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you.’”
    “So how did you get rid of him?”
    “Simple.” Geri probed her fish with her fork. “Told him I was going to the bathroom. I just didn’t mention I meant my bathroom in my room and I had no intention of coming down again.”
    “Ah,” said Anna.
    “But eventually I decided to sneak back down,” Geri confessed, looking strangely furtive. “Had rather a good time in the end…” Her voice trailed off. “Anyway,” she added briskly. “I’ve had a brilliant idea. About you.”
    “About me ?”Anna felt a vague sense of panic. It seemed rather early for ideas. And hadn’t Oscar Wilde said something about only dull people being brilliant at breakfast?
    “Remember, management consultancy is what I do,” said Geri confidently. “I’m paid to advise people on how to run their professional lives better. And I’ve got just the solution for you.”
    “You have?”
    “Sure,” said Geri, abandoning the mackerel and flinging her fork down with a flourish. “What you need is an apprenticeship.”
    Dickensian visions of workshops and boy sweeps loomed before Anna. “You mean long stands and striped paint?”
    “Of course not. Stop being so rigid in your definitions,” commanded Geri. “The first principle of management consultancy is creative thinking. I’m talking about a particular sort of apprenticeship. A bestseller apprenticeship.”
    “But where do they do those?”
    “Lateral thinking,” said Geri, tapping her forehead with a fingernail which, for all the night’s traumas, remained impeccably manicured. “You need to find a writer who needs help. Be their dogsbody. Do their errands, take their post, make their life run smoothly. And in return…”
    “They’ll show me how they do it,” said Anna slowly, catching the thread of thought. Her alcohol-sodden brain suddenly sparked into life like a match. “Or at the very least, I can pick up the nuts and bolts of it. Chapter construction, how one gets an agent, the different publishing houses…”
    Geri nodded. “Exactly.”
    “Oh Geri, that’s a fantastic idea.”
    Just then, Orlando Gossett entered the room and glided swiftly towards the chafing dishes. Having piled his plate high with eggs and fish, he turned his attention to finding somewhere to sit.
    “Head down,” Geri muttered, suddenly taking an intense interest in her Stirling Castle place mat.
    “It’s all right,” Anna said. “He’s sitting down next to Thoby, who doesn’t look very pleased about it. But then, Thoby doesn’t look very pleased about anything. He certainly doesn’t look like a man who’s spent a night of bliss with his new bride.”
    “That’s because he didn’t.” Geri blushed. “He spent it with me.”

Chapter Four
    “Forty-two, two twenty-eight, five fifty-seven.” Cassandra squinted at the list of clothes beside the computerised wardrobe door and entered the numbers of her chosen garments into the keypad, taking great care not to damage her nails. Tyra the manicurist had just left; the fact she cost just over double what most painters of nails and buffers of cuticles charged demanded that her handiwork be shown a certain respect. She was worth it though; did she not count Nicole Kidman, Elizabeth Hurley, and the editor of Vogue among her clients? Though the fact that they probably paid nothing explained Cassandra’s own exorbitant bills.
    Still, full battle dress was essential today. Cassandra was not looking forward to the meeting with her publishers at which she would no doubt be expected to explain the whereabouts of A Passionate Lover ,her long-promised but as yet unforthcoming new novel. So far, she’d pleaded writer’s block, crashing laptop, even periodic bouts of mysterious illness, but now, floating faintly but definitely into her ear was the unmistakable sound of music that had to be faced. Cassandra was unsure how exactly she would break the news that no lover, passionate or otherwise, currently lurked in her laptop, still