“And yet she made men love her,” Skye said.

“It was almost what you might call a hobby,” Jimmy replied with a note of bitterness in his voice. “And Guy Tremayne, I gather, was no exception to the rule. He was as besotted as all the other young fools who hung about Pauline and then, when he took her down to his home at Bredon to meet his uncle who had looked after him since he had been a child, she decided to marry Sir Rupert.”

“It must have been a shock for – for Guy,” Skye murmured.

“Of course it was. And it would have been better if he could have gone abroad there and then and tried to forget her, but Pauline had no intention of letting him go.”

“She sounds odious!” Skye exclaimed.

Jimmy shrugged his shoulders.

“Women never cared for her, but to men she was irresistible. I did not go to the wedding. I did not see her again until the end of 1938 when my appointment at the Embassy in Buenos Aires was announced. I had a letter from her begging me to see her and her husband before I left.”

“That was your first post in South America, wasn’t it?” Skye asked.

Jimmy nodded.

“I was very busy, as you can imagine, but I could not refuse the appeal in Pauline’s letter so I went down to Bredon and, when I heard why they wanted to see me, I understood how I could be of use.”

“How?”

“Sir Rupert had lost his nephew and heir.”

“Lost him?”

“Yes. Guy had disappeared, vanished into thin air. They had no idea where to begin to look for him. They had a vague idea that he might turn up in South America because his grandmother, his mother’s mother, had been a Mariposan.”

Skye gave an exclamation.

“That was what they meant when they said that he was of Mariposan blood.”

“Who said?” Jimmy asked.

“Never mind now,” Skye said impatiently. “I want to hear your story.”

“Sir Rupert was rather guarded as to why the boy had left home. But, when I found Pauline alone, I forced her to tell me what had happened. She told me then how Guy had been madly in love with her, but that after a visit to Bredon she had decided to marry his uncle. She was quite frank. She had felt it was time she settled down and the fact that Sir Rupert had both a title and a great deal of money undoubtedly tipped the scale in his favour.

“Guy had taken it hard and I gather that Pauline had used all her wiles to keep him at her side. She enjoyed having both a husband and what was, to all intents and purposes, his adopted son at her feet.”

“What happened?” Skye asked sharply.