‘Do you know how I conceived of this trick we have played upon Mr Savill?’ she began.

‘No.’

‘Gertrude Mahon and I once did the same to the Duke of Dorset.’ She then embarked upon a well-spun narrative which drew me back to the streets of my birth, to Mayfair, to the theatres and to Vauxhall, to the faces and names of friends I had left behind in a previous lifetime. Her lilting voice with its vague trace of Scots rendered me drowsy and content. I could still smell the faint hint of her eau de musk as I curled beside her in the warm bed.

‘I dare say our appearance at the play tonight has set tongues wagging,’ said she as I was drifting into sleep.

I looked up at her through a haze. She wore a tired but roguish smile.

‘They will formulate a story about you and me. They will suppose that you are my niece and have fled some scandal in London . . . or that you are in fact my daughter, the product of some youthful dalliance. Perhaps some will guess you are the very reason why my father married me to that old toad, Elliot, when I was younger than you.’

‘But we look not at all alike,’ I protested.

‘Psh. That matters not. They will invent what amuses them.’

Silence settled into the room. I listened to the rise and fall of her breath and assumed she had given way to sleep.

‘That would not be so disagreeable to you, would it?’ she murmured. ‘That you should be taken for my daughter?’

Her words hung in the air, begging for my heart to catch them. She understood how I had longed to hear such a thing uttered: ‘my daughter’. That you should be taken for my daughter. How did she know I yearned for that thing more than any other? To call some gentle person ‘Mamma’, as I had never done.

‘No,’ I whispered at last. ‘Not in the least.’

Chapter 11

HERE, READER, I shall abandon my pretence. I shall confide to you this: I understood precisely the significance of my appearance with Mrs Elliot at the Comédie-Française. When I had accepted her invitation I had agreed to place myself once more at the centre of the demi-monde, that scene from which I had only lately escaped. Indeed, it was not without a good deal of contemplation that I arrived at my determination. You see, since the loss of my jewels, I did not believe I possessed any say in the matter. I knew well enough that my friend would never suffer me to make use of her hôtel particulier as might a nun in cloisters.