’d ended up with unpacking all the practical stuff, while the others, ably and eagerly assisted by Thomas, decided where the pictures should hang and which window gave on to the right prospect to be conducive to guitar practice. Margaret had found a tree outside where she could get five whole signal bars on her mobile phone, if she climbed up into the lowest branches, and Thomas had immediately said that he would make her a tree house, just as he had agreed with Belle that the cottage could be easily improved by extending the main sitting room into a conservatory on the southern side. He had said he would bring brochures. Elinor had said quietly, ‘What about me?’

Belle went on looking at the space where the conservatory might stand. ‘What about you, darling?’

‘Well,’ Elinor said, ‘most architects get their first break designing extensions for family houses. Even Richard Rogers—’

Belle gave her a quick glance. ‘But you’re not qualified, darling.’

‘I nearly am. I’m qualified enough.’

Belle smiled, but not at Elinor. ‘I don’t think so, darling. I’d be happier with professionals who do thousands of conservatories a year.’

Elinor closed her eyes and counted slowly to ten. Then she opened them and said, in as level a voice as she could manage, ‘There’s another thing.’

Belle was gazing at the view again. ‘Oh?’

‘Yes,’ Elinor said, more firmly. ‘Yes. What about the money?’

She put two frying pans down on the kitchen table, now, beside three mugs and a handful of wooden spoons, which had been wrapped, in the universal manner of removal men, as solicitously in new white paper as if they had been Meissen shepherdesses. Money was haunting her. Money to buy and run a car – how else was Margaret to get to her new school in Exeter? Money to pay the rent, money for electricity and water, money to pay for food and clothes and even tiny amounts of fun, when all they had in the world was, when invested, going to produce under seven hundred pounds a month, or less than two hundred pounds a week. Which was, she calculated, banging Belle’s battered old stockpot down beside the frying pans, not quite thirty pounds a day. For four women with laughable earning power, one of whom is still at school, one is unused to work, and one is both physically unfit and as yet unqualified to work. Which leaves me! Me, Elinor Dashwood, who has been living in the cloud cuckoo land of Norland and idiotic, impractical dreams of architecture. She straightened up and looked round the kitchen. The prospect – bright new units overlaid with a chaos of unarranged shabby old possessions – was sobering. It was also, if she didn’t keep the tightest of grip on herself, frightening. She was not equipped for this. None of them were. They had fled to Devon on an impulse, reacting against the grief and rejection they had been through, surrendering to the first hand held out to them without considering the true extent or consequences of that surrender.

Elinor closed her eyes. She mustn’t panic. She mustn’t. There would be a way to make this work; there had to be. Perhaps she could appeal to Sir John, perhaps he had already guessed, perhaps he … Her eye was caught by a movement outside the kitchen window. It was Thomas carrying planks of wood towards Margaret’s communications tree. Already! They had been in the cottage one night and a tree house was under way. Elinor seized a saucepan lid out of the open box in front of her and flung it wildly in frustration across the kitchen. Who was going to pay for a tree house, please?

‘Wonderful,’ Sir John said. He was standing holding open the immense front door to Barton Park and beaming at them all. ‘Come in, come in. I wanted you for supper last night, you know, but Mary wouldn’t let me. Said you’d be exhausted. Probably right. Usually is.’ He plunged forward, bent on heartily kissing all of them. ‘She’s upstairs now with the rug rats. Bedtime. Complete mayhem, every night, goes on for hours. And then they trickle down all evening under one transparent pretext or another. Nil discipline. Nil. Bless them. Fantastic children.’

Belle said, emerging from his embrace, ‘Don’t you get involved?’

‘With bedtime? No fear. I do Tintin on Saturdays with the boys. I’m a wholly unreconstructed male, I’m happy to say. Now then.’ He swung round, closing the door and gesturing lavishly with his free hand. ‘What do you think of my old gaff?’

The girls gazed about them in silence. The hall was huge, larger than Norland, with niches for statues and an elaborate plaster frieze of gilded swags. It was as grandly chilly and unlike Norland in spirit or appearance as it possibly could have been. It resembled some kind of museum, a public space dedicated to the formal past. Elinor saw Marianne give an involuntary little shiver.

‘Frightful, isn’t it?’ Sir John said jovially. ‘Tarted up for a visit from Queen Victoria, all this marble nonsense. It’s an idiotic house. Dining room seats thirty-six. Thirty-six!’

Margaret stopped swivelling her head in amazement. She said, ‘Well, why do you live here, then?’

Sir John gave a gust of laughter. ‘It’s in my bones. Inheritance and all that. Can’t live with it or without it.’

Marianne said tightly, ‘We know about all that.’

‘Course you do. Course you do. Just consider yourselves lucky to be well out of it, tucked up in the cottage with all mod cons. Now come on in and have a drink.’ He paused in the doorway to an immense, bright room full of sofas and said, conspiratorially, ‘And meet the mother-in-law.’

‘Well,’ Abigail Jennings said, rising from one of the sofas in a flurry of scarves and small dogs, ‘if it isn’t the famous Dashwood girls!’ She flung her arms wide and laughed merrily. ‘Jonno said you were all gorgeous and he isn’t wrong! He’s wrong about most things, bless him, being only a man and therefore by definition in the wrong, but he said you were gorgeous and you are. My goodness, you are.’ She turned to a tall, lean man beside her and dug her elbow playfully into his ribs. ‘Don’t you think so, Bill?’

The tall man smiled, but said nothing. The girls stood in a row, just inside the door, with Belle slightly ahead of them, and looked at the floor.

‘Can’t stand this,’ Marianne said to Elinor between clenched teeth.

‘Sh.’

‘She’s fat,’ Margaret hissed vengefully, ‘as well as obviously being a sick bitch—’

‘Mags!’

‘I didn’t want to come out to supper, I wanted to watch—’

Elinor lifted her head. ‘Sorry.’

The tall man was looking at her sympathetically. Then his gaze shifted to Marianne, and Elinor saw something familiar happen, a startled arrested something that had everything to do with the arrangement of Marianne’s extraordinary features, and nothing whatsoever to do with her current expression of pure mulishness.

Sir John was pulling his mother-in-law forward like a prize exhibit, the dogs yapping round their feet. ‘Belle. Meet Abigail, my monster-in-law. Bane of my life, who, as you see, I adore. Mrs Jennings to you, girls. She’s pretty well a fixture here, I can tell you. The nippers adore her too. When she’s here, the gin goes down like bath water.’ He put an arm affectionately round Abigail’s shoulders. ‘Isn’t that true, Abi?’

‘If you left any, it would be!’ Abigail cried.

She extricated herself and came forward to kiss them all warmly. ‘Belle, welcome, dear. And girls. Lovely girls. Now, let me get you sorted. Elinor, you must be Elinor. And Marianne of the famous guitar? Oh, it is famous, dear, it is. Bill over there plays it, too. We know all about guitars at Barton – you’ll see! And this is Margaret. Don’t scowl, dear, I’m not a witch. Far too fat for any self-respecting broomstick. Now, Jonno, aren’t you going to introduce Bill?’

Sir John flung out an arm in the direction of the tall man, who had stood quietly by the immense marble fireplace without moving or uttering a word since they came in. ‘Meet my old mucker, girls. Belle, this is William Brandon. Late of the Light Dragoons. My regiment. My old dad’s regiment.’ He glanced at the tall man with sudden seriousness. ‘We were in Bosnia together, Bill and me. Weren’t we?’ He turned back to Belle. ‘And then he stayed in, and rose to command the regiment and now he devotes himself to good works, God help us, and comes here for a bit of normality and a decent claret. It’s his second home, eh Bill?’ He gestured to the tall man to come forward. ‘Come on, Bill, come on. That’s better. Now then, this is Colonel Brandon, Belle.’

She held out her hand, smiling. William Brandon stepped forward and took it, bowing a little. ‘Welcome to Devon.’

‘He’s so old,’ Marianne muttered to Elinor.

‘No, he isn’t, he looks—’

‘They’re all old. Old and old-fashioned and—’

‘Boring,’ Margaret said.

Mrs Jennings turned towards them. She looked at Margaret. She was laughing again. ‘What wouldn’t bore you, dear? Boys?’

Margaret went scarlet. Marianne put an arm round her.

‘Come on now,’ Abigail said. ‘There must be boys in your lives!’

Marianne stared at her. ‘None,’ she said.

‘One!’ Margaret blurted out.

‘Oh? Oh?’

‘Shut up, Mags.’

Colonel Brandon stepped forward and put a restraining hand on Abigail’s arm. He said to everyone else, soothingly, ‘How about I get everyone a drink?’

Belle looked at him gratefully. ‘I’d love one. And – and you play the guitar?’

‘Badly.’

‘Brilliantly!’ Sir John shouted. ‘He’s a complete pain in the arse!’

‘Would you play later?’ Colonel Brandon asked Marianne.

She didn’t look at him. She said, unhelpfully, ‘I didn’t bring my guitar.’

‘We could fetch it!’ Abigail said.

‘Another time, perhaps?’ Colonel Brandon said.

Marianne gave a ghost of a smile. ‘Yes, please, another time.’

‘Too bad,’ Abigail said. ‘Too bad. We were looking forward to a party. Weren’t we, Jonno? No boys, no music …’

Sir John moved round the group so that he could put an arm round Margaret. ‘We’ll soon remedy that, won’t we?’ He bent, beaming, so that his nose was almost touching hers. ‘Won’t we? We can start by christening your tree house!’

Margaret pulled her head back as far as Sir John’s embrace would allow. ‘How d’you know about that?’

He laid a finger of his free hand against his nose. ‘Nothing at Barton escapes me. Nothing.’ He winked at his mother-in-law and they both went off into peals of laughter. ‘Does it?’

‘I can’t do this,’ Marianne said later.

She was sitting on the end of her mother’s bed, in the muddle of half-unpacked boxes, nursing a mug of peppermint tea.

Belle put down her book. ‘It was rather awful.’

‘It was very awful. All that canned laughter. All the jokes. None of them funny—’

‘They’re so good-hearted. And well meaning, Marianne.’

‘It’s fatal to be well meaning.’

Belle laughed. ‘But, darling, it’s where kindness comes from.’

Marianne took a swallow of tea. ‘I don’t think her ladyship is kind.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. She was perfectly nice to us.’

Marianne looked up. She said, ‘She wasn’t interested in us. She just went through the motions. She only got a bit animated when the children came down.’

‘So sweet.’

‘Were they?’

‘Oh, M,’ Belle said, ‘of course they were sweet, like Harry is sweet. It’s not their fault if they are hopelessly mothered!’

Marianne sighed. ‘It’s just depressing’, she said, ‘to spend a whole evening with people who are all so – utterly uncongenial.’

‘Bill Brandon wasn’t, was he? I thought he was charming.’

‘Of course you did, Ma. He’d be perfect for you. Right age, nice manners, even reads—’

‘Stop it. He’s much younger than me!’

Marianne tweaked her mother’s toes under the duvet. ‘No one is younger than you, Ma.’

Belle ignored her. She leaned forward. ‘Darling.’

‘What?’

Belle lowered her voice. ‘Any – sign of Edward?’

Marianne shook her head. ‘Don’t think so.’

‘Has she said anything?’

‘No.’

‘Have you asked her?’

‘Ma,’ Marianne said, reprovingly, ‘I wouldn’t. Would I?’

‘But it’s so odd.’

‘He is odd.’

‘I thought …’

‘I know.’

‘D’you think Fanny’s stopping him?’

Marianne got slowly to her feet. ‘I doubt it. He’s quite stubborn in his quiet way.’

‘Well?’

Marianne looked down at her. ‘We can’t do anything, Ma.’

‘Couldn’t you text him?’

‘No, Ma, I could not.’

Belle picked up her book again. ‘Your sister is a mystery to me. It breaks my heart to leave Norland but not, apparently, hers. We are completely thrown by arriving here and finding ourselves miles from anywhere and she just goes on putting the herbs and spices in alphabetical order as if nothing is any different except the layout of the cupboards. And now Edward. Does she really not care about Edward?’

Marianne looked down at her mug again. ‘She’s made up her mind about missing him, like she’s made up her mind about giving up her course. She won’t let herself despair about things she can’t have, and doesn’t waste her energies longing for things like I do. She thinks before she feels, Ma, you know she does. I expect she does sort of miss Ed, in her way.’

‘Her way?’

Marianne moved towards the door. She said, decisively, ‘But her way isn’t my way. Any more than those stupid people tonight were my kind of people. I want – I want …’

She stopped. Belle let a beat fall, and then she said, ‘What do you want, darling?’

Marianne put her hand on the doorknob, and turned to face her mother. ‘I want to be overwhelmed,’ she said.

5

The following morning Sir John, blithely oblivious to any reservations his guests might have had about their evening at Barton Park, sent Thomas in the Range Rover to collect them all for a tour of his offices and design studio. Margaret, in particular, was appalled.

‘I’m not looking at pictures of those gross clothes!’

‘And I’, Marianne said, loudly enough for Thomas not to mistake her distaste, ‘am not modelling them either, thank you very much.’

Thomas, who was leaning against a kitchen counter with the tea Belle had made him, said imperturbably, ‘I don’t think you have an option.’

They all stared at him.

‘You mean we have to?’

‘Yup,’ Thomas said. He grinned at Margaret. ‘He’s the boss round here. Lady M. and Mrs J. make a fair bit of noise but they end up doing what they’re told.’ He took a gulp of tea. ‘We all do.’

‘So,’ Marianne said, twisting her hair up into a knot and then letting it cascade over her shoulders, ‘he’s kind of bought us?’

Thomas shrugged.

‘There isn’t a bad bone in his body. But he likes people around him; he likes people to like what he likes. And he likes the business. We all like what we’re good at.’

Belle looked at Margaret. ‘Find some shoes, darling.’

‘But I—’

‘Shoes,’ Belle said. ‘And perhaps brush your hair?’

Elinor said, trying to be truthful while not betraying the acuteness of their situation to Thomas, ‘We could do with some – well, work, couldn’t we?’

Belle glanced at her. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean …’ Elinor said, fidgeting with the buttons on her cardigan, ‘I mean, if the design studio could use you in some way, and Marianne and Margaret were sort of – of needed for the catalogue, it would be kind – kind of helpful?’

Belle turned to look at her fully. ‘To whom?’

Elinor stood a little straighter. ‘Us.’

‘In what way exactly?’

Elinor observed that Thomas was deliberately concentrating on his tea. She said, quietly, ‘Money, Ma.’

‘Why’, Belle said, almost petulantly, ‘is that all you can ever think about?’

‘Because’, Elinor said, in the same low voice, ‘someone has to.’

‘But we’ve got—’

‘It’s not enough. Not for four people in a cottage in the middle of nowhere, one of whom has to start school on Wednesday.’

Margaret reappeared wearing grubby trainers with the laces undone. She said, loudly, ‘I don’t want to go to school.’

Thomas put his mug down with decision. He said to her, firmly, ‘It’s the law.’

‘Thank you,’ Elinor said.

Belle looked at Marianne. She said, with forced gaiety, ‘It looks like we’re outnumbered, darling!’

‘If you mean’, Elinor said with sudden exasperation, ‘that you think you don’t have to make an effort to contribute, then you’re quite right. You’re outnumbered. Everyone has to do their bit.’

There was a brief pause, and then Marianne, apparently examining the ends of a handful of her hair for split ends, said to Elinor, ‘And what bit are you going to do?’

For a moment Elinor thought she might lose all control. But then she caught Thomas’s eye and registered a quick glance of sympathy, if not understanding. She swallowed, and let her hand drop from her cardigan buttons. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I was going to ask Sir John about work of some kind anyway. So I can do it, can’t I, this morning.’

‘Oh, good,’ Marianne said. There was the faintest edge of sarcasm to her voice. She let her hair fall again and smiled at Thomas. ‘Let’s get it over with, then, shall we?’

‘It was my dream, of course,’ Sir John said, ‘to keep everything being manufactured in Devon. I started off that way, you know, got all the machines moved from Honiton, stayed up half the night mugging up labour laws, but I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t get the margins. Labour costs in the UK are just too high. So the machines – completely outdated now, of course – moulder in the old stables, and we outsource everything to North Portugal. Modern factory on an industrial estate. Not an oil painting as a place, but they do the business. Excellent quality—’ He broke off and looked at Margaret. He said abruptly, ‘You bored?’

Margaret nodded energetically. Sir John beamed at her. He seemed entirely unoffended. ‘You’re a baggage, Miss Margaret Dashwood.’

