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Having plunged they sported like water babies in the swimming pool or frolicked at deck tennis and as each day passed, and the ship steamed slowly south into equatorial waters, their passion grew inarticulately. Not entirely inarticulately but when they spoke during the day their words were matter of fact. It was only at night, when the older generation danced the quickstep to the ship’s band and they were left alone to stare down at the white water swirling from the ship’s side and invest one another with those qualities their different upbringings had extolled, that they spoke their feelings. Even then it was by way of other people and other places that they told one another what they felt. Lockhart talked of Mr Dodd and how at night he and the gamekeeper would sit at the settle in the stone-flagged kitchen with the black iron range glowing between them while the wind howled in the chimney outside and Mr Dodd’s pipes wailed inside. And of how he and Mr Dodd would herd the sheep or stalk game in the wooded valley known as Slimeburn where Mr Dodd dug coal from a drift mine that had first been worked in 1805. Finally there were the fishingexpeditions on the great reservoir fringed with pine that stood a mile from Flawse Hall. Jessica saw it all so clearly through a mist of Mazo de la Roche and Brontë and every romantic novel she had ever read. Lockhart was the young gallant come to sweep her off her feet and carry her from the boredom of her life in East Pursley and away from her mother’s cynicism to the ever-ever land of Flawse Hall on Flawse Fell close under Flawse Rigg where the wind blew fierce and the snow lay thick outside but all within was warm with old wood and dogs and the swirl of Mr Dodd’s Northumbrian pipes and old Mr Flawse sitting at the oval mahogany dining-table disputing by candlelight questions of great moment with his two friends, Dr Magrew and Mr Bullstrode. In the tapestry woven from Lockhart’s words she created a picture of a past which she dearly longed to make her future.
    Lockhart’s mind worked more practically. To him Jessica was an angel of radiant beauty for whom he would lay down, if not his own life, at least that of anything which moved within range of his most powerful rifle.
    But while the young people were only implicitly in love, the old were more outspoken. Mr Flawse, having baited the trap for another housekeeper, waited for Mrs Sandicott’s response. It came later than he had expected. Mrs Sandicott was not a woman to be hustled and she had calculated with care. Of one thing she was certain. If Mr Flawse wanted Jessica for his daughter-in-law hemust take her mother for his wife. She broached the subject with due care and by way of the mention of property.
    ‘If Jessica were to marry,’ she said one evening after dinner, ‘I would be without a home.’
    Mr Flawse signalled his delight at the news by ordering another brandy. ‘How so, ma’am?’ he enquired.
    ‘Because my poor dear late husband left all twelve houses in Sandicott Crescent, including our own, to our daughter and I would never live with the young married couple.’
    Mr Flawse sympathized. He had lived long enough with Lockhart to know the hazards of sharing a house with the brute. ‘There is always Flawse Hall, ma’am. You would be very welcome there.’
    ‘As what? A temporary guest or were you thinking of a more permanent arrangement?’
    Mr Flawse hesitated. There was an inflexion in Mrs Sandicott’s voice which suggested that the permanent arrangement he had in mind might not be at all to her liking. ‘There need be nothing temporary about your being a guest, ma’am. You could stay as long as you liked.’
    Mrs Sandicott’s eyes glinted with suburban steel. ‘And what precisely would the neighbours make of that, Mr Flawse?’
    Mr Flawse hesitated again. The fact that his nearest neighbours were six miles off at Black Pockrington, and that he didn’t give a tuppenny damn what they