Isobel and Giles had provided a room in the main house to be available for tutorials. It was known as the tower room and was reached by a stone staircase in the oldest part of the house.

In the days of Giles’s grandparents it had been the butler’s bedroom – a butler who was said to be so good at his job that he was kept on despite bouts of extreme drunkenness when he terrorised the entire household. So great was his competence – when not in thrall to the whisky bottle – at running the house, cleaning the silver, looking after the considerable cellar and generally organising the lives of his employers that after Giles’s grandfather died his grandmother had preferred to keep a lead-weighted cosh hanging by her bed in case she ever had to deal with her butler on an off-day, rather than give him the sack and lose his services. She had not apparently had to resort to wielding this fearsome weapon but one winter night, after a drunken orgy, he had descended the stairs head first and fallen to his death. Ever since, his ghost had been said to haunt the tower room, several people over the years claiming to have heard sounds of uneven footsteps and stentorian breathing when there was no one to be seen. No servant had been prepared to sleep there since, which was hardly a problem nowadays, Giles said, because there were seldom any living-in staff at Glendrochatt, most of the Grants’ helpers occupying cottages on the estate. It seemed an ideal room for occasional use by visiting instructors – during daylight hours. So far neither Catherine nor any of the other tutors had complained of an unwanted presence during their tutorial sessions, though no one was very keen to go up the stairs alone at night.

At two o’clock, unconcerned about drunken butlers, live or dead, but very anxious to hear Catherine’s professional opinion of his writing, Christopher climbed the steep steps and found her waiting for him with the door ajar. The room had been pleasantly furnished with an oak refectory table in the window on which Catherine could lay out any papers she was working on, and there were several comfortable chairs. Ancient tartan curtains hung at the long, narrow windows and some dark oil paintings in heavy gilt frames embellished the walls, though it would have been difficult to hazard more than a guess as to their subject matter. Giles had long indulged a fantasy that if he ever felt rich enough to have them cleaned one of them might turn out to be a Rembrandt, though no art connoisseur had so far given him any grounds for hope.

Christopher could see immediately that the manuscript he had left with Catherine the first evening was on the table. The years seemed to roll back and he felt as if he were waiting outside his housemaster’s study at school.