Even towards the very end, when Alice’s life was fading away and the Doctor had given her up, for there was nothing more that he could do, Alice had whispered,

‘Promise you will not tell him about Mistral?’

Emilie had knelt sobbing at the side of the bed. She had promised, but later, when Alice had gone and they had carried her slender, wasted body away to the Churchyard, Emilie would have given everything she had in the world to retract that promise.

She had wanted to leave there and then for Monaco, to confront the Grand Duke with his crime, to call him a murderer, to show him the motherless Mistral, to know the satisfaction of denouncing him as a seducer and a betrayer.

But she had kept her promise, partly because of her religious convictions, partly because of her love for Alice, and partly because she was innately superstitious. Emilie knew she could never break that vow given on three separate occasions, but she had vowed vengeance, vowed it by all that she held sacred, and by the very memory of Alice herself.

One day, somehow, she would make the Grand Duke suffer as he had made Alice suffer and indirectly herself as well.

During the long nights when she had fought for the life of Mistral, when she had walked the screaming child up and down the kitchen almost from dusk to dawn, Emilie had found time to think, and gradually, as she thought, a plan formed within her mind, a plan which would take long years to put into operation, which would require endless scheming and plotting.

But as her hatred and her desire for vengeance grew, as it intensified, day by day, week by week, year by year, until its tentacles were so firmly fixed within her that she could no longer escape from them or indeed live without them, so was she certain that one day all that she dreamt of would be fulfilled and her vengeance assured.

And now at last, after eighteen years, the curtain was rising on the first act, the Prelude in which Mistral had grown to womanhood was finished. Looking at her, Emilie was satisfied. She was lovely – lovely enough for the part she had to play in this drama.

And then, as she looked at Mistral, the girl’s eyes, clear and unclouded, were raised to hers, and for a moment she bore such a look of Alice that Emilie felt something contract within her heart.

It was Alice who looked at her, Alice who was worried and whose lips trembled a little.

‘Please, Aunt Emilie, please, please explain things a little bit to me. It is all rather frightening, this secrecy.’

But even as Mistral pleaded, she knew it was hopeless.

Her aunt’s eyes seemed to soften and then abruptly Emilie turned her head away and walked across the room to the fireplace.