‘Who takes you home?’ the magistrate asked.

Sounding a little shocked, Liza replied primly: ‘Me ma, of course. She won’t have any of us out on the streets of a night time.’

‘Quite right,’ said the magistrate and both children received their licences.

In the cab driving back to The Dolphin Miss Grey asked Liza how, with so many babies at home, her mother found time to collect her from the theatre. Liza gave her a wink.

‘’Course she don’t fetch me nor I wouldn’t want her to. I been getting round on my own since I was five. But if it does the old geezer good to think I’m fetched, why spoil his fun?’

During rehearsals Margaret had to go to the wardrobe for fittings of her ordinary stage clothes. For Anastasia’s coronation robes, Sarah had to take her to somebody called a court dressmaker who made, so it was said, dresses for Queen Victoria. Margaret did not think this much of a recommendation for, in all the pictures she had seen of the Queen, she had worn dull black dresses just like any ordinary old lady would wear. Whatever they might have made for Queen Victoria the dressmakers had let themselves go over Anastasia’s coronation clothes: velvet and satin sewn all over with what looked like diamonds and pearls and a great train edged with fur.

‘Won’t I look beautiful!’ Margaret had gasped to Sarah the first time she had tried the dress on.

Sarah did not hold with that kind of talk. ‘Pride comes before a fall,’ she said, and ‘beauty is as beauty does.’

But Margaret did not care what anybody said. She thought she knew why the dress felt so right. ‘I think if I knew who I was this is the kind of dress I would wear every day, even for breakfast.’

It was during the third week of rehearsals that trouble blew up for Margaret. By then she knew the part perfectly and, since rehearsals had gone well, was feeling confident – perhaps too confident. Suddenly, in the middle of the scene in the hotel on the frontier of Parthenia, Sir John stopped the rehearsal. It was Margaret’s least favourite scene, the one she thought rather mushy where her father told her how beautifully people in high positions should behave. Margaret was more or less listening, but a part of her was wondering how long it would be before she had an answer to her letter to Lavinia. Sir John stopped in the middle of a sentence and he sounded really angry.

‘You are not in the scene.’

Margaret was mortified. It was not nice being scolded in front of all the cast. She sounded a little cross. ‘I’m sorry, Sir John, but I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You weren’t listening to me. Part of your mind was somewhere else. You must listen to what is said when you are on the stage or the scene drops dead. Now, we’ll start that scene again and this time listen. Listen, listen …’