It was times like this that she missed Sidney the most. Louis did what he could – he had been a good friend to them both – but it was not the same. In an age gone by, she might have stalked off the dance floor, spent and exhausted, and Sidney would have been there, already practising some new trill on his trumpet. He’d have dropped it (or stowed it safely away – Sidney Archer had been as in love with his trumpet as he was with Hélène) and come to her side. They’d have made some pretence, and then they’d have slipped away together. The band might have known, but not one of them mentioned it, for they all knew what Maynard Charles would make of a union like theirs. But none of it – the secrecy, the lies, even the panicked moment when Hélène first understood she was pregnant with Sidney’s child – mattered, because Sidney was there to help her shrug it all away.

Now, with Sidney long in the ground and Raymond yet to return to the ballroom, Hélène would have to shoulder it herself. She steadied herself with deep breaths and followed Sofía LaPegna into the dancing girls’ dressing room. Sofía was already stripped out of her ball gown. Hélène paused. She had to remember: it had been tough for Sofía too. Over the weeks her despair had slowly turned to hope, and that hope had itself solidified into a devout belief that somewhere, out there, her brother not only survived – but was thriving.

Sofía scurried over and helped Hélène out of her high-backed gown. ‘Were his hands all over you again, Hélène?’

Hélène shook her head. The other dancers made a joke out of it – but Nathaniel’s were not wandering hands, not in the way Sofía meant. Nevertheless, she felt as if she could feel them on her, even now. When she danced with Raymond, it was with the lightest of touches. He led the dance only because somebody had to lead the dance – yet, when Nathaniel put his arm around the small of her back, and pressed his other palm to hers, it was as if she was a puppet and he her puppeteer. They did not dance together. No, Nathaniel White was the one dancing – and she, Hélène Marchmont, starlet of the Buckingham Hotel, was something closer to a doll. The way he folded around her made her feel constricted, confined. It was, she had thought after that first demonstration they danced together, as if she was one of those dancing figurines fixed to the top of a music box, unable to move of their own volition, pirouetting only at somebody else’s command.