Maynard found that he was trembling. He gripped his knees beneath the table, gouging the half-moons of his fingertips into them until he found the strength to utter, ‘You have my word, Mr Moorcock, as a gentleman.’

‘Gentleman?’ Mr Moorcock mused – and there seemed to be something particularly amusing in this. ‘Oh, Mr Charles, you could hardly be called a gentleman now, could you?’

Then he was gone, off into the Candlelight’s crowds – while Maynard Charles sat alone, waiting for the shaking to subside.

Chapter Six

Chapter Six

FOUR WEEKS HAD PASSED IN a whirlwind of beds changed, floors swept, and one particularly galling occasion in which, quite by accident, Nancy had stumbled in on M. Zweig, the widower in room 114, as he prepared himself for his morning ablutions. Tomorrow was to be her first morning off since she’d arrived in London – and privately Nancy admitted that she could hardly wait. Being a chambermaid was exhausting.

The staff quarters at the Buckingham Hotel were secreted around a corner of the third storey where no guest ever had need to go. Up narrow stairs beyond a locked door, the bed-sitting rooms were arranged in a horseshoe around a kitchen where the chambermaids gathered nightly to drink tea and share meals and trade what gossip they had gleaned from the hotel floors. To Nancy, it felt like the boarding schools she’d read about as a girl – and, indeed, Mrs Whitehead, the housekeeper who lived in the same quarters, played the part of housemistress to perfection. Nancy’s mother had had a trunk of books at the bottom of her closet and, if Nancy was good, her father would let her trawl through it, breathing in the scents of the same stories her mother had loved, wondering at the little missives and messages of love inscribed in each one. What it would have been like, Nancy often wondered, to have had a mother!

Tonight, when she climbed the old servant stairs, she could hear Rosa and Ruth already clucking around the kitchen. She paused at the top of the stairs, but did not go in. Nancy had never known that the soles of her feet could hurt as much as they did right now. Looking after her father had been one thing, but six days of waking at dawn to follow Mrs Moffatt and Mrs Whitehead around the hotel was quite another. And Lord, the things she’d seen . . .