I’d been through those papers before. They had to do with various intrigues in India, although they weren’t much use without the corresponding documentation from the archives of a now defunct Indian administrative province, fortunately preserved in the notebooks of Colin’s great-aunt, in her flat in London. In short, nothing to do with anything I was doing.

So what was it doing on my desk?

I lifted the folio, turning it this way and that, but it told me nothing. Not as if it was going to pipe up like an item out of a fairy tale and sing, “Folio, folio on the shelf / Dempster is an evil elf!” or something like that.

What would Dempster want with Henrietta’s India correspondence? His interest, like mine, was in the Pink Carnation and her league. If he wanted that, the Delagardie affair was a positive gold mine. But that folio, the folio dealing with Jane’s summer sojourn at Malmaison, sat chastely on my chair where I had left it, seemingly undisturbed.

Now that I looked for it, I could see the marks of hasty turning on the pages of my notebook, the bent paper, the tiny tears. Okay, well, maybe some of those had been me, but it still made me feel like Sherlock Holmes. And was that a smear of blood on one corner? Oh, coffee. That had been me, then. Oops.

I closed the red plastic cover of my notebook and, defiantly, left it sitting in plain sight on the desk. No point in closing the barn door, right? I jammed my feet harder into my tottery stilettos and marched purposefully towards the library door. Dempster and I were going to have to have ourselves a little talk. I was historian, hear me roar!

Or not.

The library door yanked open just as I put my hand to it, causing me to wobble dangerously on my three-inch heels.

“Steady there,” said Colin, grabbing me just as I pitched face-first into his chest.

There were worse places to be. “Hi,” I mumbled into his shirtfront. “Looking for me?”

“Do you know what time it is?” he said, but I could hear the annoyance fading away even as he said it, in the softening of his tone and the way his arms wrapped around me. “I thought you had done a bunk rather than go down to dinner with me.”

I rubbed my nose into his chest, smelling his familiar scent of detergent and deodorant. “And miss the fun?” I said. “I’m thinking of going down to dinner like this. It’s very comfy.”

He slid a finger beneath my chin, tilting my face up. “You might have some trouble eating that way.”

It would have been nice to just stay that way, but guilt and knowledge lay heavy upon me. By the lurching of my tum, something Dempster this way come, and Colin didn’t know it yet.

“Hey,” I said, reluctantly peeling away. “Is Serena supposed to be here tonight?”

Maybe that hadn’t been the best opening gambit. He let me go. I felt very wobbly without his hands on my arms, wobbly and cold, the crisp air biting into that exposed triangle at the small of my back.

“Why?” He started down the hall to the stairs, me trailing alongside.

I hated the shuttered look on his face. Serena was a closed topic as far as Colin was concerned. Efforts to get him to Talk About It resulted in one of two things: diversion, i.e., kissing that sensitive spot behind my ear, pointing out a rare yellow-billed redheaded warbler through the window (I still wasn’t convinced there was any such bird, but if there was, it clearly responded to the sound of Serena’s name), or simply smiling and changing the subject. Or this. Complete shutdown. No one home, admittance interdicted, beware of dog.

There was nothing to do but blurt it out. “Dempster is here. He’s DreamStone’s historical consultant.”

“What?”

“I know, that was my reaction, too. And it gets worse.” Catching a heel on the worn carpet that ran down the center of the hall, I stumbled in my too-high heels.

“Worse?” He caught my arm, drawing it through his for support, mine or his.

“According to Cate—no, you haven’t met her yet,” I added, before he could ask. “She’s their clipboard girl, and I’ve told her she can use our computer if she likes. Don’t worry, you’ll like her.”

Colin was beginning to look a little bewildered. “What does this have to do with Dempster?”

“Right.” I took a deep breath. “Anyway, according to Cate—you know, the clipboard girl—Dempster got the job through personal connections. Apparently, he’s dating someone connected to the film.”

The carpet came to an end just at the landing. We stood at the top of the stairs, the polished wooden banister stretching along in front of us. One of Colin’s ancestors had redone it all during the height of the Arts and Crafts movement, getting rid of the old white moldings and pale paint, replacing them with heavy walnut and shiny brocades. Small golden gargoyles on a dark green background snarled down at me from the wall.

