Isobel looked at her watch. ‘We mustn’t be too long,’ she said to Evelyn. ‘We’ve taken up so much of your time already. Why don’t Louisa and I go and gather up Morwenna and John, while you fill Marnie in with any further bits of information?’

‘Excellent – you do that, darling, but don’t feel you need hurry away on my account. It does me good to see people and this is such an unusual story – I want to know more myself.’ Evelyn nodded encouragingly at Marnie. ‘Ask me anything you like, my dear. I only hope I can tell you what you want to know.’

‘Can I stay to hear it too?’ asked Christopher as Isobel and Louisa went out to the gardens. He and Marnie settled down on the sofa together.

‘Now then . . . what do you want to ask me first?’

‘Where the house is and how to get there . . . who it belongs to now . . . perhaps most of all, did you actually know the Contessa?’

Evelyn considered. ‘I certainly met her, because our families were old friends and my parents used to stay with her parents for shooting parties and social weekends and occasionally I was taken along with them. I have vivid recollections of what Lucy-Anne Drummond-Gray looked like. She was the sort of person you couldn’t help being aware of if you were in the same house, let alone the same room, as she was. It wasn’t just her marvellous hair or her beauty – and she was truly stunning to look at – but she had that other, indefinable quality which I suppose you might call “presence”.’

‘Charm?’ suggested Christopher.

Evelyn considered this and said dubiously, ‘Not exactly charm, though I’ve no doubt she could be extremely charming if she chose, but it doesn’t seem quite the right word to describe her somehow. It was something harder than charm; more challenging, more exciting . . . more dangerous. A sort of devil-may-care attitude. I don’t think she ever gave a hoot what anyone else thought of her.’ She went on: ‘But of course she was a good bit older than me and it seemed a huge gulf at the time. I was a child in the nursery and she was almost grown up and in a different world.’ She laughed. ‘But I was always fascinated by her and by her reputation! She cast a spell. I remember listening avidly to my mother and my governess having shocked conversations about her exploits. If they realised I was eavesdropping they would immediately stop discussing her and exchange a “not in front of the child” look, so I used to sit quiet as a mouse, lapping up the stories. All the young men in the neighbourhood were supposed to be madly in love with her and she certainly led her parents an awful dance. Had she still kept her extraordinary beauty, even in old age?’