Margaret had felt not only a glow of satisfaction, but also a novel sense of having done something both good and useful. She’d got up from the table then and found a basket, and Belle had put a bottle of wine in it, and glasses, and a new packet of chocolate biscuits, and some apples, and a piece of cheese, and they had all processed out into the dusky garden and helped the two of them climb up the ladder Thomas had made. It was Marianne who put the candles in the jars, and Belle who produced the old rug from the back of the sofa, and then they’d left them there, on the platform in the tree, with each other and their future and the ring Ed had actually had, all along, in his pocket.

It wasn’t a diamond, Margaret was told, it was an aquamarine. Same difference, Margaret thought, except it was sort of blue, not white, but it sparkled, and it made Elinor cry, even if in a way Margaret could see was very different from the kind of crying they usually went in for. Elinor kept looking at it, on her hand, kissing Ed, and then laughing. Ed had talked more at supper than Margaret had ever heard him, describing how he’d kept going back to Lucy’s family when he was a teenager, because they were cosy and welcoming, and didn’t make him feel an utter failure, like his mother and sister did, and he’d thought Lucy was quite pretty, then, because he didn’t know any better – ‘Only a moron would think that,’ Margaret interrupted, and he’d laughed and said, ‘Moron’s the word, Mags!’ – and how he’d got so defeated by his mother insisting on him training to be things he couldn’t bear to be that he’d got himself in a hopeless state, on the very edge of doing something that would cause him the keenest regret all the rest of his life.

Margaret strained her eyes to see them both in her tree. She thought she could make out that Ed had his arm round Elinor, and that their heads were very close together, probably touching. It was so great, it really was. Not just because it was what Ellie had wanted all along, but because Edward would be very susceptible to her, Margaret’s, nagging him to teach her to drive. After all, if he was part of the family, he’d have no escape.

‘Are you cold?’ Edward said.

‘I’m too happy to be cold.’

‘Me too. It’s like paradise here, in Mags’s tree, with you. I can’t believe it, I can’t believe my luck, I can’t believe you said yes.’

‘You knew I’d say yes.’

‘I didn’t, I was terrified.’

‘You had the ring in your pocket.’

‘I wanted you to know I meant it; I wanted to prove to you that you were it. For me. If you’d have me.’

‘I’ll have you,’ Elinor said.

‘That’s what I can’t believe.’

Elinor shifted a little, so that her left shoulder was tucked right under Edward’s arm. ‘What I can’t believe’, she said, ‘is Lucy.’

‘Do we have to talk about her?’

‘Only enough to satisfy my curiosity.’

‘About what?’

‘About’, Elinor said, ‘what she was doing, marrying your brother Robert, who is—’ She stopped.

He kissed her nose. ‘Gay,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘He knew he was gay when he was tiny. I remember him coming down to breakfast once, when he was about seven, in a necklace of Fanny’s and a huge hat with a feather. And my parents didn’t blink. Did not blink. They used to describe him to other people as being very much his own person. That was their phrase. Very much his own person.’

‘So – your mother doesn’t know?’

Edward captured Elinor’s left hand and held it out to see the ring glinting by the light of the nearest candle.

‘I have no idea if she knows. But she won’t acknowledge it if she does. She won’t discuss it. She just says he’s unusual.’

‘So – he can’t talk about it, with her?’

Edward raised her hand to kiss it. ‘You can’t talk to her about anything. Except money. Stocks and shares and house prices.’

‘Poor Robert.’

‘He doesn’t care. He lives his own life and milks her for money when he needs it.’

‘But Lucy,’ Elinor said, ‘Lucy must know he’s gay, she must have known all along.’

‘She won’t care, either,’ Edward said.

‘She must, she can’t not mind that her husband is just using her as a shield—’

Edward said flatly, ‘She’ll be fine with it.’

Elinor turned to look at his shadowed face. ‘But—’

‘Ellie,’ Edward said, ‘don’t judge everyone else by your lovely and right standards. Lucy is only out for Lucy. If there isn’t trouble, she makes it, like snowballing me with texts threatening to tell my mother we were an item, as she put it, so that I had to text her back saying please don’t, please, please don’t. God, Ellie, I was so drunk that night, and of course that played right into her hands. She’s got exactly what she set out to get, even if not with the brother she first thought of. Don’t waste an iota of concern on her. Lucy’s got her hands on a pile of money, and Robert’s got a cover as far as my mother is concerned to do whatever he wants. They’ve done a deal. It suits them both. They’re as selfish as each other. They’ll live their own lives and probably enjoy the joke of being married. And I – lucky, lucky me – have got you.’

‘But—’

‘I want to kiss you, Ellie, I want to just—’

‘One more thing,’ Elinor said.

‘What?’

‘How did you know you were off the hook with Lucy?’