‘Perhaps,’ Belle said hastily, ‘these aren’t quite the clothes that someone of Margaret’s age—’

Sir John put an arm round Belle’s shoulders. He said, interrupting, ‘We’re coming to something that’s for every age. You’ll be bowled over by my design studio. Computerised drawing boards, technology to ascertain every average body shape and size …’

He began to guide her towards a doorway through which a high-ceilinged, brilliantly lit room was visible, talking all the time. Margaret trailed in his wake, sighing and scuffing her shoes, and Marianne followed, equally slowly and at an eloquently disdainful distance. Elinor watched them disappear into the studio ahead of her and felt, with mounting alarm, that it was going to be extremely hard, if not impossible, to persuade Sir John to give her any time or attention. He had already jovially dismissed their anxiety about getting Margaret to school by declaring that Thomas would drive her as far as the bus that would take her into Exeter, and, having done that, clearly felt he had more than done his duty by his new tenants for the moment. How could she, Elinor, buttonhole him further and explain to him in a way that neither dented their dignity nor diminished their plight that they were sorely in need of opportunities to make some money? How did you manage to make it look as if you weren’t, somehow, just begging?

There were steps behind her. Elinor turned to see Colonel Brandon approaching from the stairwell that led up to the studio level. The night before, he had been dressed in an unexceptionable tidy country uniform of dark trousers and formal sweater. This morning, he was in a daytime, olive-green version of the same and his shoes, Elinor could not help noticing, were properly polished.

He smiled at her. He said, ‘Had enough of thornproof waistcoats and poachers’ pockets?’

She smiled back, gratefully. ‘It’s very impressive. I’m – I’m just a bit preoccupied this morning. I’m sure it’s just moving – the change and everything.’

Bill Brandon put his hands in his trouser pockets. ‘Especially if you’re the practical one.’

‘Well – yes.’

‘Which you are.’

Elinor flushed slightly. She looked at the toe of her Converse boot and kicked it against the floor. She said, reluctantly, ‘A bit.’

‘We’re so useful, we practical people. We hold it altogether. But we’re seen as killjoys, somehow. Most unfair.’

She glanced at him. He looked so together and trim, the open collar of his checked shirt well ironed, his hands relaxedly in the pockets of his trousers. She indicated her jeans, and the cardigan that had once been her father’s. ‘Sorry to be so scruffy.’

‘You girls’, Bill Brandon said gallantly, ‘could wear absolutely anything to great effect. Your sister …’

‘Oh, I know.’

‘Is she in there?’

‘Yes. With the others.’

‘And why aren’t you?’

Elinor sighed. She slid her own hands into the pockets of her cardigan and hunched her shoulders. ‘I rather – wanted to see Sir John.’

‘Jonno?’

‘Yes. By – by himself.’

Bill Brandon looked carefully at her. He said, ‘Is everything all right?’

Elinor said nothing. She pushed the knitted pockets as far down as they would go and stared at her feet.

‘Elinor. What is it?’

‘It’s – nothing.’

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Look, we don’t know each other very well yet, but I’m sure we will because I’m here all the time – it’s such a contrast to Delaford.’

‘Delaford?’

‘Yes. It’s – where I live. Or, rather, where I have a flat. It’s a – well, it’s a place I started when I came out of the Army. I wanted to help some of my soldiers who’d got into a bit of trouble with drink and drugs and what have you. The result of what they’d been through, you know, coping mechanisms and all that, never mind not being able to adjust to life outside the Army. And I wanted – well, it’s another story, but I wanted to help addicts in general, really, I wanted—’

‘Addicts?’ Elinor said, startled.

He nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Mostly drugs, but some alcoholics.’

‘So that’s what Sir John meant about your good works!’

‘Jonno’s been wonderful. So supportive, so generous. Our best patron.’

‘That’s wonderful,’ Elinor said seriously. ‘Really wonderful. What you do.’

‘Not really.’

‘We should have asked you, last night, we should have—’

‘No,’ Bill Brandon said, ‘you shouldn’t. I don’t talk about it much. It’s better to do something rather than talk about it. Don’t you think?’

Elinor relaxed her shoulders a little. ‘If you know what to do, it is.’

He moved slightly closer to her. ‘Which is where I came in, I think. What is the matter?’

She looked up at him. He was wearing an expression of the greatest kindness. She said, ‘I’m – just a bit worried. That’s all.’

‘About moving here?’

‘Not – in itself …’

‘Money?’ he said.

She let out a breath. ‘How did you know?’

‘Just a guess.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Money. We’re none of us really fit to work but we’ve got to. At least I have. And I was going to ask Sir John—’ She stopped. Then she said, sadly, ‘I don’t really know what I was going to ask him. For help, I suppose. Unspecified help. Hopeless, really.’

‘Not hopeless.’

‘He’s so busy, he does so much already.’

Bill Brandon looked towards the studio again. And then he looked back at Elinor. ‘He does do a lot, you’re quite right. He’s a mover and shaker by nature. So why don’t you ask someone who isn’t trying to run a business as well as a wife and four children and a sizeable estate in dire economic times? Why don’t you ask me?’

Back at the cottage, Marianne said she felt restless. She said, gazing out of the sitting-room window at the dramatic fall of land below them, ‘We can unpack any time, can’t we? Look at that blue sky.’

Elinor, coming into the room with a stepladder in order to help her mother hang their own curtains, said, ‘And those clouds.’

‘They’re nothing. They’re blowing away. Anyway, what does getting wet matter? We always got wet at Norland.’

Belle was pulling lengths of battered old damask out of a box to replace Sir John’s brightly patterned ready-made curtains. She said to Marianne, ‘What are you suggesting, darling?’

‘A walk.’

‘A walk,’ Margaret said in tones of disgust.

‘Yes,’ Marianne said, ‘a walk. And you’re coming with me.’

‘I hate walks.’

‘Why d’you want to walk?’ Belle said.

‘I want to see the old house Sir John talked about. The old house in the valley where the old lady lives who never goes out. She sounds like Miss Havisham.’

‘I don’t’, Margaret said, ‘want to see anything.’

Belle regarded the damask. It had once been deep burgundy red. It was now, faded by the sun, irregularly striped with the colour of weak tea. But anything was better than bright blue cotton printed with stylised sunflowers. She said, absently, ‘Lovely, darling.’

‘But I—’ began Margaret.

Belle raised her head. ‘I don’t want Marianne walking alone. Not after the other day. And certainly not till we know our way about.’

From the top of the ladder Elinor said, ‘The house is called Allenham. The old lady is Mrs Smith.’

No one took any notice.

‘We’re going,’ Marianne said to Margaret.

‘You’re going,’ Belle said to Margaret.

Margaret looked up at Elinor on her ladder. ‘Why can’t you go?’

‘Because,’ Elinor said.

‘I always have to do what I don’t want,’ Margaret said.

Belle dropped the curtains and put an arm round her. ‘I promise’, she said, ‘that you’ll get to an age where nobody tells you what to do any more. One day you can do exactly as you like.’

Elinor leaned forward to unhook the sunflower curtains. ‘I wish,’ she said softly, to no one in particular.

From the cottage, a path ran steeply up through the woods behind it, crossed a narrow, sunken lane, and gave on to a high, open ridge from which it was possible to see down, as if one were a passing bird, into all the interconnected valleys below. Once up there, Margaret, who had complained loudly all the way through the trees, became infected by the wind and the height, and went whirling, screaming, along the ridge, her arms held out and her hair streaming like tattered banners round her head.

Marianne followed more slowly, reluctantly entranced by what lay below her. There was Barton Park and its outbuildings, as neat and miniature as doll’s-house furniture, set among scattered small blobs of trees and connected by the regular pale curves of drives, with green spaces in between dotted with cotton-wool balls of sheep and black and white dominoes of cows. Smoke rose from chimneys here and there, and the postman’s red van crept along a drive like a little bright toy. And then, there, in the next valley, clinging to the hillside below a great hanger of trees, was the fairy-tale house of Allenham, built of soft, rosy brick, with twisted Tudor chimneys and narrow, glittering windows. Its gardens – famous, Sir John said, for being laid out to a particular design in 1640 and never substantially changed – were a distinct formal pattern, visible clearly from this height, of tall dark hedges and lower greener hedges, punctuated only by a few fountains standing dry and still in their pale stone basins. It was a different period to Norland, it was in a different situation to Norland, but something about the romance of that old, quiet house in its valley caught nostalgically at Marianne’s throat and made her abruptly feel tears rising.

‘She’s an old dear, Mrs Smith,’ Sir John had said. ‘She’s been a widow forever. Old Smith’s family made money in the north, and he brought it down here and bought that house. Spent a fortune on it. Lovely old boy. Took up local history. Too bad they never had children, and now she’s there alone, mouldering away, looked after by all these agency girls from God knows where. Heaven knows what they make of it, these Filippinos. If you’d grown up in Manila, you’d think you’d landed on the moon, arriving at Allenham, wouldn’t you?’

Margaret came panting up. Marianne pointed down to the house. ‘Look.’

‘Bit creepy,’ Margaret said. She had taken her fleece off and tied it round her waist.

‘It’s fantastic,’ Marianne said.

Margaret squinted up at the sky. ‘It’s going to rain.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘You haven’t even got a sweater.’

‘I don’t mind. What’s rain?’

A large drop fell, on cue, on to Margaret’s hand. She held it out. ‘This,’ she said.

Marianne glanced behind her. From the south-west and the direction of the sea, an immense pile of gun-metal clouds was moving purposefully towards them. She said, ‘It’s only rain, Mags.’

‘No,’ Margaret said, and her voice was suddenly urgent. She pointed, following Marianne’s gaze, at the moment that a dramatic gash of lightning split the clouds and a crash of thunder echoed round the hills.

‘Help!’ Marianne said in a different tone.

Margaret unwrapped her fleece and thrust it at her sister. ‘Take this.’

‘No.’

‘Take it. Take it. I haven’t got asthma.’

As Marianne struggled into the fleece, the rain abruptly began in earnest. Pulling her sister behind her, Margaret began to retrace their steps at a stumbling run, with the rain bouncing off the turf beside them.

‘Slower,’ Marianne pleaded.

‘No,’ Margaret shouted. ‘No. We’ve got to get back, we’ve got to get home!’

‘I can’t—’

‘You can! You can! You must.’

They floundered on along the ridge, the turf increasingly slippery under their feet, their hands increasingly slippery in one another’s.

‘Oh please,’ Margaret kept shouting. ‘Oh, please, run.’

‘I can’t, I can’t go faster, I can’t see …’

Ahead of them, the hedge that bordered the lane grew dimly visible through the sheets of rain.

‘Nearly there!’ Margaret cried. Her hair was plastered to her face and needed perpetually pushing aside with her free hand. ‘Not far!’

Marianne gave a little choked scream and then her hand slid from Margaret’s and she subsided on the earth, heaving and gasping.

Margaret collapsed beside her. ‘Marianne? Marianne? Are you OK?’

Marianne couldn’t speak. She sat where she had fallen, crouched on the sodden grass, her hands pressed to her chest, battling for breath.

Margaret began to scrabble in her sister’s pocket. ‘Your inhaler, your inhaler.’

Marianne shook her head, jerkily.

‘What d’you mean? You haven’t got it? You came without your inhaler?’

Ashen and fighting, Marianne managed a brief nod.

‘Oh my God,’ Margaret said. She could feel panic rising in her like hysteria. She mustn’t, she mustn’t. What would Ma do, what would Ellie do, she must think, think, she must – she stood up.

‘Listen!’ she shouted above the rain. ‘Listen! I’m going to race down to the cottage to get your inhaler and Ma and Ellie. Don’t move. D’you hear me? Don’t move, just do little breaths, don’t panic. OK? OK?’

Marianne lifted one hand weakly from her chest in acknowledgement and Margaret set off towards the hedge and the lane at a speed she did not know she was capable of. As she plunged through the hedge she was aware of a car coming down the lane with its headlights on, a car coming fast, too fast, and even in the midst of her fervour about Marianne it occurred to her that the situation would not be improved if she managed to get herself run over, in addition. So she slithered down the bank and flattened herself against it to allow the car to roar by.

But it didn’t. The driver obviously saw her sprawled against the bank below the hedge and screeched to a halt, spraying her with muddy water and grit. The passenger window opposite her slid down and a man’s voice said, impatiently, ‘You OK?’

Margaret scrambled up. The sight of another human, and an adult, was almost too welcome to be borne. She clutched at the gleaming car and thrust her dripping head into the interior.

‘Oh please, oh please, it’s my sister!’

The driver of the car was a young man, a dark young man. Even in acute distress, with her vision partially obscured by her wet hair, Margaret could see that on the scale of hotness, he registered fairly close to a full ten. He was – amazing. He said, slightly less irritably, ‘What about your sister?’

‘She’s up there,’ Margaret said wildly, close to tears, ‘up in the field. She’s having an asthma attack.’

‘Ye gods,’ the young man said, in quite a different tone.

He switched off the engine and was out of the car in a flash, not bothering to take the key but scrambling nimbly up the bank towards the hedge almost before Margaret had time to register that he had moved at all. She began to follow him, clumsily, calling out, ‘She hasn’t got her inhaler. She forgot her inhaler.’

‘Where is it?’ he yelled.

‘At home.’

‘Where’s home?’

‘Down there. Barton Cottage.’

He paused for a second, halfway through the hedge. ‘I know Barton Cottage,’ he said. ‘I’ll bring her. Get home and tell them I’ll bring her.’

‘You can’t—’

He had pushed through the hedge by now. He shouted down at Margaret, ‘Do as you’re bloody told!’ and then he vanished from her sight.

‘I’ve known Barton all my life,’ the young man said.

He was standing by the fireplace in the cottage, towelling his hair with an old beach towel Elinor had fetched from a box on the landing. Marianne was on the sofa with her inhaler and a little faint colour in her cheeks. She and her mother and her sisters were gazing in disbelief at the young man by the fireplace.

‘I just about come from round here. In fact, I’m staying in a house a couple of miles away, called Allenham. It belongs to my aunt. She’s pretty well immobile now, but I’ve come all my life, every school holidays. It’s a bit tricky to get away and come much, now, but I do when I can. She’s an old sweetie.’

Belle swallowed. It had not crossed her mind to send Margaret upstairs to find dry clothes. Nothing at all practical had crossed her mind since the mounting anxiety about Marianne had begun with the change in the weather, followed by Margaret’s distracted, sobbing arrival home, bursting with some incoherent story about an asthma attack and a man bringing Marianne in a car, and then the almost immediate roar of a sports car outside and a perfectly strange and godlike young man appearing at the front door with Marianne in his arms, as pale as a ghost but still breathing. Still breathing. Belle stared and stared at the young man. Even if he hadn’t looked as he looked, he would have been a hero to her: rescuing Marianne, bringing her home as respectfully as if she had been – had been a single flower. A lily. A butterfly. A broken butterfly. He had been almost tender.

‘I – I don’t know how to thank you,’ Belle said, ‘I just …’

The young man stopped rubbing. His hair was thick and dark and glossy. He grinned. ‘Then don’t.’

‘But you can’t imagine how we feel, what you have done for us.’

He glanced at Marianne. He raised one dark eyebrow, very slightly. ‘Oh, I can.’

Margaret peered at her sister. If she hadn’t been so pale, Margaret would have said she was blushing. ‘Do you have a name?’

He smiled. He dropped the towel casually on to the hearth and ran his hands through his hair. Even in wet jeans, he looked magnificent. ‘I’m John.’

Margaret said, almost shyly, ‘We know lots of Johns.’

‘Ah,’ he said. He winked at her. ‘But I am John Willoughby. And everyone calls me Wills.’

‘May we?’ Belle said.

‘I’d be offended if you didn’t.’

‘And we are—’

‘I know who you are.’

‘You do?’

‘Everyone round here knows everyone else’s business. Aunt Jane told me. She said there were new people in the new cottage and – well, I won’t tell you what she said until I know you better.’

Marianne put her inhaler down. She said, hoarsely, ‘I’m afraid that wasn’t a very good introduction.’

He looked suddenly sober. ‘Not from my point of view.’

She tried a little laugh and choked on it. Indistinctly, she said, ‘Rescuing damsels in distress …’

He said quietly, ‘One hell of a damsel.’

She tilted her head back slightly. Even bedraggled from the rain and battered by the attack, her hair matted in damp clumps, Elinor marvelled at her sister’s looks. A quick glance towards the fireplace indicated that she was not the only one marvelling. John Willoughby was wearing the expression familiar to Elinor for most of Marianne’s life, the expression she had seen on Bill Brandon’s face only that morning. And the fragility that asthma gave her, coupled with the natural intensity of her personality, plainly only magnified her appeal.

Marianne said, in a stronger voice, ‘We were looking at your aunt’s house. We were up there, looking down …’

‘Were you?’

‘It’s wonderful. So wonderful. So ancient and knowing, somehow. It made me want to cry.’

There was a brief powerful pause.

‘Did it?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘D’you know, it has that effect on me, too. I’ve always adored Allenham. When I was little, I never wanted to leave.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Can you? Have you ever lived anywhere like Allenham?’

