Because his mother didn’t have time to go down to the gate-lodge that evening, she fried Tom slices of griddle bread in the kitchen of the house and made him his cocoa there. Patty came in with the slender-stemmed glasses she’d been sent to collect from the drawing-room, from which sherry had been drunk. ‘God, wouldn’t that crowd frighten the life out of you?’ she whispered to Tom.

The visitors so observed and remarked upon in turn observed and remarked upon the bridegroom, since none of them had met Finnamore Balt before. Invited to dinner at Carriglas on the first evening of their stay, he was mistaken by Lady Rossboyne for someone else, and in her forthright manner she said so several times before the matter was set right. The Bishop was equally taken aback, having been unaware that his wife’s young relative had become engaged to a man so very much her senior. His wife, he could divine from her expression, had been unaware also.

Mrs Camier of Unionhall was particularly surprised, for although she and her husband had known that Finnamore was an older man, she had not been prepared for the austerity of his appearance and a manner that suggested to her some inner discomfort—possibly digestive troubles. Money must come into it, her husband privately remarked to her as the party moved from the drawing-room to the dining-room. Only the young man with glasses, whose name was Villiers Hadnett, found nothing unusual about Villana’s bridegroom, being mainly interested in himself.

In the dining-room Patty was nervous with the dishes, even though Brigid had warned her that she mustn’t be. Mrs Haverty carried trays, but advanced into the room no further than the sideboard. ‘Didn’t you replace your butler?’ Lady Rossboyne enquired, noting the rudimentary nature of these arrangements. ‘Very grand we all thought you, having a butler.’

‘We hadn’t the heart to replace him,’ Mrs Rolleston replied from her end of the table. ‘And then time went on and we couldn’t afford to.’

‘Well, I never! Did you hear that, Bishop?’

I beg your pardon, Lady Rossboyne?’

But Lady Rossboyne chose not to supply the Bishop with the information she had drawn his attention to. Instead she related how she herself had been fortunate to escape unharmed on an occasion during the Troubles, when a tar barrel had been set alight in the room beneath the one where she was sleeping. The neighbouring Buttevant Court, as no doubt was well known, had been razed to the ground.

‘We were mercifully overlooked,’ the Bishop murmured, but Lady Rossboyne did not wish to hear the details of that. The child with the governess-car had shown her where the outrage had occurred. She’d naturally asked about it.

‘Linchy was his father,’ Mrs Rolleston said.

‘That child’s father? So Linchy was a married man?’