“Well, what if they were written about me? I’ve as much right as any of you to think what I please. You’re greedy, that’s what it is, wanting the money, wanting every penny you can squeeze. And that’s why she left her literary estate to me. A pity she didn’t include the house as well!”

“Who died last?” Rachel put in diffidently, not sure she wanted to know. “If it was Nicholas, then it’s his will we’re haggling over, not hers.”

“They were the same. Everything to each other, and if that failed, the poems to Stephen, and the house to the four survivors, jointly,” Cormac told her over his shoulder. There was no resentment in the level voice that he hadn’t been included.

“I’d hate to see day-trippers wandering through here,” Susannah said, “staring like spectators at a hanging, then eating their pasties and cider out on the lawns overlooking the sea.” She shuddered. “It’s horrid.”

“More horrid if this place is lost,” Stephen declared. “She’s a major English poet, for God’s sake!”

“When was the last time you were in Stratford? Or Word-worth’s home in Grasmere?” Rachel asked. “Empty, musty, travesties of houses. Like mummified bodies, on view because of vulgar curiosity. I don’t want to see this place kept like a waxwork long beyond its usefulness, genteelly crumbling at the edges. I want-to be finished with it.”

“Or is it yourself you’re thinking about?” Stephen demanded. “Is it your own secrets they might find, browsing around in here?”

Rachel looked at him coldly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That all of us have private lives, and one day biographers will be delving into them, laying them bare in the name of scholarship. To learn more about Olivia, how she lived, who her family was-that’s the lot of us-how she came to be a poet in the first place.”

“That’s a dreadful thought!” Daniel exclaimed. There were skeletons in his family closet that he wouldn’t care to see rattled. Name him an Irishman who didn’t have them!