Because all through her childhood she had trailed after Frank, longing for him to take notice of her, and because he had only rarely done so, the new-found power that her body had over him was intoxicating.

‘I will,’ she said, ‘if you promise, on your mother’s life, that you will only look and won’t try and touch them.’

Frank groaned. Looking wasn’t what he’d had in mind, but he was desperate enough to know that it was better than nothing – and that, after doing it once, a barrier would be broken and she would be happy to do it again, whenever he asked it of her.

‘All right, Maudie. You win. I promise.’

Fascinated that it took so little to bring a sixteen-year-old to his knees, Maudie obliged.

Frank seriously began to wonder if he should ask his parents if he could marry Maudie. When not pushed up by her corset, her breasts were smaller than he had imagined, but they were pert and as firm as apples, and her nipples were a wonderful deep silky red. The Maudie who was able to offer such delights was a far cry from the Maudie who, until a few weeks ago, he had regarded as a tiresome nuisance.

‘That’s it. You’ve looked long enough.’

Maudie stuffed her nipples back below the hard rim of her corset and began rearranging her corset protector, underbodice and chemise.

‘Help me with these buttons, will you?’ she said, when it came to buttoning up the bodice of her dress. ‘There must be at least twenty of them.’

He did as she asked and then said, ‘Another kiss before we go back to the house, Maudie.’

‘No.’ It wasn’t that she didn’t want to kiss him again, but an instinct as old as time told her that the more she rationed the liberties she was giving him, the more eager for them Frank would be.

Having enough sense to realize she meant what she said, Frank followed her out of the summerhouse and across the vast rear lawn of Marlborough House. Until his new-found relationship with Maudie, he had never been as regular a visitor there as May and his older brother, Dolly, had always been. Toria and Looloo had never been of any interest to him and there was a five-and six-year age difference between him and Georgie and Eddy. When they had been children, it had been an age difference that had mattered. Now, when it might not have mattered quite so much, Georgie was a lieutenant aboard Uncle Affie Edinburgh’s flagship in the Mediterranean and was seldom home on leave and, after he had left Cambridge, Eddy had begun officer training at the Hussars’ riding school at Aldershot.