library, expansive park and ample stables, it was ideal for them. Harry could write his William Warwick detective novels in peace, while Emma rode every day, and Sebastian played in the spacious grounds, regularly bringing strange animals home to join him for tea.
Giles would often drive down to Bristol on Friday evenings in time to join them for dinner. On Saturday morning he would conduct a constituency surgery, before dropping into the dock workers’ club for a couple of pints with his agent, Griff Haskins. In the afternoon, he and Griff would join 10,000 of his constituents at Eastville Stadium to watch Bristol Rovers lose more times than they won. Giles never admitted, even to his agent, that he would rather have spent his Saturday afternoons watching Bristol play rugby, but had he done so Griff would have reminded him that the crowd at the Memorial Ground was rarely more than two thousand, and most of them voted Conservative.
On Sunday mornings, Giles could be found on his knees at St Mary Redcliffe, with Harry and Emma by his side. Harry assumed that for Giles this was just another constituency duty, as he’d always looked for any excuse to avoid chapel at school. But no one could deny that Giles was quickly gaining a reputation as a conscientious, hard-working Member of Parliament.
And then suddenly, without explanation, Giles’s weekend visits became less and less frequent. Whenever Emma raised the subject with her brother, he mumbled something about parliamentary duties. Harry remained unconvinced, and hoped that his brother-in-law’s long absences from the constituency would not eat into his slim majority at the next election.
One Friday evening, they discovered the real reason Giles had been otherwise engaged for the past few months.
He had rung Emma earlier in the week to warn her that he was coming down to Bristol for the weekend, and would arrive in time for dinner on Friday. What he hadn’t told her was that he would be accompanied by a guest.
Emma usually liked Giles’s girlfriends, who were always attractive, often a little scatty and without exception adored him, even if most of them didn’t last long enough for her to get to know them. But that was not to be the case this time.
When Giles introduced Virginia to her on Friday evening, Emma was puzzled by what her brother could possibly see in the woman. Emma accepted that she was beautiful and well connected. In fact Virginia reminded them more than once that she’d been Deb of the Year (in 1934), and three times that she was the daughter of the Earl of Fenwick, before they’d even sat down for dinner.
Emma might have dismissed this as simply being nerves, if Virginia hadn’t picked at her food and whispered to Giles during dinner, in tones she must have known they could overhear, how difficult it must be to find decent domestic staff in Gloucestershire. To Emma’s surprise, Giles just smiled at these observations, never once disagreeing with her. Emma was just about to say something she knew she would regret, when Virginia announced that she was exhausted after such a long day and wished to retire.
Once she had upped and departed, with Giles following a pace behind, Emma walked through to the drawing room, poured herself a large whisky and sank into the nearest chair.
‘God knows what my mother will make of the Lady Virginia.’
Harry smiled. ‘It won’t matter much what Elizabeth thinks, because I have a feeling Virginia will last about as long as most of Giles’s other girlfriends.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Emma. ‘But what puzzles me is why she’s interested in Giles, because she’s clearly not in love with him.’
When Giles and Virginia drove back to London after lunch on Sunday afternoon, Emma quickly forgot about the Earl of Fenwick’s daughter as she had to deal with a far more pressing problem. Yet another nanny had handed in her notice, declaring that it had been the last straw when she’d found a hedgehog in her bed. Harry felt some sympathy for the poor woman.
‘It doesn’t help that he’s an only child,’ said Emma after she’d finally got her son to sleep that night. ‘It can’t be fun having no one to play with.’
‘It never worried me,’ said Harry, not looking up from his book.
‘Your mother told me you were quite a handful before you went to St Bede’s school, and in any case, when you were his age, you spent more time down at the docks than you