‘What about my dog?’ said Rupert lightly, momentarily letting his hand rest on Muriel’s hair. Perfectly groomed, perfectly golden, with its metallic lustre, it looked more as if it had been mined than grown.

‘You have often said,’ Muriel continued, ‘that my good nursing, my attention to hygiene, saved your life.’

‘Yes, I have said it,’ said Rupert, smiling. ‘And I still do.’

‘Well then, I know you will understand when I ask you not to bring Baskerville into my bedroom. Or into our bedroom when we are married.’ The pansy-blue eyes looked up appraisingly and it occurred to Rupert, suddenly, how rarely Muriel blinked. ‘I don’t know if you’re aware of the work by Bestheimer and his associates on the transference of canine worms to the back of the human eyeball, but I assure you if you were—’

‘Baskerville goes to the vet every six weeks to be checked,’ said Rupert, his voice deceptively quiet.

‘I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that.’ She launched into a description of the lifecycle of Toxacara canis which would have given nightmares to Edgar Allen Poe. ‘So you see, dearest, I really must insist.’

‘Very well, Muriel; it shall be as you wish,’ said the earl. ‘Come, Baskerville.’

‘I didn’t mean—’ Muriel called after him, disconcerted by the look in his eyes.

But Rupert had gone.

It was not unexpected that the earl’s attempts to dismiss Anna should reach her ears. The following day, returning at dusk from an inspection of the haunted folly, the re-roofing of which his bailiff regarded as urgent, Rupert noticed that the door of the rose garden was ajar. Mr Cameron must be working late. He would just go in and have a word with him. Muriel had meant well, earlier in the day, when she offered to replace his ear-trumpet with one of the new-fangled hearing aids, but the old Scotsman was a crusty fellow and the moment had perhaps been unfortunate, for Mr Cameron had been showing them his new and lovely snow-white rose.

Putting his hand through Baskerville’s collar, Rupert pushed open the door. Judders of ecstasy and a violent vibrato of the single, coal-black wart on Baskerville’s blond cheek, prepared Rupert for what he would find — Anna, carrying a trug and a pair of secateurs, moving in a kind of dream among the flowers.

Tightening his grip on his dog, the earl advanced.

‘Good evening,’ he said pleasantly.

Ambushed, Anna stood her ground. Her head went up. ‘Good evening, your lordship.’

Rupert recoiled. Not since she had deplored Mersham’s lack of bathrooms had her ‘r’s rolled quite so terribly. It was her curtsy, however, that showed Rupert the full extent of her displeasure. Gone was the balletic homage, the dedicated servility. Anna had bobbed.

‘Is anything the matter?’

Anna had decided on frostiness, on silence, on le style anglais.

‘Nothing is the matter. As you perceive, I am picking flowers for Miss Hardwicke’s room. Mr Cameron has permitted it. I am not stealing.’

Rupert looked at her, completely bewildered. ‘No, of course you’re not stealing. What’s happened, Anna? Have I done anything?’

‘No,’ said Anna, still struggling with the concept of the stiff upper lip as purveyed in her infancy by Pinny and Miss King.

It was Baskerville, never an exponent of silent suffering, who put an end to this by twisting himself out of the earl’s grasp. He would, so long after his supper-time, have marginally preferred a rabbit, but Anna was undoubtedly the next best thing. By the time he had made this clear to her, Anna, trying to save her basket, had lost both her cap and her sang-froid.

‘Oh, chort!’ she said, looking up at her employer through pollen-dusted eyelashes. ‘You have made me so sad.’

‘I? I? For God’s sake, Anna.’

‘I was in the dressing room when you boasted to Miss Hardwicke how you have tried to send me away. And I do not know why because I have really tried to work hard and it is true I did not know how to gopher but this turned out not to be at all necessary and though I did play a very little the piano in the music room last week when I was dusting it was only for perhaps three minutes because it was the B flat étude which is very short as you know and in Russia always when we sent away a servant we allowed them first to explain so—’

‘Stop it! Stop it, Anna!’ Rupert reached out, took her by the shoulders. A mistake… More of a mistake than he would have believed possible. He dropped his arms, stepped back. ‘Please, for heaven’s sake, Anna. It wasn’t because I wasn’t satisfied with your work. Your work is excellent. It was because I met someone who’d stayed with you in Petersburg.’

He recounted his conversation with Mr Stewart, to which Anna listened with growing amazement.

‘You wished to dismiss me because Petya had cut his teeth on the Crown of Kazan?’

