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“i” should properly have been. He had remained amused even after the earl’s explanation of the misspelling: that the structure originally built on the site had been so entered in the Domesday Book. Everything erected after the eleventh century had retained the name, poor spelling and all, as part of a continuing tradition.
    â€œTradition, is it!” The contractor had laughed. “Can’t say I’m much for ruddy tradition!”
    â€œThen perhaps you’re not the man I’m looking for,” Lord Stanmore had countered icily.
    As a great deal of money was at stake, the contractor soon revised his opinion and began to treat the idea of “tradition” with the same respect as his employer.
    The chauffeur put the car into gear and drove cautiously down the drive, past the mounds of sand, bags of bricks, and piled scaffolding that lined it. The earl sat in the back and stretched out his legs with a sigh. He had put in some taxing days with the contractor, but, by Harry, everything was on the proper course now. He could envision what the place would look like when all of the work had been completed—the clipped lawns rising gently toward the terrace, the rambling house of brick and stone, sun glinting off its hundreds of windows. Better even than before the war, when Abingdon Pryory had been judged the most beautiful house in Surrey by the editors of Country Life.
    A pity the army hadn’t read that laudation when he had turned the place over to them in 1915. It might have made them more deferential toward what they had been given—or rather loaned for the duration of the war. The army had used the house as a rest center for officers, a place where battle-wearied men might find strength and renewal before returning to the trenches. The concept had been noble enough, but, for whatever reason, the facilities had been grossly abused. Far from being grateful for the luxury of two weeks in a lovely manor house, many of the men had treated house, gardens, and outbuildings with an animosity better levied against the home of a Prussian general than an English earl. Walls had been defaced, balustrades broken, doors parted from their hinges, and the stables chopped up for firewood. There had been even greater official desecration: Windows had been removed to get at the leading; iron gates and fencing torn down and shipped to the smelters.
    â€œLead for bullets, iron for shells,” a brigadier general in Whitehall had explained after the war. A moderate sum had been offered in compensation for damages, but he had been expected to refuse it out of patriotism, and had.
    â€œA small enough price to pay for victory, eh, Lord Stanmore?” the brigadier had said with the cheerfulness of a man who had paid no price at all.
    He felt a twinge of anger as the car headed down the mile-long drive toward the Abingdon road. Ahead were two stone pillars, a gap between them where twenty-foot-high ornamental iron gates had once stood. He had purchased the gates for his wife on their honeymoon in Italy, from the duke of Fiori’s villa in Urbino—and a pretty penny they had cost, too! Now they were gone, turned into cannon or barbed wire.
    They stopped at Abingdon village for petrol, and the earl gazed toward the Norman tower of the church. The war memorial that he had commissioned and paid for stood in a small square facing the church and could be seen from anywhere along the High Street. It was a simple monument, beautiful and dignified. An obelisk of Carrara marble inscribed with the names of the twenty-five men and two women from Abingdon who had been killed in the war. Some, to be sure, had not been natives of the village; several had simply been employed at the Pryory, or other large estates in the area. It had been the earl’s contention that those people, granted that they had been born and raised elsewhere, should be included with Abingdon’s glorious dead. The village