Fagus was looking at her and she was looking at him and there was blood pouring from his head. It was seeping through her fingers and soaking her dress and there was screaming, his china blue eyes almost white with glaze. Joan came running along the flagstone hall to where Enid held him on her knees. “What happened?” She crouched, her face inches from Enid’s; two sisters holding the writhing child, who began to choke. “He’s trying to be sick. Turn him over.” They tipped him, and he threw up over the cracked floor.

She’d been walking in the garden. That’s what happened.

She was walking in the garden of Strachur, Fagus in one hand, Bleak House in the other; a slow, agonising plod that was going nowhere, looking at how the sun glinted off the paving stones, and thinking about the castle across the loch. They used to live there. It was where she was born. If a child drew a picture of a fairy-tale castle, they would draw Inveraray – its spires and grey stone, its mullioned windows and bridges and moat, its flags that fluttered in the wind which blew, ever constant, across Loch Fyne. Inveraray Castle was where she was happy, where her brother had sat in the library with his pipe, ridiculous and young and honest; where her father admired the armoury with guests who pointed and asked questions of wars and tribes and clansman. Where she and Joan could get away from each other and their mother could rule without grief.

It was chance that had given it to them, and chance that had taken it away. Her father was the youngest son of the eighth Duke of Argyll, but his eldest brother, who became the ninth, married Princess Louise and was whipped away to royal households – so Enid, her family, her father had got to stay instead. “Someone has to care for the place,” her father used to say. “But is it ours?” Enid had asked, again and again, until she was old enough to realise that it wasn’t – that nothing was owned, that everything could be taken away. Inveraray was taken away when her uncle died and her cousin, the tenth Duke, took over.

So they were here instead, for the summer, at the house her mother had bought across the loch – she and Douglas, Joan and Pat and Sybil. Her mother moved about it with authority; it was the family home, but though it lay in the same land it didn’t feel like home at all. It felt like everything that was missing.