No wonder Henry hated his younger brother, but there was nothing anyone could do. Mrs Brandon’s efforts to shower her stepson with attentions began to border on the ludicrous; the General never betrayed by one flicker of his wise grey eyes that his younger son held his heart. Rom himself, at the beginning, looked up to Henry and longed for his companionship. It was useless. The jealousy that enslaved Henry was the stuff of myth and legend, and it grew stronger every year.

Then, when Rom was almost eleven, fate stepped in on Henry’s side. Mrs Brandon fell ill; leukaemia was diagnosed and six months later she was dead.

‘Hadn’t you better pull yourself together?’ said Henry (recalled from his last term at Eton for the funeral) to Rom, sobbing wildly in his mother’s empty room — and stepped back hastily, for he thought that Rom was about to spring at him and take him by the throat.

Instead Rom vanished with his dog, managing to go to ground in the Suffolk countryside as though it was indeed the Amazon in whose imagined jungles he had so often played.

When he came back he was different — quieter, less ‘excessive’. He had learned to consume his own smoke, but for the rest of his life he responded to loss not with grief but with a fierce and inward anger.

It was now that Henry was able to express a little of his hatred. The General, unable to bear Stavely without his wife, left for the Himalayas on an extended botanical expedition and Henry the heir — now home from school for good — began to issue orders that were obeyed. Rom’s dog was forbidden the house; his unsuitable friends — children of the village whose games he had led — were banished. Most of the servants were loyal to the younger child and Nannie, now retired and living in the Lodge, had never been able to conceal her love for the ‘little foreigner’, but there were others — notably Grunthorpe the first footman, whom Rom had surprised in the gunroom stealing boxes of cartridges to sell in the local town — who were only too glad to ingratiate themselves with the heir.

Henry’s triumph, however, was short-lived. The General returned; Rom was restored to his rightful place and presently he followed his brother to Eton, where he was safe from Henry’s tricks.

And then, in the year when Rom became eighteen, Isobel Hope and her widowed mother came to live in the village next to Stavely.

Isobel’s connections were aristocratic — her mother was the youngest daughter of the Earl of Lexbury; her father, who had died in the hunting field, had belonged to an ancient West Country family — but she was poor. As a small child Isobel had seen the great Lexbury estate go under the hammer, and her handsome father had lived on his Army pay and promises. Even before she met Henry, this lovely girl had decided that Stavely’s heir would make her a suitable husband.

She met him first at a ball in a neighbouring house, but standing beside Henry on the grand staircase, relaxed and at ease, was his younger brother… and that was that.

The love that blazed between Rom and Isobel was violent, passionate and total. They met to ride at dawn, Isobel eluding all attempts at chaperonage, and were together again by noon to play tennis, wander through the gardens or chase each other through the maze. To watch them together was almost to gasp at their happiness; no one who saw them that summer ever quite forgot them. ‘A striking couple’, ‘a handsome pair’, ‘meant for each other’ — none of the phrases that people used came anywhere near the image of those two: the slender girl with her shower of dark red hair, her deep blue eyes; the incorrigibly graceful, brilliant boy.

Rom had won a scholarship to Oxford, but he persuaded his father to let him stay at Stavely. He had inherited the General’s passion for trees and together they planned plantations, discussed rare hardwoods, spoke of a sawmill to supply the cabinet trade…

When Rom was nineteen he and Isobel became engaged. It was now that the General sent for them and told them of the will he proposed to make. Stavely was not entailed, but there was no question of disinheriting his eldest son. Henry would have Stavely Hall, its gardens and orchards, the Home Park… To Rom he would leave the two outlying farms — Millpond and The Grebe — the North Plantation and Paradise Farm itself.

Rom was overjoyed, for he had an intense and imaginative passion for land, and Isobel, though she still yearned for Stavely itself, was satisfied, for Paradise was a perfect Palladian house, pillared and porticoed, built by an earlier and wealthy Mrs Brandon who had not cared for her daughter-in-law Unless poor Henry married an outstanding woman — and this was not likely — Isobel knew she could soon make Paradise the social centre of the estate.

