Wishing herself a million miles away, and with extreme reluctance, May scratched her wrist deep enough to draw a line of gleaming blood. Then she joined with Alicky and Willy in rubbing their wrists together.

It was a shockingly primeval, intimate sensation.

‘What happens,’ she said unsteadily when the deed was done, ‘if the pact is broken?’

‘It can’t be broken. To break it would be to bring about something more terrible than you can ever imagine; something so terrible it would be like the end of the world.’

It was such childish superstition that, as they walked back across the beach to the woods, May was already pushing the unpleasant little ceremony as far to the back of her mind as it could possibly go.

Not for decades would it resurface and, when it did, she was to know with bitter grief that Alicky hadn’t been exaggerating. For their pact had broken and, for all three of them, their worlds had ended – and in ways far more terrible than could have been dreamed, on that long-ago, innocent summer day.

Chapter Three

JANUARY 1883, WHITE LODGE

It was 5 January, and May was helping her father dismantle the drawing room’s Christmas tree and was wondering, as she did so, how her family was going to get out of the dire financial pickle it had got itself into over the last four years. That they had a roof over their heads was due only to the Queen’s kindness, for when May’s parents had married, she had allowed them the use of a large apartment in Kensington Palace. A few years later and at her mother’s request, the Queen had granted permission for them to occupy, as a second home, White Lodge, a Crown property in Richmond Park.

May knew that White Lodge had only come about as their country pied-à-terre after her mother had pestered the Queen for it, in a manner no one else but a close first cousin would have had the temerity to do. The problem was that they still retained their Kensington Palace apartment and, as the running cost and staffing of one home had been beyond their means, the cost of running and staffing two had plunged them into a level of debt there was no obvious way of getting out of.

‘Mama simply doesn’t understand money,’ her father said gravely as, from a stepladder, he handed May a delicate papier-mâché angel with gauze wings. ‘God knows, I have tried hard enough to make her understand that we must live within our means – as have the Queen, the Prime Minister, Baroness Burdett-Coutts of Coutts Bank and the friends who so repeatedly and generously lend her money, but it falls on deaf ears. She simply will not rein in her expenditure, and soon bailiffs will be knocking on our door.’