‘Oh yes,’ Marianne said. She pushed herself a little more upright. Her skin was brightening. ‘I lived in the most amazing house. In Sussex. I grew up there.’

‘We all did!’ Margaret said indignantly.

‘I wish I had grown up at Allenham,’ Wills said, ignoring her.

Margaret looked out of the window. She said, determinedly, ‘Is your car a Ferrari?’

‘No,’ he said, still looking at Marianne.

‘What is it then?’

‘It’s an Aston Martin.’

‘Wow,’ Margaret said. ‘I never saw one before.’

Wills looked down at his wet clothes. ‘I ought to go. I’m sopping.’

‘Please come back again,’ Belle said. ‘Please.’

Marianne said nothing. Elinor watched Wills watching her.

‘I’d love to.’ He bent towards Marianne, half laughing. ‘Please, no more running in the rain. I might not be there to rescue you.’

She smiled at him with a smile Elinor would have described, if Marianne were not still holding her blue inhaler, as languorous. ‘I’ll try not to.’

‘Because’, he said, ‘I couldn’t stand anyone else to rescue you.’

Margaret gave a little gasp and put her hand over her mouth. Elinor said to her, quickly, ‘Why don’t you go ahead and change?’

‘Yes,’ Belle said, as if waking from some kind of dream. ‘Yes. Darling, go and change. And Elinor, do put the kettle on.’

Wills held up a hand. ‘Not for me. Thank you. Aunt Jane’s expecting me.’ He gave an almost imperceptible smirk. ‘The obligations of the heir …’

‘Oh my God,’ Marianne exclaimed. ‘Are you the heir to Allenham?’

He nodded.

‘So fortunate,’ Belle said dazedly.

Marianne’s eyes were shining. ‘So romantic,’ she said.

He nodded. ‘That’s what I think.’

He came right up to the sofa. He said, looking down at Marianne, ‘I’ll come and check on you tomorrow.’

She looked straight back up at him. ‘Yes.’

‘Take care of yourself.’

‘Oh, we will,’ Belle said with fervour.

Wills smiled at her. ‘This cottage feels great already.’

‘Oh! Oh, it’s so ordinary …’

‘Depends entirely upon the inhabitants, you know.’

Margaret said, dawdling in front of him, ‘Can I have a go in your car sometime?’

‘Of course.’ He looked round at them. ‘I’m here for a bit longer. We can rip up some of Jonno’s miles of drives.’

‘Yes, please!’

‘On one condition.’

‘Anything, anything!’

‘No more thank yous,’ Wills said.

And then he was gone. A slam of the front door, of his car door, the roar of the engine and he was gone, leaving the atmosphere behind him as charged and alive as if it had been full of fireworks. They looked at each other in the strangely complicated silence that he had left behind him. Then Marianne put her hands over her glowing face. From behind them, she said, ‘Don’t anyone say anything. Nothing. Not one word.’

‘Oh, he’s such a dish, isn’t he?’ Mary Middleton said without much emphasis.

She was standing in her enormous recently fitted kitchen, spooning fruit purée into her youngest, a little boy with his father’s ripe apple complexion, who was wedged into an immense and expensive-looking high chair.

‘Amazing,’ Belle said. She had been given a cup of coffee from a dedicated espresso machine. ‘I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a better-looking man.’

Mary bent until her face was level with her baby’s. She said, in a diddums voice, ‘Don’t talk like that in front of Mr Gorgeous!’

Belle sighed. She had never much liked babies, even if she had adored her own, especially when they grew into articulate children. She said, ‘Does he come down here often?’

Mary straightened and began to swoop another spoonful of purée down towards the baby, as if it were a descending aeroplane.

‘Well, enough to keep the seat hot, if you know what I mean. Do look at this face, watching the spoon. Open mouth, poppetty, big big mouth for Mumma. Jane Smith is a dear, and she adores that boy. But he’s spoiled, if you ask me.’

Belle looked into her coffee cup. The coffee had a creamy foam on top. It looked, it had to be said, extremely authentic. ‘We thought he was charming.’

‘Oh, charming all right.’

‘What does John think?’

‘Jonno?’ Mary said. She scraped the spoon along the baby’s chin. ‘Oh, he just thinks he’s good fun. You know. Good shot, fun at parties, all that. He knows how to behave, I’ll grant him that. And, of course, he’s very ornamental. Though not’, she said, bending again, ‘half as ornamental as some scrumptious people.’

The baby blew a few appreciative bubbles.

‘And’, Belle said, still looking at her coffee, ‘he’s, well, he’s going to inherit Allenham?’

Mary dropped a kiss on her son’s head and began to untie his bib. To Belle’s eye, she looked in remarkably good shape for someone who had had four babies so close together, and her clothes and hair seemed to owe more to Bond Street than to Barton.

‘That’s what we gather,’ Mary said. ‘Jane’s got no children of her own, and this is her only sister’s boy, her younger sister. She – I mean Wills’s mother – died years ago, of a brain tumour or something, poor thing – and his father was useless, by all accounts, lives abroad, one of those old-fashioned playboy wastes of space. Up you come, poppetty. Ooh, what a heavy boy! So lucky old Wills stands to get everything and of course she dotes on him. Not that she’s a pushover, mind you. She’s very strict about some things.’ She put her mouth into the baby’s neck. ‘Just like your mummy.’

Belle said slowly, ‘He came up to the cottage this morning …’

‘Oh!’ Mary said, settling on a bar stool next to Belle with the baby on her knee. ‘Don’t touch that cup! Hot, hot, hot! We know all about this morning. Poor old Bill. He spent hours finding all the best late roses to take up to Marianne and then there was Wills with a handful of nothing from the nearest ditch, and she didn’t even look at the roses!’ She smiled down at her son. ‘What a naughty girl, baby, what a naughty, naughty girl. And then we get Bill back here looking utterly down in the mouth, and he won’t stay, will he, but says he’s got to get back to Delaford and off he goes at a million miles an hour, gravel sprayed all over the hedges. And they’d only just been trimmed.’

‘Come on,’ Belle said. ‘He is Marianne’s age—’

‘Who? Wills? Oh, I know. But Bill is such a darling. He’s adorable with my little lot, so sweet. It’s so sad he hasn’t any of his own. Officially, that is.’

The baby had found a teaspoon under Belle’s saucer, which he was now banging randomly about and shouting. Mary made no attempt to quell him.

Flinching slightly, Belle said, ‘He seems awfully nice. Bill Brandon, I mean.’

‘What a noisy person! What a noisy, noisy boy! Oh, he’s lovely. You can’t believe no one’s snapped him up, can you? There was supposed to be somebody he’d adored once who wouldn’t have him or went off the rails or something, but he’s frightfully private, I’ve never heard him say anything himself. No, not on Mumma’s hand. Poor Mumma’s hand! And there’s a daughter somewhere—’

‘A daughter!’

Mary took the spoon out of the baby’s right hand and put it in his left. He instantly transferred it back again and resumed banging. ‘Well, I don’t know. He’s never mentioned her, so it may be just a rumour. Such a waste, if so; he’s so good with children. Not that that’s very hard, is it, my pumpkin? He’d be a fantastic husband, so loyal. And I think, personally, he’d love to be in love again.’

Belle drained her coffee. ‘Then he’d be at complete odds with my Marianne. And me for that matter. We believe in the love of a life, you see.’

Mary kissed the baby. ‘Well, I’ve got that, haven’t I, four times over!’

Belle waited a moment. She said, ‘I rather meant men.’

Mary smiled at her. ‘Bill would say that Marianne is young yet. And he loves a young mind. That’s why he adores the children so.’

Belle put her coffee cup down. ‘Well,’ she said, smiling back in a way that was not entirely natural, ‘there’s young and young, isn’t there? And to my mind, the young man who brought Marianne home and wouldn’t be thanked is pretty close to perfection.’

‘And to hers too?’

‘Her what?’

‘Is John Willoughby, in Marianne’s mind, pretty close to perfection?’

Belle got off her stool with less grace than she had intended. She extended a finger to the baby, who regarded it and turned away. ‘I think’, she said in a tone designed to discourage any disagreement, ‘that the feeling between Marianne and John Willoughby is mutual.’

‘After two days!’ Mary cried.

Belle took a step away.

‘Sometimes,’ she said loftily, ‘it is only a matter of recognition. Time means nothing. Nothing at all.’

6

‘I’ve known Bill Brandon for years,’ Peter Austen said. He had a neat grey beard and was wearing an equally neat open-necked denim shirt. ‘He’s been – well, wonderful to my family.’ He cleared his throat and looked briefly at the smooth white expanse of his desktop. Then he smiled again at Elinor. ‘You probably know what he does. At Delaford.’

‘Yes, a little, he doesn’t really …’

‘No,’ Peter Austen said. ‘He doesn’t talk about it. But he’s helped a lot of us, and saved more than a few. My boy, for one.’

Elinor also looked at the desktop. It was amazing to see so much white surface with so little on it. Even for an architect. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said politely.

‘Yes, well …’ He cleared his throat again. ‘So, any friend of Bill’s …’

‘I hardly know him,’ Elinor said quickly. ‘I mean, we only met a week or so ago, but he said you might be able to help?’

‘I always,’ Peter said, ‘I always like to do anything I can. For Bill.’

Elinor looked round the room. It was on the first floor of a new building on the river estuary, and the light flooding in from the windows and skylights gave it an unearthly brightness.

She said, awkwardly, ‘I feel really shy about all of this, about asking …’

‘Those who don’t ask, don’t get, you know. Especially when we need help.’

Elinor looked ruefully at him. ‘Which I do.’

He smiled again. ‘I know. Bill told me. And I took the precaution of ringing your college tutor before we met.’

‘Oh my goodness!’

He gestured towards the white wall behind him, on which hung huge high-resolution coloured photographs of various dramatic-looking buildings.

‘We are very lucky, Elinor. May I call you Elinor? We are still busy, even in these parlous times. We are diversified, you see. Community projects, education projects, commercial projects, conservation work, private houses: you name it; we do it. All over the county. I’ve even had the diocesan people approach me about the cathedral. We pride ourselves on a healthy team profile of all ages and nationalities.’ He gave his beard a quick appreciative stroke. ‘I’m probably the oldest director and the only one with a B.Sc. Hons and no RIBA qualification, but I have a way with the planning authorities that has proved pretty useful over the years.’

Elinor swallowed. It was hard to tell what was coming, even if the general geniality was hopeful. She said, trying to sound simultaneously modest and confident, ‘I was only a year away from—’

‘I know.’

‘I loved it,’ Elinor said with sudden release, remembering. ‘I really loved it.’

‘Your tutor thought very highly of you.’

‘Did he? Oh, did he?’

Peter Austen leaned forward, resting on his forearms. He linked his hands. ‘But you need the money.’

Elinor swallowed again. ‘Yes. Did Colonel …’

‘He did. Not in so many words. But he did.’

‘The thing is’, Elinor said, ‘that I don’t know if I’m employable. I don’t know if I’d be of any use. I mean, I’d work like anything, and I wouldn’t mind what I did, but I don’t know if—’ She stopped and looked shyly at him. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I haven’t done anything like this before. I’ve never asked—’

‘And what did I say about asking?’

She relaxed a little.

‘OK.’

‘I’ll be honest with you,’ Peter Austen said. ‘I can’t offer you much but I can offer you something. We were looking for someone to assist our chief designer, someone with graphic abilities even if they don’t have much of a grasp of building technology yet. And from our point of view, you seem good, and you’re cheap. I’m willing to give you a trial. I’m willing to give you three months working with Tony, and see how we all get on. How does that strike you?’

Elinor sat up straight and gazed at him. The light in the room around her seemed suddenly to swell into utter brilliance.

‘It strikes me’, she said, ‘as completely – completely wonderful.’

‘Fifteen hundred a month?’ Belle said. She was ladling out portions of chicken casserole.

Marianne, at the far end of the table, was reading a volume of Pablo Neruda’s love poems. Without looking up, she said, ‘Won’t that work out at below the minimum wage?’

Elinor took a plate of casserole from her mother and passed it to Margaret. She said, steadily, ‘It’s a job. I have a job.’

‘But to work five days a week for—’

‘It’ll pay our rent. And some of the bills.’

‘What bills?’ Belle said vaguely.

Margaret looked at her plate. ‘Do I have to eat the carrots?’

Elinor nodded patiently. ‘Electricity, gas for the cooker – that’s the tank by the washing line – and water rates.’

‘But artistically—’

‘I am a graphic artist, Ma.’

Belle sighed. ‘Well, darling, if it’s what you want …’

‘I do.’

‘I’m sure Jonno—’

‘Ma, I have a job in my own profession. It’s not well paid but I’ll be learning. He was a nice man. And he thinks the world of Bill Brandon.’

Marianne, her eyes still on her book, gave a faint snort.

‘And,’ Elinor said, ‘I can meet Margaret after school and we can come home together.’

Margaret was carefully lining her carrots up around the rim of her plate. She said, ‘Suppose I want to see my friends after school and not my sister?’

Elinor reached across to put a baked potato on her plate. ‘I thought you hated your new school.’

‘I do. But I might not hate all the people.’

‘I see.’

Marianne raised her eyes from her book. ‘Good on you, Ellie,’ she said unexpectedly.

‘Goodness. Thank you.’

‘She’s right,’ Marianne said to Belle. ‘She’s got a job. She’s doing something for us all.’

Margaret jabbed a knife into her potato. She said to Marianne, ‘Well, I suppose you can’t really, can you?’

Marianne let a brief pause fall, and then she said nonchalantly, ‘Well, actually, I can. As it happens.’

Belle stopped ladling. She looked at Marianne, the spoon suspended. ‘What do you mean, darling?’

Marianne let go of the book and stretched her arms lazily above her head. She said carelessly, ‘I saw Wills today.’

‘Oh, we know …’

‘You amaze me!’

‘What a surprise, darling.’

‘And he said—’ Marianne stopped.

‘What? What did he say?’

‘And he said,’ Marianne repeated, her head thrown back, gazing at her raised hands, ‘he said – that he was going to give me a car.’

Margaret dropped her knife with a clatter. ‘Wow!’

‘A car!’

‘M,’ Elinor said earnestly, leaning forward, ‘he can’t. You can’t—’

Marianne lowered her arms and regarded her sister. ‘Why can’t we?’

‘You can’t drive,’ Margaret said.

‘I can learn.’

‘You can’t accept a car from Wills,’ Elinor said.

Belle put the spoon down. ‘So romantic,’ she said, ‘but he shouldn’t. Really, he shouldn’t.’

Margaret picked up her knife again and reached for the butter. ‘What kind of car?’

‘An Alfa Romeo Spider,’ Marianne said airily. ‘Series 4. A design classic.’

Margaret jumped to her feet. ‘I’m going to look it up. I bet it’s worth megabucks.’

‘Sit down, darling!’ Belle said sharply. Then she looked at Marianne. ‘It’s very sweet of him …’

Marianne smiled to herself. She said, ‘Typical, really, the grand gesture but something that we really need, too. It was his twenty-first present from Aunt Jane. So sweet! It’s been on blocks in the garage at Allenham for ages, ever since he got the Aston. He says it’s perfect for me.’

Belle glanced at Elinor. Then she said to Marianne, ‘Dear one …’

‘He’s so wonderful,’ Marianne said.

‘Yes, darling. Yes, he is. But before Elinor says it, I have to put a bit of a dampener on things and say we can’t afford it.’

Marianne’s head jerked up. ‘What’s to afford? He’s giving me a car!’

‘We’d have to insure it,’ Elinor said. ‘And tax it and fuel it. And you would need driving lessons.’

‘Thomas will teach me!’

‘No,’ Belle said, quietly but firmly.

‘But we need a car!’

‘A sensible, dull car,’ Elinor said. ‘Not a sports car that only fits two people and no luggage.’

‘You are just so sad,’ Margaret said crossly.

Marianne bit her lip. She looked at her mother and her older sister. She said quietly, to Elinor, ‘What would it cost?’

Elinor reached along the table to take her hand. ‘Don’t know. But maybe a couple of thousand. A year, I mean.’

Marianne squeezed her sister’s hand briefly and let it go. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I can’t have it then, can I?’

‘No. Sorry, babe.’

Marianne sat up straighter. ‘If we can’t afford it …’

‘And’, Belle said unwisely, ‘it might be a bit much, you know. As a present, I mean. It’s the kind of thing you get given when – well, when you get engaged, or something.’

Marianne stood up slowly, ignoring her supper, and picked up her phone, holding it hard against her. She moved towards the door and, as she left the room, she turned long enough to say, almost triumphantly, ‘Well, what would you know, anyway, about that?’

