‘It’s just . . . sometimes I wonder what it’s for. Why I’m here. I never danced in the clubs, Louis. I came up through the tea dances, always on the arm of some local lord. But after too long in the Buckingham Hotel, with Mr Charles breathing down your neck, and you start to wonder – maybe there’s somewhere freer. Somewhere where you’re not being watched every second of every day. You used to love the clubs, Louis. So did . . .’

Hélène’s words petered into silence. Behind the area where the musicians gathered, a door led down to the dressing rooms. When she looked up, Raymond de Guise was standing there, looking pristine in his midnight-blue dinner jacket, its rolled collars faced in a shimmering silk. There was something dramatic and sad in the way he gazed out across the musicians. Hélène’s eyes lingered on him. Some of the other dancers had been known to swoon when Raymond de Guise sauntered by. They saw in him somebody doomed and romantic, but Hélène knew who he was dancing with tonight – the exiled ballerina Grusinskaya – and that look on his face was only Raymond de Guise, lost in concentration as he prepared to dance with an equal.

‘You still feel it, don’t you?’ Kildare dared to venture. ‘You still think about him often.’

‘Oh,’ Hélène said, her voice more brittle than ever, ‘how could I not?’

Raymond de Guise’s eyes landed on her. He lifted one eyebrow, as if to ask her if she was ready.

‘He would want you to . . . be yourself again, Hélène. He’d want you to live a new life. We all do.’

‘I know,’ whispered Hélène, ‘but as opulent and beautiful as this new life is, what if what you really want is the old?’

*

By the time the Archie Adams Band struck up the first notes of ‘No Other Love But You’, Billy Brogan was already sailing along the Strand on the top of a double decker bus. London at night was as cold and beautiful as Hélène Marchmont herself. A stiff wind whipped in off the river and, as Billy saw the bright lights of the Savoy Hotel rolling by, he felt a flurry of pride. The Savoy Hotel might have looked grand from the outside, but where was it that Mr Baldwin, Mr Chamberlain and their ministers took private rooms to chair their most important meetings? Where was it that King Edward brought Mrs Simpson for afternoon tea? And where was throwing a New Year’s Eve Masquerade Ball in his honour, with royalty from as far away as Norway coming to join in? The thought made Billy Brogan proud beyond measure. To come from a Lambeth terrace and belong to a place like the Buckingham was a very fine thing indeed.