Deborah St. James braked the car to a halt on a breath of laughter and turned to her husband. “Simon, have you never been told you’re quite the world’s worst navigator?”

He smiled and closed the road atlas. “Never once. But have a heart. Consider the fog.”

She looked out the windscreen at the large, dark building that loomed in front of them. “Poor excuse for not being able to read a road map, if you ask me. Are we at the right place? It doesn’t look as if a soul’s waited up for us.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised. I told them we’d arrive at nine and now it’s…” he peered at his watch in the weak interior light of the car, “good God, it’s half past eleven.” She heard the laughter in his voice. “Are you for it, my love? Shall we spend our wedding night in the car?”

“Teenagers grappling hotly in the backseat, do you mean?” She tossed her long hair back with a shake of her head. “Hmm, it is a thought. But I’m afraid in that case you should have hired something larger than an Escort. No, Simon, there’s nothing for it, I’m afraid, but banging on the doors and rousing someone. But you shall make all our excuses.” She stepped out into the chilly night air, taking a moment to study the building before her.

It was a pre-Elizabethan structure by initial design, but one which had undergone a number of Jacobean changes that added to its air of rakish whimsicality. Mullioned windows winked in the moonlight that fi ltered through the wispy fog which had settled on the moors and was now drifting down into the dales. Walls were covered with Virginia creeper, its leaves burning the old stone to rich russet. Chimneys germinated upon the roof in a helter-skelter pattern of capricious warts against the night sky. There was a contumacy about the building that denied the very existence of the twentieth century, and this quality spread to the grounds that surrounded it.

Here enormous English oaks stretched out their branches over lawns where statuary, encircled by flowers, interrupted the fl ow of the land. Pathways meandered into the woods beyond the house with a beckoning, siren charm. In the absolute stillness, the play of water from a fountain nearby and the cry of a lamb from a distant farm were the only auditory concomitants to the whisper of the breeze that soughed through the night. They might have been Richard and Anne, home to Middleham at last.

Deborah turned back to the car. Her husband had opened his door and was watching her, waiting in his usual patient fashion for her photographer’s reaction to the beauty of the place. “It’s wonderful,” she said. “Thank you, my love.”

He lifted his braced left leg from the car, dropped it with a thump onto the drive, and extended his hand. With a practised movement, Deborah helped him to his feet. “I feel as if we’ve been going round in circles for hours,” St. James remarked, stretching.

“That’s because we have,” she teased. “‘Just two hours from the station, Deborah. A wonderful drive.’”

He laughed softly. “Well, it was, love. Admit it.”

“Absolutely. The third time I saw Rievaulx Abbey, I was positively enchanted.” She glanced at the forbidding oak door before them. “Shall we try it then?”

They crunched across the gravel drive to the dark recess into which the door was set. A pitted wooden bench was tipped drunkenly against the wall next to it, and two enormous urns stood on either side. With the perversity of plants, one urn held a burgeoning beauty of flowers while the other was home to a withering colony of geraniums whose dried leaves fluttered raspingly to the ground as Deborah and her husband passed.

St. James applied some considerable strength to the large brass fixture that hung in the centre of the door. Silence greeted its fading echoes. “There’s a bell as well,” Deborah noticed. “Have a go with that.”

The ringing far back in the deepest reaches of the house immediately roused what sounded like an entire pack of hounds into furious howling. “Well, that’s certainly done it,” St. James laughed.

“Dammit, Casper! Jason! S’only the bell, you devils!” Pitched very much like a man’s but with the unmistakable cadence of a country woman born and bred, a raucous voice shouted brisk reprovals behind the door.

“Down with you! Out! Get back t’the kitchen.” A pause, followed by some desperate scuffling. “No, blast you! Out in the back! Why, you blackguard fiends! Give me my slips! Damn your eyes!” With that, a bolt shrieked back from the inside of the door, which was pulled briskly open. A barefooted woman hopped back and forth on the icy stones of the entry, her frizzy grey hair flying about her shoulders in bursts of electricity. “Mr. Allcourt-St. James,” she said without preamble. “Come in with you both. Damn!” She removed the woollen shawl she had thrown about her shoulders and dropped it to the floor, where it immediately became a rug for her feet. She tugged the edges of a voluminous, crimson dressing gown more closely round her and, the moment the others entered, energetically slammed home the door. “There, that’s better, thank God.” She laughed, a bellow both ungoverned and unrefined. “Pardon me, both. I’m generally not so awfully Emily Brontë. Did you get lost?”

“Extensively,” St. James admitted. “This is my wife, Deborah, Mrs. Burton-Thomas,” he added.

“You must be frozen solid,” their hostess noted. “Well, we’ll take care of that soon enough. Let’s get out of here and into the oak hall. I’ve a nice fire there. Danny!” she shouted over her left shoulder. Then, “Come, it’s just this way. Danny!”

They followed her through the old, stone-flagged room. White walled, dark beamed, it was bonechillingly cold, with recessed windows uncovered by curtains, a single black refectory table in the centre of the floor, and a large unlit fireplace sinking deep into the far wall. Above it hung an assortment of fi rearms and oddly peaked military helmets. Mrs. Burton Thomas nodded as St. James and Deborah gave their attention to these.

“Oh yes, Cromwell’s Roundheads were here,” she said. “They had a nice bite out of Keldale Hall for a stretch of ten months in the Civil War. Sixteen forty-four,” she added darkly, as if expecting them to commit to memory the year of infamy in the history of the Burton-Thomas clan. “But we rid ourselves of them just as soon as we could. Blackguard devils, the lot!”

She led them through the shadows of a darkened dining room and from there to a long, richly panelled chamber where scarlet curtains were drawn across embrasured windows and a coal fire roared in the grate. “Well, Lord, where’s she got herself to?” Mrs. Bur-ton-Thomas muttered and went to the door through which they’d just come. “Danny!” That brought a responding running of footsteps, and a tousle-haired girl of about nineteen appeared in the doorway.

“Sorry!” the newcomer laughed. “Got your slips, though.” She tossed these to the woman, who caught them deftly. “Chewed a bit here and there, I’m afraid.”

“Thanks, pet. Will you fetch some brandy for our guests? That dreadful Watson man finished off a good third of a decanter before he staggered off to bed tonight. It’s gone dry and there’s more in the cellar. Will you see to it?”

As the girl went to do so, Mrs. Burton-Thomas examined her slippers, frowning at a hole newly chewed in one heel. She muttered beneath her breath, put the slippers back on her feet, and replaced the shawl-which she had been using as a sort of earthbound fl ying carpet in their progress through the house- on her shoulders.

“Please do sit down. Didn’t want to light the fire in your room till you arrived, so we’ll have a bit of a chat whilst it heats up. Bloody cold for October, isn’t it? Early winter, they say.”

The cellar was obviously closer than the word itself implied, for within moments young Danny returned with a fresh bottle of brandy. She opened and decanted it at a Hepplewhite table which stood under a portrait of some glowering, hawk-featured Burton-Thomas ancestor, then returned to them with a tray on which three brandy glasses and a decanter sparkled.