“There’s more than one?”

I nodded. “To get to the one she’s mad for,” I said, “you’d need a time machine, and even then you might have trouble finding it. Her England ’s some sort of cross between Upstairs, Downstairs and The Body in the Library. If I got off the plane at Heathrow I wouldn’t know where to look for that England. But you can find it three hours from here at Cuttleford House.”

“And it’s some kind of hotel? I never heard of it, Bern.”

“Neither did I,” I said, “until fairly recently. And yes, it’s a hotel of sorts, but it didn’t start out that way. Ferdinand Cathcart built it just about a hundred years ago.”

“That’s a familiar name.”

“He was one of the robber barons, and he made his money the old-fashioned way.”

“By grinding the faces of the poor?”

“How else? After he’d made his pile, and after he’d already treated himself to a limestone mansion on Fifth Avenue and a summer place at Newport, Ferdie decided he wanted a country house. So he built Cuttleford.”

“And lived there happily ever after?”

“I gather he hardly spent any time there at all,” I said, “and he may have lived happily, but not ever after, because within five years of the completion of Cuttleford he had taken up residence in that great English country house in the sky. His heirs fought over the estate, and the one who wound up with it lost all his money in 1929 and the state took the place for back taxes. It passed through various hands over the years. After the Second World War it was a fancy drying-out farm for alcoholics, and I believe some monastic order had it for a while. Eventually it was abandoned, and then eight or ten years ago the Eglantines got hold of it and set about restoring it.”

“The Eglantines. They’re a religious order, too, aren’t they?”

I shook my head. “They’re Mr. and Mrs. Eglantine,” I said. “I forget their first names, but they’re on the brochure. I think he’s English and she’s American, or maybe it’s the other way around. They met when they were both working for a big American hotel chain, and they quit and opened an English-style bed-and-breakfast in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Then they had a chance to buy Cuttleford House, so they sold the place in Bucks County and took a shot at it.”