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something. I can’t give you lunch, I’m afraid, I’ve got to go to the bank and so on and arrange some things for Frank.’
    ‘For Frank?’
    ‘Yes, he’s coming too – to carry the bags as you put it. But don’t tell him I said that,’ he added hastily.
    ‘Oh, that’s good.’
    There was another, somewhat awkward, silence. Edward’s nephew Frank, the future Duke of Mersham, had not endeared himself to his parents by running away from school to join the International Brigade. The Duke had blamed Verity for turning him into a Communist and precipitating his flight to Spain. This was not entirely fair. It was true that Frank had been very taken with Verity and impressed by her commitment to the Party, and she had thoroughly enjoyed seeing a sprig of the aristocracy abandon his class prejudices and side with ‘the people’. It helped that he was good-looking and half in love with her. However, she claimed she had never encouraged him, except by example, to go to Spain. If there was anyone to blame it was a young Eton master by the name of John Devon in whose company Frank had gone to war.
    Verity had told the Duchess she would bring Frank home and, with Edward, she had done what she had promised. The two of them had travelled to Spain and tracked him down to a particularly nasty spot on the front line in the ever-moving battle for Madrid. The task of getting him back to England was made easier when his commanding officer had been informed that he was only seventeen. Frank had claimed to be twenty. He was immediately ordered out and had no option but to obey. He had spent the journey home in a deep sulk and had remained mutinous back in the bosom of his family. He understood why his uncle should wish to drag him home and listened guiltily as he lectured him on the distress he was causing his parents. However, he found it difficult to forgive Verity for what he saw as her betrayal. How could she of all people not approve of his leaving school to fight for the Republic?
    The long and short of it was that Frank had arrived at Mersham Castle a week after Christmas and proceeded to make everyone’s life a misery. If there was anywhere more pleasant to be imprisoned than Mersham, Edward could not imagine it, so he was not too sorry for his nephew. Bored and sulky, Frank had cheeked his father and reduced his mother to tears on more than one occasion. He had taken to hunting three days a week, choosing to jump the highest fences and run the greatest risks. His recklessness paid off. He was thrown quite badly, concussing himself briefly, and felt in some obscure way that he had made a point.
    He still absolutely refused to go back to Eton and, though the Duke could get him into his old college at Cambridge easily enough, it was evident the boy needed to do something first to clear his head of what his father called ‘this Communist nonsense’. There had been some talk of his going to the Cape or Kenya but Edward was against it. He had a feeling that, in his present mood, Frank could easily fall into bad company and turn into one of the lost souls who made their own and other people’s lives a misery in the ill-named Happy Valley. Benyon’s offer to take him to America came at just the right moment. He would have some sort of a job to keep him busy and he had more than once said how much he wanted to go to the United States, ‘where people are valued for what they are, not for where they were born’, he would add with bitterness.
    The problem, as Edward saw it, was how to get Frank to go willingly. It was important for his self-respect not to be shipped off to the States like the naughty schoolboy he was. Edward suspected that, if his father or mother informed him of what had been arranged, he would rebel. It was better they said nothing other than that Lord Benyon had expressed a desire to meet him and he was to present himself at the Athenaeum the next day for an interview about a possible job.
    Frank took the bait,