I noticed she wasn’t wearing her stylish driving cap, but the sort of scarf one wears for horse trials. I had been foolish enough to put on my felt beret and had to hold on to it for dear life. We rounded the headland with the standing stone looking down on us. In the light of day it looked like a large lump of upright granite, nothing more sinister. Ahead of us was the Camel Estuary gleaming in the sun. The tide was now partially out and the water flowed between sandbars. On our right a high brick wall ran along the road. Behind it was a stand of Scots pines and in the middle an impressive wrought iron gateway with a gravel drive leading away down the hill. I hadn’t noticed this the night before, but then I had been too intent in making sure Belinda didn’t drive us over a cliff.

“Is that your grandmother’s former house?” I asked.

“No, hers will be coming up in a little while,” Belinda answered. “Nothing as impressive as this. That’s a place called Trewoma Hall. The local stately home. I was taken there once for a garden party but I don’t think I ever went inside much. The situation is quite lovely—on the cliffs with a view over the estuary and the ocean.”

“Who lives there?”

“One of the important Cornish families own it. Trefusis is their name. They own a lot of land in this part of the world, and fishing rights and goodness knows what else. Very wealthy. Their daughter, Jonquil, was one of my playmates when we were small.” She paused and made a face. “I was about to say one of my friends, but that wouldn’t have exactly been correct. She was superior to me in every way.”

“Superior to you? Your own grandmother was a lady, wasn’t she? Your father is not exactly a peasant.”

“Well, let’s just say that she thought herself superior to me. She was two or three years older, for one thing. Very sophisticated. Frankly I was in awe of her. A little scared of her. She went to Roedean that, as you know, likes to think of itself as the premier girl’s school in England. And she’d traveled all over the world with her father who owned land in Barbados and Argentina and God knows where else. What’s more, she was gorgeous. She had the most striking blond hair that she wore in this sleek chignon that I could never have managed. Never a hair out of place, Georgie, even when we went on one of our mad escapades.”

“What sort of mad escapades?”

She grinned. “Oh, you know the sort of thing that adolescents get up to. Bonfires on the beach, exploring old smuggler’s caves, making rafts that sank in the current. In spite of Jonquil we actually had a lot of fun.”