What we don’t have here is comfort or warmth, either literal or metaphorical. It may sound exciting, I daresay even romantic, to live in a decaying stately home, but let me tell you there’s nothing romantic about rotting windowsills, and freezing cold baths, and damp wallpaper. Even the most Byronic of brooding heroes would quake in the face of the groaning, ancient plumbing system. It’s less like having an actual home and more like living in a badly run museum.

Add to this the fact that the estate is about to run completely and utterly out of money and you’ll get a sense of the perpetual state of gloom that hangs all over the place like a fine morning mist. Unless our luck changes, and soon, we’ll have to sell everything when Father dies. As far as I can tell there are no practical solutions under consideration – my suggestions that we sell off land or that I get a job have been met with a level of horror that one might typically associate with Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.

I have a terrible suspicion that their hopes are pinned on my own matrimonial prospects. The fact that I am only seventeen and have no interest in getting married, settling down, or remaining at Langton once I do, doesn’t seem to be of much importance.

I, for one, would be more than happy to live somewhere where I could have a nice warm bath on demand, but Mother and Father see things quite differently. They understand their lives only in the context of this big, crumbling house and its acres of land. We’re not alone in this – what few family acquaintances we have seem to be in a similar situation, though, generally speaking, with a bit more money to throw at the problem.

All these grand, ancient names with draughty old houses to care for – it reminds me of the story of the King of Siam, who used to gift courtiers with white elephants. A white elephant was sacred and so, on the one hand, the gift represented an enormous honour, but on the other the extortionate expense of keeping the animal was enough to bankrupt a man. That’s what these houses seem like to me: great lumbering white elephants hunkered down into the land.