It suddenly dawned on me that he was not a guest, but one of Sir Toby’s servants. I wondered if his master had given him permission to swim in the pool. I tried to imagine one of our servants daring to swim nude—not that we had a pool, and the loch was too cold for nude bathing—but I’m sure they would never have considered such unseemly behavior. The words “Not quite one of us,” a sentiment expressed one way or another several times to describe Sir Toby, passed through my head. Perhaps servants of the old school didn’t want to work for him, in spite of his money.

I waited in a circular entrance hall with a white marble floor. Around the walls were Roman or Greek busts—and I was pretty sure they were not copies. From a room beyond a voice boomed, echoing unnaturally loudly, “Yes, Johnson, what is it now? A visitor? Well, you can see I’m in the bath, damn it. If it’s that slimy little toad Schumann again, tell him he’s wasting his time. He’ll get nothing out of me and if he tries to pursue this, he’ll be sorry.”

There was a pause. Then I heard him say, “What? Who? Well, that’s different. Show her into the drawing room, get her something to drink. I’ll be along in a jiffy.”

Johnson appeared, looking a trifle embarrassed. “Sir Toby suggests you wait for him in the drawing room, miss,” he said.

“I heard.” I shared a grin with him.

“This way.” He led me through the entrance hall into a sumptuous room. The walls were lined with what even I, with my lack of knowledge, recognized as paintings of masters old and new. Wasn’t that a Renoir, and that a Van Gogh? And on various shelves and tables there were beautiful objects—cabinets of fine porcelain, silver bowls and, in a glass-topped table, I thought I recognized his collection of snuffboxes. I inched closer.

“What may I bring you to drink?” Johnson asked.

“What? Oh, a citron presse would be very nice,” I replied.

“A what, miss?”

“Fresh lemonade, you know.”

I moved toward the table. What a lot of snuffboxes there were—silver ones, gold ones, boxes carved out of jade . . . and surely that was the queen’s box in the middle? I tried to remember the exact description. I’d only know the truth if I could open the lid and see the picture of Marie Antoinette in a frame of diamonds. I wondered how easily the lid of the table would lift up—oh so casually I put my hand on it and started to raise it gently until—

“Ah, there you are,” boomed the voice behind me. “Delighted you came, my dear.”