‘In through the guest door, perhaps?’ said Raymond, with the hint of a smile.

He was teasing her. Nancy rolled her eyes. ‘I think not. Unless, that is, you were planning on getting me thrown out? So you can finally start romancing Miss Edgerton?’

Raymond’s braying laugh echoed across Berkeley Square. ‘The tradesman’s door it is.’

They stole through together. Then, in the shadowed hall, before they approached the housekeeping lounge and chequered reception hall, Raymond stopped her. A stolen kiss later, they were crossing the hall and nearly at the Grand.

Her head down, Nancy clung to the walls as she made for the service lift – but she didn’t get far. Raymond’s hand was on her shoulder. ‘Just one peep,’ he said.

‘I can’t. You know what will happen if they see us.’ She thought about Rosa and Ruth, and all their bitter comments; Mrs Moffatt, telling her to remain unseen.

She squeezed his hand and slipped away.

Head down, Raymond positioned himself just outside the ballroom doors. The Archie Adams Band was playing a slow foxtrot, ‘On the Air’, as the evening came to its end. From the edge of the dance floor, the dancers looked divine, each couple turning against the other in perfect synchrony. Raymond felt a strange longing tug at his breast, where his fractured ribs had finally knitted themselves together and stopped stinging every time that he breathed. He caught sight of Hélène Marchmont in the arms of some socialite come to London from his country estate. Fleetingly, she caught his eye and raised her eyebrows in acknowledgement. That look told Raymond everything: Get back in here, Raymond. We need you. Well, it wouldn’t be long. He’d been working hard – harder than the doctors said he must. Every moment he could, he spent walking. He stretched three times a day, desperate to keep his body as supple as it ever was.

As Hélène danced on, she turned past Nathaniel White – that cherubic snake-charmer who’d managed, Raymond had no idea how, to take his place in the ballroom. Well, Raymond could feel his body healing. And it can’t come soon enough. What right has he to be here in our ballroom? He dances no better than a guest . . . It’s because of who he is. Who his family are. Raymond hadn’t forgotten those men, what they had done out on Cable Street, what they had done to his brother. It wasn’t long ago that Raymond thought he wouldn’t mind never seeing his brother again. But somehow all of that had changed.