The gentleman’s name was Ludovic Starling. Lenox had known him for a decade. Nevertheless it was a surprise to find him at the door, for there was little acquaintance between the two men.

Ludo was through and through a son of Wiltshire, with a family that had sat obstinately on the same plot of land there since the Restoration, when one of Ludo’s progenitors had remained covertly loyal to the King. This man, Cheshire Starling, a blacksmith, had received six hundred prime acres in thanks for printing twelve copies of a single handbill that denounced (with dazzlingly poor syntax) Oliver Cromwell and his people. With a grant of three hundred pounds Cheshire had erected a tidy L-shaped hall, and the generations that had succeeded him in it had been filled with dull, pasty, and, despite their fanciful surname, heavy-footed men. The Starling women had just as little enterprise, and in all the family had been content to remain just as they were, year after year and decade after decade. Century after century. No Starling was ever too dismal a failure or too great a success, and the little parcel of family money never dipped or rose too high in value. The cousins were all looked after. They were a comfortable, pointless clan.

Until Ludovic, that is. About Lenox’s age, he had gone up to university as a willowy, handsome, ambitious lad of seventeen.