Her cheeks burning, she didn’t look round to see if Edward was following her, but when she entered the dining room and felt his hand at her elbow a moment later, she held herself very straight. If he made excuses for that dreadful woman she would hit him.

‘I’m sorry about Belinda,’ he muttered in her ear. ‘She might rub shoulders with the great and the good but she has the manners of an alley-cat.’

Ruby didn’t trust herself to speak. Instead she concentrated on selecting a little food from the huge variety of dishes on display, and it wasn’t until they were seated in a quiet alcove and Edward had fetched two glasses of wine, that she said, ‘She seemed angry.’

‘Belinda?’

‘Yes, Belinda. Had she any reason to be?’

He might have guessed she would get straight to the point. There was never any beating about the bush with Ruby. ‘Are you asking me if I have been acquainted with her in the past?’

Well, that was one way of putting it, she supposed. She said nothing and neither did she sip at her wine as he was doing; she’d had two glasses of champagne and felt a little tiddly as it was but that was probably just as well. She might not have had the courage to deal with Mrs Ferne-Rice the way she had otherwise.

Edward put down his glass of wine and then sighed. ‘It was over long before I met you.’

Stupid, so, so stupid to feel so let down and jealous, but she did, which was utterly unfair as not only had he been involved with this woman before he had met her but if he was still seeing her now she would have no reason to object. Drawing on all her composure, she said quietly, ‘I see.’

‘Ruby, I swear she is nothing to me. She never was, not really. I was young and she was married and bored. It was one of those things.’

One of those things. How could he speak so offhandedly about something that was so important? But by his own admission, it hadn’t been to him. Carrying on with someone else happened in her own class – she of all people knew that, since her world had been turned upside down because of it – but it wasn’t treated lightly, far from it. It was a terrible disgrace, a sin, a crime. A man who betrayed his wife was likely to have her father and brothers and other menfolk turn up on his doorstep and knock ten bells out of him, and a woman would be hounded out of the neighbourhood and probably pelted with muck and filth into the bargain.

She and Edward were worlds apart. Millions and billions of worlds apart.