The first time I’d walked through that house I had read the antiques and the oil paintings and the library and the matched family portraits as evidence — evidence of old money, of stability, of the cultured united family Percival had always described.

That was precisely what they were meant to do.

But wealth that is real does not need to announce itself so insistently; it was the very density of the display that should have warned me, if I’d known how to look.

Real money is quiet.

It is the desperate who over-decorate, who need every surface to testify to a solvency that no longer exists.

The Pembrook estate was not the home of a wealthy family.