It occurred to Lydia that at no point had Rebecca questioned Lydia’s accusation: she had assumed that it was perfectly likely, even probable, that Robbie had shut her in the barn.

“I’ll take the coat down to the kitchen, shall I, and dry it by the fire. That mud will soon brush off.”

“Thank you. Tell me, what was she like? Miss Penhow, I mean.”

“I called her Mrs. Serridge, of course. She was all right, quite a nice little thing. I was only with her for a week or two, but we got on fine. She gave herself airs sometimes but there was no harm in it. And you couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. She was so unhappy.”

“Was that obvious?”

Rebecca nodded. “She wanted to follow him around like a spaniel but he wasn’t having any of it. She spent a lot of time crying. Or sulking, or trying to coax him round. She thought-she thought she was, well, attractive to him. That she could win him round that way. But then she found she couldn’t.”

“Was she pretty?”

Rebecca shrugged. “She could make herself look well enough. She needed an hour in the morning to get ready. I used to help her sometimes, and she was so fussy. But she dressed quite well, I’ll say that for her. And she wasn’t bad-looking, either, not when she had her teeth in and she’d had her hair tinted. She was a lady who needed her rouge and powder. Even so, you could see just by looking at them together that he was a good ten or fifteen years younger. And then if you saw her when she wasn’t ready for company, you saw how old she really was. I dare say she felt younger than she was.”

“We all feel that.”

“Anyone with half an eye could see it was pointless.”

“What do you mean?”

Rebecca drew herself up and stood primly, her hands clasped together in front of her. “He likes the younger ones, madam. Girls.”

Lydia stood up, leaving the towel draped on the end of the bed and the flannel on the edge of the basin. Rebecca folded the coat neatly over her arm and opened the door. It was odd, Lydia thought, and rather unsettling, how quickly one became used to servants again. Or rather to not noticing all the little things they did for you.

“Rebecca? I found something else in the barn.”

The maid stopped, her hand on the door handle and her face anxious.

“Nothing to worry about. Something on the ledge with the skulls, right at the end in the corner. An old cigar box. Do you know anything about it?”

“It was Mrs. Serridge’s-Miss Penhow’s, I mean. I remember Robbie showing it to me.”

Lydia blinked. “She smoked cigars?”

Rebecca’s face creased into a grin. “Oh no, madam. It must have been Mr. Serridge’s once, I suppose. She used it for her diary. She was always writing in it.”

“Why on earth did she keep it there?”

“Maybe so it wasn’t obvious if Mr. Serridge went looking for it. I caught him looking through her writing desk once when she was having a bath.”

“It can’t have been very big.”

“It wasn’t. Just a little green book with hard covers.”

That explained the pencil. Lydia said, “Do you know what happened to it?”

“Not seen hide nor hair of it since I left the farm. He’ll have got his hands on it after she went, if she didn’t take it with her.”

Lydia nodded to Rebecca to open the door. As they crossed the landing and went downstairs, normality reasserted itself, and the maid, one step behind Lydia, kept her head modestly lowered and her hands clasped round the coat. The distance between them seemed ridiculous, given the nature of the conversation they had just had in the bedroom.

In the hall, Lydia turned to Rebecca and said in a low voice, partly because things had changed between them and partly because she wanted to show that she had no desire for them to return to their old formal footing, “You’ll have to find another Golgotha, I suppose.”

Rebecca looked at her and opened her mouth as if about to speak. Then her face changed as if a cloth had been wiped over it.

“Ah,” Mr. Gladwyn said, emerging from the drawing room. “There you are, Mrs. Langstone. Fully restored, I hope?”

Lydia turned to him and smiled. “Yes, thank you. Rebecca’s been looking after me very well.”

“Good, good. Now come and get warm, and Rebecca will bring us our tea.” He stood aside to allow her to enter the room. “What was that about Golgotha?”

“No-taffeta,” Lydia said swiftly as she passed him in the doorway. “I was asking her advice about how to clean a dress.”

Mrs. Alforde was sitting smoking by the fire. She said hello but hardly looked at Lydia. She looked tired and also older, as though she had lived too much time too quickly since lunch.

“Sorry I’ve kept you both waiting,” Lydia said.

“Not at all,” Mr. Gladwyn said earnestly. “Tea won’t be a jiffy now, I’m sure.”

“You’ve been in the wars, I gather,” Mrs. Alforde said, tapping ash into the fire.

“No lasting damage except to my gloves. How was Mrs. Narton?”

Mrs. Alforde looked away. “As well as could be expected.”

“I shall tell Cook to send her some soup,” Mr. Gladwyn announced. “Ah, here is tea.”

His ears had caught the rattle of the tea things in the hall. Rebecca shouldered open the door and wheeled in a trolley. It was a generous tea, with hot buttered crumpets, two sorts of cake and two sorts of sandwiches, as well as bread and butter. Mrs. Alforde poured and Mr. Gladwyn handed round the cups, the sandwiches and a little later the cake. At first there was not a great deal of conversation. Mrs. Alforde concentrated on eating, and so did Mr. Gladwyn. Lydia picked at a sandwich and drank two cups of tea.

By the time he had reached his third cup of tea, Mr. Gladwyn had time for his conversational duties as a host. “Yes, Golgotha,” he said. “A foolish mistake of mine-though I suppose it’s natural that a clergyman should hear Golgotha rather than taffeta. Curiously enough-” here he leaned back in his chair and stretched out his legs “-it reminds me of rather a good story that went the rounds when I was up at Cambridge. There was a gallery in the university church, you know, which was where the heads of houses sat. And we undergraduates always called it Golgotha because it was the place of the skulls or heads.” He paused and beamed at them, preparing them for the climax. “And of course we young wags used to say that Golgotha was the place of empty skulls.”

He glanced from one face to another, clearly expecting a suitable response. Lydia managed a smile, and hoped that her expression implied that she was suppressing with difficulty an almost overwhelming desire to laugh immoderately.

Mrs. Alforde merely set down her cup on the table and reached for her cigarettes again. Lydia realized that she had not been listening to a word that Mr. Gladwyn was saying.

Neither of them spoke much on the drive back to London. Lydia was glad of this for several reasons, not least because it was dark and both Mrs. Alforde’s driving and her temper had become even more erratic. They reached Bleeding Heart Square a little after seven o’clock. Mrs. Alforde stopped the car outside the house.

“Would you like to come in for a drink?” Lydia asked, glancing up at the facade of the house, at the lighted windows on the first floor; the top-floor windows were dark. “It looks as if Father’s in.”

“No, no, thank you,” Mrs. Alforde said, too baldly for politeness. “I must get back to Gerry.”

Lydia was relieved, partly because she wasn’t sure what state either her father or the flat would be in, and of course finding something to drink might be difficult. She thanked Mrs. Alforde, who in turn thanked Lydia for keeping her company and hoped that she had not found Rawling too dreary. She murmured something about getting in touch soon and drove off rather quickly.

That night Lydia slept badly, skimming on the surface of unconsciousness, moving in and out of dreams which never made sense enough to be frightening but which left her profoundly uneasy. There was too much to think about. Sometimes she thought she heard dance music, and at other times a woman crying and the sound of Mr. Gladwyn’s measured voice as the mourners clustered around Narton’s open grave. And what had happened to Mrs. Alforde? She had seemed almost hostile on the way home. She badly needed to talk to Rory. If only he had been at home. And that in itself was a thought that made her restless because it took very little to imagine him with Fenella Kensley instead.