Margaret could see, from the line of light visible under her door, that Marianne was not yet asleep. She herself had been doing what was strictly forbidden after bedtime, which was going online, with her laptop under the duvet, and looking up all the random things that suggested themselves to her, so seductively beyond the confines of her own circumstances. Tonight, fired up and fed up with her family’s attitude to Wills’s glittering offer – much enhanced, in Margaret’s eyes, by the forceful glamour of his personality – she had found a website which gave valuations for, it said, cars for the connoisseurs.

She tapped with one fingernail on Marianne’s door. Marianne called, ‘Ellie?’

Margaret pushed the door open far enough to reveal her face. ‘It’s me.’

Marianne was sitting up in bed with her phone, her thumbs poised, mid text. She said sternly, ‘Mags, you should be asleep.’

Margaret eeled into the room and settled on Marianne’s bed. ‘Who are you texting?’

‘Guess.’

‘Why don’t you ring him?’

‘I do.’

‘Does he ring you?’

‘He can’t, staying with Aunt Jane.’

‘Yes, he can – he can go somewhere.’

‘Mags,’ Marianne said loftily, ‘he’s very respectful of Aunt Jane and what he owes her and how he has to give her his company and attention. So it’s better for me to text him while he’s at Allenham.’

Margaret craned to see the screen on Marianne’s phone. ‘That’s more like an essay than a text.’

Marianne laid the phone face down on her duvet. ‘Why, exactly, did you come in?’ she said.

Margaret wriggled a little. ‘That car …’

‘What car?’

‘The one you can’t have.’

Marianne tried to look indifferent. ‘What of it?’

Margaret leaned forward. ‘It’s worth over seven thousand pounds!’

‘How do you know?’

‘I looked it up. It said about seven thousand five hundred if it has good documented history. That’s amazing.’

Marianne made a series of little pleats in the duvet cover. She said, sadly, ‘I’ve told him I can’t have it.’

‘Have you? When?’

‘Tonight. I rang him after supper. He said that it was mine whenever I wanted it and it would just wait at Allenham until I was ready.’

Margaret said, ‘Was he cross?’

‘No. Of course not. Why should he be cross? He’s never cross.’

Margaret watched her sister’s pleating hand. ‘You’re pretty gone on him, aren’t you?’

Marianne said nothing. She leaned forward a little more and something swung out of the neck of her pyjamas. They were pyjamas Margaret coveted, patterned in plaid, with rosebuds.

‘What’s that?’

‘What’s what?’

‘Round your neck. That shiny thing.’

Marianne stopped pleating and put a hand to her collar.

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Show me,’ Margaret demanded.

‘You’re not to tell Ma …’

‘I won’t!’

Marianne held something out between forefinger and thumb. It was a ring, three linked bands of different coloured gold, threaded on a chain.

‘It’s a ring,’ Margaret said accusingly.

‘I know, muppet.’

‘Well,’ Margaret said, pushing her hair behind her ears, ‘a ring looks a bit weddingy, to me.’

Marianne put the ring against her lips. ‘He’s got one, too.’

‘Wills? Wills has got a ring like this?’

‘He got them for both of us. His is bigger, of course.’

Margaret sniffed slightly. ‘You have got it badly, haven’t you?’

‘He’s wonderful,’ Marianne said. ‘He’s Mr Wonderful. Don’t tell Ma and Ellie about the ring. I mean it.’

Margaret sighed. ‘Ellie isn’t speaking to me much, anyway.’

‘Isn’t she?’

‘Not since I let out about Ed and her.’

‘Oh, Mags.’

‘Well,’ Margaret said aggrievedly, ‘I was being nagged and nagged, wasn’t I, by Mrs J. and everyone, about boyfriends and stuff, and I can’t exactly diss Mrs J., can I, however much I’d like to, so after a bit I just said I couldn’t talk about it but there was someone and Mrs J. gave one of her gross cackles and said to Ellie, Who, who, and Ellie looked at me like she wished I was dead and I said I couldn’t say but his name began with an F and then Jonno started teasing Ellie and I thought she might hit him and then thank goodness all those dire kids came in and started screaming so I was saved. Sort of. Except Ellie had a go at me afterwards and Ma heard her and said what was going on and Ellie said, Well, someone, meaning me, ate a whole bowl of stupid for breakfast, didn’t they. And she’s still cross.’

Marianne smiled at her sister. ‘She’s private, Mags.’

‘Aren’t you?’

Marianne held her ring away from her, on its chain, so that she could admire it. ‘I don’t need to be, Mags. I’m proud of how I feel.’

Margaret got off the bed. ‘I’d be proud to drive an Alfa Romeo Spider, I would.’

‘One day.’

‘What?’

Marianne lay back on her pillows and tucked the ring out of sight into the jacket of her pyjamas. ‘One day, there’ll be all kinds of things. Marvellous things. Happy, glorious things in beautiful places.’

‘Like’, Margaret said, ‘no more picnic outings with all the Middletons and those kids.’

Marianne stared at her. ‘What are you talking about?’

Margaret made a face. ‘Didn’t they tell you? We’ve all got to go, on Saturday. Jonno wants to have a barbecue, in a wood somewhere, last outing of summer or something, all of us with sausages and stuff. Bill’s taking us; it’s a wood belonging to someone he knows.’ Margaret grinned at her sister. ‘Your lucky day, M. Bill’ll want you to sit next to him.’

Marianne gave a little groan. Then she touched the ring under her pyjamas. ‘I’ll ask Wills.’

‘Yay!’

Marianne winked at her sister. ‘I’ll ask Wills to come too, and he can drive me.’

Margaret waited a moment, and then she said, carefully, ‘If I don’t tell anyone about the ring, can I come in the Aston with you two?’

Across the meagre landing, Belle heard Marianne’s door close and the scamper of Margaret’s feet going back to her own bedroom. If you could call it a bedroom, really. It was more like a large cupboard, just big enough for a bed and a chair, but at least it gave Margaret privacy, the privacy which she had claimed as being as much her right as her sisters’.

‘Why shouldn’t I have a bedroom of my own? You’ve all got bedrooms of your own.’

‘But we haven’t got tree houses,’ Marianne had pointed out. ‘You have a tree house, and we only have bedrooms. There are three proper – well, sort of proper – bedrooms, and one cupboard. So, as you have a tree house, you should have the cupboard.’ She had paused. ‘Unless, of course, you’d like to share the tree house?’

There’d been a short silence in which Margaret wrestled with her painful sense of being outmanoeuvred. And then, glaring, she’d given in. But Belle could never hear her door slam on the cupboard without a pang.

‘I just wish’, she said in a whisper to the photograph of Henry with which she had futile conversations most nights, ‘that you were here to help me make it better. For little Margaret. For the big ones too. Except that that’s mad thinking. Because if you were here, we wouldn’t be here, in the first place.’

She had him, as usual, propped against her knees in bed, holding him by his silver frame. He looked very young in the picture, very carefree, in an open-necked shirt against a summer Norland garden. There were secateurs in his trouser pocket, just visible.

‘Look,’ she said to him, slightly louder, ‘you really do need to help me. Some sign. Just some little teeny sign that I’m not letting Marianne just be swept away like someone in a canoe over rapids. It’s all happened so fast, this gorgeous boy and the drama of her being caught in a storm without her inhaler, and two seconds later, they seem to be at a point where he’s offering her a car, for heaven’s sake, and she seems to think it was the most natural thing in the world to be offered it as well as to accept it. I know you’ll laugh at me, darling, but she seems to have even less idea of reason or restraint than I did, and although he is heart-stopping to look at, and seems a model of charm, I can’t help but have a twinge of anxiety about the whole thing. It’s happened so suddenly. I mean, we didn’t even know he existed ten minutes ago, and I just have this little nag inside me that she’s riding for a fall, and she’s going to get hurt—’

There was a sound from the landing. Belle stopped talking, laid Henry down on her duvet, and climbed out of bed. She padded over to the door and opened it cautiously. The landing was dark and ringed by closed doors. Silence reigned. She shut her door again and got back into bed. She looked down at Henry. He smiled up cheerfully at her from his supine position on her duvet. ‘And I’ve got something to confess to you, darling. I did an awful thing, even if most mothers would do the same in my place. Henry, I snooped on her phone. She was washing her hair, and I went into her room and had a look at the texts on her phone – and it was, even by my standards, unbelievable. I couldn’t believe how many. There was actually nothing at all in her sent box except these completely passionate texts to him. I know you’d say I shouldn’t have looked in the first place. You’d say that the Marianne apple didn’t fall far from the Belle tree, wouldn’t you?’ she said to him. ‘You’d say that if anyone ought to have faith in Marianne surrendering to her heart in a flash, like this, it should be me. Wouldn’t you? And you’d be laughing, and teasing me a bit. And I know I’d deserve it. I do. But all the same …’

She stopped, picked Henry up and put him back on her bedside table. Then she said, to the empty, shadowy room, ‘I expect it’s being a lone parent that’s making me think like this. You’re bound to be more anxious if there’s no one to tell you not to be daft, aren’t you?’ She glanced back at Henry. ‘So I’ll try not to be daft, darling, I really will. The last thing you’d want me to do is to mistrust a lovely, pure, energetic welling up of true passion. So I won’t. I’ll believe in her just as – as you always did. Didn’t you?’

Sir John said that they would take two cars to the barbecue, and that Wills could bring Marianne and Margaret in what he called the Nonsense.

‘What is the point of a car in which you can’t get a dog and a gun and a brace of nippers? I ask you.’

‘The point’, Wills said behind his hand to Marianne, ‘is that I don’t have to take J Middleton or his brood or his gloomy friends anywhere, ever.’

They were standing on the drive below the great front steps to Barton Park. A portable barbecue and a vast number of cool boxes were being loaded into the back of Jonno and Bill Brandon’s Range Rovers, and various squeals were emerging from the front hall of the house where all the little Middletons were being inserted by their mother and an exhausted-looking Estonian nanny into outdoor clothes and boots. The Dashwood girls, who had been instructed to bring nothing but their looks and their company, were standing by Wills’s car, or, in Marianne’s case, lounging gracefully along the bonnet. Belle, who had complained of a sore throat at breakfast, had been persuaded by Elinor to stay at home.

‘Perfect timing, Ma.’

‘It is rather, I know. But this sort of outing is far more fun for you girls.’

‘Or not.’

‘Well, Marianne will love it.’

Elinor gave her mother a quick kiss. ‘Marianne would love watching paint dry, if Wills was watching it with her.’

‘Darling,’ Belle said, ‘can I ask you something? Do you know if Wills has got a job or anything?’

Elinor grinned. ‘Ma, you old matchmaker!’

‘Well, I can’t help noticing, can I?’

‘That he doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to get back to whatever he does, and that he and Marianne—’

‘Yes,’ Belle said.

She was wearing the misty expression that usually heralded another reference to Dad. To forestall her, Elinor said quickly, ‘I think he’s in property, or something.’

‘Property?’

‘Yes. I think he’s a sort of search agent. Looks for flats and houses in London, for foreigners. As investments. All very high end.’

Belle said carefully, ‘It sounds a bit – venal.’

‘Well, yes,’ Elinor said, laughing. ‘Yes. He likes the good things, does Wills. Look at that car! A fantasy of a good thing.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I mean’, Elinor said, ‘that it’s probably leased. Not many people can buy a car like that.’

‘Oh,’ Belle said faintly, and then, ‘do you think Marianne knows?’

Elinor sighed. ‘Marianne is deaf to anything anyone says about Wills, if it isn’t praise. He’s kind of mesmerised her. She can’t think about another thing.’ She glanced at her mother. ‘Ma, I’d better go.’

Wills, indeed, was in high spirits at Barton. He was making no attempt whatever to disguise the fact that he wouldn’t have had anything to do with an uproarious Middleton family outing if it wasn’t for Marianne. He had made loud fraternal remarks to Margaret about tolerating her company for the outward journey in the Aston, but definitely not for the return, and had also, to Elinor’s dismay, made fun of Bill Brandon, who was patiently loading picnic chairs and rugs into the back of his car, as instructed, with every appearance of indulgence towards his host.

‘God knows why he bothered to return,’ Wills said, lounging beside Marianne. ‘He went back to Delaford last week and I can’t think why he doesn’t stay there. He must be far more at home among all those fruitcakes than he is anywhere else.’

Marianne laughed. She was by now leaning against him quite shamelessly. ‘Stop it,’ she said, not meaning it. ‘Stop it! He’s not a fruitcake. He’s just very, very dull.’

Wills glanced down at her head, only an inch below his shoulder. He said, comfortably, ‘He’s King of the Bleeding Obvious.’

‘He’s OK,’ Elinor said.

Marianne grimaced up at Wills. ‘Her patron, you see. He found her a job.’

‘How wonderfully good of him.’

‘He is good,’ Elinor said.

‘But good’, said Wills, ‘is so boring.’

‘People really like him,’ Elinor said.

‘But not people I give a toss about. Not exceptional people. Just – just worthy people.’

Elinor said, trying to sound light-hearted, ‘You’re being pretty unfair.’

‘No, he’s not,’ Marianne said. ‘It’s just that you feel you owe Bill something. Look at him. Look at him now, on his mobile. He can’t even talk on a mobile without looking weird.’

‘The hero of Herzegovina.’

‘The Balkan bulldog.’

‘And master of the monosyllable.’

‘Stop it,’ Elinor said. ‘Stop it—’

‘Oh, look,’ Margaret said suddenly. ‘Look! He’s running! What’s happened? What’s happened?’

Wills slipped an arm around Marianne. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘whatever it is, at least he looks vaguely alive, at last.’

And they laughed together. Elinor watched Bill Brandon reach Sir John, put a hand on his arm to get his attention, and then have to persist as Sir John, far more intent upon the arranging of everything in the back of his car, failed to respond. Then she saw Bill Brandon grasp Sir John’s shoulders and turn him forcibly and say something very earnestly to him, his face very close to Sir John’s. Sir John’s hearty countenance abruptly altered from one of irritation at being interrupted to one of real concern. He put an arm up and grasped Bill Brandon’s sleeve, and then, with the other hand, patted his shoulder. It looked like reassurance.

‘It’s something serious,’ Elinor said.

‘Bill Brandon only knows how to do serious. Serious is his default mode.’

‘No,’ Elinor said. ‘No. Really serious. You can see.’

‘Then don’t look,’ Wills said fondly to Marianne, his arm firmly round her. ‘It might be catching.’

Bill Brandon was now climbing into the driver’s seat of his car while Sir John and Thomas, with much show of speed and importance, unloaded all the things that had, only moments before, been so carefully loaded in.

‘Go and see, Ellie,’ Marianne said lazily, heavy against Wills.

‘No. No, I can’t. Everyone looks really upset.’

‘I’ll go,’ Margaret said. She glanced at Wills. ‘Don’t you dare go without me,’ she added, and then she dashed across the gravel, towards Sir John.

‘Perhaps,’ Wills said, his voice as light as ever, ‘there’s been a mutiny at Delaford?’

Marianne gave a little giggle. Elinor shot her a look of reproof.

‘Well, if there has been …’

Sir John was saying something gravely to Margaret. He wasn’t smiling. He gestured at all the rugs and folding chairs dumped on the drive, and then he raised one arm and beckoned to Elinor, calling out, ‘Picnic’s off! Some bloody crisis, poor fellow! Crying shame, really it is. Come here while I decide what to do instead!’

Elinor glanced at Marianne. She said, ‘Go on, Ellie. He’s summoning you.’

Elinor began to cross the drive towards him. The moment she was no more than two metres away, Wills slid his arm down Marianne’s back and said, in a stage whisper, ‘Jump in.’

‘What?’

‘Jump in. Get in the car. Ghastly outing off, wonderful reprieve and alternative on.’

Marianne stood slowly upright. She was smiling delightedly at him. ‘What alternative?’

He came swiftly round the car and opened the passenger door. ‘Hop in. Like I said. Quickly!’

She still paused in front of him. He was looking down at her with the mixture of intensity and merriment that made her feel she could never refuse him anything. ‘Wills? What—’

He leaned forward and brushed his mouth across hers. And then he said, his face only an inch away, ‘We’re going to Allenham. And we are going alone.’

‘Now,’ Abigail Jennings said to Elinor, ‘I am not one for gossip, and I don’t want to upset your mother …’

Elinor looked down at her right arm, which was in Mrs Jennings’s firm grasp. She had seized it as they all assembled in Sir John’s library (‘The question is,’ Marianne had said of it, ‘not does he read, but can he?’) at the end of a fretful and unsatisfactory day which had never regained its impetus after Bill Brandon’s sudden departure. Elinor had tried to return home with Margaret, but Sir John, baulked of his original barbecue plans, had insisted that they all stay on right through the day, until supper at Barton Park, as if eventual success could be wrenched from the day through sheer force of will.

