The uninitiated, however, could find him conversationally taxing. There were plenty of subjects about which he knew a great deal – sometimes unexpected ones – and on which, once launched, he could be extremely interesting, but he was painfully shy and it wasn’t easy to get him going. Giles maintained that he was like one of his own cars – you had first to know how to swing the sometimes unyielding starting handle, and then how to adjust the choke to feed in the right conversational mixture.

Isobel, who had placed Lord Dunbarnock on her left, had taken a deliberate gamble in putting Marnie on his other side. Giles thought she should have put Louisa, who had met him several times before, next to him. Louisa’s social skills were well up to the challenge of flirting decorously with Lord Dunbarnock – enough to flatter, but not enough to alarm him – but Isobel wanted to see how Marnie would cope with the challenge. She had a hunch these two awkward but curiously endearing characters might take to each other. She was not disappointed. It was not the elderly or the peculiar that Marnie found threatening, but the glamorous and socially confident. From the moment when Isobel switched her attention from Neil Dunbarnock to Jonathan Mercer, he and Marnie got on famously. By the end of lunch Neil Dunbarnock, enchanted to discover a fellow blues and jazz enthusiast who could match him fact for fact on such details as the Mississippi river boats on which “old Satchel-mouth” Louis Armstrong had first played and sung, had suggested that she come over to Dunbarnock to inspect his collection of jazz recordings, which included such legendary New Orleans’ blues greats as Bessie Anderson and Billie Holiday – a rare invitation for a new acquaintance – and Marnie had confided in him about her search for a particular and possibly non-existent ancient house.

‘I hope you find it,’ he said. ‘I will give it some thought. How much longer are you staying here?’

‘Another week. We’ve been too busy writing to do any exploring yet, but Giles and Isobel are going to show us something of the neighbourhood next week.’

‘Then I’ll talk to Isobel and see if they could bring you all over for a drink. You might enjoy seeing my house. It’s what is sometimes called a “fortalice” – a fairly typical fortified house with a tower and a good hotchpotch of styles. Most of my ancestors have meddled with it in some way over many generations. You have to realise that there are many so-called castles in this part of the world. Anything with pretensions to a tower and sprouting a few bunion-like turrets here and there gets called a castle – as mine is. Some of them are the genuine article and some of course are purely Victorian.’

‘What bits of yours have you meddled with?’