‘My dear,’ Abigail said with satisfaction, ‘you do know everything, don’t you?’

‘Chip off the old block!’ Charlotte said gaily.

‘Just think …’ Abigail said musingly. ‘Just think how very, very fascinating this supper party of Fanny Dashwood’s is going to be …’

‘Is it on Saturday?’

‘It is, dear.’

‘If this baby hasn’t come by Saturday,’ Charlotte said, ‘I shall just come with you and have it right in front of everyone. Do you think I’m going to be pregnant for ever?’

‘He’s not here,’ Lucy hissed to Elinor as they got out of the taxi on Saturday night, ‘because of me.’

Elinor, focusing on managing the descent from a taxi in unaccustomed high heels, said nothing.

Lucy put a hand under Elinor’s elbow to steady her. She said, close to Elinor’s ear, ‘I mean, it would completely give the game away. You know Ed. He simply can’t hide his feelings. One look at me and it would be completely evident to everyone.’

Elinor removed her elbow. She said, straightening up and trying not to sound cross, ‘Would it matter?’

‘Oh, Ellie,’ Lucy said reproachfully, ‘you know we’ve got to play the long game!’ She looked up at the façade of the house they were outside. ‘I thought it was all doctors and stuff in Harley Street.’

‘Ooh,’ Nancy squealed from her other side, ‘totes inappropes to talk about doctors in front of moi!’

Lucy went on staring at the house. She said, dismissively, ‘It’s all you talk about, Nance.’

‘You can be such a cow, Luce.’

‘Better than boring.’

‘Boring, is it, to have a boyf with a plane, rather than one with a wrecked Sierra?’

‘Something has to compensate for a beer belly and no hair.’

‘You make me vom—’

‘Stop it,’ Elinor said. ‘Stop it. This house belongs to the family. Well, to John now. He rents out all of it except their flat.’

Lucy took her arm again.

‘Nice little earner. For your brother, I mean.’

Elinor made no reply. She glanced down the street, to the second taxi, from which Bill Brandon and Sir John Middleton, watched by Marianne and Mary Middleton, were endeavouring to extract Mrs Jennings. Lucy pressed the arm she held to retrieve Elinor’s attention. She whispered, ‘Help me, Ellie.’

‘What d’you mean?’

Lucy pushed her face so close to Elinor’s that their skin was almost touching.

‘I feel so sick. I can’t tell you. I’m about to meet Ed’s mum and he isn’t here to support me and our whole future depends upon what she thinks of me. Honestly, if you weren’t here, I couldn’t face it, I simply couldn’t. I know you’ve got to look after your sister a bit, but please don’t leave me, please.’ Her fingers dug into Elinor’s arm. ‘After all, Ellie, you’re the only sensible person here who knows.’

‘Hello,’ Mrs Ferrars said, not looking at Elinor, ‘I don’t know which of you girls is which. I told Fanny there’d be too many of you, and I’d never remember. So don’t expect me to.’

‘I won’t,’ Marianne said loudly from beside her sister.

Mrs Ferrars did not appear to hear her. She was a small scowling woman in an expensive dark dress with gnarled little hands knobbly with diamonds.

‘We are Fanny’s sisters-in-law,’ Elinor said helpfully.

Mrs Ferrars sniffed.

Elinor shot out a hand and gripped Marianne’s nearest one warningly. She said, ‘We were brought up at Norland. We know Harry.’

Mrs Ferrars looked past them both. ‘Harry is my grandson.’

‘Yes, we know that.’

Mrs Ferrars’s eyes, as small and dark as currants, shifted their focus to anything but the Dashwood girls in front of her. She said, as if making an announcement, ‘Harry will inherit Norland.’

‘Yes, we know that too.’

‘And we don’t care,’ Marianne said. ‘If that’s what you mean.’

Mrs Ferrars stiffened slightly. ‘Where’s Fanny?’ she demanded.

‘Here, Mother,’ Fanny said, materialising beside her. She flashed a perfunctory smile at Elinor and Marianne. ‘Lovely you could come.’ She took her mother’s nearest arm with a hand, Elinor couldn’t help noticing, that it was identical to Mrs Ferrars’s, only younger. ‘Mother, I’m sure Ellie and Marianne will forgive us, but I want you to meet some adorable new friends of ours. The sweetest girls. Harry adores them.’

‘Girls?’ Mrs Ferrars said with a little grimace.

Fanny gave another mirthless smile in Elinor and Marianne’s direction.

‘Yes, girls, Mother. Divine girls. Mary and I are just mad about them and you know how you love young people!’

Mrs Ferrars regarded her daughter. She sniffed again. ‘Do I?’ she said.

