The Winter Ground by Catriona McPherson

that clothes might be draped over it and can also be dabbed with cologne to scent a room.’
    ‘Rather fierce,’ I chided him. ‘He’s not that bad.’
    ‘Women always stick up for them,’ said Alec. ‘Women young and old are putty in the hands of a fragrant hat stand. Tchah!’
    I was startled by his vehemence, truth be told, but I concluded that it was to be expected when one young man, blessed by nature and fortune as he was, met another much taller, a great deal richer and rather more handsome than himself. It was a zoological response, nothing more.
    ‘Well, Mrs Wilson will be your blue-eyed girl then,’ I said, mildly. ‘She can’t stand him.’
    ‘Have you been down to the camp yet, Lord Robin?’ I asked as the soup was being handed. I noticed that Ina had a maid all of her own serving her soup from her own little tureen, while the three of us shared the friendly butler, and I missed the start of Lord Robin’s answer, thinking it through. Surely the servants jostled together in the kitchens and surely if I brushed against the butler and then he brushed against the maid and then the maid brushed against Ina, it was all the same as if Ina had brushed against me. There was, I considered, a goodly measure of ceremony about Albert’s precautions and not a lot of common sense. I retrained my attention on the talk at the table.
    ‘—but they clammed up rather, I’m afraid,’ Lord Robin was saying. ‘Perhaps I just don’t have what it takes to talk to gypsies on their own level.’
    The insult was subtle and Albert Wilson’s smile remained undimmed.
    ‘I don’t think they’re gypsies, Lord Robin, if you’ll forgive me correcting you,’ he said.
    ‘The fat old woman with the ear-bobs and the crystal ball, surely,’ Laurie replied.
    ‘French, Russian and Irish, she told me,’ I chipped in, smarting for Mrs Cooke although his description of her was accurate enough.
    ‘Have you met her, Dandy?’ said Alec, shaking his head at me in amusement. Albert Wilson had stopped with his soup spoon halfway to his mouth.
    ‘I did, I have,’ I gabbled. ‘I stopped off on the way home this afternoon. Sheer nosiness, I admit, but they didn’t seem to mind. So,’ I turned and looked Robin Laurie in the face, ‘whatever the talent is for making friends with them, I have it too. Mrs Cooke told me an enchanting story from her childhood, without bidding, minutes after we met.’ I had thought to be weighing in for Albert with this, but Lord Robin managed to turn it back on me. He gave me an impish look, as though assessing whether I was nearer in standing to Albert and the Cookes than I was to him, and then he nodded as though deciding that yes, I was.
    ‘Quite so,’ he said, grinning. ‘She barely speaks to me, she shares a fond memory with you, and she gives Wilson here the life history of every last clown and tumbler in the show. Quite so.’
    I suppressed a sigh. Clearly he was bored and was making fun to lift the boredom but it was getting rather blatant now. Alec’s golden eyes had narrowed.
    ‘And I’ll bet their life histories are worth the telling, sir,’ he said to Albert. Ina gave him a grateful look.
    ‘Oh indeed,’ came the reply. ‘Take Merryman, the clown. He was the son of a gentleman and was thought by his doctors to be an idiot. Prone to fits and tongue-tied until he was ten. Then he taught himself to read and write and joined his brothers at public school.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Robin Laurie. ‘You told me on the train.’
    ‘Whereupon he started to grow. And grow. And grow ,’ said Albert Wilson, as though this were a fairy tale, ‘so he sits himself down and thinks what will I do about this, then? And he left school and took himself a-travelling, all over Europe, all the way to St Petersburg, Constantinople and back again and taught himself everything he needed to know.’
    ‘You’ve got to admire his pluck,’ said Alec. ‘There was a chap at my school who was ten feet tall