‘No, darling. Leave that now and run up to your room and get your lessons prepared for Mr Bartlet. He has kindly allowed you to miss French today, but you must make up for it tomorrow.’

‘I will, Mama.’

Isabel’s eyes twinkled as the boy looked at her with the special conspiratorial look reserved for when Henry was near them. Already Benedict knew the set-up in the house. His father was a terror to the face, and a joke behind his back.

Isabel watched her husband as he tucked into his bacon, eggs and sausages. She had aged a great deal since the arrival of Benedict in her household. At first Isabel had been shunned by her so-called friends and contemporaries. But as her father had become besotted with the child and rumours had begun circulating that the child was actually his and not Dumas’, people had begun to call again and life had resumed its normal pattern. Isabel adored the boy; she saw him as the only thing in her life she actually possessed wholly. He was also a stick to beat Henry with and she took delight in this, surprising herself with the keenness with which she pitted her wits against her husband.

Now the child was ten, he ate with them, as a boy was expected to at a certain age, was allowed to greet company, and was being trained in the niceties of being a young man of wealth and good family. The latter made her smile in her darker moments, knowing his stock so well: a father who was enamoured of little girls and a mother who was a whore of the first water. She shunned Briony now, hated thinking about the girl who had borne him. He was her son, wholly her son.

Henry’s fork crashing on to his plate distracted her from her reverie and she looked at him, the animosity between them tangible in the confines of the room.

Folding up his paper, he stood and left the room without a word or a backward glance. Pouring herself more coffee, Isabel smiled and mentally chalked up another victory to herself.

Joshua was eating his lunch at The Chequers Inn. As always he had a pint of brown ale, and pie, peas and mash. He was swallowing down the last of his peas when his friend Billy Buggins started chattering about events of the previous night.