Grace knew all about affairs. Her own father had struggled with fidelity. His marriage to her mother had been punctuated by a litany of lovers. Of course, when Grace had been a girl she hadn’t been aware of how things were in her parents’ relationship, but as she had started to grow up the pattern of her father’s behaviour had become harder to ignore. First there were the rows with her mother. Grace would listen to them argue, their raised voices ricocheting around the corridors of the Hall like gunfire. Then he would be gone – not entirely, but regularly enough for his absence at meal times and family occasions to be obvious. And then the affair would end and suddenly he would be back, his affection for them all fresh like a newly painted fence. There would be presents and trips to the zoo, and life at the Hall would return to its usual timbre until the cycle began again.

Grace’s mother had just accepted her husband’s behaviour with dignity. She knew, or so it seemed to Grace, that he would always come back. The pull of her gravity was too strong for him to ignore. Her mother just had to be patient. Indeed, Grace was pretty sure that her mother had sometimes taken lovers of her own to fill the time whilst her father’s attention was distracted, but the pair of them had remained married, shared their golden wedding anniversary with a lavish party and all those other women had just fallen away like so many autumn leaves.

Could Grace do the same? Could she turn a blind eye to Charles’s infidelity and just bide her time until he saw the error of his ways and came back? Because he would come back to her eventually, of that she was certain. Charles loved her. She knew that he did, but also, he wasn’t about to turn his back on the Hall and all it stood for. And there were his children to consider.

The sudden thought of Hector and Clio being caught up in all this brought the nausea back, and Grace closed her eyes and bit her lip hard, forcing it to pass. Her beautiful, innocent babies. They must never know about any of it, she decided there and then. It had been hard for her, growing up in the shadow of her father’s lies, but if she was careful she could protect her own children from Charles’s. Hector was going away to school soon, so he would be safely out of harm’s way. Grace would just have to be vigilant with Clio and make sure that she didn’t stumble over any clues. Clio adored her fun-filled, larger-than-life father. It would break her heart to discover how he had betrayed them all.