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

In the wardrobe hung the uniforms Mrs Moffatt had provided. Nancy had had to pay for them, of course, with coupons to be deducted from her future wages, but she didn’t mind – for there, nestled among them, was the gown she’d brought, neatly folded up in the bottom of her case. Now that she’d seen the gowns the guests of the Buckingham wore, she was aware of how paltry it seemed. It had been the dress in which her mother was married – but, of course, it had been cut and remade countless times as the years passed by. It would not pass as elegant in these surroundings, but perhaps it did not need to. All she really wanted was to step through the ballroom doors while the evening was in full flow. All she really wanted was to breathe in the music for a few moments, to stand by the balustrade and watch the fabulous Hélène Marchmont turn a two-step across the ballroom on the arm of whichever dignitary she’d been promised to for the evening. Perhaps if she didn’t linger . . . she did not have to stand out. Perhaps it would not be such a crime to bring a pinch of magic into her own little life . . .

Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

image

THE BAND STRUCK UP. THE chandeliers were aglow. The smoke of the finest cigars rose up to make great reefs in the barrel-vaulted ceiling of the ballroom. Somewhere, a cork popped, in time with the beating of the drums in the orchestra. And on the edges of the ballroom floor, Raymond de Guise – a vision of elegance in his glistening dinner jacket, his hair newly cropped by Harrison, the hotel barber – approached a lady in a gown of flowing chiffon and lace, her neck adorned with pearls the size of robins’ eggs, the tiara in her hair encrusted with diamonds and a single sapphire that glared out like an extra eye, and offered her his hand.

‘Shall we?’

‘Mr de Guise,’ she replied, her voice half a whisper, and passed her cigarette holder, still smoking, to the hotel page at her side. ‘You are as handsome as I was told, though you do not look so very French.’

‘It is in my blood, Grusinskaya. On my father’s side.’

Grusinskaya, the exiled ballerina, spoke with a faraway voice, a voice that told of magnificent Russian palaces, cities frozen for winter, the Imperial court where she had once danced for the last of the Russian Tsars. Grusinskaya was fifty years old, but she looked much younger. Her dark hair flowed around her slender shoulders and her eyes, blue as the sapphire in her tiara, had a bewitched kind of cast. She looked longing. She looked . . . lost.