in mounds of skirts with previously crisp laundry lying around them in heaps.
The door opened and Charles stood on the threshold looking bemused and a trifle alarmed.
"What on earth is wrong?" he demanded, at first taking their sobs for distress. "Are you ill? What has happened?" Then he saw it was amusement and looked even more confounded, and as neither of them stopped or took any sensible notice of him, he became annoyed.
"Imogen! Control yourself!" he said sharply. "What is the matter with you?"
Imogen still laughed helplessly.
"Hester!" Charles was growing pink in the face. "Hester, stop it! Stop it at once!"
Hester looked at him and found it funnier still.
Charles sniffed, dismissed it as women's weakness and therefore inexplicable, and left, shutting the door hard so none of the servants should witness such a ridiculous scene.
***
Hester was perfectly accustomed to travel, and the journey from London to Shelburne was barely worth comment compared with the fearful passage by sea across the Bay of Biscay and through the Mediterranean to the Bosporus and up the Black Sea to Sebastopol. Troopships replete with terrified horses, overcrowded, and with the merest of accommodations, were things beyond the imagination of most Englishmen, let alone women. A simple train journey through the summer countryside was a positive pleasure, and the warm, quiet and sweet-scented mile in the dog cart at the far end before she reached the hall was a glory to the senses.
She arrived at the magnificent front entrance with its Doric columns and portico. The driver had no time to hand her down because she had grown unaccustomed to such courtesies and scrambled to the ground herself while he was still tying the reins. With a frown he unloaded her box and at the same moment a footman opened the door and held it for her to pass through. Another footman carried in the box and disappeared somewhere upstairs with it.
Fabia Shelburne was in the withdrawing room where Hester was shown. It was a room of considerable beauty, and at this height of the year, with the French windows open onto the garden and the scent of roses drifting on a warm breeze, the soft green of the rolling parkland beyond, the marble-surrounded fireplace seemed unnecessary, and the paintings keyholes to another and unnecessary world.
Lady Fabia did not rise, but smiled as Hester was shown in. "Welcome to Shelburne Hall, Miss Latterly. I hope your journey was not too fatiguing. Why my dear, you seem very blown about! I am afraid it is very windy beyond the garden. I trust it has not distressed you. When you havecomposed yourself and taken off your traveling clothes, perhaps you would care to join us for afternoon tea? Cook is particularly adept at making crumpets." She smiled, a cool, well-practiced gesture. "I expect you are hungry, and it will be an excellent opportunity for us to become acquainted with each other. Lady Callandra will be down, no doubt, and my daughter-in-law, Lady Shelburne. I do not believe you have met?"
"No, Lady Fabia, but it is a pleasure I look forward to." She had observed Fabia's deep violet gown, less somber than black but still frequently associated with mourning. Apart from that Callandra had told her of Joscelin Grey's death, although not in detail. "May I express my deepest sympathy for the loss of your son. I have a little understanding of how you feel."
Fabia's eyebrows rose. "Have you!" she said with disbelief.
Hester was stung. Did this woman imagine she was the only person who had been bereaved? How self-absorbed grief could be.
"Yes," she replied perfectly levelly. "I lost my eldest brother in the Crimea, and a few months ago my father and mother within three weeks of each other."
"Oh-" For once Fabia was at a loss for words. She had supposed Hester's sober dress merely a traveling convenience. Her own mourning consumed her to the exclusion of anyone else's. "I am sorry."
Hester smiled; when she truly meant it it had great warmth.
"Thank you," she accepted. "Now if you permit I will accept your excellent idea and change into something suitable before joining you for tea. You are quite right; the very thought of crumpets makes me realize I am very hungry."
The bedroom they had given her was in the west wing, where Callandra had had a bedroom and sitting room of her own since she had moved out of the nursery. She and her elder brothers had grown up at Shelburne Hall. She had left it to