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cheered an end to the fighting and privations. They had been adults, had known what they were doing.

All right, eight years after and Hitler was still bogged down fighting the Russians, and maybe it would have been the same for us, the war going on endlessly, wearing us down, making us grayer and poorer every year. Or maybe there would have been a Bolshevik revolution here. I know Daddy was very afraid of that—there were strikes and demands even during the war. But we might have won, have set all of

Europe free, as we did at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, made a peace like Vienna, not a peace like

Versailles—this was David talking. I’d never thought like that until I met him.

Daddy came in then. “How are you this morning, Luce?” he asked, ringing the bell.

“Claustrophobic,” I replied.

Lizzie came in. “Bring me toast and sausages, bacon, black pudding, and fried potatoes,” Daddy ordered.

“Yes, sir. Anything more for you, Mrs. Kahn?”

“Just some more hot water for the tea, please Lizzie.” It had got too strong.

“Is that all you’re having?” Daddy asked disapprovingly. “An egg and bread and butter? You’ll never get strong on that. Bring Miss Lucy a rasher, Lizzie. You can eat one rasher, Lucy.”

“No, thank you, Lizzie, I don’t want any bacon,” I said.

“Haven’t given it up, have you?” Daddy asked. Lizzie bobbed a curtsey and went out, getting out of the line of fire.

“No, and as you’ll have noticed at dinner last night, both David and I happily ate the roast pork and applesauce. I just don’t feel like bacon this morning.”

“All right. Sorry, Bunny,” Daddy said. “Bunny” was his pet name for me since I was small.

“What’s making you feel penned in? The police or the press?”

“What about the press?” I asked.

“Clock Farthing is apparently packed full of them. The police tell me that any of us would be likely to be

mobbed if we try to leave.”

Lizzie came back in with a jug of hot water for me and Daddy’s glass and chrome French coffeepot. She put them down where we could reach them and went out again.

“I saw

The Times,”

I said, indicating it. “I suppose the press are a necessary evil.”

I made myself another cup of tea. Half an inch of tea and the rest of the cup hot water, blissful, almost like the real thing.

“We can gag them when we want to,” Daddy said. “If it’s a national security issue, for instance.

We try not to do it too much. Something like this, well, it’s obvious they’d have a field day.” He picked up the paper and read a few lines. “ ‘Tragic waste of his genius.” What twaddle. James wasn’t a genius, though he was a sharp man, and good at seeing a job through.“

“He persuaded Hitler to make peace with us and attack Russia,” I said.

“Hitler was panting to attack Russia,” Daddy said, pushing down the plunger on his coffee. “He might have done it even without patching up a peace with us first. Even The Times admits that it was Hess who started the negotiation.”

Lizzie came back in, carrying a covered plate. “I’m sorry your lordship, but there’s no black puddings.

Mrs. Smollett is out of them, and we’re not allowed to go to the village.”

Daddy threw down the paper in irritation. “Very well, very well,” he said. “Give me what you have.”

“Mrs. Smollett has given you an extra sausage and two more rashers to make up,” Lizzie said, putting the plate down.

Mark and Daphne came in at that moment. Daphne was heavily made up. Mark looked handsome and untouchable, as always. “Bacon and scrambled eggs, and coffee,” he said breezily to Lizzie.

“I’ll have the same as Lord Eversley,” Daphne said, sitting down beside me. “Is there tea?”

“I’ll bring tea, madam,” Lizzie said, and rushed out.

“There’s no bloody black pudding,” Daddy said.

“You sound more distressed about that than about poor James being dead,” Mark said.

“Poor James,” Daddy mocked. “I can see he’s our new martyr. Pity there isn’t a General Election; we’d be sure to win on the sympathy vote. And what the devil were you doing going into his bedroom anyway, Mark? Not up to your tricks again?”

Mark glanced at Daphne, who was staring at the rather frightful picture on the opposite wall. It’s said to be early Dutch and from the school of someone or other, but it’s a terribly dark picture of lots of very dead silvery fish on a slab. Mummy hated it, and as she never ate breakfast she put it in here to intimidate everyone else. I was used to it, but I’ve seen visitors change their minds about eating after seeing it. Then

Mark looked at me, and back at Daddy, who had speared a piece of sausage as if it were an enemy.

