‘I wish I had Lady here,’ he said at one point, and then later murmured, as if to himself, ‘and I wish you would take your clothes off!’

‘I bet you do, but it ain’t gonna happen! Look, Jude, I’ve gone numb down one side, so can I move now? I must have been standing here for hours.’

‘Oh. . yes, I suppose you have,’ he said, blinking at me as if he’d forgotten I was an animate object, with a voice and a lot of opinions. ‘I think I’ve got enough to make a start.’

‘On a sculpture?’ I climbed down slightly stiffly and fetched the flask of coffee I’d had the foresight to bring with me.

‘Yes, but I’ll make a maquette or two, first.’

‘Maquette?’

‘A small three-dimensional study, exploring ideas.’

‘Right.’

‘We’ll see if Lady will oblige with the same pose without the rug when she comes in later and then I can take a few more pictures. And I’ll need you down here again tomorrow.’

He came and sat next to me on the wooden edge of the model’s dais and I handed him a plastic mug of coffee and a mince pie from a plastic box.

‘I can hardly wait,’ I said politely. ‘It wasn’t so bad, was it?’ he asked, sounding surprised. He was close enough so I could see all the fascinating little specks of gold — probably fool’s gold — suspended in his molasses-dark eyes.

‘Well, no. .’ I admitted, ‘though I thought you were only going to do one or two quick sketches, not dozens.’

‘You’re going to be immortalised in brazed and welded steel for posterity,’ he promised, which has to be the best offer of any kind I’ve had for a long, long time — and certainly one up on the popcorn and Coke Sam bought me the time we went to the pictures.

‘Where’s Merlin?’ he asked.

‘I left him up at the house. I wasn’t sure if he was allowed in the studio or not.’

‘Yes, he always comes with me, unless lured away by visiting dryads,’ he said wryly and then we sat there silently, but fairly companionably, drinking our coffee and eating mince pies.

‘Sorry I bit your head off earlier, I was upset about something,’ I said eventually.

‘That’s okay — anything you want to share?’

I looked away from his enquiring eyes and shook my head firmly. ‘The others have gone into the attic to look for costumes for the play,’ I said, changing the subject. ‘The way Coco’s carrying on, we’ll end up having to act out our parts too, though in my case I’ll have to read the lines, because I won’t have time to learn them by heart.’

‘I don’t know them by heart either: it used to be Becca, Tilda and Noël who did most of the reading. At least it doesn’t take long, because not only is it quite a short play, but Noël’s edited out all the slapstick and Malvolio stuff and filled in with a brief linking summary,’ he said, then glanced at me from under his heavy dark brows and added, his already thrillingly deep voice going even lower, ‘But if we act them out, then I expect I can manage a few appropriate actions.’

The corner of his straight mouth quirked up again, but I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that, since most of his actions towards me so far have been highly inappropriate, like dragging me into his bedroom on Christmas Eve!

Jude came back to the house with me and we went round through the stableyard, where we found that Becca had just brought the horses in and started grooming Nutkin.

‘I was playing hide and seek with the others, but me and Tilda got spotted first, behind the sitting-room curtains,’ she said. ‘One of my feet was sticking out. They’d found everyone except Coco when I thought I’d better do the horses, so I left them to it. She’s so skinny, she probably slipped between a crack in the floorboards.’

‘That’s a slight exaggeration, but she is worryingly thin now,’ Jude said.

‘I’m thinking about confiscating her laxatives,’ I confessed. ‘I don’t want her to waste away while I’m doing the cooking and have her on my conscience.’

‘Even if you do, she’ll probably just go back to them when she leaves,’ he pointed out.

‘Perhaps, but at least I’ll have tried.’

Jude removed Lady’s rug and took some more pictures of me standing with her, though I declined to take my wellies off this time, even if I did reluctantly part with my anorak. He even drew a couple of quick sketches, though the light wasn’t exactly brilliant in there and Lady kept trying to nibble the edges of the paper.

‘You’re a muse now,’ Becca said, pausing in her steady brush-strokes. ‘I’ve read about artists and their muses, you need to watch yourself!’ And she laughed heartily.

Luckily I don’t think Jude took in what she’d said, because he seemed to have mentally retired to his own little Planet Zog again, closing his sketchbook and walking off to the house without another word to either of us.

We exchanged a look and then I put my anorak back on and started to groom Lady, which has to be one of the best arm-toning exercises going.

