“You are a magician!” she proclaimed. “A sorcerer. You are one who can raise the dead, because that’s what I truly thought it was. Is it really mended, darling?”

“Fixed her like new, Miss Weathers,” said Mr. Herringe. He produced from below the counter a small brown bag, and patted it proudly. “She won’t be giving you any more trouble, I fancy.”

“You are a lifesaver, Ron,” said Alice. “I’m going to erect an enormous bronze statue to you right in the middle of Canonbury Square and hire a skywriter to write in the sky ‘Ron Herringe Saves Lives.’” She turned to fling a dramatic arm across the shop and caught sight of Emma by the drawer handles. “Josephine! What a lovely surprise!”

If Mr. Herringe had observed that Emma was being addressed by a name other than that which her parents, her sisters, and her friends had called her for most of her life, he betrayed not one flicker of reaction.

“What a stroke of luck running into you two Saturdays in a row,” continued Alice. “Don’t you just love the way London always throws the nicest people together? I wonder if it happens in other places? No, of course it can’t, because all the nicest people live here, don’t they? I’ve been having the most wretched drama, darling. I’m a positive nervous wreck, and if Ron here hadn’t ridden so gallantly to my rescue like the knight in shining armor that he is, I’d have toddled off to the zoo and poisoned myself with an asp like Cleopatra.” She collapsed onto a chair and fanned her hand across her chest. “I broke my iron,” she announced.

Emma decided she could use a jolt of Alice in her day. She sat down on the chair next to her and adopted an expression of suitable sympathy.

“Your iron,” she said.

“And it wasn’t just any old iron,” said Alice. “It was positively my dearest, my best iron in the whole wide world, and if my wonderful, wonderful Ron here hadn’t fixed it for me in time for ironing tonight, I just shudder to think what I’d have done.”

Saturday night ironing, thought Emma. By an Oscar winner in a Georgian house in Canonbury Square. Well, the rich were famously eccentric.

“Ironing can be quite therapeutic,” she remarked politely.

“Do you think so?” said Alice. She wrinkled her nose distastefully. “Well, each to her own, darling, but I personally find it the most tedious occupation known to mankind. Standing like a soldier over that great pile of shirts with your arm going in and out and in and out, and you keep having to splash water everywhere or they’ll dry out, and you can’t have a drink because you’ll spill it, and you can’t have a chat because you’ll get distracted and get the creases in the wrong places, and you can’t watch telly because you’ll get terribly cross with the actors—I can’t begin to tell you the shirts I have ruined over Doctor Who—no, you just have to stand there concentrating and getting so bored you just want to shriek in agony.” She stopped and looked at Emma thoughtfully. “But if you find it therapeutic, darling, then maybe it can be if one puts one’s mind to it. That’s a very good idea, in fact. I’ll definitely think about it.”