A stocky figure in corduroys and a green sweatshirt with Tillydrum Gardens printed on it was standing on the steps as they drove up to the front door.

‘Hi, Hamish. Lovely to see you again,’ said Isobel, climbing out of the car. ‘I know you’re going to give my visitors a wonderful tour. This time I’ve brought a real expert to appreciate your garden. Meet Mrs Gilbert who writes a gardening column and lives in Cornwall – and this is Colonel Smithson, and my cousin Louisa Forrester, and Christopher Piper who tells me his mother is a great gardener too, and finally Marnie Donovan who’s come from the States. How’s Miss Fergusson?’

‘Not too brilliant.’ Hamish shook his head sadly after shaking hands with everyone with bone-crunching enthusiasm. ‘She can’t get about as she’d like and that’s verra, verra frustrating for her. She’s got this electric buggy which helps, but . . .’ he gave a chuckle, ‘I reckon it’s really intended for pavements and such, and it gets some rough treatment here, I can tell you. She got it bogged down in the dell the other week and it was pure luck I found her when I did, because of course she didn’t have her call-aid on her, did she?’ Hamish sounded like a doting parent talking about a talented but wayward child. ‘She asked if you’d go straight on in to her, Isobel – she’ll be in the library – and we’ll set off from here and join you later.’

Isobel waved her visitors off, put the dogs back in the car and went into the house.

Strong men had been known to go to bed in their shooting stockings when staying at Tillydrum in the winter and even in May, after an unusually hot spell of weather, the stone-flagged hall with its mock-Jacobean panelling and balding tiger-skin rugs struck chill. Though Evelyn Fergusson’s father – known locally as Sweetie Fergusson because his family fortune had been founded on the confectionary industry – had been a generous benefactor to many good causes, he was notorious for his parsimonious ways on the home front. Isobel’s own father had been full of stories of breaking ice on the drinking water in freezing bedrooms in his boyhood, when staying with his wealthy but penny-pinching uncle. Evelyn, who had lived in the house all her life and was inured to its rigours, could well have been described as a hardy perennial – her short, springy hair resembled a snow-covered tussock of couch grass and the network of fine broken veins on her pleasantly weather-beaten face looked like the root system of a small but vigorous plant. Old family photographs showed her to have been extremely pretty in her youth and some hint of former beauty remained like a distant echo, though arthritis had taken its toll and steroids had given her face a telltale hamsterish look.