“I wish . . .” I heard myself saying out loud, but when I analyzed it, I didn’t quite know what I wished. Probably that I had a place where I still belonged in the world. I was just about to walk past when the front door opened and none other than my brother, Binky, current Duke of Rannoch, came down the steps, adjusting the scarf at his neck as he came. He was about to walk past without noticing me but I stepped out in front of him.

“Hello, Binky,” I said.

He stopped, startled, then blinked as if he thought he was seeing a mirage. “Georgie. It’s you. Blow me down. What a lovely surprise. We didn’t know you were in town.”

“I didn’t expect you to be in town either,” I said.

“We came down a couple of weeks ago,” he said. “Fig’s aunt just died and left her a nice little legacy, so we decided to have a central heating system put into Castle Rannoch. It can be beastly cold in winter, can’t it? And little Adelaide gets such nasty croup. So while they’re putting in boilers and pipes and things we decided to come down to London. We have to look for a governess for Podge anyway so it was really killing two birds with one stone. But enough of our boring lives—how about you? What have you been doing? The last we heard you were staying with the Duchess of Eynsford.”

“A lot has happened since then,” I said. A spasm of guilt passed through me that I should have written to my brother more often. Then I told myself that Fig would probably have burned the letters anyway. “But are you on your way to an appointment? I could come to visit when you have time and give you all my news, rather than standing here in the street freezing.”

“Come in now, if you’re not too busy,” he said. “I was only going down to my club to read the morning papers and Fig would love to see you.”

This later was completely untrue, I was sure, but I wasn’t going to turn down the invitation. “I’d love to see everyone,” I said. “It’s been ages since I’ve seen Podge and Adelaide. Are you still calling her that, by the way? It doesn’t seem the right sort of thing to call a baby.”

“I call her Dumpling, because she has round chubby cheeks,” Binky said, “but Fig doesn’t like that and Nanny insists on calling children by their proper names. No baby talk and no nonsense.”

“You have a new nanny?”

“Yes. Fig’s idea, actually. She felt that our nanny was too old and too indulgent. So she pensioned her off. Must say I don’t quite take to the new one. Too modern and efficient and worries about germs.”