The woman on the bed opened her eyes and said in a weak far-away voice,

“Dipa – has he gone?”

“No – no, not yet,” Carina said quickly. “He is coming to say goodbye to you.”

“I love him – I love him so much. I would never have parted with him –never – never – ”

Carina felt the tears start in her eyes. How awful, she thought, to know that you are dying and that you have to leave your child with strangers.

“I will look after him for as long as I can,” she said. “I promise you.”

Lady Lynche seemed hardly to have heard her and Carina thought that she was slipping away into unconsciousness.

“Lady Lynche,” she said softly. “Lady Lynche – ”

But there was no answer.

She was suddenly aware that she was holding the Birth and Marriage Certificates in her hand. She put them carefully into her handbag and then added to them the two newspaper cuttings.

She looked at the woman on the bed. There was no doubt that she must have been beautiful in a strange Oriental way.

There was the sound of voices on the stairs and the door opened.

Mrs. Bagot came in holding a very small boy by the hand.

He was dancing, squirming about and talking in a high-pitched, sing-song voice. He had close-cropped hair, small, slit-like eyes and his skin was far darker than his mother’s. It was, in fact, the colour of a yellow guinea.

He was completely and obviously Oriental, and Carina wondered with a stab of dismay what Lord Lynche was going to think of his son!

Chapter 2

The cab was being driven very slowly along the rough road. It smelt of mildew, old hay and decaying leather.

The horse went at its own pace, regardless of occasional flicks of the whip from the driver and repeated admonitions to “gee-hup”.

Dipa was asleep in Carina’s arms.

He had been dead tired long before they got out of the train and when, after a long delay, a cab was obtained to carry them to The Castle, Carina had lifted him onto the seat beside her and he had fallen immediately into the deep relaxed sleep of childhood.

Carina knew it was only the magic word ‘Lynche’ that had persuaded the Stationmaster at Moreton-in-the-Marsh to find a conveyance to carry them to The Castle at such a late hour.

The fact that he was genuinely impressed because they were visitors to The Castle did nothing to soothe her anxiety or to lessen her fears as to what reception they would receive on arrival.

She had no idea that they would be so late.