It was not, Toby had hastened to assure Campion, a tyrannous law. It brooked little interference, knew great charity, and was subject to no known codification. Lady Margaret’s whim was her desire, her desire was her law, and her strongest desire was to keep the estate happy for a happy estate was an efficient estate.

They climbed the wide staircase from the great hall, leaving the servants behind, and Toby plunged into a dark maze of old corridors, passage rooms, and odd, brief stairways. Their entrance into the New House was through a low, stone archway that opened into a magnificently light, high, decorated landing. A great tapestry took up one wall, a tapestry showing a chained and crowned unicorn that lay its head in the lap of a young girl. Above it the ceiling was a riot of intricate plasterwork, flowers and fruit spilling downward and leaving, in the ceiling’s center, a great blank oval that Toby said awaited a suitable painter. He grinned at Campion and Mrs. Swan. “Wait here.”

Campion waited. Lazen Castle was less than a half day’s ride from Werlatton, yet nothing in her life had prepared her for such a place. It crushed her with its size, its pretensions, and she felt gauche, awkward and out of place. How could she make an impression on Lady Margaret? She was dirty from travelling, unkempt, and though Mrs. Swan brushed at her clothes and tweaked them straight, Campion could feel presentiments of failure. Voices and laughter sounded from the bottom of the vast, marble staircase that ended on this landing. What was she to these people? Why should they care for her?

She feared Lady Margaret. She could hear nothing from within the long gallery into which Toby had gone, yet she knew that at this moment her fate was being decided. She knew nothing of Sir George’s letter, delivered two days previously by the Earl of Fleet, and had she known then her melancholy would have been even more profound.

“Cheer up, dear.” Mrs. Swan pulled Campion’s collar straight. “She’ll like you. Can’t help but like you.”

Toby had said, candidly enough, that Campion’s best chance of acceptance lay in Lady Margaret adopting her as she adopted, at frequent intervals, new enthusiasms that made up in absorption what they lacked in duration. Toby had spoken laughingly of these enthusiasms and of the havoc they created in Lazen’s life. Some were harmless enough, such as Lady Margaret’s period of sonnet writing that had merely inflicted reams of poetry on the family and spattered a good inlaid table with ink. Her adoption of drama, Toby said, had even imported some excellent players and musicians to the castle.

Only once had Sir George firmly protested, and that had been when Lady Margaret had contracted an overpowering desire to be a taxidermist. She had written to a tradesman in Bristol, demanding the secrets of his trade, but Toby suspected that the man had kept his professional secrets and palmed Lady Margaret off with false instructions.