‘Please eat something,’ Belle said pleadingly.

Marianne had her elbows on the table, planted either side of her untouched plate, and her head in her hands. ‘Can’t.’

‘Just a mouthful, darling, just a—’

‘Can I have her roast potatoes?’ Margaret said.

Elinor, who wasn’t hungry either, put a piece of unwanted chicken in her mouth and chewed. Marianne pushed her plate towards Margaret.

‘Can I?’ Margaret said eagerly, spearing potatoes.

Elinor swallowed her chicken. She said quietly to Marianne, ‘What did he actually say to you?’

Marianne shook her head and put her hands over her eyes.

‘M, he must have said something. He must have said why he couldn’t—’

Marianne sprang up suddenly and fled from the room. They heard her feet thudding up the stairs and then the slam of her bedroom door.

‘You told me’, Margaret said through a mouthful of potato, ‘not to ask her anything, so I didn’t, and then you go and do it.’

‘It must be Jane Smith,’ Belle said to Elinor, ignoring Margaret. ‘She must disapprove.’

‘Why should she?’

‘Well, we’ve got no money.’

‘Ma,’ Elinor said angrily, banging her knife and fork down, ‘this isn’t 1810, for God’s sake. Money doesn’t dictate relationships.’

‘It does for some people. Look at Fanny.’

‘He loves her,’ Elinor said, as if her mother hadn’t spoken. ‘He’s as crazy about her as she is about him.’

‘He’ll be back. I know he will. He’ll ring Marianne. He’s probably rung her already.’

‘Then why’, Margaret said, ‘does she keep crying?’

Elinor pushed her chair back. ‘I’m going to talk to her.’

Belle sighed. ‘Be gentle.’

Elinor paused for a second; then she bit back whatever had occurred to her to say and went out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the landing. She tapped on Marianne’s door. ‘M?’

‘Go away.’

Elinor tried the handle. The door was locked. ‘Please let me in.’

‘No.’

‘I want to talk.’

‘Talking won’t help. Nothing will help.’

Elinor waited a moment, her cheek almost against the door, and then she said, ‘Has he rung?’

Silence.

‘Have you rung him?’

Silence.

‘Or texted?’

There was a stifled something from the far side of the door.

‘Oh, Marianne,’ Elinor said, ‘please let me in. Please.’

She could hear a faint shuffling as if Marianne was approaching the door.

‘M?’

From behind the door, Marianne said hoarsely, ‘You can’t help. No one can. Aunt Jane threw him out just like Fanny did Edward. You ought to understand, if anyone can. You ought.’

Elinor waited a moment and then she said, as quietly as she could, ‘M. Is it – over?’

There was a long, long silence and then Marianne hissed through the keyhole, ‘Don’t say that. Don’t say that. Ever.’

‘My dear,’ Abigail Jennings said, ‘has she stopped crying?’

Belle was making coffee. She had not been at all pleased to see her visitor, especially as she had neither Elinor nor Margaret at home to shield her. She nodded towards the huge jug of mop-headed chrysanthemums that Abigail had brought with her.

‘Lovely flowers.’

‘You look, my dear, as if you need a stiff drink rather than flowers. It’s exhausting living with a broken heart. I remember it all too well with my own girls. Mary was a terrific weeper but luckily Charlotte was more like me and always thought there’d be a better bet somewhere else every time it happened. Mind you, I thought she’d do the dumping when it came to Tommy Palmer. But no. He has no manners whatsoever but she seems to find him funny. No accounting for taste, that’s for sure. Except when it comes to Wills – he seems to be to the taste of every living thing with a pulse.’ She looked at Belle with concern. ‘Your poor girl.’

Belle said carefully, ‘It would help if we knew why.’

Abigail raised her plump hands and let them crash on to the table, making the mugs Belle had just put down dance. ‘Money, dear.’

‘No, he—’

‘Sorry, dear, but it’ll be money. He’ll have asked Jane for another handout and she’ll have given him a flea in his ear. That car …’

‘Beautiful.’

‘Tens of thousands it would cost, dear. Tens. Even to lease it. He has champagne tastes, that boy.’

‘But’, Belle said, feeling that even if Abigail wasn’t the right person it was a relief to have someone to talk to, ‘why be so melodramatic, if it was just about money? Why rush off leaving Marianne in pieces like this if—’

‘Pride, dear. Men like that don’t care to be dependent. He’d want Marianne to think he’d earned it.’

