The surprise no doubt came in part from having had a Tudor half-timbered extension grafted onto one side and a neoclassical wing tacked onto the other. Since the eighteenth century nothing had been added, thank heavens. The upkeep on what was already there had kept two hundred years of Stantons busy enough.

Gabe had never really envied Randall the earldom. His first adult look at Stanton Abbey gave him no reason to change his opinion. In fact he wondered that Randall hadn’t said, “Thanks, but no thanks,” long ago.

When he was ten, Gabe had thought Stanton Abbey an endlessly fascinating place. He and Randall had chased each other down long stone corridors, had hidden from Earl in the priest’s hole and had raced to see who could first get through the garden maze.

Anyone who ventured into the garden now, Gabe thought as he stared at the brambles and bushes, had better mark a trail or he’d never be seen again.

Randall had tried to warn him.

“It’s a bit overgrown,” he’d said. “We keep up with the house. Got to, you know. It’s a listed building, grade one, and all that. And Freddie’s done a wonderful job with the renovations. Still, every time I go down it seems some timbers need replacing-and there’s been a spot of bother with the rising damp.”

Rising?

Drowning, more like. Gabe could feel it permeating his bones. Had he really committed himself to living here for the next two months?

In a word, yes. And he wasn’t about to turn tail and run. Earl would never let him live it down.

Well, if Randall could do it, so could he.

He’d just find Freddie the caretaker to let him in.

Frederica Crossman was not expecting visitors.

That was why she was still in her nightgown and down on her hands and knees on the stone-flagged floor of Stanton Abbey’s dower house at ten o’clock on Monday morning, trying to coax her son Charlie’s on-loan-from-school-over-the-Christmas-holidays rabbit out from under the refrigerator.