1 January 2016 The men were dumbstruck: coming toward them at great speed was a cartwheeling girl. With each rotation, her golden cowboy boots refracted light from the overhead chandeliers, creating an animated halo around her slender body. Her long limbs were perfectly straight and her hair fanned in an arc around her head. On her last turn, the girl did a flick-flack, landing lightly on both feet in front of them. She was the loveliest either had ever encountered. She had unconventional looks: a heart-shaped face and large tawny eyes fringed by thick lashes. Her skin, the color of milk, had an inner luminosity and a blush lay like two pale rose petals, spread over slanted cheekbones. Her mouth was a little too luscious; her nose, sprinkled lightly with freckles, was slightly too pronounced.

Her hair, the color of polished chestnuts, fell below her shoulders in wild curls. It was cold outside, but the apparition wore shorts, a cropped stripy jumper and a chunky golden belt that matched her boots. "Who are you?" Her voice was soft and husky. Later the men would debate if there''d been a trace of an Irish accent (it was an Indian lilt). "We''re from Plymouth Council and we''ve come to inspect the new tanks--part of regulation 7685." He was interrupted by achild who came tearing around the corner, her feet slapping on the wide oak floorboards. "You did it, you did it!" the little girl shouted. The cartwheeler laughed.

"Again, again!" "Maybe after breakfast." Turning back to the inspectors, the young woman asked, "Can I help?" "Yes, can we help?" the little girl mimicked. "We''re looking for Sir Thomlinson and Lady Ayesha Sleet," said the one in the brown suit. Then, looking the cartwheeler up and down, he added, "Is your mother around?" "I am Lady Sleet." The men, chastened, shuffled from foot to foot. Ayesha, embar­rassed for not knowing where the boilers were housed, smiled apolo­getically and texted the house manager. "The front door was unlocked," Brown Suit said defensively. "We couldn''t find a bell," the other chipped in.

"The key hasn''t been seen for nearly three hundred years," Ayesha explained. "One of my forebears went to fight in the American War of Independence and took it with him. It appears he lost it and his head on the battlefield." The men looked at each other, unsure if she was joking. She was not. Taking the little girl''s hand, Ayesha smiled and disappeared down the grand staircase. Reaching the ground floor, mother and daughter skipped all the way along the north corridor, through the Jacobean hall, and entered the Carolinian dining room, where a large breakfast was laid out on the side table. She lifted the heavy silver-lidded contain­ers one by one.

Ayesha considered the scrambled eggs, mushrooms, sausages, fried bread, tomatoes and kedgeree. Everything looked and smelled delicious, but knowing the value of a perfect figure, she resisted. Two uniformed footmen waited in the corner. They''d been trained to serve but not stare; their gazes were neutral and averted. Away from the family, behind the green baize door, the subject of Lady Sleet''s beauty and her husband''s oafish behavior was a constant topic of con­versation. In the couple''s presence, no one spoke until spoken to. The footmen, working in unison, slid the chairs away from the table, poised for when Ayesha and her daughter sat down. "We''ll both have boiled eggs, wholewheat soldiers and freshly squeezed orange juice.

Please can I also have a home-made yogurt with blueberries and a green tea." She looked at her daughter''s hopeful face. "Stella will also have a bowl of chocolate Krispies." "Yes, My Lady." Ayesha tied a napkin around Stella''s neck and tucked an errant curl behind her ear. Next to one place was a child''s guide to ponies and by the other was a daily folder. Mother and daughter opened both with great solemnity. Prepared by a junior secretary, Ayesha''s contained her future appointments and recent press clippings; photographs of herself at various parties and mentions in gossip columns.

Newspaper editors and photographers loved her: Lady Sleet personified glamour. She was ravishing, exquisitely groomed, consistently chic, wonderfully wealthy and titled. Even better, she was a beauty with a backstory: the daughter of the Earl of Trelawney raised in an Indian palace by her stepfather, a maharaja. The press''s only disappointment was the lack of scandal. So far. Everyone knew it was a matter of time; muck follows brass and what goes up eventually falls. She was Sir Thomlinson''s fourth wife. The previous ones had lasted less than five years.

