As the door shut behind them, Carina sat down in a chair. At last she was alone – at last she had a chance to think of that strange conversation with Lord Lynche and the even stranger apparition of a valet who had disappeared apparently into thin air! And Lord Lynche had undoubtedly been annoyed to see her on that staircase.

‘There is something going on here and I would love to know what it is,’ she thought with a little glint of mischief in her eyes. ‘I believe I have stumbled on another of their secrets, one of the many that are hidden from the world.’

It would be fun to be able to blackmail Lord Lynche a little, she thought to herself, and to make him do as she wanted. Perhaps she could force him to be kind to his discarded wife or even to bury her with decency.

Then she was shocked at her thoughts. What would her mother have said at her presuming to interfere with other people’s lives? And Nanny would be even more pointed in her remarks.

“Curiosity killed the cat,” she would say. Carina could hear her saying those exact words when as a child she had been curious about so much that no one would explain.

And yet however hard she tried to pretend that she must behave in a restrained and respectable manner, she could not help the question that turned over and over in her mind – where had the valet disappeared to and why?

Dipa awoke about five o’clock, but would not eat any tea. He said he had a pain in his head and after drinking a very little hot milk, turned over and went to sleep again.

The evening passed slowly. Carina wished that she had had the sense to ask if she might borrow a book from the library. She had not seen that there was one, but she knew that every house of this size usually had a magnificent library, added to by every successive generation.

There were a few children’s books in the nursery and she glanced at them, remembering one or two from her childhood but they were mostly books for boys.

After a while, she laid them aside and, looking through the luggage that the housemaid had unpacked, found a dress of her mother’s that she decided to alter. She had it spread out on a table in front of her, when a footman opened the door and asked if she would go downstairs to the library, as his Lordship wished to speak to her.

“How funny!” Carina exclaimed. “I was just wondering if there was a library in The Castle.”

“It opens off the big hall,” the footman replied. He was an apple-cheeked young man with a broad Gloucestershire accent.