And so I acquired a green and white uniform, with a striped tie, a panama hat for summer and a wide-brimmed velour one for winter, and a blazer with the school crest on it—which was our old family crest, acquired with the building. I entered what was for me a life of misery. Langley Hall could not be called an academic institution. Instead, it attracted the daughters of the upper class and of those who could pay to be considered upper class, and it readied these girls for good marriages. Of course, this was the nineteen sixties, and one did not actually broadcast this quaint notion. Girls were expected to learn useful skills to help them work in suitable jobs—PR, publishing, the BBC, maybe running art galleries or designing clothes—until they met the right sort of husband with the correct amount of money.

So from the very beginning I was an anomaly: I might have had a father with a title, but he was the art master at the school. I lived in the lodge and I was attending the school on a scholarship. And, worst of all, I was bright and driven. I asked questions of the teachers and longed for harder problems in maths classes. Some of the teachers loved me and encouraged my lively mind. The lazier and less qualified ones found me a nuisance and disruptive. They would send me to the headmistress and put me into detention, where I had to write out, one hundred times, “I must not interrupt my teachers,” or, “I must not question my teachers.”

Miss Honeywell’s skull-like face with its high cheekbones and withering sneer came back clearly into my consciousness. “So you think that you know better than Miss Snode, do you, Joanna?” or, “May I remind you that you are only here as a gesture of my goodwill because your father is no longer able to look after you properly?”

The latter was undoubtedly true. My father had never cooked a meal or ironed a shirt in his life. My mother had taken perfect care of us both. And so my becoming a pupil at Langley Hall also included taking my evening meal with the girls and doing my prep with them in the study hall, going home only to sleep. I was glad of at least that small mercy. Sharing a dorm with my enemies would have been the last straw.

Not that all the girls were against me. I did make friends: quiet, studious girls like myself. We read and exchanged books and discussed them as we walked the grounds. But it was that core group of popular girls who moved in a pack, like wolves, and loved to pick on anyone weaker than them who made it quite clear that I did not belong.

“Sorry, there’s no room at this table,” they would say when I needed a place to sit with my lunch tray.

My gym shoes would mysteriously disappear. The wolf pack smirked as I got into trouble for losing my equipment. Unlike them, I’d had no private tennis lessons, and they mocked my feeble attempts to hit the ball. They talked loudly about where they would be going skiing or if they were off to a villa in France. As we got older, these pranks eventually stopped, partly because I never let the girls see that they were getting to me, but also because boys and parties became more important. Then they would talk loudly about which dances they would attend and which boys were being given fabulous cars for their eighteenth birthdays and might drive down to visit, giving the girls an incentive to sneak out at midnight. The trouble was that they were all part of the same social set—all interconnected in a giant web by family or business. I was one of the few outsiders.

And so I had endured until I reached the sixth form. I was driven by a burning desire and a plan for life. I was going to go to university, become a lawyer, be brilliantly successful, make a lot of money, and buy back Langley Hall. I pictured myself taking my father by the arm and leading him up the drive. “This is now ours again,” I would say. “You are back where you belong—lord of the manor.”

And to Miss Honeywell I’d say, “I’m so sorry, but I need you to be out of here at the end of this term.” And I’d smile.

I had to smile now at my na?ve optimism. Now my father was dead. I was the last of the line. The title would die out and there would be no point in restoring Langley Hall to its former glory. I took a deep breath as I went up the broad steps to the front door and pressed on the bell.

CHAPTER THREE

JOANNA

April 1973

I heard the bell echoing through the foyer, and then, after a long interval, the door opened, revealing Miss Honeywell herself. I had been expecting a porter or a maid and took an involuntary step backward when I saw that face. As always, her face was a perfect mask of makeup, her eyebrows plucked and drawn in as thin brown lines, and her hair, now greyer than I remembered, had been permed into perfect layers. What I had not been expecting was for her to be wearing slacks and an open-necked shirt. During the school year, I remembered her as wearing a tailored suit in winter with a gold pin on her lapel, and in summer a crisp linen dress and pearls.

She, too, looked startled for a second, then her face broke into a smile. “Joanna, my dear. I hadn’t expected you so soon.”

“I came as soon as I received the telegram.”

“I wasn’t sure we were sending it to the right place. Your father had several addresses for you, but we thought the firm of solicitors would find you.”

“Thank you. Yes, they called me when the telegram arrived.”

“Well, that’s a relief. I am so sorry to be the bearer of such sad news. Do come in.” She stepped back to allow me to enter the black and white marble-tiled entrance hall. Inside felt delightfully cool. Miss Honeywell shut the front door behind her.