BooksBarbecue
Back One Enchanted Evening Save as PDF
Chapters (50)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Prologue
  4. The Grand Masquerade Ball
  5. Five Months Earlier . . .
  6. Chapter One
  7. Chapter Two
  8. Chapter Three
  9. September 1936
  10. Chapter Four
  11. Chapter Five
  12. Chapter Six
  13. Chapter Seven
  14. Chapter Eight
  15. Chapter Nine
  16. Chapter Ten
  17. Chapter Eleven
  18. Chapter Twelve
  19. Chapter Thirteen
  20. Chapter Fourteen
  21. Chapter Fifteen
  22. Chapter Sixteen
  23. Chapter Seventeen
  24. Chapter Eighteen
  25. October 1936
  26. Chapter Nineteen
  27. Chapter Twenty
  28. Chapter Twenty-one
  29. November 1936
  30. Chapter Twenty-two
  31. December 1936
  32. Chapter Twenty-three
  33. Chapter Twenty-four
  34. Chapter Twenty-five
  35. Chapter Twenty-six
  36. Chapter Twenty-seven
  37. Chapter Twenty-eight
  38. Chapter Twenty-nine
  39. Chapter Thirty
  40. Chapter Thirty-one
  41. Chapter Thirty-two
  42. Chapter Thirty-three
  43. Chapter Thirty-four
  44. Chapter Thirty-five
  45. Epilogue
  46. A New Year
  47. Extract from Anton Du Beke’s next novel’
  48. Acknowledgements
  49. About the Author
  50. Letter from Author

Then it’s me coming back home, empty-handed every night. No wages. No little extras. No treats saved from the dustbins being brought back to feed that lot through there. And . . . Billy thought of his father, all of the days he’d come back from the fish market not knowing if there would be work for him the next day, the next week, the next month. The world was cruel out there. The well-fed one day were starving the next. All those faces, depending on me. How could I let one of them go hungry for even one night? What does right and wrong matter when there’s hungry children to be thinking about?

Somewhere out there, over the rooftops of London, Big Ben began to toll midnight. Christmas Day had come.

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-one

image

Earlier that same night and the chambermaids of the Buckingham Hotel ought to have been in bed long ago. Yet here they were, gathered in the staff kitchenette, all clamouring for a story. ‘Tell us!’ the girls said. ‘Every . . . last . . . detail!’ they insisted. Nancy Nettleton craned around, taking in each of their faces in turn. Rosa and Ruth. Agatha and Frances.

‘We know how it started,’ Rosa laughed. ‘Dance lessons. And then—’

‘What did he do, just kiss you?’

‘You ever been kissed before, Nance?’

‘I reckon she has! Girl from a mining town like that. You’d have been fighting ’em off, were you, Nance?’

‘Wait, wait, wait!’ Nancy cried out. ‘I’ll tell you,’ she said – and there was an audible gasp around the room. ‘But you have to promise me. This is our secret, girls. Please. If Mrs Moffatt were to find out . . .’

‘Oh, rot!’ Ruth cackled. ‘She’s only a dragon half of the time. You think you’re the first serving girl, Nancy Nettleton, who’s fallen for somebody she shouldn’t in this hotel? When I first got here, there was Suzanne. Now, Suzanne and this guest, Lord Some Such or Other, they were found in—’

‘Oh, hush now, Ruth! It’s Nancy’s story we’re after.’

Nancy inhaled deeply, taking in all of the expectant faces around her. You can’t lie now, Nancy. They’ve seen. And . . . look at them. You thought they’d scorn you for it. You thought they’d mock and . . . what? Use it against you? No, looking at them now, Nancy didn’t see a group of girls scrabbling for some gossip just to spread it around. She saw them thrilling alongside her. She saw them eager for a little romance, a little adventure, a little love.

So she told them. Every last bit.

*

Later, much later, when all the girls were off to bed, Nancy silently crossed the darkened Buckingham halls and knocked on a door. Moments later, the door drew back – and there, still in his evening suit from his night spent in the shadow of Nathaniel White on the ballroom floor, stood Raymond de Guise.