Edward gave a bark of laughter. He said, ‘You’ll never believe it. An email.’

‘An email?’

‘Yes.’ He looked back down at her, and bent so that he could kiss her on the mouth. ‘She wrote me an email,’ he said, his face almost touching Elinor’s, ‘saying that she couldn’t marry me when she was in love, actually, with someone else. Who just happened to be my gay brother. Who, I wonder, did she think she had a vestige of a hope of fooling?’

‘Perhaps she didn’t care?’

He put his hand under her chin and tilted her face up to his.

‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘I don’t care about her or Robert or my family or anybody. I can’t tell you how much I don’t care about them. All I care about, lovely Elinor with my ring on your finger, is you.’

‘What?’ Mrs Ferrars said. She held the telephone a little distance from her ear, as if it might scorch her.

Fanny Dashwood, ringing her mother from her new sitting room cum office at Norland Park, raised her voice even further.

‘It’s not good news, Mother. Are you sitting down?’

‘I hear better if I’m standing up,’ Mrs Ferrars said, as if explaining something to someone extremely stupid. ‘You know that.’

‘Mother,’ Fanny said, ‘it’s about Robert.’

‘What?’ Mrs Ferrars demanded, suddenly alert. ‘Is he ill?’

‘No, Mother,’ Fanny said. ‘No. He’s perfectly fine. But – but he’s got married, would you believe …’

There was a pause. Mrs Ferrars adjusted something in her mind. Then she said, ‘Nonsense.’

‘It’s not nonsense, Mother.’

‘If Robert were married,’ Mrs Ferrars said firmly, ‘he or the Mortons would have told me. He tells me everything.’

‘Mother,’ Fanny said, raising her voice again, ‘he hasn’t married Tassy Morton.’

‘He must have.’

‘He hasn’t, he hasn’t, he’s married – oh God, Mother – Robert has married Lucy Steele.’

There was a further pause. Then Mrs Ferrars said, ‘Who?’

‘Lucy Steele. The girl with the teeth and the sister. You know, Mother. She was going to marry Edward.’

Mrs Ferrars gave a little scream. ‘You’re making it up!’

‘I’m not, Mother. I’m not. They got married in Devon or something, from Lucy’s home, on an impulse.’

‘Why?’ Mrs Ferrars wailed. ‘Why?’

‘Oh, Mother, who knows? He’s always been a law unto himself.’

‘How could he do this to me?’ Mrs Ferrars cried. ‘How could he treat his own mother like this?’

‘It’s not about you, Mother,’ Fanny said crossly. ‘It’s about the family. And Father’s money.’

Mrs Ferrars seemed to pull herself together. ‘Well,’ she said in a much more decided tone, ‘they won’t get a penny of that.’

Fanny said wearily, ‘You don’t mean that, Mother.’

‘I do, I certainly do!’

‘No, you don’t. You adore Robert. You always forgive Robert.’

Mrs Ferrars said, unexpectedly, ‘Why isn’t that girl marrying Edward? After all the fuss?’

Fanny said sharply, ‘Because she knows which side her bread is buttered, Mother. And she knows Robert is your favourite.’

‘She’s right,’ Mrs Ferrars said, her voice somewhat softened, ‘I have always found Robert much easier to deal with. A sweeter nature, you know.’

‘So you’ll forgive him—’

‘I didn’t say that, Fanny.’

‘But you will. You’ll let Lucy worm her way in, with Robert’s help, and before you know it, she’ll have carte blanche to do up the house in Norfolk—’

‘Don’t be so jealous, Fanny,’ Mrs Ferrars said. ‘I’ve never liked sibling rivalry: you knew that. And you’ve had your fair share, and more. I don’t care for someone with a house like Norland begrudging her brother having a mere farmhouse in Norfolk.’

‘Mother, I never said, I never meant—’

‘In any case,’ Mrs Ferrars said, interrupting, ‘that house needs renovating. I would say, actually, that renovation is long overdue.’

Fanny gave a little shriek, and threw her phone across the room. Mrs Ferrars took her own phone away from her ear and shook it a little, as if in puzzlement, and then, with determined precision, began to dial Robert’s number.

Sir John Middleton was in his element. The weather was better, the house was full – both Bill Brandon and Abigail Jennings had returned to occupy their old bedrooms for at least a long weekend – that poor girl up at the cottage was on the mend, and there was also a full-blown romance going on up there between her sister and the F-word boy. Add to that the news that his son and heir had gained a place at his father’s old school – Mary was making an immense fuss about the boy boarding, at his age, but he had yet to silence her with reminders of pipes and tunes – and the signing of a satisfactory new contract with a clothing distributor in northern India, and Sir John could feel that all was pretty well in his good-natured if not over-sensitive world.