Before returning to Canada, Una takes the train with Robin to London. To ensure it gets maximum wear, Robin sports a dress of Judith Carlisle's creation, lavishly crinkled forest green fabric, with deep midnight-blue panels hidden in the skirt and shot through with rosebuds. It's as elegant as a child's Christmas gown should be, and not Una's idea. That Robin wears it voluntarily for the train journey into Blake's famously smoggy London, home to dark Satanic mills, is nothing short of a minor miracle.

This time Iain runs them to the nearby station. He drives the way Una expects Shirley's child to drive, without fuss or embellishment. When they arrive at the station, he hovers and offers to accompany them. Una declines but Iain insists on buying the tickets. He waves away Una's protestations on the basis Robin is only a half-fare, and he can spare the expense.

'Besides,' he says, 'I have years of not having a favourite Auntie to make up for.' He grins the ineffable Blythe grin, part mischief and madness, part undiluted charm. Carl has it too. Had it? Funny how inheritances skip family lines.

Fr. Sowerby is immediately recognizable on the Waterloo platform, by the broad-brimmed black hat and billowing cloak of priests the world over. Combined with the ubiquitous dog collar, there's no room left for interpretation. Una raises a hand to him in salutation.

'Ah,' he says, 'you'll be…' he reaches ineffectually for Cressida's full title. Una is quick to correct him. As they walk, Robin firmly in hand, Una explains that they have all been trying to trace Elise's family for years, and how, with Cressida and Joan in England, everyone thought they were best-positioned to oversee the operation.

'Of course,' says Fr. Sowerby. 'I confess, I was half-afraid when I got that letter. I've lived in dread of someone coming looking for Elise since that night outside the Blue Carnation. Longer maybe.'

Una makes what she hopes is an appropriately sympathetic noise. The memory of reading hand-to-mouth the story of Elise English in the dread expectation she come to London to hand Robin over forever as real and roiling in its uneasy, disquieted terror as the day she split the seal of the envelope.

Robin is oblivious. She slips through London streets bright-eyed and giddy, green and blue skirt swirling dizzyingly as she peers at flower stalls and window displays with eyes saucer-wide. She's a rose in full flush amidst winter-raddled and cold-seared buds. Fr. Sowerby motions them into Lyons' Corner House, and Robin cranes her neck to squint up at the glass displays with their spartan spread of sweets and savouries. They order tea, and it arrives in a metal teapot that has all the utility of a chocolate one. The heat goes straight to the handle and seers Una's fingers when she tries to play mother. The priest opposite commiserates, but Una waves him off with reminiscences of Li's cast-iron teapot, heavy as lead when full and hot as boiling water should be. She wraps a flimsy napkin around the handle, pours out and asks, 'What mission were you sending Elise to, all those years ago? It wasn't in the letter. One of your projects?'

'No,' he says. 'It was a Methodist friend's brainchild. There was a school – '

It is extremely hard not to laugh. Una bites the inside of her cheek and tries not to anyway. She doesn't quite succeed.

'It would seem,' Una says, 'I was always supposed to cross paths with Elise English and her bird. You sent her to the Anglo-Chinese School, didn't you? On Barker Road?'

Fr. Sowerby's eyes are wider than planets or the great, glassy chandeliers of Raffles.

'I taught there for years,' says Una. 'It wasn't Methodist, not at first. Elise never arrived. Not in 1939, and never after that.'

The conversation loops and segues, as conversations do. It's strange to talk of Elise English like this, over imperfectly brewed tea in a metal teapot, accompanied by thick, cheap, pallid green china cups to cradle. They order cinnamon rolls, half-stale and inexpensive, and Robin crumbles them gleefully, her hands a mess of melted icing and spice. The London traffic clatters past the window, throwing up plashes of water and mechanical conversation of its own. Strange, but pleasant, too. Elise was always so close about her past life – well, they all could be, Una supposes, herself included.

