Kitty let herself into Cliff House, via the conservatory, stopping to plump up the Wedgwood blue cushions on the white wicker chairs. She tiptoed silently into the house and halted by the open door of Julian’s study. He kept his fossils in here – extinct sea animals with obscure names. Dull, implacable things.

She glided into the room to check them and stopped by the desk where a file lay open. On top of it was a list in Julian’s handwriting. ‘Virginia Marie, Claude, Katrine.’ Kitty stared and a hand gripped her heart coldly. Virginia? Katrine?

She pushed aside Julian’s list and bent over to read what was in the file. ‘The enemy is now me…’

Oh, yes, it is, she thought. The enemy is me: my rotten, ageing body. She leafed further through the pages. ‘5 June 1942. My Darling. I am worried. I can’t help feeling that you are exposed to danger, your white, slender body hungry or damaged… Remember you promised to return.’

Kitty sat down heavily in the desk chair. Tears began to flow down her cheeks and she let them drip down to her chin.

A hand descended on to her shoulder, causing her to rear up in fright. ‘And what the hell do you think you are doing?’ asked Julian.

She looked up at him, wet eyes meeting antagonistic ones, and faltered, ‘Reading these letters. What does it look like?’

He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. ‘You’re snooping, Kitty.’

She sobbed. ‘I know, I know.’

Julian had woken suddenly, choked by a dream. He had been walking along the beach. His feet dug into sand so hot that it burnt his soles. Arms wide, he swung round to savour the heat and then, suddenly, he was in deep water, fighting for breath. Below his blurring vision lay rocks and sands and a world of undulating seaweed.

He lay and reflected on his dream. Its imagery and significance were embarrassingly obvious. He was in deep water.

Not now.

He turned and punched the pillow. On that Friday morning a journalist from the Guardian had rung to check whether the rumours that Portcullis’s disappointing margin of return on the Hastings and Bournemouth project had been correct. Julian had been able to put him right – after a fashion. But it was a straw in the wind.

It was no good becoming involved with Agnes Campion at this precise moment. Why, therefore, had he asked before he left Agnes’s flat that night if he might see her again? That she had refused meant nothing. He had asked a second time and she repeated that she could not see him again until they had sorted out the subject of Kitty. It had not occurred to Julian that Agnes might be a woman of scruple.

Kitty? Kitty was the thorn buried in Julian’s flesh that, every so often, drove itself in deeper. It was a reminder, a penance… an anchor. How could he explain the position to a pair of puzzled grey eyes?

He said goodnight and left the flat.

The sound of feet padding softly in the kitchen broke his reverie. Kitty.

He heard the sound of stifled sobbing.

Agnes knew perfectly well that she had been obsessed by Madeleine. Madeleine the virtuous mother, Agnes the outcast sinner. Madeleine was dazzlingly soft and seductive, full-bodied, fragrant and powerful. Agnes placed her in a frame and arranged the objects of married life around the figure of the suffering wife.

The three elfin-faced daughters in smocked floral frocks and white socks. The appartement in the rue Jacob, painted a fashionable grey-white. The china, the glassware, the books.

But even all these considerations, and the domestic details, begged from the reluctant Pierre, had not stopped Agnes continuing the affair, and she had learned the lesson of the selfish power and persuasion of passion.

Yet Madeleine had triumphed. In their bed, she lay beside Pierre, and it was Agnes who grew bitterly jealous of the rightful wife. Equally, Agnes understood the other woman’s grief and her desire to make Agnes pay for her trespass. In that Madeleine had succeeded superbly, for Agnes suffered as she had never before, her guilt ensuring that it was sharper, more intense and more damaging than perhaps was necessary.

Perhaps Madeleine had banked on that too.

The pattern must not be repeated; nor should she get back on the treadmill of hope and self-disgust. Yet the terrible thing was that the moment Julian had confessed about Kitty, Agnes’s emotions slipped into a higher gear. She had fallen in love.

11

Everyone sat it out through March, which turned to April, a grudging, unspring-like April with squalls of rain and blustery winds, and into May, holding the equilibrium. At least, that was how Agnes saw it. She pictured Kitty – well, a notional picture of Kitty – willing the centre to hold and Julian, hair ruffled, eyes hollow with strain, dodging the issue. And herself?

She did her best to forget Julian. Heroically so. She and Bel had mapped the next six months’ work, found the money, set the schedules. This left her free to concentrate on the house.

