‘Shame for what, Sir?’

‘Shame to fall.’

‘Oh,’ said Clorinda, ‘well, it was all the fault of the fireworks creating such a fright to you. If you ask me, you are one of the bravest people I’ve ever met. To walk on two bits of wood, like that. And to do that swinging and flying business through the air, with no net to catch you. Are you a Roman Catholic, Sir? Because I honestly think Our Lady herself would have been impressed by you and she would not have you talk of shame.’

Florian Bellenger had laughed joyfully and pressed the flowers into Clorinda’s arms. They were Michaelmas Daisies and the purple and yellow of them reminded her of the scabious and ragwort which sprang up in the parks of Dublin, for want of a scythe. As she buried her face in them, Florian Bellenger had leaned forward and kissed her ear.

After that, he had called several times. Mrs Morrissey had made him tea and offered him muffins, for which she did not ask him to pay. If she was working, his eyes followed her about the room. It wasn’t difficult to deduce that he had decided to fall in love with her.

When she thought about this, objectively, her own responses puzzled her. She could see that, by her own standards – in which people of great singularity, even downright oddness, were always favoured over those who were merely replicas of a thousand, directionless others – Florian Bellenger was a perfect man. Foreign, fearless, with an unknown, exotic past, the body of a dancer and a smile of such sweetness that other women became instantly flustered by it, he was surely an alluring prospect as a lover. And yet Clorinda Morrissey didn’t want him. She liked his presence, his voice, his kindness, but she just didn’t want him in her bed. After a while, she wondered whether she didn’t want him because he had fallen, even as her young carrot-headed suitor in Ireland had fallen and succumbed to death. And she concluded that the only kind of man she might take willingly into her arms was one who would not fall, but on the contrary, be steady enough to lift her up, to a higher position in the world.

Now, on the day when she had agreed to help Sir William Adeane and Valentine Ross with their domestic troubles and was already making lists in her mind of the dishes she might make for them, here was Florian Bellenger at her door once again.

Damp and hot from her cleaning of the tea room and the arduous mixing and beating of flour, butter and sugar, with her brown hair in wild, escaping curls, she was tempted just to signal to him through the glass, telling him to go away. But he was pressing himself very close against the door and holding up a parcel, suggesting that he had come on an important errand. So Clorinda sent her helper, Mary, into the back kitchen, dried her hands on her apron and let him in.