She'd been preparing her History of British Architecture students for the trip to Abinger Manor from the first day of class. Abinger Manor, deep in the Buckinghamshire countryside, reflected every style of architecture known to Great Britain while simultaneously being the repository of everything from priceless rococo silver to paintings by English, Flemish, and Italian masters. Victoria had shown her students endless slides of coved ceilings, broken pediments, gilded capitals on marble pilasters, ornate stone drip spouts, and dogtoothed cornices, and when their brains were saturated with architectural details, she sopped up the overflow with additional slides of porcelain, silver, sculptures, tapestries, and furniture galore. This, she told them, was the crown jewel of English properties. The stately home had only recently been opened to view and the wait to see it among people who were not so fortunate as to be enrolled in the History of British Architecture class at Cambridge University's summer session was a minimum of twelve months. And that's only if the eager visitor spent days on end trying to get through by telephone for reservations. “None of this reservations-by-Internet nonsense,” Victoria Wilder-Scott told them. “At Abinger Manor, they do things the old-fashioned way.” Which was, of course, the proper way to do them.

They would see this monument to days gone by-not to mention to propriety-in a few hours, after a rather long drive across the countryside.

They were to meet that morning after breakfast at the Queen's

Gate, which gave way to Garrett Hostel Lane, at the end of which their mini-coach would be waiting for them. It was here, where the assembled students picked up their sack lunches and browsed through them with the usual complaints about institutional food, that they were finally joined by a subdued Sam Cleary and a miserable-looking Frances.