‘Don’t panic, girls!’ Fanny’s heart was thumping. She felt dizzy and sick. ‘It is perfectly safe.’ She heard a gasp, a little scream. And was that a giggle? Surely not. ‘Miss Atkinson?’ This place was so thoroughly unnatural. The poor young lady was quite possibly scared out of her wits.

‘Thank you, madam.’ Miss Atkinson’s speaking voice had a pleasing musicality. ‘Please do not concern yourself. I am perfectly well.’

‘And we have made it!’ George shouted in triumph. ‘Here is the curtain. Ready, all?’

Their eyes were so shocked by the light flooding in through the glass roof that at first they were blinded. With all the grace and speed of a tortoise emerging from winter, Fanny groped her way to the central platform and clung to the railings in fear of her life.

‘I say!’ George exclaimed, spinning round on his heel like a dancer. ‘Will you look at that?’

The five stood – suspended in space, bathed by the sunshine – surrounded on all sides by an enormous, painted replica of the Neapolitan region. William, bending his neck back to take in the sky, whistled in admiration. ‘What an extraordinary sight!’ He reached out and offered his arms again to Miss Atkinson and Mary. ‘Ladies?’ He smiled. ‘A stroll through the Italian streets, if you will?’

Fanny hoped they were not wanting to spend too long here. Personally, she felt she had got the measure of it already. She had been once to Paris – most unenjoyable; the food made her ill – and formed there the firm opinion that one European city was much like another. She tucked her arm under George’s and allowed him to walk her around.

‘So what were they against, that crowd outside? While not doubting their passion, I could not quite make it out.’

‘This very Panorama, apparently.’ George spoke from the side of his mouth as he studied the painting. ‘False representation … fakery … we mortal fools cannot be trusted to tell the difference between this and the real thing … all the usual.’

Fanny sighed. Londoners: give them all a day on horseback over the Weald or a full week of harvest, then let us see if they still hold these ridiculous views.

It was the middle of March. She and Sir Edward, with Mary Dorothea and her new governess, had been up in Town since January and, though she was trying her best to get used to it, London would persist in being so very different from everything she thought as the norm.