‘Darcy, can we go somewhere quiet?’ Helen pleaded. He was deaf to the urgency in her voice. Instead he took her hands and whirled her on to the dance floor. ‘Quiet? At a ball? Dance with me first. We haven’t danced together since Montcalm. New Year’s Eve, remember? I couldn’t believe my luck. I still can’t, Helen.’ He kissed her cheek, and Helen felt as if he was twisting a knife between her ribs. Then she saw Chloe looking curiously at her and forced a bright smile. As his arms came round her and he dragged her into the dance she thought that Darcy was like a huge, affectionate dog. How different from Tom’s aloof coolness, with the heat beneath.

The evening drew her on into its bright, frivolous, utterly inapposite tangle. The others seemed to dance inexhaustibly. When she begged to be allowed to sit down, she was passed inexorably from Dave Walker’s clutches to Scot’s taut grip. She found his stiff-lipped Glaswegian incomprehensible against the roar of the music. When he smiled at her only one half of his face moved, the pucker of scar tissue keeping the other immobile. ‘Ye don’t look sae happy for a gairrl just engaged,’ he told her, and she turned her head away from him.

At last they had apparently danced enough …

‘Supper,’ somebody said, and ‘Much more champagne,’ someone else added. She found herself being drawn out into the moonlight again. The moon was high overhead now, and the colour of beaten silver. Darcy was holding her hand, leading her up the hollowed steps again and into the Hall. Candlelight shone into amused faces all round her, and on pretty, festive food that she couldn’t have imagined eating. There was indeed a string quartet, playing Beethoven into the dim arch of space above the clatter, and calling out, and clinking of glasses. Then immediately, it seemed, they were off again. Helen was hopelessly letting herself be carried along with the evening’s tide instead of trying to swim against it. Darcy was not to be deflected from his determined enjoyment, and she knew his stubbornness. Wearily, she decided that she was incapable of judging now whether the moment was tactful or cruelly ill-timed.

The evening was interminable, and there were hours to endure yet. There would be more dancing, and then breakfast among the pools of candlewax at the long tables, and then emergence into the incongruous bright daylight and the roar of work-bound traffic.

Helen followed the cheerful babble down the steps again, her heavy feet making her lag behind. She saw the hem of Pansy’s dress whisk out through the arch and away under the lacings of laser light.

A hand caught her arm, so suddenly and sharply that she almost cried out. A green velvet sleeve, and then Oliver’s hollow, glittering smile hanging over her. His fingers dug into her flesh.