There was, she supposed, nothing to object to in Marcus Grenville. He was practising at the time as a barrister with a prestigious London firm. He was charming and handsome in a dark, rather heavy way and he always knew the right things to say. In his education it seemed there had been no gaps. He could discuss opera and architecture and the latest technology with a fluency that impressed her grandfather and made him chuckle with delight.

Perhaps it was his education and his intelligence that she came to despise first. She felt that in all this clever talk there was an element of showing off and that if she knew anything at all about the theories he propounded she would discover him as a fraud. His knowledge, she felt, was superficial, acquired like everything else he did, not through interest but through ambition. She was aware from the beginning that ambition was what had prompted him to ask her to marry him. It was the Cadver, the estate and the land, which attracted him. The prospect of owning it excited him so that when he walked up the drive to meet her he was flushed and happy with all the appearance of someone in love.

‘He’s besotted with you, Livvy,’ her grandfather would say. ‘Any fool can see that. You’ll have to marry the man.’

‘No,’ she could have said. ‘You’re the fool.’ But still she went along with it.

Why did she go along with it? she wondered now as she arranged the flowers on the long dining-room table. To please her grandfather, of course, but there had been more to it than that. She had thought that she would be able to manage Marcus; that in the things that really mattered to her – the running of the house and the estate – she would be in charge. It had been a shock to find that he could be stubborn, wilful, even stupid.