“I see,” Lucy said, finding his dismissive attitude rather grating. “And I see it was originally called Knightstone Manor.”

Gabriel laughed heartily. “Well, Robert Catesby was hardly going to call it Gunpowder Cottage before the Gunpowder Plot, was he? That would rather have given the game away! Ha-ha!”

“I had assumed it was given the name later,” Lucy said coldly, “because of the Catesby connection.”

Gabriel nodded. “The name was given to the place in the eighteenth century,” he said. “There was an antiquarian who lived hereabouts who claimed to have found evidence that Knightstone Manor had been the home of Robert Catesby, and apparently the Lancings rather liked the notorious connection, so they adopted the name. There’s no proof of any of this though. Antiquarians weren’t like historians,” he added loftily. “They embraced the local myths and folklore as fact and caused a lot of confusion as a result. You know the local hillfort called Arthur’s Castle?” he continued, and when Lucy nodded: “The same antiquarian renamed that around the same time. Previously it had been called Knightstone Camp but this guy was convinced there was a link to King Arthur.” He snorted. “As if Arthur even existed!”

“I like to think that he did in some shape or form,” Lucy said. She was starting to see that Gabriel was a terrific intellectual snob. “I mean, not all legend and folklore is true, but often it does have a kernel of fact at the core, and that’s interesting, isn’t it?”

“It’s not history,” Gabriel said, “it’s storytelling.” His tone implied how little he rated such things.

“My aunt Verity told me wonderful stories when I was a child,” Lucy said. “It was quite inspiring.”

“She’s still busy telling stories now,” Gabriel said, showing a flash of the sharpness she had seen earlier in his sister, Persis. “All this talk of a Tudor garden at Gunpowder Cottage!” He swung around to point at the picture. “You don’t see any evidence of it in the painting, do you? It’s nonsense!”

“You seem very vehement,” Lucy said, disliking him more and more each time he opened his mouth. “If the house was derelict, maybe the garden had become overgrown and lost.”

“Perhaps.” Gabriel smiled with kindly condescension. “I think it’s a wild goose chase, to be honest, and I told your aunt that when she first raised the idea of an excavation. I always feel that history should be left to the experts.”

“Finn MacIntyre is an expert in historical gardens, isn’t he?” Lucy said. “And wasn’t his brother Charlie also a professional historian? And by the way, my understanding is that he had found proof of the connection to Robert Catesby.” She was starting to get genuinely annoyed now. Gabriel’s insistence that he knew better than everyone else was rather grating. She suspected he was bitter because he hadn’t been invited to be a part of the investigation. “Anyway,” she said, “as Finn has found some archaeological evidence, perhaps we should wait and see.”