Elinor was very tired. The day had required enormous effort to fend off roguish assumptions about what Wills and Marianne might be up to, and to restrain Margaret’s fury at being deprived of a ride in Wills’s car and then offered a dank picnic in Sir John’s own woods, standing on wet leaves under gently dripping trees, by way of a substitute. She would have given anything not to be faced with an evening of determined jollity, but Marianne’s glaring absence had left her with no courteous option.

She tried to disengage her arm. ‘Please …’

Abigail Jennings was smiling, but her grip was firm. ‘Where do you suppose your sister is?’

Elinor said wearily, ‘I have no idea.’

‘You must do.’

Elinor gave her arm another half-hearted tug. ‘None.’

‘Hasn’t she texted you, at least?’

Elinor looked down at her arm. ‘Please let me go.’

Mrs Jennings leaned closer. There was no one else in the library – Margaret had been inveigled upstairs to play table football with the two older children – but that didn’t stop her almost whispering, with a vehemence Elinor tried not to see as triumph, ‘They’re at Allenham!’

‘Who are?’

‘Don’t be silly, dear. Don’t play dumb with me. Your sister and Wills have been at Allenham all day!’

Elinor tried not to show the dislike she felt. ‘Why shouldn’t they be there?’

Mrs Jennings let go of Elinor’s arm at last. ‘No reason, dear. If they’d done it openly.’

Elinor took a small step away. ‘What d’you mean?’

‘I mean’, Mrs Jennings said, ‘that Jane Smith doesn’t know that they’ve been.’

Elinor looked at her with real distaste. ‘Nonsense,’ she said.

Mrs Jennings smiled. ‘No, dear. Not nonsense at all.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Well, dear. Jonno knows everything that goes on round here, and I know nearly everything. Mary knows what she wants to know – so wise of her, I always think. But Nina, who looks after the children here, is a friend of Thandie, who is looking after Jane Smith just now, and Nina had a text from Thandie this afternoon to say that she caught your sister and Wills upstairs at Allenham and Wills made her promise not to tell his aunt that they’d been. Poor Jane’s so deaf now that she wouldn’t hear a brass band playing in the same room, bless her.’

Elinor stared at her. ‘Caught them?’

Mrs Jennings laughed. ‘Well, they wouldn’t have been playing cards, dear, would they?’

Elinor stepped back. ‘It doesn’t sound like Marianne, like the kind of thing she’d do.’

‘Doesn’t it, dear?’ With a boy like Wills? They’re all mad about Wills. Thandie’ll never say a word if he’s asked her not to. But your mother …’

‘What about my mother?’

‘It might worry her.’

Elinor took a further step away. She said, unhappily, ‘Please don’t mention this.’

‘Oh, I won’t, dear.’

‘I’m going to find Margaret.’

‘Oh, don’t do that, dear. Jonno was so hoping—’

‘We should get back,’ Elinor said with decision.

Mrs Jennings nodded. Her expression sobered. ‘Maybe you should.’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell you what, though …’

Elinor paused. ‘What?’

Mrs Jennings gave her a sudden conspiratorial smile. ‘Allenham’s a lovely house. But so dated. Modernised, it would be a dream. A dream. And I know Mary would be happy to help – she’s so good at houses. Wouldn’t that be fun?’

‘Don’t lecture me,’ Marianne said indignantly.

Elinor moved to close the kitchen door. Margaret was already asleep upstairs, and Belle was in the bathroom with the radio on.

‘I’m not.’

‘You’re so priggish,’ Marianne said. ‘You’re such a prude. Just because you only let Edward kiss you if he’s brushed his teeth.’

‘It’s not that.’

‘Not what? Not what? Say it, Ellie, say it. Say, “You, Marianne, should not have sex with Wills in the house that’s going to be his anyway, one day.” Just say it.’

Elinor said angrily, ‘Stop showing off. I don’t care about the sex.’

‘Oh, don’t you? Don’t you? We’ve been down here for weeks and not a word from Ed, not a flicker, nothing. And I meet someone really special and you don’t mind at all, do you, you don’t mind that he adores me like I adore him, and that he’s going to inherit this amazing house and that we had this incredible—’

‘No, I don’t!’ Elinor shouted.

The comforting rumble of the radio from the floor above stopped abruptly.

Elinor leaned towards her sister. In a furious whisper she said, ‘I don’t give a stuff what you and Wills do or where you do it. I don’t envy you being almost off your head about someone. I really don’t. What I object to is that you did it behind his aunt’s back, and he knows she’s deaf. I object to the fact that you sneaked.’

The kitchen door opened. Belle stood there wearing an old towelling robe of Henry’s, with her hair scooped up on top of her head in a pink plastic clip. ‘Not fighting, I hope,’ she said severely.

Marianne shrugged. ‘No.’

Elinor said, looking at Marianne, ‘I was defending Bill Brandon.’

‘Good for you, darling.’

Marianne didn’t look at her sister. She said, ‘I said it must have been a crisis about this mystery daughter. And Ellie said it would be something at Delaford, someone broken out or something …’

‘Enough’, Belle enquired, ‘to raise your voices?’

Elinor said, ‘It’s been a long day.’

Belle advanced into the room. ‘Has he really got a mystery daughter?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s just gossip.’

Belle looked at Marianne. ‘What does Wills say? Wills knows everything about everyone round here.’

Marianne leaned against the kitchen table. ‘Wills thinks Bill Brandon is a joke.’

‘That’s not very kind.’

‘But it’s accurate.’

‘My darling,’ Belle said directly to Marianne, ‘is there anything you want to tell me about today?’

Marianne looked up at her mother. Her eyes were shining. ‘Nothing, thank you, Ma. But everything is good. No, that’s not accurate. Everything is wonderful.’ She came round the table and stood in front of her mother. ‘Ma,’ she said, ‘isn’t it just fantastic? It feels so right. I’ve never felt anything so right before.’ She looked round the kitchen. ‘D’you know what he said today? He said that although he knew Allenham was historic and amazing and all that, he really loved this cottage. He said he hoped you’d never change it, even all the awful Middletonisms. He said he just loved it and that he’d been happier in the last few weeks than he’d ever been in his life.’ She clasped her arms around herself in a close embrace, and closed her eyes. ‘He said that, Ma. He said he’d never, ever felt like this before and he’s coming over tomorrow to say it all over again.’

And then she opened her eyes and went off into a peal of laughter. ‘Tomorrow!’ she said, ‘If I can wait that long!’

7

It was difficult to persuade Margaret to leave Marianne on her own at Barton Cottage the next morning.

‘But he promised I could go in his car. And he didn’t take me yesterday because of all that hoo-ha with Bill and everything, so he will today. He promised!’

‘I don’t think it was actually a promise.’

‘It was! It was! I told everyone at school I knew someone with an Aston Martin.’

Marianne stopped brushing her hair long enough to say, ‘No, Mags.’

Margaret stuck her lower lip out. ‘Why d’you have to see him so specially today, anyway? You see him all the time, all the time, so what’s so—’

Belle said firmly, ‘He asked to see her today. He made an appointment.’

‘What d’you mean? He isn’t a dentist, or something.’

‘Maybe’, Belle said, ‘he wants to say something very particular.’

‘Well, he could say that anywhere. He could—’

‘Mags!’

‘You’, Belle said to Margaret, ‘are coming to church with Elinor and me.’

Margaret looked appalled. ‘Church!’

‘Harvest festival, darling. Barton Church, small community, joining, all that sort of thing.’

‘Why doesn’t Marianne have to come, then?’

Belle smiled across at her middle daughter. ‘I expect she’ll tell us why when we get back. Elinor?’

‘Yes, Ma.’

‘Do you think perhaps not jeans, for our first appearance at Barton Church?’

Kneeling in church, Elinor tried to focus on the things she had to be thankful for. Margaret might insist she hated her new school, but she was at least going every day and was not, as far as Elinor knew, playing truant. They had a roof over their heads in a lovely place with a landlord who might be slightly trying as a personality but who was unquestionably large-hearted. Her mother, though strangely unfocused without Fanny to battle with, was not visibly unhappy and from Monday week she, Elinor, would be employed, however modestly, in a structured and congenial company whose very occupation was as close to her heart as she could have hoped for.

It was unwise, she thought, shifting slightly on her unevenly stuffed hassock, to think too much about hearts. Marianne’s, always loftily removed from all the optimistic boys who had been in hot pursuit of her throughout her teenage years, appeared to have been given away, and gladly, eagerly, to a complete stranger in a matter of days. Elinor couldn’t but acknowledge that Wills scored incredibly highly on both looks and charm, and she was in no doubt that he was as besotted as Marianne, but something in her held back being able to rejoice fully with her mother and sister. She supposed, a little sadly, that her temperament just wasn’t designed to believe that nothing mattered in the world besides romantic love. Try as she might, she couldn’t convince herself that the world was well lost for love, or that a penniless life in a garret meant bliss as long as love was there as a substitute for warmth or food. Sometimes over the years she had looked at Marianne and envied her ability to abandon herself almost ecstatically to music, or place, or literature or – as so intensely in the present case – to love. It must be extraordinary, Elinor thought, to be able to surrender oneself so completely, not just because it would feel so exhilarating but also because it meant that one was – oh, how unlike me, Elinor thought regretfully – able to trust. Marianne could trust. She trusted her instincts; she trusted those dear to her; she trusted her emotions and her passions. She drank deep, you could see that; she squeezed every drop of living out of all the elements that mattered to her. It made her careless sometimes, of course it did, but it was a wonderfully rich and rapt way to be.

And I, Elinor said silently to herself, am not rich or rapt in the very slightest. So, although I can see that Wills is really beautiful, and delightful, I also kind of mistrust all that beauty, all those high spirits, and think unjust, quelling thoughts about where does his money come from and why doesn’t he need to get back to work and why does he beguile us with questions instead of telling us anything about himself? We know nothing, really. It’s all hearsay, sort of fairy-tale inheritance stuff that belongs in a novel, not the real world. And suppose he just really fancies Marianne, and it isn’t real love? Suppose it’s just sex? I wouldn’t blame him, I wouldn’t blame either of them, but Marianne, being so absolutely wholehearted, can’t separate love and sex and she might get hurt. Which I, for all my dreary cautiousness and prudence, could not bear. She’s never fallen this hard, not ever. And there’s just a little cold part of me that doesn’t have any faith in what’s going on.

Which is probably a bigger cold part than I want to admit, and pretty off-putting to the world in general, because Ed hasn’t been in touch since we got here. Nothing. Not a text or a call or an email. Nothing. And I am not contacting him. I am absolutely not. In fact, I have deleted his number from my phone and I have defriended him on Facebook, because although I don’t really want to do either, I have to take charge of the things I can take charge of, and removing myself from contact with him is one of those things, however pathetic. I’ve got to protect myself. Or, to be truthful, I have got to be able to tell myself that I’m at least trying to. I may have felt more comfortable with him than I ever have with anyone, but I am not laying myself open to any more pain or disappointment than comes my way any more. If he’s dumped me – and I’m not sure, if I’m honest, that we ever really got to the level you could be dumped from – then he just has, and I’d better get over it. If he’s met someone else, then he has. I’m not going to cry over him – or at least, I’m not going to cry except in strict, strict privacy – and I’m not going to waste time and energy thinking about him. I’m not. I get fed up with the number of times he occurs to me, every day, but I won’t encourage it. I will get on with what there is to get on with, one foot in front of another—‘How much longer?’ Margaret hissed beside her.

Elinor didn’t look at her. She kept her eyes closed.

‘Two more prayers,’ she whispered. ‘One more hymn.’

Margaret leaned closer. ‘I bet when we get back, they’ll have gone off somewhere and I won’t get a ride in his car today either.’ She paused and then muttered vehemently, ‘It’s not fair.’

The Aston was, surprisingly, still outside the cottage when they got back, walking across the park from the church with Belle cajoling Margaret to admire the view, and the weather, and the prospect of a roast chicken for lunch. Margaret was immediately excited to see the car, and began to run towards it, squealing, so that Elinor, impelled by some instinct that she couldn’t immediately identify, began to run too, catching at Margaret’s sleeve.

‘Stop, Mags, stop!’

‘Why? Why should I?’

Elinor dragged her sister to a halt. ‘Don’t, Mags.’

‘But he promised!’

Elinor glanced up at the cottage. It looked exactly as usual except that there was a distinct and unwelcome air, to Elinor’s perception, of something not being quite right. She held on to Margaret’s sleeve.

‘Just wait.’

‘Why? Why?’

‘I don’t know. Just – just let me go in first.’

‘You are so mean!’

Elinor turned as Belle came up. Belle said, ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing, maybe …’

Belle looked at the cottage. ‘We should make a noise, so that they—’

‘No,’ Elinor said. She let go of Margaret. ‘No. I’ll just go in first. Quietly.’

‘Darling, what’s all the drama?’

‘It may be nothing,’ Elinor said.

She walked towards the front door, leaving her mother and sister standing by the car. Margaret laid a reverent hand on the bonnet. She said, in surprise, ‘It’s still warm!’

Belle was watching Elinor. ‘So he hasn’t been here long.’

Elinor put her key into the lock and turned it. As the door opened and Elinor went in, Belle saw, quite plainly, Marianne dash sobbing out of the sitting room and rush towards the stairs and then the door swung shut behind Elinor and left Belle and Margaret standing there, beside the car.

‘I can’t explain,’ Wills said.

To his credit, he looked as stricken as Marianne had. He was standing on the hearthrug, on the very spot he had stood after rescuing Marianne from the thunderstorm, but this time he looked almost cowed, Elinor thought, beaten. His hair looked lank and his face was suddenly the face of someone both older and sadder.

From the doorway, Elinor repeated, slightly louder, ‘What’s happened?’

Wills made a limp gesture with one hand, as if whatever it was had been both incomprehensible and also impossible to avoid or repair. ‘Just – something.’

‘What, Wills, what? What did you say to Marianne?’

Elinor heard the front door open again behind her.

‘That – that I’ve got to go back to London.’

‘Why? Why have you, on a Sunday, all of a sudden?’

‘I just have to.’

Elinor sensed Belle and Margaret coming up right behind her. ‘Did you have a row?’ she demanded.

He shrugged.

‘Did you?’

Belle put a tentative hand on Elinor’s arm. ‘Darling …’

Elinor shrugged her off. ‘Did you have a row, Wills? Did you upset your aunt?’

He sighed.

‘I’ll take it as a yes,’ Elinor said. ‘Was it about Marianne? Was it about yesterday?’

He raised his head slowly and looked at them all. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Is that the truth?’

‘Yes!’ he said, almost shouting. ‘It has nothing to do with Marianne!’

Belle pushed past her daughters. She crossed to the fireplace and put a hand on Wills’s sleeve.

‘Stay here, dear Wills, you’d be so welcome.’

He gazed down at her, his eyes full of tragedy. ‘I can’t.’

‘Of course you can! You can have Mags’s room.’

‘I’ve got to go back to London.’

Margaret said, in amazement, ‘Are you being sent?’

He attempted a lopsided grin. ‘Sort of.’

‘But she can’t.’

‘She can.’

‘Because’, Elinor asked pitilessly, ‘she pays the bills?’

He looked immediately uncomfortable. He said, hesitantly, ‘This isn’t about that.’

‘Then what?’

He seemed to pull himself together. He said, ‘I can’t tell you. I can’t tell Marianne. But none of this, none of it, has anything to do with her. She’s—’ He stopped and then he said, ‘I’m really sorry but I’ve got to go.’

Belle was still touching him. She said earnestly, looking up at him, ‘Till when?’

He paused and firmly disengaged himself. And then he said bitterly, to no one in particular, ‘I wish I knew.’

‘Please eat something,’ Belle said pleadingly.

Marianne had her elbows on the table, planted either side of her untouched plate, and her head in her hands. ‘Can’t.’

‘Just a mouthful, darling, just a—’

‘Can I have her roast potatoes?’ Margaret said.

Elinor, who wasn’t hungry either, put a piece of unwanted chicken in her mouth and chewed. Marianne pushed her plate towards Margaret.

‘Can I?’ Margaret said eagerly, spearing potatoes.

Elinor swallowed her chicken. She said quietly to Marianne, ‘What did he actually say to you?’

Marianne shook her head and put her hands over her eyes.

‘M, he must have said something. He must have said why he couldn’t—’

Marianne sprang up suddenly and fled from the room. They heard her feet thudding up the stairs and then the slam of her bedroom door.

‘You told me’, Margaret said through a mouthful of potato, ‘not to ask her anything, so I didn’t, and then you go and do it.’

‘It must be Jane Smith,’ Belle said to Elinor, ignoring Margaret. ‘She must disapprove.’

‘Why should she?’

‘Well, we’ve got no money.’