Fr. Sowerby produces a copy of The Clue of the Leaning Chimney for Robin. It's as immediately recognizable as any Adventure Book, a titian-haired Nancy in white blouse and red skirt leaning precariously out of a tree in a pose Una thinks Iris invented. Una remonstrates gently about unnecessary gifts and Fr. Sowerby demurs. Someone, he says, told him Robin was keen on the author. Cressida, presumably. Possibly Joan, who reads every Adventure Book and Carol Keene alongside Robin from a distance of half a world away. Robin's delight is the lightning-rod kind that goes straight to the eyes an squeezes at Una's heart. Robin this carefree and unconcerned realizes all Una's hopes for her. She reaches out becrumbed hands for the latest Nancy Drew and it's al Una can do to swipe at her with a napkin and coax thank you, from crumb-spattered lips.

Afterwards, Fr. Sowerby walks them around London. The usual sights – St Paul's Cathedral, the Embankment, Heel's department store – but St Mark's Clerkenwell, too, with its incense-and-mustiness savour and wrought-iron candle brackets. There's a Pelican with a bleeding chest on the altar frontal that makes Una's heart stutter, because once, years ago, a dying Elise English quilted that pelican on a scrap of a quilt block for her daughter. Alien theology aside, Una sends a half crown clanging into the nearby tin and lights a candle, lux perpetua luceat eis, for Elise English, who called herself Anglican, and who even half-mad, never forgot St Mark's, Clerkenwell.

'I do that too,' says Fr. Sowerby, voice static-crackling. 'Have done ever since I learned she was really dead. That poor child.'

Una turns to look at him in the half-light of the candles, but she doesn't need to, not really, to see that he doesn't mean Robin. Robin lives the life of a giddy thing, adventuring with parrots and cousins, learning playfair cyphers and mathematics from a kindly gnome and – more reluctantly – the fine art of syntax and satin stitch from Una. In daring moods, they team up, gnome, mother-figure, and Isobel Blythe, to teach Robin to dance of a lazy Sunday afternoon. Gershwin is a favourite, but sometimes it's How High the Moon and others still, the languid waltzes and Straspheys of Una's girlhood. Presently Robin sports an elaborate sartorial creation courtesy of Judith Carlisle by way of Martin Swallow and clutches Nancy Drew under ebullient arms. Elise English had no such luxury and Una and priest know it, if Robin doesn't. Elise was indeed, a poor child. The unlikely saving grace of camp was that Elise English was not alone when death came at the end. Una thinks this as the candle flickers temperamentally in its bracket. The smell of incense, prayer and old dust is more potent than ever in St Mark's, Clerkenwell. Una inhales it and exhales Keats. I could not see the flowers at my feet/ Nor what soft incense hangs upon the bough. She knows, as she does it, that this is the end of the hunt for Robin's family. They were all the family in the world little Elise English had, with her dancer's feet and Irish green eyes. The women from camp and Fr Sowerby, Anglican vicar. A strange family, built on the tender mercy of God. But they were Elise's and they loved her.

Back out into the grey, chill misty, mizzle haze of a wintry London afternoon. Fr. Sowerby sees them to Waterloo station and all but puts them on the train with promises to keep in touch.

Joan waits at the other end, because, as she says, 'Iain and Emmy went walking that impossible hedge of Cressida's, despite the rain and it's half-dead state. God knows why. Rather them than me.'

'I'll remind you of that when it's you and some shadowed, far-off doctor, shall I?' says Una. Joan splutters but does not steer them into any ditches, so Una counts it a victory.

Later, there's a meal, gifts all round, and mistletoe. When Iain catches Emily under it, he gives her a brother's kiss on the cheek. Bernice is derisive, and vocal about it.

'Oh, for God's sake,' she says, 'do it properly or not at all.'

'Leave them be,' says Una.

'I like a thing done right,' says Bernice, unruffled.

'We know,' say several people at once.