If Mark didn’t trust me, I didn’t like to say that I already knew it was Daphne who had found the body. I

had finished eating in any case, so I stood up.

“Going, Luce?” Daddy asked, looking up from his plate. “How would you fancy a ride in an hour? We’d better not go off the property, but we could go up to the woods and around the
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lake, get some exercise.

No point in keeping the horses down here eating their heads off for nothing.”

It was a wonderful idea, and it brightened the day immediately. I hadn’t ridden in months—riding in

London was no fun, going up and down the Row with everyone watching, more like showing a horse than riding one properly. Daddy was like that. He’d seem gruff and selfish, and then he’d see the right thing to do and suggest it.

“I’d absolutely love to,” I said, and Daddy smiled at me in a pleased kind of way. I went up to my room to change.

I hadn’t brought riding clothes down with me. But I knew I had an old pair of black jodhpurs in the back of my closet unless Mrs. Simons had turned it out. She hadn’t. They were hanging there among the other bits and pieces I hadn’t bothered to take with me when I married, the lilac jacket with the stain on the pocket, the ghastly gold lame dress Mummy insisted I wear to be presented, the brown leather jacket, much too big for me, that I used to use as a dressing gown when scuttling to the bathroom in the winter. I

pulled on the jodhpurs, struggling to do them up. I’d put weight on in London. I added a cream pullover and the jacket of my heather tweeds. I’d brought the tweeds because tweeds are always correct in the country, and I really didn’t have any idea what Mummy intended.

I went down to the stables and got Harry to saddle Manzikert and Trafalgar. I spent a little while saying hello to the horses, who were mostly old friends. There was one new little brood mare Daddy had picked up somewhere, called Clover, and a new colt out in the paddock, by Issus out of Valley Forge.

Harry said they were calling him Dunkirk.

“I haven’t had much time for the horses this year,” Daddy said as he came up. “I miss your help in the stables.”

“I miss the horses,” I admitted.

“You could take Manny,” he said. Harry led the horses out and I swung myself up onto Manny’s broad back. “She’s yours by any measure—you’ve ridden her for years.”

I patted her neck. “I’m tempted, but I don’t have anywhere to keep her and she’d hate to be kept in a hacking stable. Anyway, you know I never ride in London.”

“When you and David get yourself a country place,” Daddy said, “you could start a stud.”

“One day,” I said, though I knew that David loved London and loved his work. David had a kind of bank, funded partly by his family money and partly by my money that I’d brought with me when I

married him, and the bank loaned money in tiny amounts to poor people who wanted to start up in business or expand the businesses they had. Many of his customers are Jews and many of them are women, and there are little corner shops and traveling plumbers and building firms all over the country that are thriving now where otherwise people might be on the dole, all because David believed in his scheme and made it work. He hated to leave it even for a few days. I didn’t think he’d ever want to live in the country.

Harry asked Daddy if he wanted his shotgun. “Not while the birds are out of bounds,” he said.

“I could pot a rabbit or a hare, but where’s the sport in that? Besides, Mrs. Richardson wouldn’t deign to put it on the table, hey?” We all laughed at that.

“I’m very partial to jugged hare,” Harry said.

“So am I,” Daddy said. “And hare with raspberry sauce.”

“Mrs. Smollett does a lovely jugged hare,” Harry said.

Daddy took the shotgun and slung it across the saddle. “Just for you,” he said.

We walked the horses until we were up on the turf. Then we brought them to a trot, into a canter, and at last a good gallop.

Manny definitely needed the exercise, she was raring to go, and Trafalgar gave her a good race.

If we’d gone on we’d have been on land that was part of Adams’s farm, so Daddy pulled up and turned onto the track through the woods, where we had to walk them. The horses were happy enough to walk, having had a little run, and it did mean we could talk.

“Can the police really make us stay on our own land?” I asked.

“Yes and no,” Daddy grunted. “They can ask us to, and we will, of course, because we don’t want to pervert the course of justice. If we really wanted to go, they couldn’t stop us without arresting us. Your mother says if they don’t let us go tomorrow she’s going to drive down to the gates and dare them to arrest her in front of the press and the whole world. They wouldn’t do it, of course.”