‘Ma,’ Elinor said angrily, banging her knife and fork down, ‘this isn’t 1810, for God’s sake. Money doesn’t dictate relationships.’

‘It does for some people. Look at Fanny.’

‘He loves her,’ Elinor said, as if her mother hadn’t spoken. ‘He’s as crazy about her as she is about him.’

‘He’ll be back. I know he will. He’ll ring Marianne. He’s probably rung her already.’

‘Then why’, Margaret said, ‘does she keep crying?’

Elinor pushed her chair back. ‘I’m going to talk to her.’

Belle sighed. ‘Be gentle.’

Elinor paused for a second; then she bit back whatever had occurred to her to say and went out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the landing. She tapped on Marianne’s door. ‘M?’

‘Go away.’

Elinor tried the handle. The door was locked. ‘Please let me in.’

‘No.’

‘I want to talk.’

‘Talking won’t help. Nothing will help.’

Elinor waited a moment, her cheek almost against the door, and then she said, ‘Has he rung?’

Silence.

‘Have you rung him?’

Silence.

‘Or texted?’

There was a stifled something from the far side of the door.

‘Oh, Marianne,’ Elinor said, ‘please let me in. Please.’

She could hear a faint shuffling as if Marianne was approaching the door.

‘M?’

From behind the door, Marianne said hoarsely, ‘You can’t help. No one can. Aunt Jane threw him out just like Fanny did Edward. You ought to understand, if anyone can. You ought.’

Elinor waited a moment and then she said, as quietly as she could, ‘M. Is it – over?’

There was a long, long silence and then Marianne hissed through the keyhole, ‘Don’t say that. Don’t say that. Ever.’

‘My dear,’ Abigail Jennings said, ‘has she stopped crying?’

Belle was making coffee. She had not been at all pleased to see her visitor, especially as she had neither Elinor nor Margaret at home to shield her. She nodded towards the huge jug of mop-headed chrysanthemums that Abigail had brought with her.

‘Lovely flowers.’

‘You look, my dear, as if you need a stiff drink rather than flowers. It’s exhausting living with a broken heart. I remember it all too well with my own girls. Mary was a terrific weeper but luckily Charlotte was more like me and always thought there’d be a better bet somewhere else every time it happened. Mind you, I thought she’d do the dumping when it came to Tommy Palmer. But no. He has no manners whatsoever but she seems to find him funny. No accounting for taste, that’s for sure. Except when it comes to Wills – he seems to be to the taste of every living thing with a pulse.’ She looked at Belle with concern. ‘Your poor girl.’

Belle said carefully, ‘It would help if we knew why.’

Abigail raised her plump hands and let them crash on to the table, making the mugs Belle had just put down dance. ‘Money, dear.’

‘No, he—’

‘Sorry, dear, but it’ll be money. He’ll have asked Jane for another handout and she’ll have given him a flea in his ear. That car …’

‘Beautiful.’

‘Tens of thousands it would cost, dear. Tens. Even to lease it. He has champagne tastes, that boy.’

‘But’, Belle said, feeling that even if Abigail wasn’t the right person it was a relief to have someone to talk to, ‘why be so melodramatic, if it was just about money? Why rush off leaving Marianne in pieces like this if—’

‘Pride, dear. Men like that don’t care to be dependent. He’d want Marianne to think he’d earned it.’

‘Hasn’t he?’

Abigail gave a cackle of laughter. ‘He wouldn’t know hard work, dear, if it jumped up and bit him on the bottom!’

Belle began to pour the coffee. ‘They were so adorable together.’

Abigail leaned forward, folding her arms under the cushiony shelf of her bosom. ‘Well, luckily, dear, marriage bells aren’t the only answer for girls these days, are they? And Marianne’s only just out of school, for goodness’ sake.’

Belle said abstractly, ‘I was only eighteen when I met their father.’

‘You were an exception, dear. The modern way is to be like your Elinor, with a career and no time wasted mooning over this F boy. Jonno and I have been killing ourselves over that. The F-word boy, we call him!’ She looked round. ‘Where is Marianne?’

Belle pushed a mug of coffee across the table. ‘She’s gone for a walk. She walks all the time, poor darling, wearing herself out. I make her take her phone and her inhaler but I can’t help her sleep.’

‘And Elinor?’

Belle looked a little startled, as if she’d temporarily forgotten about Elinor. ‘Oh, she’s at work.’

‘Sensible girl. Does she like it?’

‘I think so,’ Belle said uncertainly. ‘I mean, she’s only just started, so it’s a bit early to know.’

Abigail took a swallow of coffee. ‘He’s a naughty boy, Wills, a very naughty boy. And the sooner Marianne gets over her infatuation, the—’

‘It’s not an infatuation!’ Belle said indignantly.

Abigail stared at her. Belle leaned towards her, across the table. ‘Don’t you’, she said, in a different and more emotional tone of voice, ‘believe in love at first sight?’

Abigail went on staring. Then she picked up her coffee mug again. ‘Sorry, dear,’ she said, ‘but no. I do not.’

On the hill above Allenham, where the fateful thunderstorm had begun, Marianne sat on the damp grass, hugging her knees. Below her, the old house lay quietly in hazy autumn sunshine, on its hillside, a plume of bluish smoke rising softly out of one of the marvellous twisted Elizabethan chimneypots, the only other sign of life being the miniature figure of one of Jane Smith’s gardeners raking up leaves. She couldn’t hear him from where she sat, but she could watch him, with avidity. He was raking across the sweep of grass below the window behind which she had had the most wonderful afternoon of her life, in a four-poster bed whose hangings, Wills said, had been embroidered in 1720. She had put a hand out to touch them, reverently, and he had captured her hand in his at once and said that she wasn’t to give a flicker of her attention to anyone or anything but him, or he’d be jealous.

He’d been gorgeously, blissfully jealous of everything that day. She’d wanted to examine every painting and rug, to exclaim over panelling and marquetry and plasterwork, to run her hands over velvet chair seats and polished chests, but he’d stopped her, laughing, pulling her to him, taking her face in his hands, touching her, kissing her, pushing her down into that welter of linen pillows and silky quilts on the great bed until she capitulated completely and let him take her over. Her eyes filled now thinking about it, thinking about him. It had been the ultimate in truth and beauty, to surrender to someone like that when it was someone that you were meant – meant, as she and Wills were – to belong to.

‘Don’t contact me,’ he’d said to her on that Sunday, kneeling on the hearthrug in front of her, clutching her to him, his cheek pressed to her belly. ‘Don’t do anything until I’m in touch again, anything.’

She’d had her hands in his hair. She said shakily, ‘But how am I to know—’

‘Trust me,’ he said. She could hear that his teeth were clenched. ‘Trust me.’

‘Of course.’

He lifted his face. He said, ‘You do, don’t you?’

She nodded vehemently. ‘You’ve got to,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to. You’re the only person in my life who I trust and who trusts me. The only one.’

Even in her shock and misery, she had felt a jolt of happiness then, a little flash of recognition and self-justification. He’d be in touch. He’d be back. He said he would – and he would. He belonged to her; they belonged together. Trust was too small a word for what they had between them.

She got slowly to her feet. The gardener was now piling the leaves into a kind of mesh-sided truck. It wasn’t fair, really, to expect even Ma, let alone Ellie and Mags, to have the first idea of what she was feeling, or of what she and Wills felt for each other. Ma and Dad had had something pretty good going, for sure, but Mags was still a kid and Ellie didn’t have a passionate bone in her body. She, Marianne, must remember that. She must go home and, while needing to remind them all that, with Wills absent, she was only half a person at all times, she must be forgiving and understanding about Elinor’s limitations.

She began to walk back along the ridge towards the lane and the path down to Barton Cottage. She put a hand into her pocket to pull out her phone – and withdrew it. She would not torment herself by checking it for messages. She had switched it to silent for that very reason. He had said he would be in touch and explain everything, when whatever was the matter was sorted, and he would. She knew it. She knew him and he would do what he had promised. More likely, actually, she thought, scrambling down the bank to the lane where she had first seen his car, he would probably surprise her.

Half skipping down the path to the cottage, Marianne was aware that she felt almost light-hearted. It had been good to look at Allenham, good to remind herself of that magical day, good to reassure herself that exceptional people could not have anything other than equally exceptional relationships. And as she came round the corner of the cottage to the area of gravel Sir John had laid down for parking, she caught a gleam of silver, glossy silvery grey, exactly the colour and finish of Wills’s car, and she began to run, stumbling and gasping, towards it, her arms outstretched and ready.

But it was a Ford Sierra on the gravel. A battered old Ford Sierra with a peeling speed stripe down the side. And Edward Ferrars was getting out of it, looking thin and tired, in the kind of sweatshirt that Wills would never have been seen dead in.

He gave her a half-hearted smile. ‘Hello, M,’ he said.

‘Where’ve you been?’ Margaret demanded.

They were sitting round the kitchen table with macaroni cheese and a bowl of salad that Margaret had positioned so that nobody could see she hadn’t taken any.

Edward put down a forkful of pasta. He said vaguely, ‘Oh, here and there. Plymouth and stuff. The usual.’

Elinor wasn’t looking at him. She wasn’t, in fact, looking at anyone. She had arrived home, with Margaret, in the dusk, to find Edward and Marianne playing the guitar together, and Belle bustling in the kitchen – ‘So lovely to have someone to cook for, even if it is only macaroni cheese’ – and nobody had seemed particularly pleased to see her, let alone troubled to ask her how her day at work had been. All right, it had been her fourth day, not her first, but it was still her first week. And Ed – well, Ed might have managed to make some distinction between greeting her and greeting Mags. Mightn’t he?

‘Did you go to Norland?’ Belle asked.

She’d had a glass of wine while she was cooking and her cheeks were pink. He said, still vaguely, ‘About a month ago.’

Marianne leaned forward, her eyes shining. ‘How was it? Oh, how was it?’

‘Like everywhere else in autumn,’ Elinor said shortly. ‘Covered in dead leaves.’

‘Ellie!’

Elinor jabbed her fork into her supper. ‘Some things’, she said, ‘just aren’t for sharing. Like you and your thing for dead leaves. Mags, you haven’t had any salad.’

‘What about these Middletons?’ Edward said.

‘I hate salad!’ Margaret shrieked.

Marianne closed her eyes. ‘They’re awful. Beyond words.’

‘No, they’re not!’ Elinor cried.

‘Because of them,’ Marianne said dramatically, ‘I’ve had more to bear than I have ever been asked to bear in my life.’

Elinor pushed the salad towards Edward. ‘Ignore her.’

‘Darling!’ Belle said reprovingly.

‘It’s a beautiful place, here,’ Elinor said steadily. ‘And this is a practical house. And the Middletons are kind.’

Belle looked at Edward. ‘Talking of kind, Ed, how is your mother?’

He pulled a face. ‘Don’t.’

‘Why not?’ Marianne said.

Edward picked up a cherry tomato out of the salad and put it in his mouth. He said, round it, ‘She simply will not get that I don’t have ambition.’

‘But you do,’ Elinor said quietly.

He didn’t look at her. He said, ‘Not her kind.’

‘Well, darling,’ Belle said brightly, ‘I expect she worries about you. I expect she wants to be sure you’ll have enough to live on.’

Edward said gloomily, ‘Money isn’t everything.’

Elinor took a breath. Then she said, ‘No. But it needs to be enough.’

‘Enough,’ Marianne said dreamily, ‘to run a beautiful old house and be free to have all the adventures in the world.’

‘I want to win the lottery,’ Margaret announced. ‘That’d solve everything.’

‘Maybe—’

Elinor smiled at her younger sister. ‘Oh, Mags!’

Edward said, smiling at her too, ‘You could buy your own wheels then.’

‘I’d buy paintings,’ Marianne said. ‘And clothes. And islands. And people to come and sing for me.’

Edward grinned at her. ‘Romance for you. Cars for her. It’s so nice that some things don’t change.’

Marianne looked abruptly grave. ‘But I am changed, Ed.’

There was a tiny silence. Then he said unhappily, ‘Me too.’

Elinor said, too loudly, ‘Well, I’m not.’

‘No,’ Belle said with relief. ‘Nor you are.’

‘I seem,’ Elinor said, ‘to be just as bad at reading people as I ever was. I think they’re one thing and then they turn out to be something quite different. Probably I’m just stupid to believe what anyone says. I should stick to their behaviour, shouldn’t I? I should just believe what I see and not what I hear. Don’t you think?’

There was another silence, considerably more awkward. And then Mags reached across the table and seized Edward’s hand. ‘What’s that?’

‘What’s what?’

‘That ring! You’re wearing a ring.’

Edward put his hand out of sight on his lap. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘Show me!’ Margaret insisted.

Edward hesitated. Belle leaned forward, smiling. ‘Come on, darling. Show us.’

Reluctantly, Edward drew his right hand out of his lap, and laid it on the table. On his third finger was a silver band with a small, flat blue stone set in it.

‘You don’t wear rings,’ Marianne said. ‘You are so not a jewellery man.’

Edward said self-consciously, ‘It was a sort of present.’

‘Who from?’

‘Fanny’, Margaret said, ‘would never give anyone a ring like that.’

Edward looked miserable. He tugged the ring off and put it in the pocket of his jeans, tipping himself sideways to do it. ‘Sort of,’ he said again. ‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘It’s like Ellie’s,’ Margaret said, ‘Ellie’s got a ring like that.’

Elinor put her hands in the air. ‘Not wearing it,’ she said, ‘look.’

Edward went on gazing at his lap. Margaret said, ‘But it’s like yours.’

‘Is it?’ Elinor said to Edward. ‘Is it like mine?’

He said nothing. Belle picked up the wine bottle. ‘Refill anyone?’

Nobody spoke. She upended the bottle into her own glass.

‘Well, I shall finish it. It was a present from Jonno. He’s so kind, presents and parties all the time.’ She glanced at Edward. ‘He’ll want to meet you. He’ll want to have a party the minute he knows you’re here.’

‘I’m only going to another Barton party,’ Margaret said, ‘when Wills is back and I can go in his car.’

Edward looked round the table, his gaze suddenly focused. ‘Who’s Wills?’

‘A friend of Marianne’s,’ Elinor said quickly.

Edward looked at Marianne. Her face was abruptly illuminated, shining. He said teasingly, ‘A friend with a significant car, then?’

She turned to look at him. She was almost crying with eagerness. ‘Oh, you’ll really like him!’

‘I – I’m sure I will. When can I meet him?’

Marianne gave him a wide, tearful smile. ‘Soon,’ she said. She looked round the table, nodding and smiling. ‘Soon!’

8

The house was very quiet. There wasn’t even any wind, so that Belle knew she would be able to hear the sound of feet or wheels on the gravel to warn her of anyone arriving. She was, she told herself, perfectly safe. Mags was at school, Elinor was at work and Marianne had taken Edward out for a last walk (for him) and another longing, greedy look at Allenham (for her).

If it hadn’t been Edward’s final walk before he left, she would not be in Elinor’s bedroom, hunting through her drawers. If he hadn’t said that he really had to leave that day, even though he didn’t want to and had no desire to be anywhere else, she wouldn’t need to look for evidence in this decidedly underhand way. And if Edward was being incomprehensible, Elinor was just as bad. She had been perfectly civil to him all week but nobody could claim that she had shown him any special warmth or attention. And he’d plainly wanted it, needed it. No normal, natural woman, Belle thought, almost indignantly, could have resisted wanting to reassure a man so evidently in need of comfort and confidence as Edward Ferrars.

But not Elinor, apparently. Elinor found it not just acceptable but seemingly quite easy to behave towards Edward as if he were no more than a welcome but mildly irritating brother. And when Belle had said, slightly reproving, to her, ‘I think he’s depressed, poor darling,’ Elinor had simply replied, ‘Then that makes two of them. A soulmate for Marianne,’ and turned the volume on the kitchen radio up louder.

And when Belle had tried to relay to Elinor a very significant conversation she had had with Edward about his family’s ambitions being so very far from his own, and his despair at their ever coming round to his point of view, Elinor had waited politely till she had finished, and then said, ‘I know all that, Ma. I know what they want. I know what he wants. And I know that his mother is completely dominating.’

‘Then why aren’t you nicer to him?’

‘I am nice. I’m perfectly nice.’

Belle gave a little sigh of exasperation. ‘Darling, you know what I mean. At Norland, you were both—’

‘Norland was different,’ Elinor said. ‘We were different.’

‘But I thought you loved him?’

‘Ma,’ Elinor said, glaring, ‘I am not chasing after anyone. Right? And I am not discussing my most private feelings, or speculating about Edward’s, with anyone. Ever. OK?’

Belle had blinked. In her head she could hear Henry saying, in the conciliating tone peculiar to him, ‘Don’t upset yourself, my darling. Don’t be upset.’ She swallowed.

‘Very well, Ellie.’

