England is a small and crowded country. Enough vacant land for the type of training center the secret intelligence agency MI6 wanted to build is often hard to come by. MI6 wanted at least a square mile with buildings, which doesn't grow on bushes along every cowpath and byway.

But it so happened that, just as MI6's search was beginning, a certain earl was being buried. This earl had been at Eton with the man called J, the head of MI6, in the days before World War I. This was so long ago that neither of the men enjoyed being reminded of how long ago it had been. But the friendship had lasted down the years. It had lasted as J rose to be one of the most distinguished spymasters in the free world, and as the earl rose to be a general, complete with VC and DSO, and later became a distinguished member of Parliament. But no amount of distinction can ensure that a man will not fall from a horse and break his neck, and the earl did just that.

J attended the funeral at the earl's family seat. Afterwards the new earl ushered him into the great, gloomy, oak-paneled library. There he made J a proposition concerning the disposal of the family estate-or at least of part of it.

«You know what death duties are like, sir,» said the younger man. «We should be able to hold on to the main estate. But father was rather old-fashioned. He preferred to keep as much in land as possible. We don't have much cash, so we're going to have to sell off the Herefordshire estate.»

«Indeed?» said J, with deceptive placidity.

«Yes. It's not a great huge thing, less than fifteen hundred acres. And the house is a great wretched Victorian pile that sheds tiles and chimney pots on alternate Thursdays. But the stables are in good shape, and there's plenty of room. Also a good bit of privacy. The land's heavily wooded, and the walls and fences have been kept up fairly well. My father was a bit-ah, shirty, when it came to trespassers. Got in trouble with the county over that a few times.»