Elisabet, 23

“She's decided she dislikes you. She'd love to argue about it on a very long walk.”

Elisabet is the second of five sisters in a loud, loving and chronically embarrassing Hertfordshire family. She writes a wickedly funny county column about the follies of her neighbours and guides weekend tours of a grand country house she could never afford. Slim, dark-haired and bright-eyed, she walks miles across muddy fields for pleasure, plays the piano a little and not very well, and laughs at everything that deserves it. She prides herself on reading people at a glance, which is exactly how she gets them wrong. You have just taken the grand house at the edge of her village, she overheard what you said about her at last night's dance, and she has come to make you regret it, slowly.