I glanced around at the shrouded furniture that cluttered the parlour where we were sitting. ‘If we’re going to be doing any shooting, wouldn’t it have been better to invite a few more people?’ And bring some servants, I might have added. We’d had to lay our own fire, and a sorry job we’d made of it. The October chill had soaked into the bones of this house and though our blaze had finally caught, it was not yet doing much to warm a room that hadn’t been inhabited for some weeks at least, by the looks of things. I didn’t want to think about the state of the bedlinen upstairs; we were, I suspected, in for a clammy night. ‘We’re not here for the shooting,’ Morgan said, taking out his cigar and examining it for flaws, ‘though it is said to be excellent here. And there are trout in the river. Perhaps next time, Thorpe.’ ‘Then what are we here for?’ He’d told me next to nothing so far. We’d left London under a pall of secrecy, without notifying anyone or leaving any clue as to where we’d gone.
