Vivienne felt herself growing angry. It was just like her stepfather to have his minions watch her like this. Wasn’t it enough that she was banished from his Suffolk estate so that he could have her mother all to himself?

The words were rising up her pale, swan-like throat of their own volition. She blurted them out.

‘I’m eighteen years old. Nearly nineteen. I’ll not be a kept woman. He’s turned my mother into his pet and he tried to do the same to me. Well, I made a resolution, Mr Charles. I’m through with it. All the money in the world doesn’t matter to me.’

Maynard Charles remained silent.

‘Oh, I know what you think. I’d be thinking it too. Who is Vivienne Edgerton without a new outfit every single night? Well, I’ll tell you who. I’m me. All of that money he throws at me – it isn’t for my benefit. It’s to keep me quiet and pliant. And all the while it’s been . . . rotting me. Yes, that’s the word. Rot! You spend and it fills a hole inside you. But the next time you spend, the hole’s a little deeper, so you need to spend more. Soon enough, you’re destroying yourself – just like I did last Christmas. So I don’t want his money, Mr Charles!’

‘Vivienne,’ Maynard began calmly, ‘money doesn’t have to corrode. Money makes the world go round.’

‘I’m a leech, Mr Charles. Oh, he makes sure I pay my way in this hotel, and of course you benefit from it too. A permanent guest in the finest suite! But I do not want to remain a leech any longer. I want to contribute. I’m worth more than dresses and pearls, aren’t I? I can . . . help.’

‘Help?’ To Maynard, the idea was patently absurd.

‘Not the hotel,’ Vivienne went on, ‘but there has to be something for me. Some way of mattering. Not like my stepfather and his parties and his hunts.’

Maynard rounded the desk and perched on its edge, close to where Vivienne sat. She shuffled backwards; it was just like Maynard Charles to come and patronise her. The old man meant well, and she knew he’d covered for her indiscretions on more than one occasion in the past, but how could he ever understand what it felt like to be trapped like this, trapped in her own skin?