‘All right, I know it sounds absurd but—’

‘Absurd? It is crazy! Sergei has always said that the English aristocracy have brains like very small aspirins and now I believe it. In any case, the Crown of Kazan was very heavy. Niannka was always angry with Mama when she wore it because it gave her a headache.’

‘Niannka? Is that the lady with the mummified finger?’

Anna dimpled, but her eyes were sad, for Niannka’s desertion had hurt more than anything in the dark days of the revolution. ‘Yes. It was the finger of St Nino, who lived in the monastery at Varzia, where she was born. He has many fingers, that one, perhaps three thousand — the monks are such rogues!’

‘You’ve been there?’

She nodded. ‘We stayed with Niannka when Mama took the waters at Borzhomi. It was very beautiful. We ate with our fingers and slept on the ground and washed in the Kuru, which is very cold and green and runs down from the Caucasus, and the men had great moustaches and got drunk and fell out of their caves,’ said Anna, her face lighting up at the memory. ‘Only the chickens I did not like,’ she added, turning her thumb to reveal a white scar across its base.

‘And it’s certain that she robbed you?’

Anna shrugged. ‘Kira’s aunt saw her on the Anchikov Bridge, laughing with some soldiers of the Red Guard after we had fled. It is natural, perhaps. She was a woman of the people.’

‘She undoubtedly seems to have been that,’ said Rupert reflectively. Then returning to the attack: ‘Anna, you must see how unsuitable it is, your being here.’

‘No, I do not see it.’ Her eyes kindled. ‘I know. It is because I am a woman! It is all right for Sergei to be chauffeur to an amazingly stupid duchess, though he has seize quartiers and his grandfather was a grand duke, and it is all right for Colonel Terek to drive a taxi though his family has owned three-quarters of the Kara Kum, but I… I may not work. Naturally. In a country where women must be trampled to death by ’orses before they are permitted to vote one would expect this.’

‘No, Anna, you’re wrong. I worked with women in the war — I know very well what they’re capable of.’

‘Then why? Just because we are rich in Petersburg?’

‘Not only rich — Oh, Anna try to understand. In Russia they probably wouldn’t have allowed me over your doorstep.’

‘Pas du tout.’ She dimpled up at him. ‘Mama was extremely democratic. Earls with large estates and many Christian names were frequently admitted. By the front door, even.’

‘Oh, God.’

They had begun to walk between the fragrant bushes, drawn by the remembered perfection of Mr Cameron’s new rose.

‘You really like it here, don’t you?’ said Rupert wonderingly. ‘Though we work you half to death, though your hands are raw and chapped, though you’re cruelly short of sleep…’

They had reached the rose. ‘Yes,’ said Anna so quietly that Rupert had to bend his head to hear. ‘Yes, I like it here. I like Mrs Park, who is so gentle and so good, and James, who has struggled and struggled to make himself strong. I like the courage of your mother, who is so patient with the spirits who plague her, and I like your uncle, who hears music as if each time it had been just composed. I like the warriors on your roof and your foolish dog and the catalpa tree that leans into the lake… And this rose, I like,’ she said, bending in reverence to Mr Cameron’s masterpiece. ‘Yes, very much I like this rose.’

She fell silent. (And if I were to take the secateurs, thought Rupert, and cut each and every blossom from this incomparable bush and pour them in her lap, what then?)

Anna looked up at him. Her face crunched into its monkey smile. ‘And the appendix of Mrs Proom,’ she continued, ‘ah, that I truly love!’

Rupert lifted his hands in a mocking gesture of surrender. ‘Then stay,’ he said, ‘heaven forbid that I should come between you and Mrs Proom’s appendix,’ — and left her.

The dowager was tired. She had spent the morning in the village, comforting Mrs Bunford, who was still very much upset at having been asked to make neither the wedding gown nor any of the dresses for the bridesmaids and, to console the widow, had ordered her own outfit of powder blue wild silk. To give Mrs Bunford wild silk to ruin was the act of a lunatic and the dowager was already regretting it. Then as she walked to her brougham she was accosted by tiny, tottery Miss Frensham who had played the organ in Mersham Church for forty years. Miss Frensham, rheumy-eyed and quavery, wanted to know if it was true that Miss Hardwicke wanted neither ‘The Voice That Breathed O’er Eden’ nor the ‘Lohengrin March’ like they always had, but something modern that Miss Frensham was almost sure she wouldn’t be able to play since she couldn’t see too well nowadays to read new music. Because if so, perhaps they’d like to get someone else to play, though it wouldn’t be easy not to see Master Rupert married, not after she’d read him every single page of The Prince and the Pauper when he had the measles, because he always noticed when you missed a bit out, not like other children…