‘But if I want a lump sum he can block me. I’m going to change that, even if I have to do as I said and haul someone in off the street to marry them.’

‘You’ve got men pursuing you by the dozen. Won’t one of them do?’

‘No, it should be someone right outside my normal life, who’ll serve his purpose and then vanish.’

Benedict laughed. ‘Then why not advertise?’

The next moment he wished he’d held his tongue, for Meryl whirled around on him, her eyes shining. ‘Benedict, you’re a genius. That’s exactly what I’ll do.’

‘There’s something wrong with this whisky of yours,’ Ferdy Ashton observed, studying the bottom of his tumbler.

Jarvis, Lord Larne, raised his head from the desk where he was working. ‘Something wrong with it?’ he asked, frowning.

‘It keeps disappearing,’ Ferdy complained. ‘I could swear this glass was full a moment ago. So was the bottle. And look at them now.’

Jarvis’s rather stern face softened into a grin. ‘You’ve got my special vanishing whisky,’ he said. ‘It always seems to be around when you’re here.’

‘Well, it’s certainly vanished now.’

‘You know where it’s kept.’

Ferdy looked around him at the library of Larne Castle as though expecting a fresh bottle to present itself for inspection. Behind the thick brocade curtains a window rattled slightly in the night wind. It was tightly shut, or at least as tightly as could be managed, but there wasn’t a window in the building that didn’t let in a draught. The place was eight hundred years old and urgently in need of repairs to help it withstand the gales. Its inhabitants protected themselves as best they could with heavy drapes and roaring fires. There was one in the grate this minute, casting a red glow over the two Alsatians stretched out on a shabby rug before it.

Nearby sat their master, also shabby despite his ancient, aristocratic title. From his appearance Lord Larne might have been one of his own tenants. His dark brown hair looked as if it needed a cut, and its shaggy disarray somehow typified him. His corduroy trousers were old and darned, as though in continual use for hard country work, which, in fact, they were. The sweater Jarvis wore over them had started life in an expensive shop, but it too had come down in the world.