Fanny gave a playful little laugh. ‘Oh, these ones you will!’ She threw a fleeting glance towards her sisters-in-law. ‘Supper soon,’ she said, as if food was plainly all that they had come for. ‘A buffet, as we’re so many, but all Ottolenghi. Don’t you just adore their cooking?’

‘That’, Marianne said, hardly lowering her voice, ‘was absolutely awful. The longest, dullest supper of my life. And the food – well, it’s pure exhibitionism to serve food like that, for just standing about with plates and forks. And can you believe that a roomful of supposedly educated people could be just so banal and boring?’

‘Sh,’ Elinor said automatically.

‘Cars and right-wing politics from the men. Nothing worth the breath it was uttered with from the women.’

Elinor bent towards her sister. ‘M, someone will hear you.’

Marianne raised her chin a little. ‘I don’t care if they do. Why are we here? Why did we get ourselves mixed up in—’

‘John and Fanny’, Elinor said firmly, ‘are family. We had to come.’

‘And why is Fanny all over those Steele girls? Look at her and her mother and your friend Lucy.’

‘She’s not my friend.’

Marianne gave her sister a quick, mischievous smile. She said, ‘She thinks she is.’

Elinor said sadly, ‘That’s the sort of thing Mags would say.’

‘Don’t. Don’t. I miss Mags, I miss—’

The door opened suddenly and revealed Harry on the threshold in his pyjamas, wearing an expression of ferocious defiance.

‘Oh!’ Mary Middleton cried at once. ‘Spider-Man! Look, Spider-Man! My William just adores his Spider-Man PJs!’

Fanny, not to be outdone in the maternal rapture stakes, rushed forward and knelt by Harry. ‘Now, poppet—’

Harry shouted, ‘I don’t like being in bed!’

Fanny tried to put soothing arms around her son. He wrestled himself free immediately.

‘Don’t! Don’t!’

‘Now, Harrykins, Mummy’s big boy …’

Mary Middleton said, to no one in particular, ‘Such a big boy! But not quite as tall as William.’

Fanny twisted round. She was wearing a tight, small smile. ‘Oh, I think you’ll find he’s taller.’

Harry caught sight of his aunts. He shouted, ‘Ellie! Ellie, Ellie, Ellie …’

She came forward, smiling, and knelt on the floor beside him.

‘Hello, Harry.’

He said, ‘I don’t want to be in this bed. I want my proper bed.’

‘Perhaps I could come and read to you?’

‘I think you’ll find’, Mary said to Fanny, ‘that William is in the top percentile of height for his age and that Harry—’

‘—is a much bigger boy!’ Fanny said brightly to her son.

Mary was in no hurry. She indicated Elinor, kneeling beside Harry. She said calmly, ‘She’ll know. Elinor knows both boys. She sees William at least every week.’

Fanny turned to fix her hard, demanding gaze on Elinor. ‘Well?’

There was a pause. Elinor took Harry’s hand and, for once, he didn’t snatch it back. They looked at one another. From the edge of the group, Lucy Steele, whose opinion had not been sought, said loudly that she thought both boys were enormous and that she’d have thought them years older than they actually were, if she hadn’t known their ages. No one took any notice, not even Mrs Ferrars, who had now come to stand on Harry’s other side, as if to defend him from all slights.

‘Well?’ Fanny said again to Elinor, remorselessly.

Elinor squeezed Harry’s hand. ‘You are my nephew,’ she said to him, ‘and I love you, and I think that by next year you will be as tall as William, and by the time you are both grown up, you will probably be the taller because your daddy is taller than his daddy. So you just have to eat all the good stuff, and not the rubbish, and wait.’

Harry nodded. He did not seem unduly upset by the verdict.

‘Thank you,’ Fanny said sarcastically to Elinor.

‘It’s a pity’, Mrs Ferrars said, ‘that she can’t show loyalty even to her own family, don’t you think?’

‘You asked me’, Elinor said, ‘for my opinion, and I gave it.’

She got stiffly to her feet. Looking up at her, Harry said, unexpectedly, ‘I don’t mind. I’m gooder at football, anyway.’

‘Thank you.’

He said, still holding her hand, ‘Will you come and do drawing for me?’

Fanny gave a little snort. ‘Drawing?’ she said, witheringly.

Mrs Ferrars gave Elinor a hostile stare. ‘You draw?’ she said accusingly.

‘Yes,’ Elinor said. ‘Sort of. I – I’m doing architecture.’

Mrs Ferrars and her daughter exchanged glances. ‘Oh, architecture.’

‘So,’ Fanny said to her mother, ‘nothing artistic. Terribly neat and clean. She’s very good at neat and clean.’

Mrs Ferrars gave a tiny, chilly smile. ‘Not like Tassy Morton, then?’

‘Oh, no, Mother, nothing like. Those divine flower paintings—’