She had read the letter a hundred times. It was the product of seven months’ diligent work – all of those letters of enquiry sent from her cottage home, the dismissive ones she’d received in reply, the correspondence she’d entered into with potential employers that then came to naught, the hours she’d spent canvassing for referees, somebody, anybody, who might give her a chance. And all of that done while also putting her late father’s affairs in order, making sure her younger brother could finally stand on his own two feet, confronting the solicitor from Morecambe Bay who’d decided, without instruction, that the taxes due on what little her father had left behind demanded further commissions – and all because, as a woman, Nancy supposedly needed extra help in calculating the figures, in managing the accounts. As if she hadn’t been looking after the household finances since she was a girl. As if a man could do better, just because he insisted on people calling him sir.

She looked up. All of these people crammed around her on the Underground carriage had lives of their own. Some were bankers and some were clerks. Some were, no doubt, chambermaids-in-waiting just like her. Some might be runaway princes, or gentlemen playing at being paupers . . .

A man was staring at her from across the carriage. His face was the colour of pond water, his beard as entangled as briars, and in his bloodshot eyes was a look of quiet desperation. Yes, London was a city for kings and queens, but it was a city for beggars as well, she thought sadly. She pictured the Buckingham Hotel and, kneading some life back into her tired leg, wondered what she might find.

*

The Buckingham was every bit as opulent as she’d imagined. Where Nancy came from, the local hotel was two rooms above the village inn, or lodgings with old Mrs Gable – who took in miners from out of town, kept them six to a room and fed them on porridge oats at dawn and mutton stew after dark. By contrast, the Buckingham Hotel rose, seven storeys and more, above the resplendent green of Berkeley Square. Its gleaming white facade and the miniature colonnade where hansom carriages and taxicabs awaited each night made it stand out, even on a square where every townhouse was worth as much as every building in Nancy’s entire village combined. Marble steps led to the hotel’s striking bronze doors, a gold-plated rail sweeping up towards them. The man who attended the door wore a coat of long black velvet, despite the summer warmth, and a top hat that stood out like a shadow against the hotel’s bleached brick. Up above, an enormous copper crown stood between the hotel’s pavilion roofs, proclaiming it royal by association.