Only Tom didn’t know how to catch yet. He opened his arms and the cushion collided softly with his chest and he’d sit down with a bump and a rattle of giggles. Yvette would say, Houp-là! Then she’d throw the cushion again, and once more Tom would bump down onto his bottom with another gale of delight. Toss, bump, giggle, houp-là. Five, six, a dozen times. I lace my fingers together and stare hard at Sir Gregory, try to armor myself with his bright breastplate but this memory is a heavy spear and I didn’t see it coming.

It must be years since I was last ambushed like this.

Silently—or rather, without speaking, since the action has a soundtrack of gasps and grunts—Lady Brock rises to her feet and crosses the room. There is a clink of glass, and then a small neat whiskey is placed on the table near my knee. She fusses with the curtains, drawing them wider, allowing me to drink it without an audience. I bind my fingers around the glass and bring it to my lips. The alcohol lights a familiar path down into my chest, unifying this time with all the other times a stiff drink has brought me to my senses, making me feel old. Making me feel better.

Lady Brock leaves the curtains, collapses herself carefully back into her seat opposite me. Her face is ancient in the brightening daylight, her eyes hooded.

“Oh, what do they know, the young,” she barks suddenly. “My goodness, when I moved here, it was like being eviscerated. Things I hadn’t noticed for decades, a pair of Michael’s riding boots, for example—brought him back as if he was standing in the room wearing them. He died in ’39, a week before war broke out. We had no children. He’d been gassed on the Western Front in 1917 and his lungs slowly filled up.”

This, I think, is suffering of a different order.

“A very long war,” I say after a moment.

“Exactly. Seeing a life like Michael’s—witnessing it at close hand: he drowned, essentially—means that I come to church for form’s sake only. I believe in form, you see, but not God. I don’t have any truck with Him.”

I sip my drink. “That strikes me as an entirely understandable attitude.”

Her eyes sharpen. “No guff, then?”

“What?”

“Spiritual guff. You haven’t tried to persuade me of the reward in heaven and so on.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Good. No conceivable afterlife is worth what he went through. Now.” She brings her bony knees together, clasps her fingers around her now empty mug. “Morale. You’ll be busy enough, which is good. Keep busy, and fill up those little empty corners with Scotch. Or golf, like your smooth young curate.” A glimmer of a grin. “Are you feeding well? Doesn’t look like it.”