Rupert, when he appeared, was wearing a bow tie of lapis-lazuli blue, a touch of startling colour; but his pinstripe suit was as conservative as ever: narrow lapels unlike the modern look, and not a hint of flare to the trousers. His oiled hair was iron grey, combed from a parting that was geometrically exact.

They strolled around saying little, finally stopping in the Viking room upstairs, where a wide metal bowl hung on chains from the ceiling.

‘Cooking-pot,’ said Gavriela.

‘The inscription says—’

‘It’s wrong.’

He raised an eyebrow, as if to ask when she had become an archaeologist, but said nothing. Gavriela had been expecting pointed irony.

‘How’s Brian?’ she asked, wondering if that was where the problem lay.

‘Shacked up with a dance choreographer in Soho.’

That stopped her. ‘Oh, Rupert.’

‘The fellow’s fifteen years younger than I am.’ This was bitterness such as Gavriela had never heard, not from Rupert. ‘And here I am among the antiquities. No jokes about old queens, please.’

She slipped her arm inside his. ‘I was going to suggest that pot of tea,’ she said. ‘And perhaps a nice chocolate biccie to dunk in it.’

They sat in a noisy corner of the tea-room, which was better than silence for private conversation. Gavriela was finishing her tea when Rupert said, ‘I’ve other news.’

‘What is it?’

‘Something best learnt when one has placed the cup back on the saucer, dear Gavi.’

She put it down carefully.

‘At least I’m already sitting,’ she said. ‘I take it you have smelling salts in case I decide to faint.’

‘Not an eventuality I thought of, quite frankly. It’s just that in addition to becoming a grandmother . . . Congratulations, by the way. I mean it.’

She patted his hand.

‘Yes, I know you do. And I’m getting nervous. What—?’

‘You’re also due to become a great aunt,’ he told her. ‘In three months’ time, give or take.’

Several blinks accompanied her search for meaning in his words.

‘I don’t . . . Oh.’ It was obvious. ‘You mean Ursula.’

Her niece. Step-daughter to Dmitri Shtemenko, defector, for whatever that was worth – the debriefers in the old Wiltshire mansion would have got everything they could from her, but no professional intelligence officer would shared classified material with their family – and living somewhere in Britain, as far as Gavriela knew, for these past, what, sixteen years? That would make her thirty-two or thirty-three, depending on when her birthday fell.

My only niece and I don’t know even that.

Or the name that people called her these days. It surely would not be Ursula Shtemenko, or even Ursula Wolf.

‘When did she marry?’ she asked Rupert.

His answer was a short silence, then: ‘A couple of my schoolfriends were bastards, literally speaking. They had a hard time of it, I grant you, bullied every day for years. But they got through it.’

That was not comforting. She wondered if Rupert were annoyed with Ursula out of principle or because – a better thought – he would have preferred to relay a happier version of events to her, Gavriela.

‘Carl wasn’t exactly born in wedlock either,’ she said.

‘He was, in the only way that matters.’ Rupert meant the legal documentation, forged by his department, that had showed Gavriela, or rather Gabrielle Woods, to be a war widow. ‘Sodding Brian, I don’t know how you could ever forgive him or me. Especially me.’

She squeezed his pale hand.

‘We did what we had to, all of us, dear Rupert. And as for them . . .’ She gestured to a group of young people dressed androgynously, males and females wearing identically flared pastel jeans, their hair equally shoulder length but without the braids a warrior needed to keep the hair out of his eyes – where had that thought come from? – and ridiculous shoes unsuitable for running or agile footwork. ‘They’ll never know what we went through, but it doesn’t matter.’

Give the young folk their due – they did not look like the kind of people who would care about illegitimacy one way or the other. Perhaps her great-niece or great-nephew would not face the same kind of harshness that others used to.

Or her grandson.

‘Anna’s not married to Carl either.’ She had not meant to tell Rupert. ‘I know I call her his wife, but they haven’t ever tied the knot, not legally. She’s still Anna Gould.’

Rupert sighed. ‘You and I . . . The people in our lives don’t have an easy time of it, do they?’

‘Cursed by gypsies, is that what you mean?’

He finally smiled, his face lean, porcelain skin showing lines. ‘On the rare times a game gets out of control,’ he said, ‘I prefer castling as a manoeuvre. A defensive huddle staving off defeat, while I find a way to survive.’

She had always thought of him as playing the chess game of life, and him a grandmaster, but she had never heard him use the metaphor so precisely.

Then he added, ‘Why don’t you come round for supper?’

‘Um . . . You mean to your house?’

‘That’s what I was thinking of.’

She had never been there.

‘And when were you thinking of?’

‘Tonight. If you’re visiting Anna and the baby in hospital, then a late supper, perhaps.’

Was this what he had meant by castling? Old friends spending time in each other’s company as a defence against loneliness?

‘I’d love to, dear Rupert.’

‘Well, good.’

Over the next few weeks, she became a regular visitor to Rupert’s Chelsea home, where listening to Brahms or Bach in his drawing-room (not a term she had ever used outside ironic conversation) became a pleasant habit. At Oxford he had read Greats, which the rest of the world called Classics, and his collection of sketches and old books was fascinating.

But there was another postscript to their meeting in the British Museum that she did not share with him at first, because he did not need the worry. He had officially retired from the Service, and his intention was to write monographs on ancient Troy and the relationship between the early Roman Empire and Greece – echoes of Macmillan’s speech in ’56 regarding Britain and the States – with the benefit of insight gained from a career spent among the secret strategists and covert machinations of international politics.

In her overcoat pocket, when she had recovered it from the museum cloakroom, there had been a photograph, the second time such a message had been left for her. The other time, the picture had shown Ilse and Dmitri, with the girl who turned out to be Ursula; it suggested that this second photo came from Dmitri also, but the darkness did not leave traces in handled material, so there was no way to be sure.

It was consistent with the location, a photograph of a withered, blackened iron blade that might have come from the museum’s Roman room, except that Gavriela could read the pattern that surely no one else could see among the creases and folds.

The sword, more than a millennium old, seemed to be in a display case, no doubt a museum, but the photographer had been careful to exclude any clues as to which museum, or even which country, it might be in. And yet it was not the physical object but the runic word upon it that resonated with Gavriela—

So brave, my Wolf.

—and that was upsetting because it was surely what the anonymous donor intended, and she could not think of anyone but Dmitri Shtemenko who would play with her mind that way. After a day’s thought, she decided to share it with Rupert, because she did not like the coincidence of Dmitri’s being in the country – him or someone working for him – at the same time that Ursula was pregnant.

‘You said he considered Ursula a possession.’ Rupert was sitting with legs crossed in his high-backed armchair. ‘Not a stepdaughter he loved, but something he owned. That we had stolen from him.’