Elinor had relaxed a little. ‘Thank you.’

‘I – just don’t want you to be unhappy, too.’

Elinor had given her a quick kiss. ‘I’m not.’

Well, she wasn’t, not actively and visibly, like Marianne so much of the time. But there was something there, a shadow, a reticence, a holding in, that made Belle’s heart ache for her oldest daughter, and drove her to search Elinor’s bedroom for something, anything, that would prove that Edward Ferrars – were he free of that monster of a mother – was true of heart. It was too bad, really it was, to have two out of three daughters involved with men who seemed addicted to muddle and mystery.

Elinor’s drawers were so unlike Marianne’s or Margaret’s. Both of them lived in persistent chaos: Marianne’s a charming, bohemian clutter of colour and texture; Margaret’s merely chaos. But Elinor’s possessions had a system to them, and an order. She would know where to find a navy sweater, or something to write with, or her driving licence. There were even box files, Belle was chagrined to see, labelled ‘Barton Cottage – Utilities’, and ‘Important Documents’ as well as a small pile of invoices, weighted with a big smooth pebble, with ‘Paid’ written across them in red pen. On the chest of drawers were photographs of – gulp – Henry, and little Harry, and the three Dashwood girls dressed for Christmas in tinsel wreaths, and one of her, Belle, standing in the herbaceous border at Norland in a huge straw hat, her arms full of delphiniums. And in front of the photographs was a series of Indian lacquered bowls of various sizes, holding Elinor’s necklaces and bracelets, jumbled up together and slightly dusty. Belle poked a finger into the smallest bowl, which held paper clips and a key or two and some rings, which she took out and laid on the chest of drawers. There was a ring made of turquoise Perspex and a brass ring – Indian? – inlaid with a domed reddish stone, veined like marble, and a plain, flat silver band. Belle picked it up and turned it round. It had a small blue stone set into one side. It was immediately familiar. It was exactly the same as the ring Margaret had noticed Edward wearing at supper, the first evening, which he’d been so embarrassed about, only smaller. Elinor and Edward had the same rings.

Carefully, Belle scooped up all three rings and stirred them back among the paper clips. They had the same rings, but they weren’t wearing them. And, plainly, they didn’t want to talk about why they possessed them and why they weren’t wearing them. They couldn’t have quarrelled, or Edward wouldn’t have come in the first place, or stayed for a whole week in the second. And, as Elinor, said, she’d been perfectly nice to him. Perhaps they were waiting for something to happen. Perhaps it was something to do with Edward’s mother, perhaps … There were feet on the gravel, just audible from Elinor’s bedroom at the side of the house. Belle walked quickly out on to the landing and opened the cupboard where Elinor had put the linen when they had first arrived at Barton Cottage. Maybe she was, as Elinor had suggested, silly to worry. Elinor didn’t look unhappy, and Edward was no unhappier than usual. The front door opened.

‘Ma?’ Marianne called out.

‘Up here!’ Belle cried. ‘Just sorting the towels!’

Tony Musgrove, for whom Elinor worked, had found her a car. It belonged to his stepson, who was working in Bolivia for three years, and who had said it was fine for someone else to use it, in fact he’d rather have it used than have it sitting on blocks in Tony Musgrove’s driveway. Tony said that the company would insure and tax it, if Elinor could pay for the petrol.

Elinor had hesitated. Tony, a blunt man in his forties, had stared at her. ‘Don’t you want it? Most people in your situation would jump at a chance like this.’

‘Oh, I do.’

‘Well, then.’

‘It’s just’, Elinor said, ‘that it’s so kind. And you mightn’t keep me on after three months. And then—’

‘We will,’ Tony Musgrove said. ‘You’re bloody good.’ He held out the car keys. ‘And bloody cheap. Now clear off.’

The car, Elinor thought, gingerly pushing the gears about before she started the engine, was hardly going to impress Margaret. It was, if anything, more dilapidated than Ed’s – best, really, not to think about Ed – and had been sprayed a colour which was very nearly orange. It made her visible in a way that was anathema to her, but it was a car. It would get her from Barton to work and Margaret from Barton to school. It would mean that they weren’t eternally dependent upon, and thus obliged to, Sir John. And it was truly kind of Tony Musgrove’s stepson and truly kind of the company. She was very lucky and she would take as much care to be very grateful as she could to demonstrate to everyone, but especially to her family, that nothing had changed between her and Edward because there wasn’t enough there, in the first place, to change, and also because nobody could do anything until he managed to break free of his mother.

Which, Elinor said to herself, carefully turning the car out of the car park and into the street, I am not going to have anything to do with. His mother is his problem, and not mine. And even if I wish that he would stand up to her, I know from personal experience how incredibly hard it is to stand up to a member of your own family who can make life unbelievably unpleasant for ages for everyone, if crossed. He is stuck. I am also, in consequence, stuck. But he was, for some reason that I was not prepared to ask him, wearing a ring identical to the one he gave me which he said he bought in a craft shop in Plymouth because the girl who made it was local and called Eleanor. So I take heart from that. I do. I will. It is very annoying to find that I haven’t got over him, at all – in fact, rather the reverse – but I am pretty sure he hasn’t got over me, either, so I won’t keep asking myself if I’m OK, like prodding at a sore tooth, because if I do, I will drive myself quite mad.

She pulled the car to an uneven halt outside Margaret’s school. Margaret had been persuaded to join the school’s homework club – ‘It is so unfair, why do I have to, why, Thomas’d always come and get me, he said he would, you are so, so mean’ – so that Elinor could collect her after work and they could come home together. Margaret was standing on the pavement, her skirt hitched unevenly high above her knees, scowling at her phone. She goggled at the car. ‘You’re not telling me that this is it?’

Elinor patted the passenger seat. ‘Hop in.’

‘It’s a joke. It’s completely dire. What if anyone sees me in it?’

‘They’ll think you’re very lucky not to have to use public transport. Good day?’

Margaret sighed and began to scrabble for her seat belt. ‘Don’t be ridic.’

‘What?’

‘You heard.’

‘What’, Elinor said patiently, ‘is ridic?’

Margaret turned to face her sister and mouthed the word elaborately. ‘Ridiculous.’

‘Ah.’

Margaret held her phone out. ‘Now look at this.’

‘I can’t, Mags. I’m driving.’

‘We can’t go straight home. We’ve got to go to the Park.’

‘What?’

‘Ma says. She texted. It’s Jonno and Mrs J. and everyone. We’ve got to meet Mrs J.’s other daughter or something.’

Elinor gave a little groan. ‘Why tonight?’

‘Search me. It’s bad enough Ed going, without this.’ She sighed again. ‘Nobody at school has a life like mine.’

Elinor patted her knee. ‘Poor old you.’

‘It’s all very well for you,’ Margaret said crossly. ‘You don’t mind.’

‘What don’t I mind?’

‘Well,’ Margaret said, ‘it’s all the same to you, isn’t it? You’re just fine, always.’ She glanced sideways at Elinor’s profile. ‘Aren’t you?’

‘Awful wet day,’ Sir John said exuberantly, kissing them all as they filed past him into the hall at Barton Park. ‘Pissing down.’ He gripped Marianne’s arm. ‘Far too wet for your usual walk to Allenham, eh?’

Marianne looked very grave and said nothing.

‘But I’ve got a party here!’ Sir John said. ‘I’ve got people! I’ve got food and drink and a fire and people! Too bad poor old Bill’s still stuck in London.’

There was a flurry in the doorway to the library and Mrs Jennings surged through, towing a very small, very pretty, very pregnant girl in her wake. ‘My dears. Dashwoods all. This is – Charlotte.’

Sir John put an arm round his sister-in-law. ‘She’s a peach, what?’

Belle, seeing what was expected of her, stepped forward and kissed Charlotte’s cheek. ‘She is indeed.’

Charlotte looked delighted. ‘Honestly. A peach! Look at the size of me, will you? I’m not due till after Christmas and I’m huge. Beached whales aren’t in it.’ She gave a peal of laughter. ‘Except that’s pretty insulting to whales, don’t you think?’

Elinor smiled at her. She was so pretty and so merry. And so unlike her taller, thinner and equally pretty sister. Then Elinor glanced at Marianne. She was looking away from them all at a painting of a boy in blue silk breeches, his hand on the head of an elegant dog, and her expression was not helpful. Elinor said quietly, ‘M?’

Marianne sighed, and moved a step further away.

‘Leave her,’ Sir John said in a stage whisper. ‘Leave her to pine in peace.’

Charlotte Palmer stood on tiptoe, as if to try and attract Marianne’s attention. ‘You pine to your heart’s content!’ she called. ‘He’s a complete dish. Eat your heart out George Clooney, frankly. Wills is gorgeous. He’s a neighbour of ours in London, of course.’

Marianne was still regarding the picture, but her expression had intensified to one of extreme alertness.

‘No, he is not,’ said a voice from the direction of the library.

They all turned. A youngish man in a business suit was standing in the doorway, studying the screen on his BlackBerry.

‘He is too!’ Charlotte said, smiling delightedly. ‘He’s practically round the corner.’

‘John Willoughby’, the man in the doorway said, still looking at his screen, ‘lives the other end of the borough. King’s Road.’

Charlotte gave a little smirk. She did not seem remotely abashed.

‘Put that away,’ Mrs Jennings commanded her son-in-law, indicating the BlackBerry. Sir John waved an arm at her.

‘Come on, Mrs J., leave him be.’

The man in the doorway appeared to take no notice of either his mother-in-law or his brother-in-law, but instead put the BlackBerry to his ear and strolled back into the room, talking into it as he went.

‘So rude!’ Charlotte said happily. ‘He’s an absolute nightmare! Don’t ask me what he does! I haven’t a clue. It’s all screens and figures and his BlackBerry is simply welded to him. He never tells me a thing. And it’ll be a million times worse when he’s an MP.’

‘Goodness,’ Belle said almost inaudibly. ‘An MP.’

‘I know!’ Charlotte said. ‘It’s insane, isn’t it? Especially when you consider Tommy. I mean, he hates people, simply hates them, doesn’t he, Mummy?’

‘Too true,’ Mrs Jennings said, roaring with laughter. ‘Simply loathes me, especially now he’s saddled with Charlotte!’

Charlotte leaned slightly forward, her face alight with pleasure. ‘And the funny thing is, isn’t it, Mummy, that he’s got to pretend he likes people if he wants them to vote for him! It’s hilarious. Just imagine’ – she held out a plump little hand as if writing in the air – ‘Thomas Palmer, MP on the Houses of Commons writing paper. It’s a scream, isn’t it? But he says there won’t be one single perk for me, not one. He’s not letting me anywhere near the place. It’s just too funny, don’t you think?’

Elinor nodded, dumbly. Margaret was fidgeting beside her. ‘Can I – Can I—’

‘Can you what?’ Sir John said jovially. ‘Escape?’

Margaret nodded. ‘Baggage,’ he said, ‘Complete baggage. Go on then, go upstairs and find the children. Good God, Belle, you’re as hopeless with her as Mary is with ours. Now then, everyone. What d’you say to a spot of dinner?’

‘Well,’ Charlotte Palmer said to Elinor after supper, ‘you drew the long straw, didn’t you! Jonno on one side, Tommy on the other. Lucky you!’

‘Oh,’ Elinor said, slightly flustered. ‘It was fine, he—’

‘He’s really taken a shine to you,’ Charlotte said. ‘Next thing is, he’ll be asking you all for Christmas!’

‘I don’t think so, I wouldn’t—’

‘He adores having the right people. Adores it. I can’t have you breaking his heart too, not with so many broken hearts already round here.’

Elinor leaned forward. She said, almost in a whisper, ‘Do – do you know Wills?’

Charlotte beamed at her. ‘Everybody knows Wills.’

‘Do they?’

‘But I know why you asked me, don’t I! You didn’t ask me just because he’s the hottest—’

‘I asked’, Elinor said firmly, interrupting, ‘because I’d like to know a bit more about him.’

‘Of course you would,’ Charlotte said, laughing. ‘You’d want to know everything about anyone who’s such an item with your sister!’

Elinor glanced across the table to where her mother was drinking coffee with the Middletons and Mrs Jennings. ‘You don’t want to pay too much attention to them, and what they say.’

‘Oh, I don’t!’ Charlotte said airily. ‘I’ve lived with my mother for nearly thirty years, don’t forget! No, it wasn’t them who told me first, it was Bill Brandon. You know Bill Brandon.’

Elinor was truly shocked. ‘Bill Brandon told you …’

‘Oh yes! In London. On Monday. I just happened to see him because I was picking up something in Bond Street and he was doing something pompous like going to the Royal Academy, and we were talking about Barton and all of you lot were mentioned and I said, Oh, Mummy says they’re all so pretty and one of them has already got off seriously with Wills and he said—’ She broke off abruptly.

‘What? What did he say?’

Charlotte put her hand over her mouth as if to stifle a new burst of giggles. ‘D’you know – I can’t remember! Maybe he didn’t speak! Maybe he didn’t say anything, maybe he just sort of looked as if he knew it was true? Whatever. Does it matter? Course not! Well, only to him, of course, poor old thing.’

Elinor said, with difficulty, ‘Why?’

‘Well,’ Charlotte said happily, ‘Mummy says he’s a bit gone on your sister too. He’s such a romantic sweetie, even if he’s a bit of an old stick.’ She leaned forward herself now, as far as her belly would allow. ‘Tell you what: Mummy and Jonno really tried to cook something up between me and Bill when Jonno married Mary until Mummy realised that being Mrs B. would be less than no fun for me! Yikes, just think of it!’

‘Did you,’ Elinor said, hardly able to utter the words by now, ‘go out with him? With Bill?’

Charlotte stared at her for a moment and then fell back into her chair with squeals of laughter. ‘Oh my God, no! He never even asked me to sit next to him! Though I bet he’d have liked me to. But I’m fine with Tommy. He’s such a hoot. Even if he never tells me anything.’

Tommy Palmer materialised beside them, his BlackBerry still in his hand. He said to his wife, ignoring Elinor, ‘If I did, you’d never listen to a word I said to you—’

‘See?’ Charlotte said delightedly to Elinor. ‘See?’

‘—so why bother, I ask myself. So I don’t.’ He held out an empty whisky tumbler. ‘Get us a refill, Char. I didn’t marry you for your brains. I married you for your body. As is evident.’

Charlotte heaved herself out of her chair and took the whisky glass. She gave Tommy a resounding kiss. ‘See?’ she said again to Elinor. ‘Isn’t he the absolute end?’

Tommy Palmer didn’t look at his wife. Instead he glanced across at Elinor. His look was surprisingly kind. ‘You OK?’ he said.

She was startled. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Thank you, yes, we—’

He smiled. He said, indicating his wife, ‘They’ve got hearts of gold, these Jenningses, but as much sensitivity as hippos in season. It might not occur to any of them that jolly evenings at Barton Park aren’t exactly up your alley.’

Elinor shot a look at Charlotte. She was gazing up at her husband and laughing, with every appearance of sheer delight. Elinor said, uncertainly, ‘Thank you. Everyone’s so kind, I mean …’ She stopped.

Tommy Palmer put the hand not holding his BlackBerry on his wife’s head. He said, ‘They do kind as naturally as breathing. But imagination wasn’t what their fairy godmothers brought to their christenings.’ He winked, very slightly and entirely unflirtatiously, at Elinor. ‘So I’m just saying that you’ve got an ally. Should you ever need one.’

She was stammering. ‘Th-thank you.’

He took his hand off Charlotte’s head and gestured airily with it. ‘No thanks in order. Just remember. Now, Char, where’s my drink?’

From her bedroom, where she was playing a Villa-Lobos Prelude – very haunting, very melancholy – on her guitar, Marianne could hear her mother on the telephone. She was probably talking to Jonno, who, despite having a business to run, rang most mornings to relay and pick up gossip. It was a habit Marianne herself found close to contemptible, and she couldn’t help but remind herself that even if Wills did have a penchant for observations about other people – always redeemed, of course, by their being so funny – he more than counterbalanced it by his intense capacity to share all the cultural elements of life that mattered so much to her: the poetry and the landscape and the romance of history – and the music. Oh, the music! He’d picked her guitar up one day – he didn’t play as well as Ed or as Bill Brandon, if she was honest, but he had such feeling for music – and said, ‘D’you play the piano?’

She’d been startled. ‘Well, I can. But I’d rather play the guitar.’

He’d looked straight at her, very seriously. ‘I’m so glad.’

‘Are you?’

‘The piano seems so much more – more distant, to me. I love the way guitars are so passionate, so involved.’ He’d bent towards her. ‘Can you feel the vibration when you’re playing?’

She’d nodded. She’d said softly, ‘Of course I can. I can feel the tone.’

His face had been so close to hers. He’d said, almost in a whisper, ‘So sensual. So sexy.’