But Emily gets a thorough kiss, and there's clapping and cheering from the unsolicited spectators. Briefly this upstages the cuddly parrot Emily gifts Robin. The thing is eye-popping scarlet, with green, yellow and blue tipped wings and tail. The eyes loom larger than life in it's ovoid head, it's beak a preposterous length. Cressida narrows her eyes, having never seen one of Emily's astonishingly colourful creations yet, only heard tell of them. Una suspects it's a macaw, and says so, which makes Cressida's eyebrows lift so high they all but pack suitcases and depart for countries unknown. In the process she catches sight of Emily's left ring finger. This explains the ramble through the hedge maze, anyway. There are exclamations and questions, and a general air of inquisition as the women fall upon the winking stone there.

It's a slip of a thing, fiery red in a way that conjures the ruby sunset of Li's necklace of silver fish. Una smiles at the sight, partly for the echo of Carl's gesture, partly because of the flash of the boy whose family swore up and down would be a priest in due season. Looking at Iain now, Una can't see it herself. Except in this tacit acknowledgement that rubies are the imperfectly-rendered price of virtuous women. She nods across the cross-chatter at her nephew and they trade smiles of mutual understanding. Around them the air buzzes. When did this happen, and why didn't you say and I knew you two were plotting fly round the room.

'I told you,' Una says sotto vocce to Joan, 'there was method in the earlier hedge maze madness.'

Joan laughs good-naturedly. 'You know an awful lot about it,' she says, but any further commentary gets lost in the clamour of so much inquisition by the others. Emily and Iain bear this interrogation with laughing stoicism.

'Here,' says Bernice, 'let me look,' and seizes Emily's hand unprompted. She holds the elongated fingers in place, and the stone, an unassuming and burnt-ember red thing in an unfussy setting that refracts the firelight.

For a moment she catches Una's eye, and Una knows they are both at camp again, the moon high, Robin in Una's arms, and Una is saying, That's not what it is of the slip of a band with a lapis-blue stone in her lap. Perhaps they slip further, Bernice to her Robert and Una... Una expects to feel the cool brush of a brother's kiss at a train station. It wouldn't be the first time it's intruded on her – or Percival Curtis's murmured Shelley in her ear in lieu of a dance invitation, the air of Singapore spiced and humming around her.
The sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea…

Neither ambushes her. The memory that surfaces smells of the Kingsport harbour, lobster traps and salt, and the speaker says of her eyes and Robin's It's the way you look with them. As if there are worlds within worlds. Like irised rain.

'Lovely,' says Una, clawing her way back to the present. Vociferous agreement from the others.

'Not too old-fashioned?' says Iain, who's obviously been worrying this point.

'Never,' says Emily. Una and company are quick to concur.

'Personally,' says Cressida, 'I sense a catch.' She tries, Una can see, to remain unimpressed as ever, but doesn't quite succeed. Under her gimlet eye, Iain shifts and scuffs the toe of his shoe against the carpet. The motion leaves faint streaks where he ruffles the fibre of the carpet out of stroke.

'Well,' he says, 'obviously, the independence situation isn't resolved, and the bandits are still everywhere. The army still has me in the middle of it, so…'

The penny drops, bronzed, sun-warm and weighty into Una's lap. She says, 'Will you tell your family you aren't coming home, or will I?'

This time when Iain scuffs his shoe the carpet stripes disappear as the bristles smooth themselves back into their rightful trajectory. 'The thing is, Auntie…' he starts, and it is hard – extremely – not to laugh at his transparent unease.

'Go on,' she says. ' Didn't I tell you you couldn't leave? Your father suspects as much anyway, and I don't mind. But write to them, too. Let them know you're thinking of them.'

Iain grins the Blythe grin, perhaps a touch more sheepishly than is strictly usual.

'Still my favourite Auntie,' he says.

'I should hope so, too' says Una. Then Robin and her mercifully-plush parrot turn a cartwheel dangerously close the the Wedgwood and their collective attention shifts. Blue Runnymede china chatters dangerously. The sun tumbles acrobat-wild through the window, and the afternoon ends in the rippling harmony of so much laughter.