The room that Mrs Pugh showed Helen into was high and awash with elegant pale shades of blue and pink. There was a little chaise longue upholstered in blue watered silk at the foot of the wide, heavy bed. Even Helen could see that the furniture was Chippendale, but it was well used, with none of the stiff formality of museum pieces. There was a faint but pervasive smell of lavender.

‘Would you like me to send someone to unpack for you?’ asked Mrs Pugh.

‘No. No, thank you, really,’ said Helen, backing defensively towards her case. No tissue paper, she thought. No monograms, and no expensive labels either.

‘Right you are. I’ve put you next door to your friend, the other young lady. You’ll be wanting a good gossip, I expect.’

Helen throught fleetingly that Pansy would indeed be a welcome sight in this intimidating house.

‘I expect Mr Hart will come and show you the way down for lunch. If you need anything, just ask me or Mr Maitland.’

When she was alone, Helen smoothed her clothes and combed out her black hair. She could think of nothing else to do to make herself ready so she wandered to and fro, touching the cotton wool and cologne laid out on the dressing table, feeling like an intruder in the dignified room.

On the table beside the bed Vogue and Country Life lay with a copy of the day’s Times and a crystal glass and decanter. Helen picked up the newspaper and began to stare unseeingly at it. This is Oliver’s home, she kept thinking. All this – those gates, and the house practically filling the horizon, the servants and pictures and beautiful things – this is ordinary life for him. How could I ever have imagined …

Restlessly she stood up and went to stare out of the window. Parkland, landscaped in the grand style, rolled away from her. There was no other building to be seen. Just grass, and ancient trees, and in the foreground terraces dropping to the geometry of formal gardens.

She turned away in relief when she heard Tom at the door.

‘Ready to come on parade?’ he asked.

‘Don’t make me any more nervous than I am already,’ she begged. ‘Who’s going to be there?’ Helen noticed that he had toned down the slight eccentricity of his clothes for Montcalm. He was wearing a grey vicuña sweater now over a cream shirt, much more Princeton than Broadway.

‘Oh, very much a family party,’ he teased her. ‘Just you, and me, and her ladyship. Everyone else has gone hunting. The really big meet of the year is held here, tomorrow, before the New Year’s Eve ball. But I suppose they want to keep their eye in, or whatever it is you’re supposed to do on horseback.’ Tom had led them a different way from her room. Now he paused with his hand on her arm.