There would have to be a post-mortem and an inquest, he told her, but he had already spoken to the coroner and there was no doubt that the verdict would be accidental death. There would be no delay to the funeral.

‘It will be in the church, at Mere,’ he told her. ‘Do you suppose that many of Oliver’s friends will want to come?’

‘I think they all will,’ she answered him. We all loved him, she thought again, in our own ways.

‘Darcy,’ she ventured, ‘how are your parents?’ Her dislike of Lord and Lady Montcalm was forgotten in her sympathy for them.

‘Broken. Especially my mother.’ Helen saw it clearly. The beloved, intriguing and wayward Oliver, focus of all those silver-framed photographs, was gone. She understood that for all his difficulty he had been idolised. And she saw Darcy’s homely face and self-effacing bearing, remembering how often anger had possessed her at his parents’ coldness.

Now, in the midst of this tragedy, Darcy was somehow proving himself. Respect took its place with liking in the complication of her feelings for him.

He came and sat beside her, taking her fingers in his firm clasp.

‘I didn’t know him very well,’ he said sadly. ‘We never understood each other. But lately, just lately, I felt that we liked one another better. Like brothers in any family.’ His smile was wistful, with a trace of hunger in it. He wanted her to talk about Oliver. ‘You were probably closer to him than I ever was.’

‘Perhaps.’ She couldn’t do it, without uncovering truths that were too close to pain to face today.

The silence settled around them again. Darcy was so close, solid beside her, but Helen felt as alone as she had ever done in her life.

How isolated we are, she thought. And how tenuous the strongest links turn out to be. She had the vertiginous sense that Darcy was a total stranger, and that all the strength of her feelings for Tom had been hallucination. But no. That wasn’t true. She knew that she loved Tom with every fibre of herself. And yet she had turned him away so that she could go on sitting here beside Darcy because she believed that it was the right thing for her to do.

The right thing?