Maynard paused. How to describe the feeling that had been building in him all day? How to put something as intangible as this into words? The day, he reflected now, had gone exactly according to plan – as he had known that it would. The Christmas luncheon had been a triumph. The Grand had been a magnificent affair. Even when Raymond’s secret world arrived unannounced in the Queen Mary, there had been no disaster. Raymond had handled it with considerable aplomb.

Why, then, did Maynard Charles get the feeling he was sleepwalking, sleepwalking into something from which there was no return?

Was it how close they’d come, in the past week, to inviting Lord Edgerton’s wrath, his stepdaughter found half dead on the Buckingham floor? Was it how Nathaniel White strode through the ballroom, a colossus with connections to the most dangerous Englishmen in London? Was it his last meeting with Mr Moorcock, and the fear he had felt for so many years – the fear of exposure, the fear of being found out? Was it only that New Year was on the horizon and, without King Edward to grace his hotel, the extravaganza on which so much of the hotel’s future rested was suddenly so much more of a risk?

Or was it something more? This feeling he couldn’t escape, that not only the Buckingham, but the whole of England itself, was marching onwards into the dark? That the titbits he gathered for Mr Moorcock were but the tip of the iceberg. That the England he loved and had fought and lost so many friends for was standing, brave but alone, in the path of a coming storm?

Maynard Charles drained his glass. If they were dancing to disaster, he decided, there was nothing to do but dance on. The world had to keep turning. He was but one man, and a hotelier at that. How could one man do anything to change the world?

He reached out and took Aubrey’s hand gently.

‘It was,’ he declared, ‘a triumph.’

But all that night, and into the long morning after, the thought would not leave him: every day was another day closer to the end.

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-two