“I’m sorry I’m late, Miss Wyvern,” the little woman said. “The taxicab took a wrong turning and I missed my connection at Paddington.”

Phyllis Wyvern looked round triumphantly at each of us, but she said nothing.

I felt rather sorry for the little creature, who, now that I thought about it, looked like a flustered cannonball.

“I’m Bun Keats, by the way,” the woman said, giving a jerk of the head to each of us in the room. “Miss Wyvern’s personal assistant.”

“Bun’s my dresser—but she has even greater aspirations,” Phyllis Wyvern said in a haughty, theatrical voice, and I could not tell if she was teasing.

“Hurry along now, Bun,” she added. “Spit-spot! My wardrobe wants unpacking. And if my pink dress is wrinkled again, I’ll cheerfully strangle you.”

She said this pleasantly enough but Bun Keats did not smile.

“Are you related to the poet, Miss Keats?” I blurted, anxious to lighten the moment.

Daffy had once read me “Ode to a Nightingale,” and I’d never forgotten the part about drinking hemlock.

“Distantly,” she said, and then she was gone.

“Poor Bun,” Phyllis Wyvern said. “The more she tries—the more she tries.”

“I’ll give her a hand,” Dogger said, moving towards the door.

“No!”

For an instant—but only for an instant—Phyllis Wyvern’s face was a Greek mask: her eyes wide and her mouth twisted. And then, almost at once, her features subsided into a carefree smile, as if the moment hadn’t happened.

“No,” she repeated quietly. “Don’t do that. Bun must have her little lesson.”

I tried to catch Dogger’s eye, but he had moved away and begun rearranging tins in the butler’s pantry.

Mrs. Mullet turned busily to polishing the covers on the Aga cooker.

As I trudged upstairs, the house seemed somehow colder than before. From the tall, uncurtained windows of my laboratory, I looked down upon the vans of Ilium Films, which were clustered, like elephants at a watering hole, round the red brick walls of the kitchen garden.