It was with something like guilty relief that she looked up the train times for Montcalm, and then telephoned the number that Oliver had given her.

A suave male voice answered the phone and said, ‘I will find his lordship for you, if you will be good enough to hold on.’

Helen made an awed face at herself in the mirror of the hallstand as she waited.

‘Helen? You are coming, aren’t you? It’ll be an errand of mercy. This year’s family party surpassed even last year’s in awfulness.’

She smiled quickly at hearing his familiar drawl again.

‘I’ll be there. Can someone meet me off the train?’

‘Sure thing. Looking forward to it.’

Helen packed her suitcase in a state of nervous anticipation. She had very few clothes so it wasn’t difficult to decide what to put in, but she was afraid that nothing was appropriate for a Christmas house-party at Montcalm.

Twenty-four hours later she was stepping down from the stopping train at the little local station. At first sight the platform seemed empty except for a fat ticket-collector, then she saw a dark figure leaning against the wall of the tiny station house. The anticipation, which she had been trying to curb all the way from home, died in her at once when she saw that it was Tom Hart. He took his hands out of the pockets of his svelte cashmere coat and hugged her briefly before swinging her suitcase out of her reach.

‘I’ll take it. Welcome to Montcalm. Oliver’s hunting, so he asked me to come and collect you.’

‘Is Pansy here?’

‘Not till this afternoon.’

A flicker of acknowledgement, half humorous and half rueful, passed between them.

Tom’s car was out in the station yard. They drove along wintry lanes between black hawthorn bushes that gave occasional glimpses of frost-hardened fields. ‘What’s it like?’ Helen asked.

Tom sketched a quick gesture with a ramrod back and an imperious hand. ‘Very grand. Just wait and see. I’ve no idea what to call anyone, whether it’s Oliver’s old man or the under-butler. I just adopt the role of the bizarre American, so they’re all agreeably surprised when I know what fork to use and don’t drink the fingerbowls.’

‘That’s no help to me,’ Helen groaned. Suddenly she felt acutely nervous.

All too soon they were driving beside the long wall that enclosed the park of the great house. Tom turned in at the gates that Helen remembered from her visit with Oliver. She saw that there was a shuttered wooden hut and a turnstile beside the lodge and Tom nodded towards it.

‘Not open to the great public today.’

Ahead of them, strikingly defined on its low hill, was the house. To Helen, it seemed a threatening mass of windows, turrets and crenellations. It was an eighteenth-century monument to family pride, vast, assertive, and very slightly mad.