He had led his daughter out at the New Year ball and seen her eyed by the local bloods, flinging her head up and laughing, sometimes catching her lower lip in her teeth as he had first seen Elizabeth do in an apple orchard in Cornwall thirty years earlier. And best of all, he had lain nightly beside his wife, moved to acts of deep affection, a poor acknowledgement of her gentle constancy.

Nor had this idyll been rudely terminated by the intrusion of duty. In the end it had been crowned with an unexpected event, a circumstance of the utmost felicity for them all.

Two days into the new year, as the spectre of reaction began to show its first signs with the planning of arrangements to return the children to their home in Hampshire, White received an unexpected letter from solicitors in Ipswich. Sir Richard had inherited a small estate betwixt the Deben and the Aide, a remote corner of Suffolk lying east of the main highway north from the county town, within sight of the desolate coast of Hollesley Bay and comprising one modest house and two farms. The estate had once formed part of the lands of a dispossessed priory, the ruins of which stood romantically in its north­west corner.

'It sounds delightful,' said Elizabeth over breakfast, as Catherine White explained the lie of the land and Sir Richard scratched his head and pulled a face.

'Too damned far, m'dear,' he explained, 'no good to me. Belonged to a cousin o' mine. Eccentric fellow; built the place but never married. House can't be more than three years old.' White picked up the letter again, searching for a fact. 'They found him dead in a coppice, frozen stiff, poor devil.'

They had fallen silent, sipping their chocolate with the spectre of untimely death haunting them.

Later, as Drinkwater and White drew rein atop a low rise that looked west to the Palladian pile of Holkham Hall gilded in the sunshine of the winter morning, Sir Richard had turned in his saddle.