I Richard - By Elizabeth George Page 0,3

of British Architecture students for the trip to Abinger Manor from the first day of class. Abinger Manor, deep in the Buckinghamshire countryside, reflected every style of architecture known to Great Britain while simultaneously being the repository of everything from priceless rococo silver to paintings by English, Flemish, and Italian masters. Victoria had shown her students endless slides of coved ceilings, broken pediments, gilded capitals on marble pilasters, ornate stone drip spouts, and dogtoothed cornices, and when their brains were saturated with architectural details, she sopped up the overflow with additional slides of porcelain, silver, sculptures, tapestries, and furniture galore. This, she told them, was the crown jewel of English properties. The stately home had only recently been opened to view and the wait to see it among people who were not so fortunate as to be enrolled in the History of British Architecture class at Cambridge University's summer session was a minimum of twelve months. And that's only if the eager visitor spent days on end trying to get through by telephone for reservations. "None of this reservations-by-Internet nonsense," Victoria Wilder-Scott told them. "At Abinger Manor, they do things the old-fashioned way." Which was, of course, the proper way to do them.

They would see this monument to days gone by - not to mention to propriety - in a few hours, after a rather long drive across the countryside.

They were to meet that morning after breakfast at the Queen's

Gate, which gave way to Garrett Hostel Lane, at the end of which their mini-coach would be waiting for them. It was here, where the assembled students picked up their sack lunches and browsed through them with the usual complaints about institutional food, that they were finally joined by a subdued Sam Cleary and a miserable-looking Frances.

If clothes made a statement about the outcome of their wee-hours discord, Sam had clearly emerged the winner: dapper as always in a trim sports jacket, with his bow tie cleverly complementing the forest green highlights in his tweed trousers. Frances, on the other hand, was dowdiness incarnate in a drab, too-large tunic and a matching too-large pair of trousers. She looked like a refugee from the Cultural Revolution.

Polly seemed eager to mend whatever breach she might have caused between the professor and his wife. After all, she was nearly fifty years Sam's junior and a girl with a boyfriend back home in Chicago to boot. She might have enjoyed the attentions of an older man - a really older man, as she would have put it - in the college pub for several nights running, but that was not to say that she would ever have considered fanning the flames of Sam's interest to build to something more. True, he was extremely nice looking with all that gray hair and that blush of good health on his cheeks. But there was no way around the fact that he was also old, and he couldn't compare to Polly's own David despite David's so far unshakable and somewhat obsessive interest in developing a career studying howler monkeys.

Polly called out a cheerful good morning to the Clearys and motioned to them with her camera. She'd put on an enormous telephoto lens for their outing, which served her purposes well at the moment. She could take the picture she wanted of Sam and his wife while keeping her distance from them. She said, "Stay right there by the herbaceous border. The colours are sensational with your hair, Frances."

Frances's hair was gray. Not that stunning white that some women are blessed with but battleship gray. She had a lot of it, which was fortunate, but the dullness of its colour made her look dour at even her best moments. And this not being one of her best moments, she looked pretty much the worse for wear.

"Amazing what lack of sleep can do to one, isn't it?" Noreen Tucker murmured with great meaning as the Clearys approached the rest of the students after posing cooperatively - at least on Sam's part - for Polly's picture. "Ralph, you haven't forgotten your nuts and chews, have you, sweetie? We don't want any crises in the hallowed halls of Abinger Manor this morning."

Ralph's answer comprised a downward motion with his thumb in the direction of his waist. This was easily interpretable: The plastic bag in which he kept his trail mix was pluming out of his safari jacket like the tail of an infant marsupial.

"If you feel the shakes coming, you have