From Mrs. East, the bones—a famous theft, a prominent local family, an unsolved mystery. Mrs. East remembering the newspaper reports from the year she was twelve, the gossip raging for months in town, the sightseers who came down from London to stand at the manor’s gates and gawp, before heading to The Polly Tearooms for scones. The flesh we added from books Peter found or ordered from the library, a guide to local history, a compendium of unsolved crimes, a biography of Lady Mary Ashton, the owner of the diamonds. The case we assembled went like this:

In 1936, a diamond necklace is stolen at the manor. The manor, then as now, is three stories high, built of redbrick and sandstone. A small portion belongs to the sixteenth century, most to the seventeenth, and of course there are the later additions: the outbuildings and stables, the Georgian folly of a Greek temple in Portland stone down by the lake. There are sixteen bedrooms on the two upper floors, not including those in the servants’ quarters. On the ground floor, there is a library and a drawing room, a dining hall and a room for billiards. There is a boot room and a run of sculleries and pantries.

The road that passes in front of the house is at the time little more than a cart’s width wide. Even in 1936, it’s a rare day that sees more than a handful of motorcars, which is to say cars are noticed.

The manor’s heyday is long gone. It is the same all over the country. The estate is being sold parcel by parcel to pay taxes and death duties, to make up for investments gone south with the Wall Street crash. The family cannot get the staff. There are factories in Swindon and Oxford where the wages are higher, where the young people don’t have to bow and bob, where there are bosses, not betters. Still, the staff—all old hands (too old it is lamented), all trusted faithfuls, no newcomers, no one who can’t be vouched for—do a fine job, the all-important appearances are maintained.

The manor has been in the family since Queen Anne. They won’t sell it until they have to. In 1936, having to is twelve years off, when the Denfords’ boy is dead and Lord Denford, shunned from 1940 onward for his vocal support of Hitler in the years before the war, for having stood up in the House of Lords and sung “Land of Dope and Jewry” to the tune of “Land of Hope and Glory,” finally accepts that the writing is on the wall.