When I went into the house a little while later, Coco was still missing and they were getting anxious about her.

‘I can’t think where she’s got to,’ Guy said. ‘We’ve even looked in the attic, which was supposed to be out of bounds, but there’s no sign of her anywhere.’

‘Did you check to see if her coat and hat were missing? She might have gone outside,’ I suggested.

‘Yes, I thought of that,’ Michael said, ‘but they’re still there. I don’t think she’d have stayed out very long anyway, it’s too cold. And she’s not exactly the hillwalking type, so she won’t have got lost.’

‘No, I just thought she might have had a sudden impulse to set out for the village, but obviously not.’

‘Did you look in all the chests and trunks?’ asked Tilda from the sofa, where she was comfortably reclining while watching the hunt. ‘Only I suddenly remembered that story about the bride playing hide and seek on her wedding day and vanishing, only for them to find her skeleton in a chest years later.’

Noël looked very struck by this. ‘Of course! It’s just the sort of silly thing she would do — and there are two or three in the attic, as well as the sandalwood chest on the landing.’

Guy, Jude and Michael dashed upstairs, but I couldn’t myself see Coco squeezing herself into a trunk. ‘Did you check the cellars?’ I asked Jess.

‘Yes, and the utility room and everywhere else I could think of. Come on, let’s go up the backstairs and see if they’ve found her yet.’

I followed her upstairs, stopping to check the wardrobe in my room and Michael’s and the linen cupboard between them. And then suddenly I remembered Noël telling me there was another door at the top of the staircase, leading to a stairway to the unused servants’ rooms in the smaller attic over this wing. It was in a dark corner, easy to miss, but from behind it came a faint scrabbling and a wavering cry of, ‘Help! Heeelp!’

‘Coco? It’s all right, we’ll have you out of there in a minute,’ I called, tugging at the handle, which wouldn’t budge. ‘Quick, Jess, go and get your Uncle Jude and the others, I can’t shift this.’

Jude could, though, and with one mighty wrench it creaked open, revealing a tearstained, pallid figure huddled on the bottom stairs.

He picked her up as if she weighed nothing and she clung to him whimpering, ‘I thought no-one would ever find me and I was going to be there forever! And I went upstairs to see if there was another way out and something big and white flapped at me!’

Shuddering she turned her face into his shoulder as he stroked her hair and said gently, ‘It’s all right, Coco, I’ve got you now.’

At that moment I felt a sudden pang of something that I feared might be jealousy: I had never been held so tenderly in someone’s arms as if I was feather-light and fragile! (Alan would have fallen over, had he tried.)

‘You’d better put her on her bed,’ Guy suggested. ‘Come on, Coco, you’re safe now and we would have found you eventually.’

‘I hadn’t even noticed that door was there,’ Michael said.

‘Noël told me about it and I suddenly remembered. But Guy’s right and she ought to go and lie down for a bit. Someone make her a hot drink and I’ll sit with her.’

‘Guy can do that while I check for the mysterious ghostly thing,’ Michael said. ‘If I vanish, you know where I am!’

I followed after Jude, who had laid Coco down on her bed and was now attempting to detach her arms from their death grip around his neck.

‘Oh, there you are,’ he said to me with some relief.

‘Guy’s making her a hot drink and Michael’s gone to see what frightened her in the attic.’

‘Oh, it was horrible, swooping at me out of the darkness!’ Coco shuddered, reaching for Jude again, though he was now out of reach.

Guy brought a mug of tea and said, ‘I’ve told the others we’ve found her and Michael says there was a pigeon up there — one of the windows is broken — so that must be what flew at you.’

Coco sat up and took the mug, pleased if anything with all the attention she was getting and starting to look a lot better. ‘Is there sugar in this?’ she asked after a sip.

‘Sweetener,’ Guy said, though I was sure he was lying. He exchanged a look with Jude and they both made their escape, while I seized the moment to give Coco a good lecture on the danger to her health from guzzling laxatives like sweets. She took it like a chided little girl and I felt about a century older and quite mean by the time I’d finished.

Then I removed her stash of Fruity-Go from the bedside table. ‘I know you’ve got more in your handbag, but I suggest you ration yourself to a normal dose every day until you run out, then stop them altogether. If you eat small, sensible meals, you’ll be fine, you really don’t need them.’