IN THE FINAL DAYS APPROACHING Christmas, the atmosphere at the Buckingham Hotel had changed from one of ruthless order to one of barely controlled chaos. It seemed to Nancy that the very fabric of the hotel was changing. The guests who came were of a different order: the businessmen and dignitaries visiting on official business had retired to their country estates for the season, while the guests who arrived were cut from a different cloth. They came, not to use the Buckingham Hotel as a home away from home and explore the sights and sounds of London town, but to revel in the luxury and splendour of the Buckingham itself. For a week now, the kitchens of the Queen Mary and the Buckingham’s other dining rooms had been on high alert, everyone from potboy to head chef working long into the night to prepare for the Christmas Day to come. Eighty prize turkeys from a Gloucestershire farm had been delivered to the hotel cold stores. One hundred wood pigeons, pheasants and grouse were strung up by their feet in the cold larders, waiting to be plucked by the army of sous-chefs drafted in for the occasion. An inventory of the cold room would have shown six whole red deer, butchered and dangling from spikes, along with forty suckling pigs and a succession of haunches of beef big enough to feed a battalion. Nancy had caught sight of the cauldrons of gravy that had been slowly simmering since the equinox, and the Christmas puddings – baked en masse in August and left to mature in the dark kitchen larders – were now being unearthed and fed with yet more brandy for the occasion.

Nancy was worried about Frank. Mrs Gable would put on a Christmas spread for the boys who stayed in the boarding house, but Nancy did not like to think of him waking up on Christmas morning without his family. She had arranged for the hotel post room to send him a set of postcards of London’s most magnificent sights: the Tower and the Thames, the rolling green splendour of Regent’s Park and the majesty of St Paul’s. All of these things she meant to show him one day. It did not seem right that he should be lonely on Christmas morning.

Nancy lingered in the reception hall, in the shadow of the Norwegian fir, watching as Hélène Marchmont stepped through the revolving doors, straight into a waiting Hackney carriage. The last of the pre-Christmas guests were making a steady stream through the doors as well – and there among them stood Vivienne Edgerton. She was dressed sombrely for a day like this, with a simple sky-blue day dress and a day bag at her side. She looked drawn, thought Nancy. Drawn and old. Nancy had to remind herself that she was the elder of them by four, maybe five years. Vivienne was only a girl.