“Clearly not,” Lizzie said warmly. “Whilst Jules helps me sort out this legal mess I’m going to be writing some music, just like I mentioned. Or I will be when I get the house cleaned and the garden cleared and the piano tuned and all the other stuff done that I was paying you to sort out.”

“Look, Lizzie,” Bill said, “there was no point throwing money away on that place. I...ah...I invested it for you instead. I’ll give Francis a call; ask him to send you the financial details...”

Bill, Lizzie thought, had never been so keen to involve her in discussions with her accountants before.

“Please do call Francis,” she said. “Tell him I’m moving my business to Carpenter’s. Oh, and Bill—you’re fired.” She pressed the button to end the call. It felt good. She felt free.

Humming a few lines of music under her breath, she went into the library. The heating had not yet started to make an impression on the room. It felt cold and unwelcoming and the shelves were thick with dust. In her grandparents’ time the books had all been catalogued and sorted by topic like in a proper library system. Her grandfather had been a keen antiquarian collector with a particular interest in local history. Lizzie’s father had let all of that go; in fact, she thought he had probably only kept such an esoteric collection of books to give the impression that he was cultured. Plenty of the stacks had drinks stains and cigarette burns on them.

She found what was left of the history section. Roman Britain mingled on the shelves with the history of the Habsburg Empire and Fatimid Egypt. She searched in vain for something on the Tudor period, resolving to go down to the Burford library as soon as she could to find a book about Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley. Then she saw a slim volume with a worn red leather cover and rough-cut pages. On the spine, in gold lettering it read: An Historical Account of Cumnor—with some particulars of the Death of the Countess of Leicester by Hugh Usher Tighe. The date at the bottom was 1821. Lizzie wrapped her grandfather’s big thick jumper more closely around her and settled down in the leather armchair to read.

Hugh Tighe, she quickly discovered, had been a huge fan of Sir Walter Scott. Scott had based his book Kenilworth on the story of Amy Robsart and this had heavily influenced Tighe who saw Amy as a tragic and ill-treated heroine, the victim of a ruthless and ambitious man. For all Lizzie knew this could well have been the case but she thought Amy sounded rather feeble. Whilst Robert Dudley was living it up at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, Amy pined away, neglected and alone in the Oxfordshire countryside. Eventually Robert, keen to be rid of his inconvenient wife in order to marry the Queen, had allegedly arranged Amy’s murder. “The corpse of their wretched victim was precipitated down a flight of stone stairs, which led from the long gallery to the hall below, under the hope that it might give a plausibility to a tale by which they intended to conceal their crime,” Lizzie read in Tighe’s lurid prose. “From this time the vengeance of heaven appears to have fallen, not only on the perpetrators of this atrocious murder, but also on the house in which it was committed.”