Without a glance left or right, blind and deaf to everything except the imperative need within her, Helen began to stumble towards him. Longing flooded through her and she already felt the weight of his arms around her, and the pressure of his mouth against hers.

The rest of the world was forgotten in the surge of pure joy at the sight of him.

The crowds tangled around her, pinioning her arms and keeping her agonisingly apart from him. She saw Tom hold out his hands to her before a long chain of conga dancers twisted between them and he was hidden.

Helen snatched her cold hands out of her pockets to help force her way through the crowds. As she moved she felt the weight sliding on her finger and then heard a tiny clink as the Viscountess’s ring dropped and rolled away. She froze in her headlong rush. Slowly she tore her gaze from the point where she had seen Tom and made her eyes quarter the pavement between the shuffling feet. The ring lay a few inches away, as ominously bright as a splash of new blood on the paving. Helen sank stiffly to her knees and reached for it. When her fingers closed over it again, she felt it cold and bulky and almost unbearably heavy.

Darcy. Darcy’s ring. Her promise, and her vow not to see Tom any more. I can’t trust myself, she whispered, and she knew they were the truest words she’d ever spoken. Desperately her fingers tightened around the ring until the stones bit cruelly into her flesh. She scrambled up and saw that the space in front of her had miraculously cleared. Only a few yards separated her from Tom and he was still waiting for her, one hand outstretched.

‘No,’ Helen shouted desperately. ‘I can’t.’

The dancers looked curiously at her and then swirled around to separate them again.

With every bone and muscle in her body aching and crying out against the movement, Helen turned away. She felt Tom’s gaze on her back, and knew that she would never forget how he had looked as he sat there with his black hair blown into a peak by the river wind.

Chloe was in the crowd to the right of her. Helen pushed frantically towards her, longing but not daring to look back at the bridge parapet. She reached Chloe and grasped at her arm. The solid warmth of it gave her the strength to look back.

Tom had vanished. The space on the bridge mocked her with its emptiness. The crowds were already streaming away, to breakfast parties or to dance and sing in the streets with the fiddle-players and morris men, and they had engulfed him.

Helen swayed slightly, suddenly icy cold. She was numbly aware of having made a terrible decision; a decision that had left her lonely and hopeless.