This one had done eight. The Sleets'' union was an accident waiting to happen. No one believed she''d married for love: they were correct. Sleet, then forty to her eighteen-year-old self, had been a solution to a prob­lem which was partly money (or lack of) but mainly Ayesha''s long­ing for security. Orphaned at seventeen, she was evicted by one family and disowned by the other. Sleet offered an instant, wildly indulgent prepackaged life, complete with private airplanes, yachts, more clothes than she could wear, drawers of jewels and, best of all, for their wedding present he bought and gave her Trelawney Castle: home to her father''s family for eight hundred years. She loved, too, that he''d known her mother, Anastasia, and she was happy to hear story after story about their time at Oxford University. Like a child trying on a grown-up''s pair of high-heeled shoes, she struggled to find balance and slipped around in a world better suited to someone else.

To give her life more substance and her marriage more gravitas, Ayesha created a narrative in which she was the heroine and her husband the misunderstood hero. They were, so her story went, injured people healed by mutual love. Both were illegitimate and were told their births had ruined other people''s lives. She explained his flashes of cruelty and vulgarity as by-products of childhood wounds and mistook his need to control for caring, and his grandiosity for generosity. In the early years of her marriage, Ayesha had nothing to do but wait for her husband to come home. For a man stimulated by the unob­tainable, her availability bored him. Ayesha spent her days shopping, buying clothes which the chauffeur carried from the store to the car and into the house for the maids to hang in color-coordinated obsoles­cence in her wardrobe. She had forty-eight pairs of red shoes, each with a slightly different detail.

There were ninety camel-colored cashmere sweaters, eighty unworn. She fussed over shades of lipstick and read parts of glossy magazines and romantic novels. The birth of Stella and her enrollment at the Courtauld Institute, where she took a first-class BA and was now studying for an MA, were transformative; she was still lonely, but her days had intellectual content. Flicking through the pages of her folder, Ayesha smiled to see her image on the front cover of Hi! magazine and skimmed through an arti­cle entitled "Lady Sleet, London''s most glamorous wife?" The pictures were flattering but she was irritated to be described as a "socialite"--no one took her studies seriously. She made a note to employ a PR agency to work on changing her descriptive pronoun to "art historian." Stella pulled at her mother''s shorts. "Bored." Ayesha stood up, her napkin falling to the floor.

She bent to pick it up. A footman got there first. She smiled at him apologetically. It was his job, but she hadn''t got used to playing "the grande dame." Taking Stella''s hand, she led her daughter along several passages to the green­houses where, among the banks of houseplants, her husband had com­missioned a painting studio complete with easels and massive reserves of paint and brushes. Stella''s were stubby, while Ayesha''s brushes were made of the finest hair. Because his wife had been born and grew up in India, Sleet decided that Indian painting would be her hobby. "I''m going to hang your first work in my office," he said.

Ayesha had a great aptitude for studying art but little talent for making it. Each year she bought a Mughal flower drawing from a dealer close to the British Museum, signed it "AS" and gave it to Sleet. He, in turn, re-gifted it to a member of staff. The studio''s glass windows overlooked the formal gardens that ran down to the estuary. Stella, tired of painting, played with a toy pony on the floor. Ayesha was distracted by an ever-changing sky. Life in Corn­wall was a meteorological festival; weather conditions changed several times an hour. There was nothing faint-hearted about nature in these parts; it belted, pelted, blasted, bored, poured, whipped, slammed, burned and blustered all in one day.

From the shelter of the studio, she saw a squall approaching from the west. The horizon darkened; streaks of rain like heavy lines of pencil smudged and slashed across the sky. The eye of the storm was probably ten miles away. In the meantime, the sun played hide-and-seek in a fast-moving cloudscape, and flurries of snow fell but didn''t settle. "An artist called Turner tied himself to the mast of a tall ship in a stormy sea. He wanted to experience really bad weather so he could paint better," she told Stella who, used to her mother''s musings, went on playing. A snowflake landed on the warm window. Ayesha traced its progress down the glass as it turned from a perfectly shaped crystal into a dribble of water.

She had secured everything she''d ever dreamed of: why did her life feel so hollow? Her loneliness was a permanen.