My dear Lydia, I don’t want to pester you but I do miss you frightfully. I do wish you’d come back. Everyone goes through these sticky patches. I’m awfully sorry about what happened, and swear it won’t happen again. We ought to give it another try, don’t you think? I couldn’t stand rattling around in Frogmore Place all by myself. So I’ve shut up the house for the time being and I’m living at the club. The only other bit of news is that I had a long chat with Rex Fisher, and he arranged a private meeting with Mosley himself. Sir Oswald isn’t at all what I’d expected-and, by the way, he says I have to call him Tom now; all his friends do-I’ve never met anyone like him, in fact. He’s a real leader. The sort you feel you could follow to hell and back. Anyway, old thing, the long and the short of it is that I’ve decided to join the Party. I wanted you to be one of the first to know. I’m going to work directly with Rex. He’s got a special role in mind. All rather hush-hush. Do think about what I said. It’s just not the same without you, old girl. With my best love,

Marcus

A car door slammed in the square below. Lydia crumpled the letter and dropped it in the wastepaper basket. She threw the box of chocolates after it. The noise made her father stir in his chair but he kept his eyes resolutely closed.

Lydia went into her bedroom, where she hung up her coat and put away her hat. She stared at her pale, set face in the damp-stained mirror over the washstand.

“Damn it,” she said aloud. “Damn, damn, damn.”

She returned to the sitting room. Mr. Serridge was in the hall, shouting for Mrs. Renton. She retrieved the chocolates from the wastepaper basket, ripped off the pink ribbon that fastened the box and removed the lid. The smell of good chocolate rose to meet her. Her mouth watered. She began to eat.

8

UNTIL YOU READ Philippa Penhow’s diary with the benefit of more than four years’ hindsight, you don’t realize what a methodical man Serridge was. He always gave the impression of being impulsive, and somehow this impression was reinforced by the untidiness of his appearance. He was the sort of man whose hair always needs brushing. Who apparently needs mothering.

Sunday, 16 February 1930 We walked in Kensington Gardens this afternoon. I could not help watching the nurses and their charges. If I had married Vernon all those years ago, one of those little children might have been my grandchild. What an extraordinary thought! All that is impossible now, of course. I have made my bed and I must lie on it. It seemed surprisingly mild for the time of year and Major Serridge was in high spirits. He protected me from the attentions of an overenthusiastic Labrador in the kindest way possible. I think he is particularly fond of animals, and they instinctively trust him. We watched the children sailing their boats on the Round Pond and then walked over toward the statue of Peter Pan near the Long Water. He said the statue was charming, and that it made him wish that he could be a child again. As we were strolling back, he told me something that rather disturbed me. He said he was a little concerned about Mr. Orburn, and how he was managing Bleeding Heart Square on my behalf. He thinks he may be overcharging me. “I don’t say he’s a crook, of course, that wouldn’t be fair. But he’s a lawyer, and he’s always got his eye on his fee.” (How like the dear Major: always bending over backward to be fair to everyone.) I pointed out that Aunt and I had always used Mr. Orburn, and before him his father, for all our legal business. The Major said that perhaps that was the problem-that Mr. Orburn had become a little too used to my trusting him.

You may have read somewhere that that’s how lions catch an elephant-they isolate it from the rest of its herd: they separate it from its natural protectors.

As the crow flew, the village of Rawling was hardly more than forty miles from Bleeding Heart Square. If you were an earth-bound mortal, however, the distance was longer, and seemed far longer still. The village was six or seven miles north of Bishop’s Stortford in a bleak and sparsely populated area of country where lanes meandered from hamlet to hamlet.

The railway did not pass through Rawling itself so Rory was obliged to travel to the nearest station at Mavering. The journey took him the better part of the morning-the bus to Liverpool Street Station, a train to Bishop’s Stortford, another train on the branch line passing through Saffron Walden, where he changed again to a small, almost empty train that took him slowly to Mavering itself.

There was too much time to think. At Liverpool Street Rory found a window seat in a third-class smoker. As the scruffy suburbs gave way to the equally scruffy countryside, he found himself thinking not so much about what lay before him as about Fenella.

He had telephoned her the previous evening. She had been in too much of a hurry to talk for long-she was on the verge of going out to another of her political meetings. This one was going to be a smaller affair than the last but the same speaker, Julian Dawlish, would be there. There was talk of founding a committee, Fenella said, and Rory had heard the note of excitement in her voice without altogether understanding it. He had come back from India to find Fenella had grown into a familiar stranger.

He was glad to leave the last of the trains. Mavering turned out to be a thin, uncertain village, little more than a scattering of agricultural cottages linking two substantial farms. Only two other passengers joined him on the small platform. Both of them looked curiously at Rory, as did the solitary porter. Rory ignored them and strode away.

Narton had drawn a sketch map on the back of an envelope that showed the way to Rawling from Mavering. Fifty yards from the station was a squat little church. Rory swung onto the footpath running along the wall of its graveyard. It was muddy underfoot but Narton had prepared him for that as well so he was wearing stout boots.

Beyond the churchyard, the path dropped down between fields. It was lined with bushes and the casual trees of the hedgerow, and in the summer must have been a green tunnel. Now there were clear views of bare fields on either side and rows of feathery elms. Though it was a gray day, it wasn’t raining and the air smelled clean and unused.

After a few hundred yards, Rory slipped into the rhythm of the walk and began to enjoy himself. Even if this was a wild-goose chase, at least he was out of London. He came to a junction, where he bore right as Narton had told him to. After another quarter of a mile, the path came to an end at a five-bar gate of rotten wood with a stile on one side. Beyond it was a metalled lane.

Rory paused on the stile to light a cigarette. To the right, on the brow of a low ridge, was a red-brick house of some size set in parkland. The wall that ran along this side of the lane was in poor repair and in places had been patched with barbed wire. He jumped down and turned left into the lane, following a long, lazy bend that passed a lodge cottage on the right. When the lane straightened out, he found himself within sight of the village.

Rawling had another small, squat church. Beyond it, half hidden by a pair of Douglas firs and a majestic cedar of Lebanon, was the Vicarage. It was an ill-proportioned building constructed mainly of dirty yellow bricks, with round-headed window and door openings picked out in red. Apart from the mansion on the ridge outside the village, it was the only residence of any substance.

Rory walked up the short drive. Parked on the gravel outside the front door was a Ford 8 painted black on top and white underneath, like a penguin. According to Narton, the Vicar was a creature of habit. He usually paid calls in the first half of the morning. The second half he devoted to working in his study. Then came lunch, followed by a lengthy period of recovery.