The Académie des Artistes sat on one of the cobbled rows snaking away from Covent Garden, the only thing to announce it a simple silver plaque on the wall between the French restaurant La Folie and an antique bookseller of high renown. The door itself was unremarkable – the Académie did not have to announce itself to the world. Those who knew of it, knew where to find it.

The doorman, when he appeared, was a man who had been born in the heart of the last century; his wrinkled skin hung loose around what had once been his significant jowls, and the suit he was wearing seemed to come from another century as well. He considered the man standing on the cobbles coldly. Then, recognising him, he stepped aside and admitted Raymond within.

Raymond was thankful for the heat emanating from the flickering fires. A narrow set of stairs led to the gentleman’s club on the building’s uppermost storey. The Académie des Artistes had a long and noble tradition. A small club with private smoking chambers and a staircase leading down to a secret back room and the restaurant below. The great Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova had made the Académie her home when she came to London with her rendition of the Dying Swan in the years before the Great War. Dancers and choreographers as feted as Jules-Joseph Perrot, the balletmaster of the Imperial Ballet in St Petersburg, had come to this place and dined among stars. Marie Taglioni, who first pioneered La Esmeralda. Enrico Cecchetti, the virtuoso from Milan, who had hidden from the world that he could only turn in one direction across his entire career. Eduardo Corrochio had celebrated here the night after he became the world’s first Tap Dancing Champion in 1890. Joe Frisco, the American vaudeville performer who took Broadway by storm with his Jewish Charleston, was known to frequent the Académie every time his shows brought him to London. There was even one night, which horrified the Imperial ballet artistes dining in the secret restaurant room, when Mata Hari herself was said to have draped herself across one of her paramours here, in this same smoky room.

And now came Raymond de Guise.

If they knew what kind of ruffian I really am, they’d turf me out on my ear. Even so, the wonder of climbing these stairs, where dancers so much greater than he had once trod, was exhilarating. No matter how many ballrooms and palaces he visited, the wonder of it still touched Raymond. That’s how I know I’ve never really belonged, he thought. Somewhere inside, I’m still Ray Cohen, standing on a street corner at night on lookout while his brother and friends clamber through some broken window . . .