“You cannot do a thing until you are strapped up,” the housekeeper insisted in a voice of authority. “I will send one of the grooms for the physician right away, but he lives at Bridgewater and it will take an hour or so to fetch him. You must get into bed and wait for him. It is the only thing to do, I assure you.”

“That is good advice,” Gretna murmured.

Mrs. Merryweather compressed her lips. It was obvious not only that she was in pain but it was difficult for her to say any more in front of the housekeeper and the chambermaids.

Only when finally they had put her into bed dressed in a white muslin nightgown that the housekeeper had produced, did she lie back against the pillows and look at Gretna with consternation on her kind fat face.

“A fine tangle I’ve made of it,” she moaned. “Now, harken to me. Miss Gretna. You are to say you want to dine up here with me. No goin’ downstairs.”

Gretna glanced over her shoulder to where, through the open door, she could see the housemaid unpacking one of her boxes that had just arrived. She could see her white muslin dress, the only new one she had had in five years, but which she had made especially for her journey to London, being taken out and shaken free of its creases.

Just for a moment she hesitated, wishing to please Mrs. Merryweather.

And then there was a dancing light in her eyes as she announced,

“Pray forgive me, but I do want to go downstairs to dinner. I want to see the silver and I want to see the treasures that his Lordship has promised to show me.”

Mrs. Merryweather tried to sit up.

“Your poor mother would turn in her grave. You know as well as I do that you ought not to be dinin’ alone with a gentleman.”

“It will not matter because he has no idea who I am,” Gretna answered. “I am not a Society miss to be chaperoned and cosseted. I am just an ordinary girl – your niece from a farm – that makes it quite all right, doesn’t it?”

Mrs. Merryweather grumbled,

“You don’t know what you are talkin’ about, you silly child. You are to stay up here, I tell you. Stay with me. I won’t have you goin’ down there. His Lordship is not the sort of person who you should be dinin’ with.”

“What sort of person is he then?” Gretna enquired. “Have you remembered what it was you had heard about him? Do tell me.”