It was only later that year, when Sybil gave her first cries and Noelle Archer herself lifted the mewling baby to Hélène’s breast – that sound, more real and beautiful than anything she’d ever heard in a ballroom – that she’d felt the grief subside. My daughter, she’d realised. The revelation was unique. The child had been growing for nine months – but only when she could see her face, touch her and feel her, did she understand. I am a mother – for now, and for the rest of my life. The enormity of it, the love and the fear that mingled in her, was almost too difficult to grasp. But she lay there that night and she knew just how right it was.

‘He would have been proud of you, Hélène,’ said Noelle. ‘Proud of you both. Let’s make it a Christmas to remember. He always loved your English Christmases. He’d want that for Sybil too.’

At that moment, Maurice Archer burst back into the room, brandishing not only his shovel but the most glorious smile. ‘Come and see!’ he said, and together the family followed him out to the yard.

In front of the house, where he’d cleared the path, the snow was piled high in what Hélène first took for a simple hummock. It was only as she carried Sybil around it that she looked down and saw it for what it was: a giant trumpet, sculpted perfectly from the fallen snow. It was the most wonderful thing.

*

By the time the first suppers of Christmas Eve were being served in the Buckingham Hotel, Billy Brogan was loping back across the river. Over his shoulder was a haversack and, wrapped up inside, the perfect Christmas surprise: a single suckling pig. He could almost taste it now.

The lights were on at home. Billy gambolled through the door and, in an instant, was mobbed by his brothers and sisters. They seemed to think him Father Christmas himself, and nothing could have given Billy greater joy. With a half-dozen pairs of hands clutching him, he allowed himself to be carried through to the living room, where the tiny tree his parents had put up appeared a mere bough when set against the majesty of the fir tree standing in the Buckingham hall. And yet the presents piled up around its bottom in their higgledy-piggledy pyramid seemed greater than any gifts that would be exchanged in the Buckingham tomorrow morning. Billy’s heart soared.

‘I’m about to make your night even better,’ he announced. ‘Stand back, you bairns. Wait until you see what we’re eating tomorrow . . .’

The pig was wrapped in baking parchment. When Billy unfurled it on the floor, his sisters cringed away – all except Roisin, with the ruddy cheeks, who joined her brother Patrick in poking the poor dead thing with the tip of her finger.

‘And I got this too, for those that’s grown up enough.’