Your endless bloody class-consciousness, Kim had said. Will would like to know how he was supposed to be oblivious to class while standing in a palace with a man who’d been born there, looking at paintings of his ancestors.

“The sixth marquess, by Van Dyck,” Kim said. They were in the Portrait Room, a room full of portraits. The unlamented Lord Waring had named his rooms after Napoleonic battles, which was bloody stupid, but the stating-the-obvious names here were getting on Will’s wick just as much. “He was a drinking companion of Charles II; Rochester—the poetical earl, you know—wrote a highly offensive poem about him. We were Royalists, of course. The lady with the saccharine smile and the look in her eyes that could curdle milk is my great-grandmother, by Sir Thomas Lawrence. Allegedly she had a brief sojourn as the Prince Regent’s mistress, but who didn’t?”

He was trying to be funny. Will would have liked to be funny back, or at least give him the laugh he was working for. He couldn’t.

Footsteps echoing, they went from the Portrait Room into the Long Gallery, which was indeed long and had even more art. Lots and lots of landscapes: a few Constables showing East Anglian countryside, many more of imaginary-looking places with dramatic cliffs, or Italian cities with architecture. Plenty of still lifes too, of the kind that showed dead hares on tables surrounded by lumpy fruit and vegetables. It was probably worth a fortune. Will hated all of them except the Constables, and would have preferred to hate everything.

Kim was trotting out more names that probably meant something to the initiated: Canaletto, Van Bayeren, Fuseli. This painting had been acquired by the seventh marquess at such-and-such a diplomatic event. That one used to belong to a famous person Will hadn’t heard of. A third was considered the artist’s masterpiece. And so on.

“Don’t they have any pre-Raphaelites?” Will asked abruptly. He wasn’t sure he liked those much either, but Kim loved them. Kim filled his walls with yearning knights and soulful maidens, pictures full of hope and longing for something beyond the material. That was the romantic streak that Lord Flitby and Lord Chingford and life hadn’t managed to kick out of him, and there was nothing like it here in the procession of grand people, grand architecture, things.

“I doubt it. My father dislikes sentiment.”

That wasn’t all he disliked, Will thought, looking round at the acres of oil. He’d bet money that not one single painting here had been bought because someone loved it, and he couldn’t stand this any more. “Can we get out of here? Go outside?”

Kim nodded. He led the way along, and round, and down the stairs to a corridor where they came face to face with Lord Chingford.