Peter had managed to keep his leg draped over the chair all this time. Sophia wondered that it hadn’t fallen asleep. Or fallen off. He snapped his paper in half loudly, making sure the Guardian logo remained visible. “The day’s work all finished?” he asked. “Servants all bullied? Monies gouged? Tendencies to modernism eradicated?”

“And the peasants trod under my horse’s hooves, Peter,” said Sir Michael, settling into his chair. “It’s been a very satisfactory morning.”

“Is it me, or has Peter become rather a sad figure?” Sir Michael asked a short while later. He was walking with Sophia in the garden. The two of them treading slowly in step down the flagstone path between scarlet dogwood and robinia. Column fragments, and statues weathered to near-shapeless hulks, stood at intervals in the wild grass, lining the way: the garden had been the abbey cloisters some five hundred years before. “All that moral superiority and outrage,” he went on in an undertone. “I suppose it’s what one clings to in lieu of success, but still …”

“He only does it to provoke you,” said Sophia. She took his arm. Being wifely, on purpose. Because it soothed him. Because it relaxed them both.

“All that talk about the people.” he said, in his favorite harrumphing lord-of-the-manor style. “Sounds like an American. We the people. I mean, it’s incredibly sentimental, isn’t it? He should be better than that.”

Sophia lifted her face to the bracing northern wind. Watched the huge cumulus clouds crossing like a ghostly fleet in the broad blue sky. The red dogwood swayed around her, the robinia swayed. She felt her father’s thick bicep under her fingers, under the tweed, and she leaned against him. Life always seemed more tolerable to her out in the garden.

“The people have had this century pretty much all their own way, as far as I can see,” Sir Michael was going on. “And what have we got for it? More mass slaughter than all the crowned heads of history combined could ever have dreamed of. Gas chambers and cultural revolutions, that’s the work of the people. Then, when a Churchill or a Roosevelt sorts things out for them, they start wailing, ‘Oh, it was our leaders who did it, our leaders misled us.’ Well, who were their leaders? Cobblers and peasants and house painters. What did they expect? The people. Anything they can’t murder, they degrade. Television, fast-food restaurants …”

Modern art, thought Sophia dreamily.

“Modern art,” Sir Michael said. “ ‘The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right.’ You know who said that?”

She stroked his sleeve affectionately, thinking, Alexander Hamilton.

“Alexander Hamilton,” Sir Michael declared. “And he was in the we-the-people business long before Mao Tse-Peter in there.”