‘Fitz.’ It was Clare. She stood in the doorway, wiping the tips of her fingers on the already-muddy bib of her dungarees. She was speaking to her son, but her eyes were on their visitor. He had been holding his empty coffee cup, as he leaned with both elbows upon the window sill, but now he drew himself up, and set the cup down on its saucer.
‘There’s some coffee left for you, too, Clare,’ said Fitz.
He always called her ‘Clare’ in front of strangers. He fetched a clean cup from the shelf and poured the coffee out neatly.
She thanked him. And then, ‘Could you introduce me to your friend, please?’
Fitz understood her tone. He bowed as if he were the leading actor introducing a new play at an old theatre, or a troop of clowns at a circus. ‘Dr Ned More,’ he said, ‘it is my honour to introduce you to Clare Worth.’
‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ said Ned More, holding out his hand – ludicrously – over the sill and across the wide table. Clare couldn’t have reached it without climbing on a chair.
She sipped her lukewarm coffee, letting Ned drop his hand and retreat into a slightly baffled expectation.
Fitz followed her gaze out into the front garden, where her eyes had picked out the car standing in the sunny lane.
‘That’s not a very surgical parking job, for a doctor,’ she said. ‘You’re all over my Michaelmas daisies.’
The kind-eyed young man was clumsy, too. As he reached in to set down his coffee cup, he turned his head too fast towards the car and knocked it on the window sash above him. Despite the pain, he laughed with embarrassment. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I was looking for the house number. As you can see, I’m not always a very coordinated sort of person.’ He rubbed his head, and walked in a little circle in the garden outside. Fitz noted, as he knew Clare also had noted, that Ned More was certainly trampling the bed of pansies by the window.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Apparently not.’
‘I’m not that kind of doctor anyway,’ continued Dr More. He now leaned into the casement again, and briefly rested his forehead on his forearms. ‘I’m a historian, but I haven’t actually taken my degree yet. Well, I’m not properly a historian; I’m more of an archaeologist. Who doesn’t do fieldwork. Not yet, anyway. Oh, I don’t know what I am.’
‘You appear to be lost, for one thing?’ ventured Clare. Her coffee was gone, so she tried the pot, and got the last of it. Normally she would have offered the last cup to the guest; Fitz thought it likely she was preoccupied with her trampled pansies.
The young man looked up, his face suddenly a picture of earnestness. ‘No,’ he answered. ‘I’m not lost at all. I’ve driven all night to get here. I’m found!’
Clare looked at him blankly.
‘I hope you received my letter?’ tried not-quite-Dr More.
‘No,’ said Clare. She put down her cup and folded her arms across her chest.
‘Yes!’ cried Fitz. ‘From the castle!’
Fitz ran upstairs and retrieved Mr Ahmadi’s book from under his pillow; the unopened envelope still marked his page among the blotted sheets. When he had flown down the stairs and into the front room again, he found Clare still watching Ned More, her arms still folded across her chest in distrust. With considerable ceremony, which he hoped might distract Clare from his role in concealing the letter in the first place, Fitz drew it from the book and presented it to her. ‘Madam,’ he said.
‘That’s it!’ Ned More was beaming again.
‘No,’ said she. ‘Somehow it appears I hadn’t received it. I haven’t read it yet, anyway.’
The young man frowned.
Fitz had slid into one of the spindled chairs at the table.
‘But since you are here, Dr More, Clare needs the letter no longer. She has the sender on hand, to explain everything to her!’
Clare had turned the letter over in her hands. The sight of the return address had a pronounced effect on her. Tightening her clutch, she narrowed her eyes, and she looked up sharply at their guest in the window.
‘Fitz,’ said Clare, ‘have you finished Mr Ahmadi’s book yet?’
‘No, Clare, not even close.’ He held it up and opened it at the place the envelope had marked – only a few pages in.
Clare wasn’t looking. She held Dr More’s eye very firmly as she spoke, as if he might suddenly produce a large hook, catch Fitz by the nape of his neck, and heave him out of the room never to be seen again.
‘Well, I think you must return it to Mr Ahmadi this morning anyway. Can you please take it back to him now, tell him that I sent you, and ask Cook to make you a cup of chocolate while you choose another.’ This was not a question.
‘But I don’t want a cup of chocolate –’
‘But Mr Ahmadi will be very pleased to give you one, when you ask him. Off you go.’
Fitz rolled his eyes at Ned More, then backed out of the room as if from the presence of a monarch, averting his eyes and waving the book flatteringly in the air over his head. He ran down to the kitchen door and opened it – but he didn’t go to Mr Ahmadi’s. Instead he tiptoed back to the hallway and, just beyond the doorway, stood listening.
‘I came for your son,’ Ned More was saying.
In an instant all the blood in Fitz’s body leaped into his head. His ears and eyes throbbed, and
