Within a month of her marriage she’d started planning her escape. Her honeymoon at the barracks in Edinburgh over, she’d been delivered to Cherry Trees while Douglas went off to France, and she’d been glad that the awful motion carried out in an uncomfortable bunk at midnight hadn’t borne fruit. Alone for the first time in her life, her childhood lost, the imprint of her mother’s stony face firmly planted in her mind, her father already ill and her brother on a ship to Basra, she’d looked up irreconcilable differences in a law book she’d found amongst Douglas’ things; it was to be a simple matter of pretending it had been unconsummated, like an unpalatable soup. It was how she was going to get out and right the ship that was listing badly; it was how she was going to get her life back. But then her father had died and her brother had died and her mother’s hand had shaken, the brown paper wedged beneath it. In the shuttered drawing room of Bryanston Square she’d asked her mother, “What happens if I don’t?”

“Joan is the eldest,” Sybil had replied.

“But Joan’s a girl, and she’s not married.”

Joan had laughed, “Well spotted.”

It had taken the journey home to Berkshire for her to fully understand. It had struck her then, as the train rattled and she was thrown about, that if her mother could give it to Joan she could give it to anyone. Their fortune wasn’t ruled by the laws of primogeniture at all but simply by the habit of tradition; Ivar was due to have it because tradition said boys came first. That boy was gone, that tradition stymied, her mother had nothing but the swaying of her heart. Joan was a girl. Enid was a girl. Joan had twenty-two reasons to hate her; one for every year that their father had loved Enid more.

So here she was now, walking in the garden of Strachur with Fagus; 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.

Joan came trailing out of the glass doors, followed by Pat. They’d been Red Cross girls together during the war. Cross Red girls, Enid called them. They didn’t find it funny. They found most things funny, but not if they came out of Enid’s mouth. Smart, whip-thin and unafraid, Pat Dansey blew rules of breeding out of the water, and nobody cared. She was fun, she was a gas, and their mother loved her almost as much as she loved Joan. Pat was always there, always around, Joan’s ever present confidante and ally, and this summer had joined them to escape the heat of a scandal of such epic proportions that even Joan, at dinner last night, had said it should probably be left alone.