As if to cement his position in Palazzo Vespucci, John had, whilst Sir Christopher was safely ensconced in the clinic, taken the high-handed step of exchanging his study with the spare room, the latter being much the nicer of the two chambers. He also established an archive, as he liked to call it, in the abandoned room upstairs, next to the loggia, where he slowly began to sort and file the voluminous correspondence, manuscripts and photographs of Sir Christopher’s mother and brother, as well as all of Sir Christopher’s personal papers.
As he set about ordering these documents, his greatest attention was reserved for the correspondence between the two Noble-Nolan brothers, both sides of which he held in his watchful grasp. John had initially assumed that Sir Christopher’s reticence about