Three months later the General died of a heart attack, sitting in a chair with a bundle of Toussia’s letters in his hand. When the funeral was over they looked for the will he said he had made, but it was nowhere to be found. Curiously the solicitor he had called in had gone abroad, and his clerk knew nothing of a later document. It was thus that the old will was declared valid — the will made before Rom was born — in which every stick and stone on the estate was left to Henry.

Why did Rom do nothing to save himself, people asked later? Why didn’t he insist on an enquiry or bring pressure to bear on his brother to make an equitable division?

It was pride, of course, the fierce pride of the gifted and strong who will take nothing from anyone; perhaps also the knowledge that if Henry had practised any kind of fraud the mills of God would grind him more surely than Rom could hope to do. But there was something else, something that Henry saw with a puzzled fury — a kind of exaltation, a glittering excitement at being stripped thus to the bone. To begin again somewhere else, to pit himself against the world, to make a fortune and a place for Isobel that owed nothing to privilege and class was a challenge to which Rom’s passionate nature rose with a kind of joy.

‘We’ll start again somewhere quite different — somewhere in the New World. I shall build you a house fifteen times as grand as Stavely, you’ll see!’

‘Oh, Rom — in that wretched Amazon of yours!’

‘No.’ But he smiled, for one cannot entirely choose one’s obsessions and since his ninth birthday his had been that vast, wild place of mazed rivers and impenetrable jungle. ‘There’s a fortune to be made there, but you would hate the climate. In North America — California, perhaps. Or Canada — wherever you please!’

He stretched out his hands to her, for he no more doubted her than he doubted his own right arm, but she shook her head. Isobel had seen her mother humbled when the great Lexbury estate was broken up. She was afraid — and she wanted Stavely.

Thus it was Isobel who succeeded where Henry had failed; it was she who broke Rom. A month after the General’s death, she withdrew from her engagement. That night Rom found her in the Orangery with Henry and knew what she would do.

The next day he was gone and nobody at Stavely ever heard from him again.

Crossing the courtyard behind the house with the coati at his heels, Rom’s way was barred by Lorenzo, his butler and general factotum, beaming with pleasure and surrounded by a cluster of indoor servants who had left their preparations for tomorrow’s party for the ballet company in order to share their master’s impending joy.

‘It has come, Coronel!’ said Lorenzo, throwing out an annunciatory arm. ‘Roderigo has sent word from São Gabriel and Furo has gone to fetch it in the truck.’

There was no need for Rom to ask what had come. Follina was connected by a rough road, passable by motor in the dry season, to Manaus, where he had his main office and warehouse. Another, much shorter track led to the tiny village of São Gabriel on the Negro, where he had built a floating jetty, storehouses and a rubber-smoking shed; it was there, rather than at his private landing stage, that goods for Follina were unloaded.

But though Rom could pioneer a dozen new enterprises, could import grand pianos from Germany, American motor cars, carpets from Isfahan, nothing excited his men so much as the arrival of the washing basket from Truscott and Musgrave in Piccadilly containing his freshly laundered shirts.

To add to the stories of ludicrous and extravagant behaviour among the rubber barons had not been his intention. Mrs Lehmann, who washed her carriage horses in champagne, or young Wetherby, who walked a jaguar with a diamond collar through the streets, had Rom’s utmost contempt. Yet unwittingly he had created a legend which outclassed them all. The travels of his laundry to and from London’s most exclusive valeting service were spoken of in Rio and Liverpool, in Paris and Madrid.

Rom ran Follina entirely with a native staff. He found that his Indians could be taught to do anything except perhaps to count; certainly they washed and ironed entirely to his satisfaction. His shirts travelled to England to be laundered because of a promise he had made to a generous and lovely woman and it was her memory, now, that softened his face.

Had it not been for Madeleine de la Tour, Rom’s midnight flight from Stavely might have ended very differently. Arriving penniless in London, half-crazed with rage and pain, he had gone to the house of the only relative he knew his mother to possess: a distant cousin; Jacques de la Tour, who had a number of business interests and who Rom hoped might give him work.

Jacques was away on an extended tour of the East, but his wife Madeleine took Rom in. She took him in in all senses: into her house, her mind, her heart and — with marvellous flair and intelligence — into her bed. She soothed the appalling hurt that Isobel had dealt him; she civilised him and left him with a sense of gratitude that had never faded. In the end, sensing his need to start on his adventure, she insisted on lending him money for his fare to Brazil.