Colin turned to me, his sun-streaked hair bright against the hunter green backdrop. “Do you think—?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. She didn’t say.” I didn’t like this any more than he did, but there was no ignoring the evidence. “Who else could it be?”

Colin pressed his eyes closed. I could see the network of fine lines around his eyes, pale against his suntanned skin. There was more than one way to save the world. Colin might not be a swashbuckling double-oh-something, but he had his own variety of hero complex. He had single-handedly held up his sister through the trauma of their father’s death, their mother’s defection, and Serena’s own romantic disasters.

I squeezed Colin’s arm. “She’s a grown woman.” Serena was a full two months older than me. Right now, I felt positively ancient. “She’s old enough to make her own decisions.”

“Yes. She has done, hasn’t she?” Colin nodded towards the stairs, his face showing nothing, revealing nothing. “Shall we go down?”

I thought of and discarded at least half a dozen saving phrases. She didn’t mean it; she does love you, you know; that’s not what I meant. None of them would do the least bit of good. It would only draw us both further into a conversation neither of us really wanted to have. Sometimes, talking about it doesn’t make it better.

There was also the selfishness factor. My relationship with Colin still felt, even six months in, too new and fragile to risk, even for a good cause.

I wrinkled my nose at him. “Unless you want to order takeout and have it delivered up to the second floor? Right. I didn’t think so.” We made it about two steps before I tugged him to a halt. “There’s one more thing you should know.”

“Don’t tell me,” Colin said flatly. “They’ve decided to rebuild the whole house as a Disney castle and staff it with singing Martians.”

“Er, no. Jeremy’s seated us at opposite ends of the table.” I did my best to dispel the image of a kick line of musical Martians pouring our after-dinner tea. That was probably DreamStone’s next movie, with Micah Stone as the kick-ass alien hunter. “The joke will be on him when we spend the whole evening communicating in semaphore. Like that Monty Python sketch with Cathy and Heathcliff.”

Colin slid his arm around me for a quick squeeze. “Whatever Jeremy might think, it is still my table. No one’s seating arrangement is set in stone.”

“Except for Micah Stone!” We paused on the landing where the stairs turned. “That was a joke.”

Colin scanned the arriving guests from the safety of the balustrade. “Do you see Dempster?”

From the landing, we had an excellent view of the center hall. The house had never been a grand mansion, only a modest gentleman’s residence, but, to my apartment-bred eyes, the hall was still a generously proportioned one. It might not be Blenheim or Chatsworth, but it could still hold a good thirty people with room for catering staff to circulate with their faux silver rent-a-trays. The door kept opening and closing, admitting more and more people as cars made hash of the carefully combed gravel circle outside, some veering off onto Colin’s precious lawn.

They were a mixed bag, the guests. I amused myself by playing Spot the Americans. It wasn’t a fail-safe game, but I prided myself on a fifty percent accuracy rate. It wasn’t just the clothes, but something about expression and carriage. My theory has always been that different vocal constructions shape our facial muscles differently, so that you can tell an American face from a British one simply by the way the person holds her mouth.

Not a fail-proof system, but reasonably reliable. In this case, there was the added clue of the Curse of the American in England, the attempt to out-British the British, the Americans wearing what they presumed Brits wore for a country house weekend, while the Brits themselves, a far flashier and more glamorous crowd than the gang at the pub or the academics of my acquaintance, were dressed in the latest of Madison Avenue couture. DreamStone backers, I imagined, or friends of Colin’s mother and her husband. They moved in moneyed circles, hobnobbing with the artsier end of the international jet set—and by artsy, I mean those who bought art, not those who produced it. That was Jeremy’s job. He sold high-end art, acting as agent to a series of prestigious modern artists, among them, Colin’s mother.

I didn’t see Colin’s mother. I gathered, from what I had heard, that she had a phobia about Selwick Hall. The phrase “gives me hives” may or may not have been used. Besides, this production was Jeremy’s baby, not hers. It didn’t matter to her that her only son might be involved or that his life might be disrupted by it.

My fingers had curved into claws on the timeworn walnut of the banister. I forced them to unclench and went back to scanning the crowd.