THERE WASN’T A DEPARTMENT in the Buckingham Hotel that didn’t believe that, were it not for them, the hotel itself would crumble. Ask the restaurateurs, the concierges, the chief engineer, the bookkeeper, the garage attendants, any one of the hundred pages who scurried through the hotel halls. Even the members of the Archie Adams Band, who were polishing their instruments in the lull before the afternoon demonstration dances began, believed the same. ‘We’re the heart and soul,’ Archie Adams told his orchestra. ‘What’s a hotel, if it doesn’t have a heart? Nothing more than bricks and mortar . . .’

Hélène Marchmont had heard some of the less experienced dancers saying the same thing. It was true that the advent of dancers in the hotel had changed the Buckingham’s fortunes – but so too had the wealth of Lord Edgerton, who became majority shareholder and Director of the Board in the same month the Grand Ballroom first opened its doors (so Hélène did not think it wise to draw too many conclusions). Besides, as principal female dancer of the ballroom, it was unbecoming of her to make comment. Right now, with the time for the demonstration dances approaching, she was on her knees in the dressing rooms trying to stop Sofía LaPegna’s tears making rivers of mascara down her powdered face. The poor girl was beginning to look like a circus clown, and the dances were only an hour away.

‘I’m sorry, Miss Marchmont. You must think me a frightful—’

‘I’ll hear nothing more,’ Hélène said, standing back. ‘SofÍa, you’ve every right to be upset, but . . .’

Hélène was a tall woman, a favourite among the hotel’s more rarefied guests. She had been tall at thirteen and now, approaching thirty, she stood inches above the rest of the dancers in the troupe. Her striking gold hair was now cut in a fashionable bob to fit beneath her cloche hat, but all that did was accentuate her extraordinary cheekbones and the vivid blues of her eyes. Those eyes had once captured the heart of a photographer, who put her in the pages of Esquire and even Harper’s Bazaar; it was those eyes that had helped to catapult her to the stage and keep her there.

Sofía was starting to calm down. Some of the other girls were squabbling around, helping each other into their gowns or relaxing with the help of the clove cigarettes that Billy Brogan, rising star among the hotel pages, brought from a place in Chinatown. The air in the dressing room was a fug of clove smoke and sweet perfumes: the heady scent of Guerlain’s Shalimar, the tropical notes of Je Reviens, all of them provided by a boutique perfumery in one of the Regent Street arcades.

‘I’ll be fine, Miss Marchmont. I can still dance.’