Now, though, love felt different. It felt like sickness in the bottom of her stomach. It felt like faintness when she demonstrated a particular dance with Raymond de Guise. It tasted like last night’s dinner, forever lurking at the back of her throat.

The moment she stepped through the doors and Sidney introduced her, his family fawned around her. They made her tea. They buttered hot teacakes and presented her with all manner of biscuits. They made her feel more at home than her own family ever had. And she knew, in an instant, that she had a new family now. Perhaps it was a family the world might never know about – but it was a family all the same.

That Christmas had changed her life. She’d lain in the back bedroom here, with Sidney next to her, and wondered at the baby budding inside her. She’d been here at New Year too, when the Archie Adams Band played for Prince George, the Duke of Kent, who was entertaining his continental friends at the Buckingham’s famous Masquerade Ball. Sidney had kissed her goodbye on the doorstep and set off into the snow with his trumpet case at his side.

He’d never come home, for as he left the Buckingham late that night – drunk, perhaps, on what a beautiful turn his life was taking; drunk, too, on the brandy that Archie Adams had shared around while the festivities were at a high – he stepped out into the path of an omnibus slewing around in the snow.

The horror of the moment when Louis Kildare appeared on the doorstep in Brixton to break the news . . . The fraction of a second when she thought he was playing some terrifying joke and that Sidney would appear from around the corner, his trumpet in his hand. Then the yawning realisation that this was real, that Sidney was gone, that Hélène’s whole world was being torn into fragments around her. All of these moments were like photographs. She remembered them so starkly. But no moment would ever be imprinted on her consciousness as vividly as the moment Louis presented her with the trumpet that had been found just a few yards from his body, still safely tucked up inside its case. One day, she would give it to Sybil – the first and last gift from her father.

Hélène had sat at his funeral while their baby turned somersaults inside her, unable to reveal herself as Sidney’s lover, able only to shed tears as a member of the Buckingham Hotel who’d known him for his music. She’d hidden the pregnancy well, flanked on one side by Louis Kildare and the other by Raymond de Guise, the only two men she’d trusted enough to tell. With their support she had managed to keep in the tears until nobody could see. Then, in the churchyard, she’d felt the bite of the wind and realised that she’d never hear him playing his trumpet again, that she’d never wake to see him grinning at her, that she’d never tell him that, when she danced in the ballroom, it was him she was thinking about, no matter who was in her arms. The devastation was absolute. Hélène’s world was a different shade of grey. When people spoke to her, she heard them only as if from a distance. The sun was gone, and in its place there was endless night.