“It is about you,” Rupert answered. “Aunt Alyna said you are a Knight Errant and so I want to hear about you.”

It suddenly struck him that Ivan was already halfway to the house and would reach the sugar almonds before him.

Dropping his wooden horse, he ran hastily after his younger brother, shedding his paper helmet when he was half way across the lawn.

Lord Dorrington looked at Alyna with a question in his eyes.

”So I have become a Knight Errant?”

He saw a very faint flush rise against her white skin.

“Rupert wished to know what one looked like,” she explained, “and so I told him that you were one. After all, you are concerned with rescuing me from an ogre.”

“Then I hope I have been successful,” Lord Dorrington answered. “Are you happy here?”

Her eyes lit up.

“Very happy!” she replied. “Your sister has been so unbelievably kind to a stranger.”

As she finished speaking, she looked up at Lord Dorrington and realised that he was staring at her hair.

Nervously she swept it back from her shoulders as if she had just realised that it was hanging loose.

“I-I am sorry – ” she began.

“Simonetta!” Lord Dorrington said quietly, almost as if he spoke to himself.

She looked at him in surprise and then she quizzed him,

“Do you mean Simonetta Vespucci?”

“I do,” Lord Dorrington replied, “the model for Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Yet perhaps your hair is even more the colour of the picture by Piero di Cosimo, who painted her with a serpent round her neck.”

“Elizabeth told me that you had said I was to wash it,” Alyna said in a low voice. “How did you know?”

“It was skilfully done, I grant you that, but I knew that there was something wrong,” Lord Dorrington answered. “It was like looking at a picture that has been over-painted. At first I could not think what was amiss.”

She paused and then he said very quietly,

“It was criminal to attempt to alter anything so lovely.”

“Lovely?”

There was no mistaking the genuine surprise in Alyna’s voice and she continued,

“Mama has always deprecated the fact that my hair was too red. It is not a fashionable colour and she knew that Prince Ahmadi likes only very fair women.”

Lord Dorrington did not speak and she continued,

That is why she told the hairdresser that he was to bleach it. But he said it would take too long.”

“So what did he do?” Lord Dorrington enquired.

“He made a paste, which he painted all over my head and added some yellow powder. He used to touch it up every time he came to the house. I thought it looked vulgar, but Mama was pleased and so apparently was the – Prince.”

Her voice trembled for a moment.