‘Hasn’t he?’

Abigail gave a cackle of laughter. ‘He wouldn’t know hard work, dear, if it jumped up and bit him on the bottom!’

Belle began to pour the coffee. ‘They were so adorable together.’

Abigail leaned forward, folding her arms under the cushiony shelf of her bosom. ‘Well, luckily, dear, marriage bells aren’t the only answer for girls these days, are they? And Marianne’s only just out of school, for goodness’ sake.’

Belle said abstractly, ‘I was only eighteen when I met their father.’

‘You were an exception, dear. The modern way is to be like your Elinor, with a career and no time wasted mooning over this F boy. Jonno and I have been killing ourselves over that. The F-word boy, we call him!’ She looked round. ‘Where is Marianne?’

Belle pushed a mug of coffee across the table. ‘She’s gone for a walk. She walks all the time, poor darling, wearing herself out. I make her take her phone and her inhaler but I can’t help her sleep.’

‘And Elinor?’

Belle looked a little startled, as if she’d temporarily forgotten about Elinor. ‘Oh, she’s at work.’

‘Sensible girl. Does she like it?’

‘I think so,’ Belle said uncertainly. ‘I mean, she’s only just started, so it’s a bit early to know.’

Abigail took a swallow of coffee. ‘He’s a naughty boy, Wills, a very naughty boy. And the sooner Marianne gets over her infatuation, the—’

‘It’s not an infatuation!’ Belle said indignantly.

Abigail stared at her. Belle leaned towards her, across the table. ‘Don’t you’, she said, in a different and more emotional tone of voice, ‘believe in love at first sight?’

Abigail went on staring. Then she picked up her coffee mug again. ‘Sorry, dear,’ she said, ‘but no. I do not.’

On the hill above Allenham, where the fateful thunderstorm had begun, Marianne sat on the damp grass, hugging her knees. Below her, the old house lay quietly in hazy autumn sunshine, on its hillside, a plume of bluish smoke rising softly out of one of the marvellous twisted Elizabethan chimneypots, the only other sign of life being the miniature figure of one of Jane Smith’s gardeners raking up leaves. She couldn’t hear him from where she sat, but she could watch him, with avidity. He was raking across the sweep of grass below the window behind which she had had the most wonderful afternoon of her life, in a four-poster bed whose hangings, Wills said, had been embroidered in 1720. She had put a hand out to touch them, reverently, and he had captured her hand in his at once and said that she wasn’t to give a flicker of her attention to anyone or anything but him, or he’d be jealous.

He’d been gorgeously, blissfully jealous of everything that day. She’d wanted to examine every painting and rug, to exclaim over panelling and marquetry and plasterwork, to run her hands over velvet chair seats and polished chests, but he’d stopped her, laughing, pulling her to him, taking her face in his hands, touching her, kissing her, pushing her down into that welter of linen pillows and silky quilts on the great bed until she capitulated completely and let him take her over. Her eyes filled now thinking about it, thinking about him. It had been the ultimate in truth and beauty, to surrender to someone like that when it was someone that you were meant – meant, as she and Wills were – to belong to.

‘Don’t contact me,’ he’d said to her on that Sunday, kneeling on the hearthrug in front of her, clutching her to him, his cheek pressed to her belly. ‘Don’t do anything until I’m in touch again, anything.’

She’d had her hands in his hair. She said shakily, ‘But how am I to know—’

‘Trust me,’ he said. She could hear that his teeth were clenched. ‘Trust me.’

‘Of course.’

He lifted his face. He said, ‘You do, don’t you?’

She nodded vehemently. ‘You’ve got to,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to. You’re the only person in my life who I trust and who trusts me. The only one.’

Even in her shock and misery, she had felt a jolt of happiness then, a little flash of recognition and self-justification. He’d be in touch. He’d be back. He said he would – and he would. He belonged to her; they belonged together. Trust was too small a word for what they had between them.

She got slowly to her feet. The gardener was now piling the leaves into a kind of mesh-sided truck. It wasn’t fair, really, to expect even Ma, let alone Ellie and Mags, to have the first idea of what she was feeling, or of what she and Wills felt for each other. Ma and Dad had had something pretty good going, for sure, but Mags was still a kid and Ellie didn’t have a passionate bone in her body. She, Marianne, must remember that. She must go home and, while needing to remind them all that, with Wills absent, she was only half a person at all times, she must be forgiving and understanding about Elinor’s limitations.