Her brother inclined his head in acknowledgment. He knew better than to press his sister when she made it clear she didn’t want to talk anymore. He was intrigued, however. He draped her light evening cloak around her shoulders and held the door for her, following her down the stairs to the hall.

“Do you think Ma and Pa are enjoying themselves in Baden-Baden?” Petra asked as they stepped out into the warm evening. “I can’t see Pa taking the waters, can you?”

“Only if it’s liberally diluted with whisky,” her brother returned with a chuckle. He waved down a passing hackney. “But you know our mother, she’ll be perfectly happy gossiping with her friends and complaining about how foul the water tastes.”

“And making up for it with lavish dinners,” Petra said with an affectionate smile. Sir Percy Rutherford and his wife, Lady Cecilia, were fond but benignly neglectful parents, happy to leave the upbringing of their children to nannies, governesses and boarding schools. Once they no longer required that supervision, their offspring were encouraged to pursue their own lives as they wished, never deprived of anything except timely advice. It had occurred to Petra with hindsight that her mother could probably have saved her from the dreadful mortification of her girlish infatuation with Lord Ashton if she’d troubled to take an interest in what her daughter was doing during that summer in the country.

The hackney turned onto Piccadilly, the pavements crowded with people from all walks of life taking the early summer air on a beautiful evening: shopgirls, maids on their evening off, barrow boys and street vendors, all jostling for space. The strains of a harmonica from a busker on the pavement filled the air as Jonathan and Petra stepped down from the cab outside the grand entrance to the Criterion. Jonathan dropped a coin into the musician’s upturned cloth cap before ushering his sister through the Criterion’s ornate doors into the marble entrance hall. Voices rose and fell from the Long Bar at the rear of the hall.

They climbed the wide staircase to the first-floor dining room where they were greeted by a frock-coated majordomo. “Colonel Lacy’s party is already here, sir. May I take your cloak, Miss Rutherford?” He gestured to a liveried attendant, who immediately took Petra’s cloak and her brother’s hat, evening gloves and white scarf.

The majordomo led them across the marbled dining room to a table beside one of the long windows overlooking the bustle of Piccadilly.

“Forgive the gate-crasher intruder?” Jonathan said in smiling greeting as he brushed a kiss on the cheeks of the two women sitting at the table. “Rupert . . . Edward . . .” He held out his hand in greeting to the two men who had risen at the Rutherfords’ approach.