Nine places had been set around the table, which by any measure was an odd number, and only three of the dinner guests were ladies. This curious arrangement struck Eleanor, who was one of the three ladies (Cecily Pyke and Blanche Rothe were the others), and from her place seated between Fraser Pyke and Judge Thistledon she wondered why Alasdair had accepted Charles Booker-Reid’s invitation. There was, surely, little political capital to be gained from a man who had lost the safest seat in New South Wales and who, on being newly elected, seemed unable to recall the exact location of his new constituency.

‘Eat up, eat up,’ said Booker-Reid, rubbing his hands together and presiding over the julienne soup and the medallions of foie gras, the roast loin of mutton and the lobster cutlets, the iced pudding and the out-of-season glacé strawberries with an almost pantomime glee while touching almost nothing himself. He drank a good deal though. He was a widower, his young wife perishing barely a year into the marriage of some unnamed and unknown illness.

The dead wife’s father, the explorer Sir Bertram Egremont, was here, and one of the dinner guests. Clearly the old gentleman bore no ill will towards the son-in-law who had driven his only daughter to an early grave, for he was seated, quite at ease, at the foot of the table, a brandy in one hand, the other resting on the arm of his chair. The man must be in his seventies at least but he cut a fine figure, lean and leathery with a shock of snow-white hair, seated perfectly upright in a tight fitting if outdated collar and cravat and sporting a splendid set of bushy mid-century whiskers. Sir Bertram was speaking, Eleanor saw, in that way that all men of his age had: dully and at great length and with an unshakeable belief that his audience hung suspended from his every word.