Mere House itself looked different from the rest of the village. It was a low, grey house, very old, set slightly forbiddingly against a belt of dark yew hedges. There was nothing of the stately home about it. It was solid, square and functional, a country landowner’s home without architectural frills or unnecessary decoration. Darcy told her that it had been the original family seat before the eighteenth-century Mortimores became gradually more powerful and, with the power, hugely wealthy. They had built Montcalm and settled to a fashionable life amongst their terraces and parterres, away from the business of the land. But the sons of the family had traditionally lived at Mere before inheriting, overseeing the business of the estates and the comings and goings of the tenant farms.

Darcy led her round to the front of the house. The paving under the small, heavily leaded windows was cracked and lined with dark green moss. Under the yew hedges were great clumps of daffodils, palest cream to brazen orange. The land dropped away in front of them towards the village, newly ploughed, dark soil alternating with clipped pasture. In the quiet Helen could hear the steady chug of a tractor and, carried on the wind, the high bleat of new lambs.

Darcy’s eyes were on her face, turned slightly away from him as she looked at the view. From the placid, well-ordered landscape under the spring sunshine she turned back to the house. It looked as if it had been standing there for ever. Back into her mind’s eye came Montcalm with its fantastic turrets, pinnacles and balustrades.

‘Why did they bother?’ she murmured to Darcy, laughing.

‘My feelings exactly.’ There was clear approval in his eyes. ‘You like this better?’

Helen hesitated for a minute, then said softly, ‘Yes.’

Darcy looked out across the fields again. ‘I love it,’ he said simply. ‘I shall miss it when I have to … leave.’

‘Not yet,’ she said.

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘But one day, just the same.’

The wind carried birdsong, and the noise of the tractor as it trailed evenly up and down the long field.

‘Come inside,’ Darcy said at last. ‘We’ll have some lunch, then I’ll take you round the farm.’

There was no exquisite antique furniture or fragile porcelain here. Mere was furnished in heavy dark oak that looked as old and solid as the house itself. The rooms were shadowy, making the sunny patches that fell through the small windows look startlingly bright.

In the big, square, low-beamed dining room there was only one place laid by the carver chair at the head of the table. A silver tankard stood ready with a bottle of beer beside a copy of Farmer’s Weekly.