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glass.
    When he drew back she said, ‘Don’t you mind?’
    ‘Mind what?’ he whispered.
    ‘My skin. Don’t you mind kissing a coloured girl?’
    He didn’t answer but kissed her again, this time with more urgency.
    Finally he said, ‘Mind? I told you, you’re my black pearl. When I first set eyes on you in the servants’ hall I thought you were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. When old Druitt told me to take you into dinner I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.’
    There was no mistaking the sincerity of his tone. Bertha was touched. She felt for his hand and squeezed it. She saw Jim’s blue eyes go round with concern.
    ‘You’re not cross, are you, that I kissed you? You just looked so fine standing there, I couldn’t help myself. It wasn’t that I thought I could, I don’t think you’re fast or anything.’ He looked so worried that Bertha laughed and swung his hand.
    ‘No, I’m not cross. Not at all.’ She leant towards him, the better to show him how far from cross she was, but they heard footsteps and Jim drew away.
    ‘I must go. Save this for me.’ And he touched his finger to her lips and was gone.
    Bertha turned back towards the house, rolling the pearl between her fingers. It grew warm in her hand. She slipped it into the bodice of her dress and as she walked into the house she could feel the glow somewhere just above her heart.

Chapter 6

A Link in the Chain

    I F MRS CASH HAD BEEN EDUCATED AS ELEGANTLY as her daughter, if she had read Byron, or had pored over Doré’s engravings of Dante, she would have recognised Lulworth with its turrets and its twisted chimneys silhouetted against the shining sea as a glorious example of the Picturesque. But Mrs Cash was the daughter of a colonel of the Confederate Army, and when she had been growing up, there had been no call for poetry. Mrs Cash was a crack shot and could command an army of servants but she had not had a sentimental education.
    After the Confederate surrender at Appomatox, Nancy Lovett, as she then was, had been sent North to stay with her aunt in New York. She was a handsome girl with dark hair and a delicate but firm jaw. Her mother had sent her into enemy territory with misgivings, but Nancy had not looked back. She liked the rich colours of her aunt’s house, the wide skirts, the elaborate pelmets. She enjoyed the plentiful food and rosy prosperous company. When Winthrop the Golden Miller’s son had proposed, she had accepted gladly. Her mother had sighed and thought about what might have been, but her father was by then in the institution where he would die three months later. Later, as Nancy the bride solidified into Mrs Cash the society matron, she had felt some of the lacunae in her education; she could not speak a word of French, for example. But for a woman with such a natural talent to command, her inability to talk to the French Ambassador in his native tongue was the faintest of setbacks. Colonel Lovett had been a keen disciplinarian before his ‘indisposition’ and he would have appreciated his daughter’s ability to impose order.
    So Mrs Cash did not gasp, as so many visitors had before her, at the romantic charms of Lulworth. The house with its four turrets flanked by lacy Jacobean wings studded with mullioned windows was imposing but delicate, like a queen whose coronation robes cannot disguise the slenderness of her waist or the fragile tilt of her head.
    No, like the commander she was, Mrs Cash sized up the strengths and the weaknesses of her new billet. She could tell from the irregular façade with its towers and battlements that the food would be at best tepid by the time it reached the dining room. Driving in through the park gates, Mrs Cash looked up only briefly at the bronze stag over the cast-iron gates; she was far more interested in the dilapidated state of the gatehouse windows. By the time she was halfway up the drive of two-hundred-year-old elm trees she had made a realistic