‘Let's all go,' said Hugo. 'I want to see it too and Fen might not be able to answer all my technical questions.'

‘You are unbearably sexist, Hugo,' complained Fenella good-naturedly.

Hugo gave his friend a lazy smile that would have made any girl's stomach clench, Sarah acknowledged – but not hers, not now. She was never going to be so silly as to even think about him again. Thank goodness she hadn't let her guard down too much before! She felt she'd had a narrow escape. If you can kiss a girl like he'd kissed her when you're engaged to someone else, you are a low-down, dirty, rotten scoundrel and not to be trusted. However charming you were.

‘Do you mind hanging on while I get my camera?' he asked. 'Some pictures could be really useful.'

‘For the "before", do you mean?' asked Rupert.

He smiled. 'I thought Sarah could use them. She has a top celebrity client who might be interested in using Somerby as a venue.’

Hugo went and Fenella said to Sarah, 'So who's your client? Or can't you say?'

‘I can't say, I'm afraid, but I'd love it if she chose to come here. Is the house very dilapidated? Oh, sorry, was that rude?'

‘Rude but understandable. Come on,' said Fenella, 'I'll show you. In fact it's not too bad structurally, as far as you can tell. The roof is mostly sound and it's not too dreadfully damp. There's woodworm but no dry rot that we've discovered. We did have a jolly thorough survey before we moved in.' She made a face. 'My parents insisted. They wanted us to sell it and buy somewhere sensible. We're getting a roof expert in tomorrow for the bit that Rupert's worried about. That did fail the test. Rupert, can you and Hugo find us when he comes back?’

The two women left the huge kitchen and went through the green baize door to the hallway. Sarah stopped and noticed that the ceiling was dark with centuries of grime but the floor was parquet and in good order. Sarah couldn't decide just then if she thought it would benefit from several coats of paint, or was more picturesque as it was.

The drawing room was beautiful, made so by its semicircular ceiling-to-floor windows through which summer sunshine now streamed. It too had a parquet floor that needed, according to Sarah's unskilled eye, nothing more than a good polish. The walls had the tattered remains of wallpaper that was more like a mural than paper, although a repeating pattern could be detected. Birds of paradise flitted between trailing vines and classical columns. Distant vistas included pyramids and rolling hills.

‘What fantastic wallpaper,' said Sarah.

‘Isn't it? We're hoping to get a paper restorer to tell us about it. If we were millionaires we'd get it reproduced and put it back,' said Fenella.

‘Even as it is, it's heavenly,' said Sarah. 'In fact I'm not sure that it would be as good if there weren't great bits missing. It might be too much.'

‘We had exactly the same thought, but there's probably a middle way.' Fenella paused. 'Do you really think you might persuade your client to come here? I mean, let's face it, although we've started work, it's still in relatively bad decorative order, as an estate agent would say. I'd call it shabby.’

Sarah was outraged by this description. 'No, not shabby! Shabby-chic if you must, decaying grandeur, fading aristocracy, any of those things – but not just shabby!’

Fenella laughed. 'OK. But will you be able to sell it to her?'

‘I'm not sure, to be honest. She was so set on the traditional English country church thing and I'd need to see the rest of it. And of course what it really depends on is if you can get your licence in time.'

‘Oh, here are the boys,' said Fenella as voices could be heard echoing through the empty house. 'Have you met Electra, Sarah?'

‘No.'

‘You'd like her. She's fun.’

Sarah managed some sort of smile as if the prospect of meeting Electra was, while not at the top of the list of most-wanted events, at least not at the bottom. In fact, it languished a few places behind Godzilla in a temper. 'It's a beautiful house,' Sarah said to Rupert as the men joined them. 'I can't wait to see the rest of it.'

‘The library's through here,' said Fen. 'This is the one without a decent floor.' She opened double doors into a room as enormous as the drawing room.

‘Just put something down to cover it and paint it white,' said Hugo, raising his camera.

At least while he was taking a fusillade of shots from every conceivable angle, she didn't have to talk to Hugo, and nor could Rupert and Fenella. It helped. She didn't want the subject of Electra coming up just now. By the time they left, Sarah was convinced she'd feel absolutely fine about Hugo having a fiancée – why she'd allowed him to inhabit the emotional part of her brain even for a nanosecond was beyond her. But she'd have all that soppy stuff well under control any minute now.

‘Let's have a look at what's through here,' she said firmly and walked as if she was thinking only of her client, the venue and the floor.

‘The piece de resistance is this,' said Rupert, ushering them through the door of a panelled study.

‘Ah, the chapel,' said Hugo. 'Amazing!'

‘It's actually quite a recent addition to the house,' said Fenella. 'One of Rupe's ancestors made a fortune doing something dubious like slave-trading – exploiting someone, anyway – and absolved his sins by building this. It's not to my taste, actually.’

A high, vaulted ceiling, a marble floor and three stained-glass windows at the end made it look, to Sarah's eyes, more like a small church than somewhere for a mere family to worship. In fact, she'd arranged weddings in churches that felt far smaller.

‘It's an almost perfect example of the High Church revival,' said Rupert. 'Not exactly a copy of much earlier churches but it reflects the best medieval precedents and shows a return to sacramental tradition.'

‘You sound very knowledgeable,' said Hugo. 'Been boning up on it all, have you?'

‘Of course.' Rupert laughed a little defiantly. 'I'm almost an expert now.'

‘Don't encourage him, Hugo,' said Fenella. 'He'll bang on for hours if you let him.'

‘What I need to know,' said Sarah, on tenterhooks for the answer, 'is could you actually use it for weddings? Getting a licence for the house is one thing, but if you could have the ceremonies here, it would be even more wonderful.’

Fenella and Rupert exchanged glances. 'That's what we're hoping for,' said Fenella. 'Like you, we thought using the house for weddings would be nice, but if people could actually get married in the chapel, well, that would be brilliant.'

‘The aunts, who I inherited from, were always thinking up money-making schemes and I know they talked abut weddings, but I'm not sure if they got as far as getting it licensed.'

‘We haven't followed up seeing about getting the chapel licensed because we thought the house was in far too bad order for us to use it,' explained Fenella. 'We didn't know what we wanted to do anyway. It's only quite recently that we decided the house needs to earn money and not just us.'

‘Would it still be consecrated?' asked Hugo. 'Presumably if it is, you could still have weddings here.’

Fenella shook her head. 'Don't know that either. Sorry to seem so stupid. We haven't been moved in all that long.'

‘I know,' said Hugo. 'I was at your house moving party when you left the old place.’

Sarah felt that at any moment she might be exposed to distressing details of what Hugo got up to at that party, whom he met, or went home with, and how much fun Electra was. She wanted to get back on track. 'So do you have to go through the house to get into it? I'm just wondering-'

‘No!' Rupert interrupted her gleefully. 'The beauty part' – he strode across the aisle to the other side – 'is that it has access to the outside world. It was so the local people could use it too. At the time there was something happening that meant the local church was out of action, and so the ancestor who was building this had the side door put in.'