“Someone he met at work—Lady Emma someone-or-other.”

I remembered the last conversation with Dad; the stuff about Nelson and the French revisionists.

“Emma Hamilton?”

My mother popped her head around the door from the kitchen.

“You know her?” she asked in an aggrieved tone.

“Not personally. I think she died in the mid-nineteenth century.”

My mother narrowed her eyes.

“That old ruse.”

She steeled herself and managed a bright smile.

“Will you stay for supper?”

I agreed, and she went to find a chicken that she could boil all the taste out of, her anger at Dad for the moment forgotten. Mycroft, the gameshow ended, shuffled into the kitchen wearing a gray zip-up cardigan and holding a copy of New Splicer magazine.

“What’s for dinner?” he asked, getting in the way. Aunt Polly looked at him as you might a spoiled child.

“Mycroft, instead of wandering around wasting your time, why don’t you waste Thursday’s and show her what you’ve been up to in your workshop?”

Mycroft looked at us both with a vacant expression. He shrugged and beckoned me toward the back door, changing his slippers for a pair of gumboots and his cardigan for a truly dreadful plaid jacket.

“C’mon then, m’girl,” he muttered, shooing the dodos from around the back door where they had been mustering in hope of a snack, and strode toward his workshop.

“You might repair that garden gate, Uncle—it’s worse than ever!”

“Not at all,” he replied with a wink. “Every time someone goes in or out they generate enough power to run the telly for an hour. I haven’t seen you about recently. Have you been away?”

“Well, yes; ten years.”

He looked over his spectacles at me with some surprise.

“Really?”

“Yes. Is Owens still with you?”

Owens was Mycroft’s assistant. He was an old boy who had been with Rutherford when he split the atom; Mycroft and he had been at school together.

“A bit tragic, Thursday. We were developing a machine that used egg white, heat and sugar to synthesize methanol when a power surge caused an implosion. Owens was meringued. By the time we chipped him out the poor chap had expired. Polly helps me now.”

We had arrived at his workshop. A log with an ax stuck in it was all that was keeping the door shut. Mycroft fumbled for the switch and the striplights flickered on, filling the workshop with a harsh fluorescent glow. The laboratory looked similar to the last time I had seen it in terms of untidiness and the general bric-à-brac, but the contraptions were different. I had learned from my mother’s many letters that Mycroft had invented a method for sending pizzas by fax and a 2B pencil with a built-in spell-checker, but what he was currently working on, I had no idea.

“Did the memory erasure device work, Uncle?”

“The what?”