Not that she could have done anything to prevent it because a challenge once given and accepted involved the honour of the participants and there was no going back.

The first thing Thalia knew about it was when she went into her mother’s room to bid her good morning and Lady Caversham said,

“I cannot imagine what has happened, Thalia. When I woke, your father was not here. It is not like him to leave the house without telling me where he is going. It is too early for him to be riding.”

Neither of them could imagine what had occurred until half an hour later they heard footsteps coming up the stairs.

“Here is Papa!” Thalia said. “Now he will be able to tell you, Mama, where he has been.”

Sir Denzil had entered the bedroom and his wife had given a little cry.

“What has – happened? Why do you – look like that?”

“I have killed him!” Sir Denzil muttered.

“Killed – who?” Lady Caversham cried.

“Spencer Talbot,” he answered, “and now I have to leave the country.”

“Leave the – country?”

Lady Caversham could hardly whisper the words.

“I have already seen the Lord Chancellor,” Sir Denzil explained. “It was the only thing I could do in the circumstances. After all Talbot was in the Cabinet and the first thing I realised was that there must be no scandal that would affect the Government.”

“How could you – kill him? How is it possible?”

“I meant only to wing him in the arm,” Sir Denzil said, “but he moved at the last moment, I think because he intended from the very first to kill me. His temper is proverbial.”

“Instead – you killed – him!”

Thalia heard her own voice say the words and was surprised that she had spoken.

“Yes, I have killed him,” Sir Denzil said, “and because Lord Eldon is insistent that there should be no scandal, the whole thing will be hushed up and it will be announced that Talbot has died of a heart attack. But I am to go abroad for three years.”

“Three – years!” Lady Caversham echoed faintly.

“It might have been five or eyen life,” Sir Denzil said, “but knowing Talbot’s temper the Lord Chancellor has been lenient to me, as he pointed out in no uncertain terms.”

“But three – years, dearest! Where will you go?”

“Anywhere in Europe is impossible, I realise that,” Sir Denzil had replied, “and I have no wish to be a prisoner of Bonaparte. No, I shall go to America.”

“To – America!”

Thalia’s voice echoed round the room, because she was so astonished.

America seemed far away, a land of unpredictable people who had thrown out the British, a land fill, she thought, of Red Indians and black people who had been brought there from Africa to work as slaves.