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By Root 502 0

bit as difficult as we had been led to anticipate, with Marsh silent, Alistair monosyllabic, and Lady Phillida making constant gay forays in her quest for information. Sidney Darling appeared after the rest of us had settled to our first course, full of apologies (“Trunk call to London; business couldn’t wait”), bonhomie (“Alistair old man, been a while”), and charm (“Perfectly splendid to meet friends of my brother-in-law; what a perfectly lovely frock on you, Miss Russell. I say, any relation to Bedford?”). Sidney Darling was a tall, thin, languid, inbred aristocrat with protruding blue eyes and the pencil-thin moustache and sleek light hair of a film star, dressed in a height-of-fashion dove-grey lounge suit with Prince of Wales turn-ups. His topics of conversation ran the narrow gamut from horse racing and shotgun makers to the best spots to winter along the Riviera. His response to our lack of interest in those accepted passions of the leisured class was mild surprise followed by a pitying smile. Sidney Darling did indeed set one’s teeth on edge.

Despite their traditional interests, however, I could see that the Darlings were not cut to the peer’s age-old pattern. Certainly, they were the very definition of old money—at least, the wife was; nonetheless, the Darlings moved in a social milieu that included film directors, the sons and daughters of American tycoons, progressive European novelists, and the sorts of artists more often seen in newspaper columns than on museum walls. This was, I thought, the new generation of the entitled, whose traditional studied lack of interest in the getting of money, the dictates of fashion, or human beings outside their circle was being modified to include the people and places, music and talk of the West End, Europe, and even brazen America. Indeed, Lady Phillida’s own speech reflected this, wavering as it did between the lady’s compulsory “one” and the blunt and egalitarian “I”; she had even used the vulgar term “week-end” without a hint of coyness.

Eventually, at the conclusion of one long recitation of the personal history of a prized shotgun, it registered on Darling that the rest of the table was not participating in the narrative with any degree of enthusiasm. He dabbed at his thin moustache and turned dutifully to Holmes.

“Tell me, Mr Holmes, what do you do?”

“I raise bees.”

The slightly pop blue eyes blinked. “Ah. How int’resting.”

“Very.”

Seeing her husband foundering on the rock of Holmes’ avocation, Lady Phillida decided to give me a try.

“And you, Miss Russell. Do you also keep bees?”

“I read theology. At Oxford.”

“Oh. Well. That’s rather . . . interesting as well,” she replied dubiously, her mind, no doubt, filled with furious speculation concerning the private dinner conversations that took place between the spectacularly mismatched married couple which her brother had inflicted on her for the week-end.

Alistair gave a small choking sound and reached to retrieve a hastily dropped table napkin. For the rest of the meal, we spoke about gardens.

CHAPTER SIX

Six people escaped with gratitude from the lunch table, scattering in all directions to marshal thoughts, and energies, before the dinner hour would bring us inexorably back together. Holmes and I went up to the rooms we had been given, which were in the oldest, western wing of the house but which had been made comfortable by efficient fires and an actual modern bath-room between them. My own room was a festivity of blue and gold, with a froth of silken drapes on its four posters, a counterpane of delicately embroidered silk, and terrifyingly pale carpets on the floor. Mahmoud would have given it me as a joke; of Marsh, or his sister, I could not be sure. Holmes was given the King’s room, all heavy red velvet and massive carved bed; the king had been George I, whose visit had no doubt precipitated a large part of the grand rebuilding and propelled the Hughenforts to the brink of penury.

Marsh’s suite was down the corridor in the same wing, we had been informed by Ogilby, although I thought it had pained