Marianne gave a little gasp now, and checked herself. It was blissful and simultaneously agonising to remember such moments. Recalling them made her unable to sink into the music as she used to, because the only sinking she longed for these days was into Wills’s arms. She stopped playing and bent her head over her guitar. Here came the tears again, a release but also accompanied by waves of misery, waves of memory, waves of—‘Marianne!’ Belle called up the stairs.

Marianne raised her head, sniffing. ‘Coming.’

She laid the guitar on her bed, snatched a handful of tissues from the box on the floor and blew her nose. Then she rubbed the balled-up tissues across her eyes and crossed the room to open the door.

‘Yes, Ma?’

Belle surveyed her woebegone face. ‘Oh, darling …’

‘I’m OK.’

‘You’ve been crying again. You poor lamb.’

‘Why doesn’t he ring?’ Marianne wailed. ‘Why doesn’t he answer my emails? Or my texts, even? Why doesn’t he at least let me know he’s alive?’

Belle came two steps up the staircase. ‘He will, darling. I’m sure he will. It must be something very serious, something he wants to protect you from.’

Marianne sniffed again. ‘Sorry. Sorry to go on about it.’

‘I just wish I could help.’

‘You do,’ Marianne said. ‘By being nice to me. Everyone’s nice to me. Even those morons up at the Park who don’t know when to stop teasing. I know they mean to be nice because they’re too stupid to see how clumsy they are.’

‘That was Jonno on the phone just now.’

Marianne sat down on the top step of the stairs. She said, wearily, ‘Surprise, surprise.’

‘He is inexhaustibly jolly. No sooner do the Palmers go – they left this morning – than he invites someone else to stay. Mrs J.’s late husband’s goddaughter or something. And her sister. They are your sort of age, and Jonno wants us to go up for dinner, on Saturday.’

‘No,’ Marianne said.

Belle smiled. ‘That’s what I told him. I mean I didn’t put it like that. I didn’t say none of us could bear another meal at the Park. I said that we absolutely could not accept any more hospitality from them until we had repaid some of it here.’

‘Oh, Ma …’

‘So,’ said Belle triumphantly, ‘they are all coming to lunch on Saturday – minus the children, thank goodness – including these two girls.’

Marianne sighed. ‘I can imagine them.’

‘No, darling,’ Belle said, ‘you can’t. You might love them. They might be just what you need to – to distract you. They are called Lucy and Nancy. Lucy and Nancy Steele.’

Margaret was going home with a new school friend and would not, she said with emphasis, need picking up by Elinor. There had been a good deal of telephoning and need for reassurance about this arrangement, but Elinor had finally prevailed over all Belle’s anxieties by using her lunch break to visit the friend’s mother and see for herself the absolute reliability of the situation: a semi-detached house in a suburban street, unmistakably inhabited by a family of unimpeachable orthodoxy. She had even felt impelled to half apologise to Margaret’s friend’s mother.

‘It’s just that we’re a bit new to round here and Mags has only been at the school a few weeks and …’

The woman was laughing. She patted Elinor’s hand. ‘I get it, dear. No hard feelings.’

But even that confirmation of respectability didn’t stop Belle from ringing Elinor’s mobile several times during the afternoon, so that when it rang, yet again, Elinor snatched it up without glancing at the screen and said almost crossly into it, ‘What now, Ma?’

‘It’s Jonno,’ Sir John said.

‘Help. Sorry. So sorry. Family stuff.’

‘Tell me about it. Just tell me about it. That’s why I’m ringing.’ Elinor felt an instant clutch of alarm.

‘What, what—’

‘I’ve been turned down,’ Sir John said. ‘By your mother.’

‘Turned down?’

‘I’ve got a brace of lovely girls here and your mother has declined to bring you all here to supper to meet them.’

Elinor swallowed. ‘But you’re too good to us. We were with you only—’

‘Listen,’ Sir John said, ‘I’d have you to supper every night if I had my way, promise you. But I can’t shift your mother. And it’s dull for these lasses, stuck with us, although I have to say that they are brilliant with the kids, brilliant. They said they adored nippers and they really do seem to. Amazing. But look. I rang you because even if I can’t shift your mother and Marianne, why don’t you drop by on your way home?’

Elinor closed her eyes. ‘That’s sweet of you, but—’

‘Don’t but me. Don’t.’

‘Jonno,’ Elinor said, opening her eyes, ‘it’s really nice of you, and I’d really like to meet them. But I’m tired. I—’

‘It’ll perk you up to come to supper!’

‘No,’ Elinor said, with more force than she intended. ‘No.’

There was a brief and startled pause. She could hear Sir John giving some instruction or other to his secretary. Then his voice boomed in her ear again.

‘Just a drink, then.’

‘Well …’

‘Great,’ he said. ‘Splendid. Settled. We’ll see you for a drink on your way home.’

Elinor sighed. He had already put the phone down. She laid hers down too, slowly, on the bottom rim of her drawing board.

Tony Musgrove looked at her over the top of his reading glasses. ‘Boyfriend trouble?’ he said.

Elinor made a face. ‘I wish.’

The sitting room at Barton Park was in uproar. It seemed to Elinor to be too hot, too bright and too full of charging children, never mind the noise. There were two young women – dressed, Elinor couldn’t help noticing, with elaborate modishness – on the floor, trying to field a child or two as it hurtled past, and, on a sofa at a slight distance, surveying the scene with every evidence of satisfaction, was Mary Middleton, placid in cream cashmere.

Sir John sprang forward to greet her, a glass in his hand. ‘Hello, lovely girl. Welcome to the usual madness. G and T?’

‘Actually,’ Elinor said, ‘could I have something soft?’

‘No!’ Sir John said. ‘No! Don’t be such a party pooper. Wine, at least, if you won’t have any gin! I shall get you wine. Don’t argue. You know I can’t bear to be argued with.’

Elinor shrugged, resignedly. ‘OK.’

‘Good girl. That’s more like it. Shan’t be a tick.’

Elinor looked back at the riot in the room. One of the girls on the floor, with a sharp, pretty face and tumble of carefully arranged long glossy curls, caught her eye, got to her feet and came towards her, her hand out ready, and smiling. The hand, Elinor observed, was encircled with charm bracelets and carefully manicured.

‘You have to be Elinor!’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m Lucy. Lucy Steele.’ She turned and pointed towards the floor again. ‘That’s my sister. She was Mr J.’s goddaughter.’

Elinor nodded.

‘We’ve come for the weekend,’ Lucy said. ‘Amazing house! You should see my bedroom. You could put our whole flat into my bedroom! And the children are so cute, really lively.’

‘Certainly lively.’

‘And she’s just amazing, too,’ Lucy said. ‘Isn’t she? I mean Lady M. Awesome clothes, and her figure! You’d never think she’d had four children, would you? Amazing.’

Elinor looked across the room. Mary Middleton was watching the two older boys pushing Lucy’s sister down on to her back on the carpet, one of them using her hair to speed the process, with no sign that she was other than completely oblivious to the need for discipline.

Elinor said anxiously, ‘Is your sister all right, d’you think?

Lucy glanced across, almost casually. ‘Oh, Nancy’s fine. She can take care of herself.’

Nancy gave a faint but distinct cry of pain and put her hands to her head. Mary roused herself, without urgency, from her sofa. She said lovingly, ‘Be careful, boys.’

‘Get off!’ Sir John roared at his children, returning with wine for Elinor in a glass as big as a small bucket. ‘Get off the poor girl, this instant!’

‘Jonno,’ Mary said reproachfully, ‘they’re only playing, bless them.’

Nancy Steele struggled to her feet and adjusted her clothing. She smiled bravely, showing long, unnaturally white teeth.

‘It’s fine,’ she said, ‘I’m OK. Totes OK. Mos def.’

‘Nancy,’ Sir John said, ‘come and meet Elinor. Elinor lives—’

‘Oh,’ Nancy said, advancing on Elinor and thrusting out a hand adorned with long, acrylic nails, ‘I know about you! Don’t we, Luce? You lived at Norland, didn’t you? We know all about Norland.’

Elinor took her hand for as brief a moment as possible. ‘Oh?’

Nancy looked significantly at Sir John. She said, nodding, ‘Oh yeah. We know all about the F-word guy! Fo sho we do!’

‘Nancy,’ her sister said tensely.

Elinor looked steadfastly into her drink.

‘We know it all!’ Nancy said. She ran a hand through her visibly straightened hair, letting it fall back into exactly the same shape as it had been before she touched it. ‘We know that your sister’s made it with a really cute guy, and that you’ll be next! Scream!’ She gave Sir John a nudge with her elbow. ‘We even know the F-word guy! Don’t we, Luce?’

Lucy shifted slightly and examined her bracelets. ‘Well, only slightly.’

‘Luce! We do! At Uncle Peter’s!’

There was a sudden squeal of pain and rage from across the room. They all swung round. Mary Middleton was holding her kicking three-year-old, Anna-Maria, and saying urgently, ‘So sorry, darling, careless Mumma, silly Mumma, horrid Mumma’s brooch to hurt poor baby Anna, sorry, sweetie, sorry, poppet.’

Sir John strode over. ‘What’s happened?’

‘My pin caught her little arm, her poor little arm.’

Sir John seized his daughter’s flailing arm and peered at it. ‘Can’t see a thing.’

‘There!’ Mary cried. ‘There!’

Anna-Maria wrenched her arm out of his grasp, flung her head back and screamed afresh.

‘Totes adorable kids,’ Nancy Steele said.

‘Really cute,’ Lucy echoed, without complete conviction.

Elinor regarded them both. She took a step back and put her almost untouched glass of wine down on the nearest surface. ‘I think I’ll just slip out,’ she said. ‘Quietly. Have a good evening.’ She managed a smile. ‘See you soon.’

At the end of Saturday lunch at Barton Cottage, throughout which Marianne had sat without speaking, gazing aloofly past the assembled company out of the window, Lucy Steele followed Elinor out to the kitchen. She said eagerly, ‘I’ll help you make coffee.’

Elinor put the pile of pudding plates she was carrying down, with difficulty, on the cluttered table. ‘It’s OK.’

‘Let me help, do. Look at all this washing up!’

‘I’m used to it.’

Lucy, taking no notice, began to run hot water into the sink. She said confidingly, ‘I’m really sorry about Nance. All the endless, endless man talk. I’m afraid she’s a bit one-track-minded and this guy in Exeter, Brian Rose, she was going on about, well, he’s, um … well, she’s my sister but it’s a bit much really. Kind of embarrassing. Are there any gloves?’

‘Gloves?’

‘Washing-up gloves. Rubber gloves. You know.’

Elinor shook her head, ‘Sorry. We just have neglected hands.’

Lucy put her own hands behind her head, and twisted her hair into an artless knot. ‘No matter. Anyway, poor old Nance. I’m afraid it’s all boys and bags with her.’

‘Bags?’

‘Handbags,’ Lucy said. She located a bottle of washing-up liquid and squirted some liberally into the sink. Then, appearing to concentrate very hard on swishing the soap into a foam, she said, almost carelessly, ‘Have you ever met Mrs F.?’

Elinor stopped scraping scraps off plates into the bin. ‘Who?’

‘Mrs Ferrars. Ed’s mum.’

‘No,’ Elinor said shortly. ‘The scary mother. No, I’m glad to say.’

There was a short pause and then Lucy said, turning from the sink, ‘That’s a real pity. I wish you had. I – I so wanted you to advise me.’

Elinor put the scraped plate down on the nearest worktop. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I don’t get …’

Lucy looked down at her wet hands. She appeared to be deciding something. Then she looked up again, earnestly, at Elinor. ‘Can you keep a secret?’

‘Of course, but should you—’

Lucy held up one hand. She said solemnly, ‘I knew I could trust you. The minute you walked into the room at Barton Park, I just knew you were honour bright.’

‘Well,’ Elinor said, picking up the next plate, ‘thank you, but I can’t see how I can advise you about anything, nor where Ed’s mum fits in.’

‘Oh, not now,’ Lucy said, ‘She doesn’t matter now. But she might, you see. Soon. Quite soon.’

She smiled to herself, shyly, as if she were relishing some secret. Elinor put the plate down and came round the table.

‘Are – are you going out with Ed’s brother or something? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? You’re going out with Robert and he hasn’t told his mother?’

Lucy looked straight at Elinor. Her eyes were wide and guileless. She smiled again. ‘Oh,’ she said softly, ‘not Robert. He’s a complete muppet. I’m talking about Ed.’ She let a fraction of a second pass and then she said, ‘My Ed.’

Elinor didn’t move. She remained where she was, standing by the table. Everything seemed to have stopped, even her breathing. As she stood there, she was conscious, through the intensity of her own shock, that Lucy was watching her carefully. She made a supreme effort. ‘Wow …’

‘I know,’ Lucy said. ‘It’s so great, but it’s so awful, having to keep it a secret. Are you OK?’

Elinor nodded. She could feel her body starting up again, tentatively, as if it was wondering whether it would work again.

‘Ed wanted me to tell you,’ Lucy said. ‘He thinks the world of you and your family. You’re like a sister to him.’

‘Ed wanted you to tell me …’

‘Well, I know he would want me to tell you. You know how hopeless he is at expressing himself – it drives me mad sometimes! But the thing is …’ She stopped, significantly.

Elinor, concentrating on both breathing and giving nothing away, waited.

‘Actually,’ Lucy said, ‘he is my Ed.’ She looked away, as if privately communing with someone who wasn’t there. ‘I think you could actually say we were engaged, in a way. Enough for me to have this, anyway.’

She reached into the neck of her shirt and pulled out a chain, holding it bunched in her hand to indicate that it was private and personal.

‘Wow,’ Elinor said again, her voice sounding to herself as if it came from miles away, ‘I didn’t – know you even knew each other, let alone …’

‘Oh yes,’ Lucy said, moving to stand very close to her. ‘Oh yes. My uncle Peter runs a crammers, in Plymouth. Ed was sent there. Didn’t he tell you? And Nancy and I grew up in Plymouth. We were always round at Uncle Peter’s. Peter Pratt. He was like a dad to Ed.’

Elinor recovered herself a little. ‘Ed never said anything to me about—’

‘No, he wouldn’t. He’s so shy. And there’s his old witch of a mother so it had to be secret from everyone. But we saw each other again at a party the other day – mutual friends down here – and I just knew. The minute I saw him again, I knew. It was like we’d never been apart. Poor lamb, he was so drunk that night! Completely out of it. I expect it was the relief of seeing me, don’t you? But honestly, Elinor, thank goodness I was there to look after him, he was in such a state.’ She paused and gave Elinor a wide smile. ‘And the next day, I took him shopping.’ She held the chain out to Elinor. There was a ring on it, a flat silver band, with a small green stone set into it.

‘We got these,’ Lucy said, ‘both of us. He didn’t really want one but that’s just a boy thing, isn’t it, about having anything that might be thought girly, so I made him have one too. And now he texts me, like, all the time. Shall I show you how many? I can’t show you what they say, of course, but you’d understand that, wouldn’t you? I’ve told him that when I’m twenty-one – any minute, so exciting! – we’ll tell everyone, and between you and me, Ellie – can I call you Ellie? – I’ll be sick with relief. I hate secrets, just hate them, and anyway it stresses me out, not saying, and worrying that Nancy might, because she’s so hopeless and blabs everything to everyone, and she’s the only person who knows. Oh God, it’s been such a strain!’

Elinor regarded her. She said, as levelly as she could, ‘Why is it still a secret? Why don’t you just marry?’

Lucy sighed. She picked up the nearest tea towel and held it to her face, as if to wipe her eyes with it. ‘Ed says he can’t. He can’t commit till he knows what he’s going to do. He says he can’t expect me to live in a hole-and-corner way on nothing.’

‘Aren’t you earning?’

Lucy raised her chin. ‘I’m a therapist.’

‘Oh.’

‘Reflexology.’

‘Oh.’

‘I don’t make enough money to support both of us. It’s heartbreaking.’

Elinor straightened her shoulders a little. ‘I’m sure it is.’

‘I just thought’, Lucy said, her voice becoming little girlish, ‘that if you knew Ed’s mother, you could help me think of a way to get round her. Because we’re so stressed about it all. Didn’t you think Ed was stressed when he came to stay with you? He’d come straight from me, and we’d had such an awful time saying goodbye. Awful. We’ve got to take some action. We’ve got to. Don’t you think?’

The kitchen door opened. Margaret stood there, holding the dish in which Belle had made an enormous apple crumble.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Nothing,’ Elinor said.

Lucy smiled at her and swooped forward to relieve her of the crumble dish. ‘Your lovely sister’, she said, ‘is helping me to untangle a bit of a knot in my life. That’s all.’

Margaret stared at her and let the dish go. She shrugged. ‘Whatever,’ she said.