“ ’Ere, watch it, love. You’re slopping soup all over.” The gruff voice brought me back to the present with a jerk. I wrenched my eyes away from the poster on the wall and down to the scene in front of me. A long, gray line of shabbily dressed men, muffled against the bitter cold, snaked across Victoria Station. They clutched mugs or bowls and stood patiently, eyes down or staring, as I had been, into a world that nobody else could see but them. I was currently helping out at the station soup kitchen. It was a bitter and bleak January day, and I felt as cold and miserable as those poor wretches who shuffled past me.

“Oh, crikey. Sorry,” I muttered as I noticed the trail of soup splashed across the oilcloth table. “I wasn’t concentrating.”

“It’s all right, love. It can’t be much fun doling out soup all day, not for a young lady like you.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” I said. “Help yourself to bread.”

“Thank you kindly, miss.” The man gave me a half nod, half bow. “You’re a real toff, you are.”

He was correct, of course. I am a real toff—Lady Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie, daughter of the second Duke of Glen Garry and Rannoch, thirty-fourth in line to the throne of England—and I was helping out at the soup kitchen for several reasons: The first reason, naturally, was that I couldn’t find a proper job. I had been educated to curtsy without falling over (most of the time), to know whether a bishop takes precedence over a duke (depends if it’s an archbishop or a royal duke) and which fork to eat oysters with (trick question: oysters are tipped from the shell straight into the mouth). I had never learned useful things like typing or bookkeeping or even cooking. Besides, the world was in the throes of a terrible depression and even people with strings of qualifications couldn’t find jobs.

My second reason for working in the soup kitchen was that Her Majesty the Queen approved of voluntary service for the good of the community at this sad time. “It’s up to us to set an example, Georgiana,” she had said to me more than once. And I have to confess that maybe this particular volunteer job was attractive because a certain Mr. Darcy O’Mara had been known to help out here when he was in London. However, the most compelling reason for my selfless ladling of soup into tin mugs was that my sister-in-law, Fig, had taken up residence in our London house. Any excuse to escape from her was welcome.