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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

Only when Billy was certain his father had gone to bed did he lie back on his cot, reach into his back pocket, and draw out the two pound notes he had secreted there. Then, reaching down into his mattress, he dragged out the little tin keepsake box he’d kept since he was young, listened to the rattle of coins and other notes inside, and slipped the new additions within. His father had no need to worry. Billy Brogan knew exactly what he was doing in the Buckingham Hotel.

And if Maynard Charles were to catch wind of it? Well, it would matter not one jot. Those two pound notes now sitting happily in his keepsake tin – they’d come courtesy of Maynard Charles himself.

Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten

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RAYMOND DE GUISE WAS UP with the lark, pacing behind the locked doors of the Grand Ballroom. It seemed so much bigger during the day. When it was not thronged with dancers, and the champagne was not in full flow, the ballroom was almost ghostly. To Raymond’s mind, there was something sad about it. A ballroom was for living. A ballroom demanded people and laughter and noise. And yet . . .

He did not like the silence. When he was with a guest in the ballroom, or rehearsing the demonstrations with Hélène in the little studio behind the dressing room doors, he was spirited away to some other place, a realm where nothing else mattered but the music and movement. But when he was alone . . .

He had tried to put it out of his mind, but ever since that summer night when Mrs Adelman had whisked him back to her suite, the idea of his brother would not leave him alone. He woke, sometimes, from dreams in which his brother pitched up here, at the doors of the Buckingham Hotel. He imagined the looks on the faces of Maynard Charles and Hélène Marchmont. He wondered what would happen if his brother were to stride into the Grand Ballroom and put his arms around him. He had not appeared yet, but that did nothing to quell Raymond’s nerves. Every day he doesn’t appear is just a day closer to it happening, he thought ruefully. And then what? How would I explain a man like that to the citizens of the Buckingham Hotel?