I paused as I passed Harrods’s windows. All those stylish dresses and shoes! My only attempts at keeping up with the latest fashion had been during my season, when I had received a meager clothing allowance, studied magazines to see what the bright young things about town were wearing this season, and then had the gamekeeper’s wife run me up copies. Mrs. MacTavish was good with her needle but they were poor imitations at best. Oh, to have the money to sail into Harrods and choose an outfit, just like that!

I was lost in reverie when a taxi pulled up at the curb, a door slammed, and a voice exclaimed, “Georgie! It is you. I thought I spotted you and I made the taxi driver stop. What a surprise. I didn’t know you were in town.”

There before me, looking dazzlingly glamorous, was my former schoolfriend Belinda Warburton-Stoke. She was wearing an emerald green satin opera cape—the kind where the sides are joined together to make the sleeves, thus making most people look like penguins. Her hair was styled in a sleek black cap with a jaunty hair ornament on one side, complete with ridiculous ostrich feather that bobbed as she ran toward me.

We rushed to embrace. “How lovely to see you, Belinda. You’re looking fabulous. I would have hardly recognized you.”

“One has to keep up appearances or the customers won’t come.”

“Customers?”

“My dear, haven’t you heard? I’ve started my own business. I’m a fashion designer.”

“Are you? How is it going?”

“Frightfully well. They are positively fighting to have the chance to wear my creations.”

“How wonderful for you. I’m envious.”

“Well, I had to do something. I didn’t have a royal destiny, like you.”

“My royal destiny doesn’t seem too promising at the moment.”

She pulled out some coins to pay the taxi driver, then linked arms with me and started to march me up the Brompton Road. “So what are you doing in town?”

“I bolted, taking after my mother, I suppose. I couldn’t stand Scotland a minute longer. ”

“Nobody can, darling. Those awful loos with the tartan wallpaper! I have a permanent migraine when I’m there. Were you on your way somewhere? Because if not, come back and have a drink at my place.”

“You’re living near here?”

“Right next to the park. Terribly avant-garde. I’ve bought myself a dear little mews cottage and done it up and I’m living there alone with just my maid. Mother is furious, but I am twenty-one and I’ve come into my own money so there’s not much she can do, is there?”

I allowed myself to be swept up Brompton Road, along Knightsbridge, and into a cobbled back alley where the former mews were now apparently transformed into living quarters. Belinda’s cottage looked quaint on the outside but inside was completely modern—all white walls, streamlined, Bakelite and chrome with a cubist painting on the wall, possibly even a Picasso. She sat me on a hard purple chair, then went across to a generously stocked sideboard. “Let me make you one of my cocktails. I’m famous for them, you know.”