They sat in gloomy silence. The doors to the drawing-room opened and two footmen entered, one carrying coal and kindling and the other a basket of logs.

‘At last,’ said the earl. ‘What took you so long?’

‘There was such a shortage of fuel in the city, my lord,’ said the first footman, ‘that we sent two fourgons out to the country to Stacey Court.’ Stacey Court was the earl’s country home.

‘Well, get the fire started,’ grumbled the earl.

As the resultant blaze began to thaw the room, the earl felt that even his brain was beginning to thaw out. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘We’ll ask that Cathcart fellow. What’s he doing now?’

‘Lady Glensheil tells me he has opened a detective agency. Very American. Like Pinkertons.’

‘I’ll try anything,’ said the earl. ‘We could have left for Nice a week ago if it hadn’t been for Rose.’ He rang the bell and told the butler, Brum, to find the direction of Captain Harry Cathcart’s detective agency and ask him to call.

Harry Cathcart brightened when a footman brought him the earl’s request. It was not that time had been lying heavily on his hands. On the contrary, his days were taken up, just as before, with hushing up society’s scandals and finding lost dogs. But he had hoped for more dramatic assignments, and somehow, working in the past for the earl had certainly led to murder and mayhem.

He picked up his hat and coat and went through to the outer office where his sheep-faced secretary, Miss Jubbles, was labouring over accounts.

‘I’m going out for a bit, Miss Jubbles,’ he said. ‘Anything I can get you?’

‘Oh, no, Captain.’ Miss Jubbles gazed adoringly at the handsome captain with his thick dark hair, rangy figure and black eyes. Harry shrugged himself into his fur-lined coat and crammed a wide-brimmed hat on his head. Out in Buckingham Palace Road, where he had his office, the cold was intense. In a neighbouring building the pipes had burst, and icicles glittered against the sooty brick. Other buildings had lagged the outside pipes with old sheets and he felt he was walking past ghostly sentinels with their whitish arms stretched up to the frost-covered roofs. He walked carefully because the street-sweepers had been unable to clear the pavements of the frozen-hard mud and it was slippery underfoot.

As he made his way to Eaton Square, he felt a frisson of excitement. He would see the infuriating Lady Rose again. He remembered her as he had last seen her with her intense blue eyes and thick brown hair, her figure unfashionably slim in this new Edwardian era, where men liked their women plump.