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related? It’s true! My great-uncle Peter wanted to marry your grandmother, but she married your grandfather, so he got engaged to your aunt Mina instead.’ I frowned while I tried to work that out. ‘They were twins so I s’pose it didn’t make much difference. But then he went out to India to fight the treacherous natives and died there of the… the same thing…’ He trailed off. ‘His name was Peter Markham, and he was my mother’s uncle. So we are nearly related, aren’t we?’
    I could tell that he was babbling because he was uncomfortable. That silence gave power was an unexpected and welcome discovery.
    He looked around again and his face brightened. ‘Do you want to play a game?’
    I shrugged.
    ‘Do you know “I’m thinking of something”?’
    I nodded. It was a game I played with Father sometimes.
    His eyes flicked to my stick. ‘I’m thinking of something beginning with S.’
    I wrote ‘STICK’.
    He looked disappointed. ‘Your turn.’
    I won easily.
     
    Simon should have been at school with other boys his age but he was considered delicate, so a tutor gave him lessons in the morning. The boys in the village were too rough for himto play with; he told me they taunted him and called him a sissy and a girl. He was going to be fourteen that autumn, around the time I was to turn thirteen myself, and would soon be going away to boarding school, once he was considered strong enough. But until then we saw each other every day and became companions of a sort. It helped that I thought myself superior to him – he was so childish that I felt like the older, wiser one.
    Dry days we spent on the Downs where we played hide-and-seek and I taught him to play Fivestones and Seven Tiles; rainy days were spent in the old schoolroom where we played chess and Parcheesi. He soon got used to my silence and began to frame his questions as Aunt Mina and the servants had learnt to – so that I only had to nod or shake my head to reply. Aunt Mina seemed relieved that I had found a friend. I wonder now if his discovery of my hiding place was as accidental as it seemed, or whether Aunt Mina and Mrs. Beauchamp had put their heads together.
    I did not have much in common with Simon, but I tolerated him because I knew that he was lonely, and I understood loneliness. In India, Father and the servants had been my only real companions. All the other children my age were at school in England and Mother did not like me to play with Indian children. She had pressed Father to send me away too, but he refused; he had hated being sent away when he was a boy.
     
    Simon’s tutor had been giving him extra lessons all summer to prepare him for school but on the day before he was due to leave he developed a fever. His departure was put off to give him time to recover, and over the next month I went over to visit him every day. Mrs. Beauchamp sent the dogcart forme each morning and I was driven to their house in the next village, which lay less than a mile away along the foot of the Downs.
    I could tell that Simon’s complaint was more one of nerves than health. He was perfectly happy playing games or talking when we were alone, but, as soon as one of his parents entered the room and asked how he was feeling, his temperature soared. He was made to rest in the afternoons, and so I often ended up joining the grown-ups downstairs. Right from the start, the Beauchamps treated me as one of the family. Like Simon, his mother was small and fair, but her hair was a deeper gold and her eyes a warm blue. She dressed in the latest fashions, in beautifully cut patterned long coats over narrow ankle-length skirts in vivid peacock colours, unlike Aunt Mina, who wore old-fashioned dresses with a small bustle, in grey or muddy mauves and lilacs. They were unlikely friends, because Aunt Mina was deeply conservative and Mrs. Beauchamp supported women’s suffrage, but the two families had known each other for years.
    I came to know Mrs. Beauchamp quite