Mangan pauses on the threshold. He looks about him and takes in the scene with a sweep of his arm. “We are entering into a bastion of the old order, my friends. Be vigilant. Their world is a seductive one. They will flatter and fawn and pour syrupy words in your ear. There is a danger of losing one’s self.”

“Or at least,” observes Gudrun, “one’s self-respect.”

“But nice to have some champagne,” Perry points out.

“Ah!” Mangan grips Perry’s arm. “How many great artists have sold their souls while under the spell of that golden poison, hmm?”

Bram leans closer and speaks softly. “I thought we were here to find new commissions.”

Mangan’s beetle brows wriggle in distress. “We must prostitute our art or starve, it is true, but, oh, how it pains me to do so! To think that we must display the charms of our talent as if on some street corner to attract the lustful glances of the moneyed classes.”

“Surely,” Bram says, “that money will buy us the freedom to also do our own work, our best work.”

Mangan slaps him on the back with bruising enthusiasm. “Ah-ha, the pragmatic optimism of youth. God bless you, young Bram. I for one will take a place in that rosy future you paint for us. Come! Let us enter the fray.” He straightens his unstraightenable tie, dusts off his sleeves, sets his shoulders back, and leads them forward.

The Anstruthers’ ballroom is grand in every sense of the word. Bram has never seen a room in a private house with such extravagant proportions, such opulent decor, or such glamorous occupants. For a moment he thinks his nerve will fail him, and he glances back at the door to see if a swift and discreet exit is a possibility. But Mangan has already been spotted by an art lover who is intent on engaging the whole of his party in conversation. The orchestra has not yet begun to play, but even so there is a surprising amount of noise. Excited chatter, cheery greetings, the clink of glasses, the stepping or striding of more than two hundred well-shod feet, all combine to form an amorphous hubbub, through which only the odd word can be understood. Bram feels unequal to the task ahead of him. How can he hope to impress people like this? He is a nobody. Mangan likes to refer to him as an “undiscovered talent,” but now he feels merely as if he is Bram from Yorkshire, in borrowed clothes, with no money and only two commissions to his name. He has none of Mangan’s flamboyance or Gudrun’s unshakable self-confidence.

And what will Lilith make of my presence here, in a place I so evidently do not belong?