Both his grandfathers were many years dead but Alasdair’s sense of Reuben and Conall burned brightly in him and had fashioned him in a way his own father had not. Of his two grandmothers, he knew almost nothing. That Conall Dunlevy had stayed in Liverpool long enough to marry a local girl, name and origins unknown, and to sire a quantity of offspring was the sum of his knowledge. As for his Sussman grandmother, she had shrunk into the mists of time, a ghostlike figure dying unnamed and forgotten in England as her disgraced husband served out his sentence on the other side of the world. His mother, Lily, seemed barely to remember her, and Lily’s two maiden sisters seemed never to refer to her, or if they had he could not, now, remember it.

They were a strange pairing, his parents, Lily Sussman and Fergus Dunlevy. Lily had had a quiet presence that somehow made her the centrepiece of every room. His father, at over six foot, a large figure by any measure, and with a brooding manner that often overtook him and kept him away from the house and in his office for days on end, filled a room yet was rarely its centre. Where Lily had an almost intrinsic sense of good taste, his father strived for it and despised it in equal measure. They had moved to a large house at Ashfield as the family’s wealth had grown, additional servants were employed, a carriage was kept, but where Lily managed the new servants without appearing to do so, Fergus avoided them and preferred to dress himself. He had rarely spoken of his upbringing, never made reference to the family he had left behind or to the Irish navvy father who had not wanted his son to take a scholarship and who had refused to speak to him once he had.

The family’s wealth had grown.