“Did you know Scoatney was going to be yours then?” “Good Lord, no—there were six lives between me and it. And I loved it with a most precocious passion. I remember standing at the top of the staircase looking down on my grandfather, my father and uncles, and a cousin of my own age all at tea in the hall, and thinking: ‘If they were all dead, Scoatney would belong to me.’ And then rushing screaming to the nursery, appalled at my wickedness.