No, they wouldn’t arrest Mummy, or Mark Normanby, even though pretending he’d found the body when Daphne had was actually coming much closer to perverting the course of justice than I’d like to go.

They might arrest David, though, if we tried to leave. It would give them an excuse. Nobody would protest, least of all the press, who were always stirring up hatred against Jews. I hoped they’d find the real murderer soon.

The woods were beautiful, bluebells everywhere, and the trees in just their best leaf, all the green looking newly washed. The sun kept going in and out of the clouds, and every time it came out the landscape lit up again, so you never got tired of it. There were lots of ferns just uncurling under the trees—I kept feeling that I might catch one in the act. There was also a terrific amount of very vibrant moss anywhere it was shaded and the slightest bit damp, which Daddy shook his head at but which I privately thought very beautiful. We came out of the woods by the lake, where we could trot a little. We saw a few hares, too far and too fast to shoot, and plenty of whirring wood pigeons making, as Hugh once said, their insistent demands for a return to the one style of architecture that really suited them: “Ro-coo-co! Ro-coo-co!”

We talked a little as we rode.

“Normanby’s a donkey, and his wife’s worse,” Daddy said. “Know anything about that?”

“I’m not sure their marriage will last,” I said, looking at the bluebells and the woods and not at Daddy. If he was feeling me out to see if I knew about Daphne finding the body, I didn’t want to play.

“It’ll last if the silly ass wants to be Prime Minister,” Daddy said, and snorted. “Divorce is a dirty word in politics. It’s important to be seen to be doing the right thing.”

“They could live apart, though,” I suggested.

“Oh yes, they could live apart.”

We rode on, not talking about anything important, and then we came back around the woods, having made a circle, to where we could gallop back downhill towards home.

Manny sensed something before I did. Maybe it was something that showed more clearly to horse sense than humans. She put up her head and whickered. I turned to Daddy to say something about her being spooked, then something whizzed between us, stinging me hard on the cheek. I could swear I didn’t hear

a sound until afterwards. “Dammit, he’s hit you,” Daddy said, and then he yelled, “Go, Lucy!”

and in case I didn’t, he slapped Manny’s flank and she took off downhill as if it were the home stretch of the

Derby. I tried to look back, but I couldn’t see anything. There was something trickling down my cheek.

“Daddy!” I shouted. I heard another whizzing sound, and then the familiar bang of a shotgun.

I managed to get control of Manny and turn her back up the slope, which might have been crazy
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of me.

David said it was. He also said it was the kind of thing people did in combat, so that was all right. I didn’t think about it—there was no time to think about anything, really. Trafalgar came down towards us.

Daddy was slumped over on her back, riding like a sack of turnips. “Are you all right, Bunny?”

he called.

“Me?” I was surprised he asked. “I’m fine. How about you?”

“He winged me. I’ve a bullet in my arm. But I got him. Now we’ll find out what’s going on.”

“You got him?” I echoed.

One of the police constables came up and caught at Manny’s head. “What’s happening?” he asked.

“My daughter and I were attacked by a terrorist,” Daddy said. “I defended myself with my shotgun.”

“A terrorist?” I asked.

“Are you sure you got him?” the policeman asked.

“Oh yes, I got him,” Daddy said. “He’s dead.”

12

Royston interrupted Carmichael just as he was finishing with Lord Eversley’s report.

“A couple of things, sir,” Royston said.

Carmichael set his report down, knowing Royston, unlike Yately, wouldn’t interrupt him frivolously.

“Report on shoe sizes,” Royston began. “The big feet going up and down the drive are definitely Kahn’s.

I asked him point blank and he said he had walked down to the village on Saturday morning.

When asked what he’d done there, he said he’d looked around. When asked why he’d gone, he said he’d wanted a breath of air.”

Carmichael laughed.

“What’s funny?” Royston asked.

“I expect he wanted to get away from his in-laws, that’s all,” Carmichael said. “Anything else of note on boots?”

“Nothing,” Royston said.

“Oh well, we thought it was probably nothing. What else?”

“I had to call the Yard twice about Kahn’s flat. The first time I couldn’t get hold of anyone who could authorize it. Too early.”