My house, she thought, so wounded by all that warm, careless flesh that has lived under its roof, by numberless feet treading through the centuries, by weather and by the slippage of energy and money.

First, a survey. (‘If you want instant depression,’ Julian Knox had told Agnes over that meal of scrambled eggs, ‘talk to a surveyor.’ He added, ‘They are careful people.’)

No doubt about it, Mr Harvey was indeed a careful man. He took one look at Flagge House and got down to work with his electronic tape-measure, which emitted a bee-like hum.

‘Regular maintenance,’ he informed Agnes, with the satisfaction of a missionary faced with the most pagan of territories, ‘can pre-empt all sorts of horrors, and I’m afraid the late Mr Campion did not invest in it, if you take my meaning.’ Enraptured by the flight of his electronic bees, he adjusted the dial. ‘An historic house can’t look after itself.’ His tone was one of reproof.

They made for the drawing room and Mr Harvey measured and paced with his tape-measure and dictated notes. Occasionally he became transfixed by a crack or a fissure, by the tilt of the stone fireplace and, in particular, the long windows overlooking the terrace.

Eventually he pronounced, ‘Proper restoration is always expensive, but it depends what you want. A total overhaul or just bits and pieces.’

‘Can you pick and choose what to preserve?’ Agnes fingered a curtain, which had been bleached by the light. ‘I would have thought not.’

Mr Harvey’s machine hummed in agreement. ‘I’d like to view the cellars and storage areas.’

The cellars ran the length of the house and were dark, cold, and bled damp. Agnes led the way. ‘This one was known as the women’s cellar,’ she explained, embarrassed that anyone should have had to work in such conditions, ‘where they did the pickling, spicing and meat curing. The men’s cellar, where the wine and beer was kept, is through that door.’

The measuring and humming and dictating began all over again. If Mr Harvey was of a careful disposition, he was also a showman. He paused, milking his moment, and ran his hand over the brick on which a blotched mural had been painted in mould. ‘It’s a big story of rising damp, Miss Campion.’ To emphasize the tragedy, he stamped his feet on the flint cobbles and showed her where the ooze created a lustrous setting around the cobbles.

Agnes went quiet. She knew death had been here, an uneasy death, or so it had been reported in the records. A-swagger with riches racked up from exploiting trade in cardamom, muslin and jute in the East India Company, Archibald Campion had been hot to build a grandiose Victorian wing. Driving their spades into the earth to set the foundations for the wing, the estate workers had hit a pile of human bones. ‘There was no question that they were human,’ noted Camilla Campion, Archibald’s wife, ‘and some were horribly charred. We were afraid that we would catch a putrid contagion.’ The conclusion was, she reported, shocked, that these bones were the relicts of plague victims, denied proper burial in the graveyard.

Unquiet their death and, thus, unquiet their souls: they beat their anguish and disturbance against the brick and silence.

Mr Harvey was upset by what his inspection revealed. His machine snapped to a halt. ‘I’m afraid that, over the years, the external soil level has risen. It requires to be stripped back and a damp course inserted.’

‘I’d better get you some coffee, Mr Harvey, and we can discuss the options.’

While they sat and drank it in the kitchen, Mr Harvey reeled off a verbatim report in which the word ‘defective’ featured heavily. The roof timbers were defective. The brickwork was defective and had the additional problem of soot disease – ‘Sulphuric acid, Miss Campion, caused by a mingling of fumes and damp air, which penetrates the brickwork.’ Further defects included damp in the roof and an almost certain infestation of lyctus and death-watch beetle, and the ivy growth on the Victorian wing.

‘I know that,’ said Agnes. She looked down at her untouched coffee. ‘What are we talking?’

Mr Harvey shifted into a comfortable position on the chair and totted up sums under his breath. ‘Thousands.’ He peered at her face. ‘Don’t worry, Miss Campion. Once you’ve reached fifty or so anything else on top seems immaterial.’

At last Mr Harvey announced that he had done. With doom in her heart, Agnes accompanied him to his van, parked by the kitchen garden. He tapped the wall. ‘These I like. Put me in front of a wall,’ he said, ‘and I can tell you such things about it. Like this one.’ He pointed. ‘English bond. Not to be mixed up with Flemish bond.’

‘Certainly not,’ said Agnes, with gallows humour.