“Milady!” Julius shouts, at the door not at the window, though he can plainly see her, see all of them, standing in a row, their eyes riveted to his figure. “Mother! Come greet your beloved son.”

At the word, Thomas turns away in disbelief.

“Surely—”

Lady Naylor’s face is stony.

“Indeed. My son from my first marriage. And you are my second husband’s sister’s child. I tried to work it out the other day. The correct terminus. Some manner of cousin, I suppose. In a roundabout way.”

She eyes Thomas blandly, then walks over to the door. “I see he omitted to mention it to you at school. An oversight, no doubt.”

She pauses before opening the door. “Well, unless you are dying to greet your schoolmate, I suggest you and Charlie return to your luncheon. I expect my little Jules will want to talk in private. He and I have business to discuss.”

ф

For the next few days they see little of Lady Naylor. She spends hours locked in with her son, then withdraws to her private quarters for all but meal-times, where she presides with grim politeness over a table split in half between her children and her guests.

Thomas expects to feel annoyed by her change: shut out, rejected, replaced; more than half his questions still unanswered. Instead, something else sets in, a newfound sense of freedom. For the first time since the day of their arrival, he and Charlie find themselves thrown together, with time on their hands. That, and Julius’s presence — his smug malice; his strutting grandiosity — makes it feel like a weekend at school.

More familiar now with the routines of the household, no longer worried about causing offence by poking their heads where they don’t belong, they go tearing through the estate. Initially, the explorations dispense with talk. It is a relief to Thomas. There has been so much talk since their arrival, so little time for the words to settle.

Their exploration unearths a whole series of wonders. The stables, for one thing, turn out to be a whole system of sheds, workshops, kennels, and living quarters, so extensive they feel like a roofed and rambling village all their own. Amongst the three dozen or so hunting dogs there is a Russian borzoi with a chest so deep, its fur almost brushes the ground. Farther back the body tapers into a waist so narrow, a child could encircle it with its hands. In another shed, uncaged, unchained, Lord Naylor’s mastiff whiles away its days, sleeping with both paws draped over an axe handle he has claimed, they are told, from earliest puppyhood. The dog is said to weigh one hundred and twenty-three pounds, and is kept on largely because “it’s bloody hard to shift.”