“We’ve both been through a lot,” I said. Her gaze held mine. We both knew what the lot was that she had been through. The betrayal. The baby she had been forced to give up. Mine had been nothing so dramatic—just the knowledge that I was not wanted in my family home and really hadn’t had any means of support until recently. “So tell me,” I went on, lifting the conversation out of this gloomy phase, “your grandmother’s will. You knew she’d left you money, didn’t you? But it was more than you expected?”

“Oh yes. Absolutely oodles of it, darling,” Belinda said. “And not just money. Some rather extravagant jewelry, for one thing. Heavy Victorian stuff, nothing I’d wear but some really fine stones that can be reset or sold. Oh, and her house in Bath. A Georgian house in one of the crescents. Très, très elegant. And”—she paused, waving an excited finger at me—“a property in Cornwall.”

“How amazing,” I said. “I thought you told me she had sold her house in Cornwall long ago.”

“That’s right, so I did,” Belinda said. “She had a lovely property near the coast, called Trengilly Manor. I used to spend my summers there, after Daddy married the witch and I was no longer welcome in my own home. I was really despondent when Granny decided that Trengilly had become too much for her and she needed to be near good doctors, good theater and good food and moved to Bath. Then I was sent off to school in Switzerland so it didn’t matter awfully much, but I still miss that house. We had such good times there. . . .” Her face had grown quite wistful.

“But now you find she owned another property in Cornwall?”

Belinda nodded. “I was astounded, darling. Why hadn’t I known about it? I don’t think it’s anything impressive like Trengilly was, but it’s supposedly in the same part of the world as the old house and it’s called White Sails. It may be really nice to have a bolt-hole on a Cornish beach when I need to get away from the world.”

She looked around. “So where is everybody? You said Darcy is off somewhere, but your mother and grandfather and Sir Hubert?”

“All deserted me, I’m afraid,” I said. “Mummy went back to Max when he sent her a telegram saying he couldn’t live without her. That made Sir Hubert decide he needed to go and climb more mountains. And Granddad is whipping the boys of the East End into shape. Everyone has something to do except me. . . .”

We broke off the conversation as Emily, another girl we had recruited from the village to train as a parlormaid, came in wheeling the tea trolley.