The Secret Countess

12

Inner peace now descended on Baskerville, who found his new life of abasement below stairs a beguiling and hitherto undiscovered world of the senses. It did not, however, descend on the focus of his adoration, Anna Grazinsky.

Anna had not caught so much as a glimpse of the earl since he’d walked out of René’s shop in Maidens Over, which made her suppose that he, too, was avoiding any place where they might meet. Worked off her feet, as were all the maids, Anna had in addition to act as handmaiden to the incessant bodily horticulture with which Muriel prepared for her Great Day. Packs of oatmeal and buttermilk had to be poured over Muriel’s white limbs, purées of soft fruit to be smeared on her face. Pummice-stoning Muriel’s elbows, massaging egg-white into her scalp, applying an amazing quantity of sliced cucumber to her eyelids as she floated in the bath kept Anna in a state of bemused exhaustion from dawn to dusk. For the rest, she kept silence. Only her eyes betrayed her wonderment that love, when it came at last, should be so physical, so exhausting and so sad.

The fatigue below stairs, the anxiety above, as the dowager wondered whether Uncle Sebastien, aged by five years in the last weeks, would get to the church to give away the bride, were not echoed by Muriel herself. Muriel felt fine. With five days to go she was certain that her decision to have a quiet wedding at Mersham had paid off. Not one of her father’s disreputable relatives had shown any sign of life and soon, now, Dr Lightbody would arrive to see the completion of her journey into the aristocracy.

Yet at the very moment that Muriel was anticipating his arrival with such pleasure, the doctor was sitting in an ante-room in the Samaritan Hospital in the Edgware Road, in a state of bewilderment and shock.

‘I can’t believe it,’ he said, shaking his blond and handsome head. ‘It isn’t possible. Not Doreen.’

‘We’ve expected it for some time, Dr Lightbody,’ said the matron, who had indeed tried several times to give the obstinate man an idea of his wife’s condition. ‘She was very ill when she was admitted, as you know. It was only a matter of time.’

Alone in his lodgings that night, the doctor sank wearily into his chair. He was a widower. Doreen had done the unbelievable thing and without a word to him, without, so to speak, his permission, she had died. Really, it was quite appalling, quite unbearable.

And not only that. In two days’ time he was supposed to go to Mersham, to Miss Hardwicke’s wedding and the ball which preceded it.

He would have to cancel it, of course. But how dreadfully disappointed Miss Hardwicke would be. She had been so interested when he had hinted that he might be willing to come and work at Mersham. And how agonizing it was for him to break his word.

But would he in fact have to break it? The doctor rose and walked over to the mirror. Considering the shock he had just sustained he was looking wonderfully well. Supposing he went very quietly to the wedding? In a black armband to signify bereavement, emitting a restrained sadness which could not fail to touch Miss Hardwicke’s heart. Yes, in a sense it was his duty to go. One could, after all, be a little vague about exactly when Doreen had died.

Yes, he would go to the wedding. It was, when all was said and done, a religious ceremony. But not to the ball. People might really think it was odd if he came to the ball in a black armband. And in any case a black armband would not go at all well with the white tunic, the golden circlet of laurel leaves and the lyre of Apollo. Sighing, the doctor moved over to the wardrobe and opened it. Nathaniel and Gumsbody had done him proud — the outfit was extremely becoming, simple yet regal, and they had thrown in, at half price, a bottle of liquid make-up for his arms and legs. He had tried a little on his knees last night and the effect was excellent: sportive yet glowing. But of course a black armband would kill that. It was impossible.

For a while he stood looking at the white folds of the chiton, the finely wrought sandals. Was he perhaps being rather selfish, obtruding his grief like that? Why wear a black armband at all? Why, in fact, tell anyone that Doreen had died? To go, keeping to himself this bereavement, to pretend to laugh and dance and be merry when his heart was breaking — was not that the noble thing? Was that not what Apollo himself would have counselled? To dance with Miss Hardwicke, to hold in his arms her full-breasted, white skinned loveliness, to remind her, under cover of the music, of her procreative duties, was that not a worthier task than to sit here mourning and grieving, a victim of self-pity and despair?

Of course there was the funeral. But Doreen’s parents, with whom she had never quite cut off relations though he had begged her to often enough, would be only too happy to organize all that without interference. And a thoroughly lower-class business it would be — but that was their affair. The actual interment, after all, wouldn’t be for at least a week and he’d be back by then.

Yes, it was a hard choice, a task that would take all his self-control but he would do it. He would go to the wedding and the ball — and somehow contrive to enjoy himself. In which case, as he was going to see the florist anyway about a suitable wreath, he’d better enquire about a white carnation to go with the morning clothes he’d hired. Or would a gardenia be better? That is, if gardenias were worn at country weddings before lunch…?

The Herrings, meanwhile, had perfected their plan for getting to Mersham with a minimum of financial outlay. It was a complicated plan and though Melvyn had explained it several times to Myrtle, she was having trouble with it, her physical endowment, though generous, not being of the kind that extended to the grey matter of the brain.

‘Look, it’s like this,’ Melvyn explained patiently. ‘I buy one ticket for the two of us, see?’

‘What with?’ asked Myrtle, unhooking her corsets, for they were preparing for bed.

‘Just leave that to me, will you? I buy a return ticket, see? Then you wait till there’s a good crowd pushing round the barrier an’ you go through and give up your half of the ticket all properly like, and as soon as you’re through you push the return bit of the ticket back in my hand. Then I come along and the inspector says, “Tickets, please” and I say, “I’ve already given it to you”.’

‘But you haven’t,’ said Myrtle, rubbing the weals the whalebone had left in her burgeoning flesh.

‘No, Myrtle; I know I haven’t. Because you have. So then I say, all innocent like, “But I gave it to you” an’ he says, “No, you didn’t” and I say “Yes I did an’ if you look you’ll see I have because ’ere’s the return half with the number on it and if you look you’ll find the same number on one of the tickets in your hand.” And then ’e looks and sure enough, there it is.’

‘What about the twins?’ asked Myrtle, slipping back into the black crêpe de Chine petticoat that did double duty for a nightdress. That was what she liked about black undies; there wasn’t all that bother about washing them.

‘We’ll do the same with the twins. Buy one ticket between the two of them.’

‘All right. Only you go and explain to them what they’ve got to do.’

Melvyn rose and opened the door of the adjoining room. Owing to an unfortunate spot of bother with the bailiffs, the twins were sleeping on a mattress on the floor. Dennis was lying on his back; his full-lipped mouth hung open and, as he breathed, the mucous in his nose bubbled softly like soup. Beside him lay Donald, apparently overcome by sleep in the act of eating a dripping sandwich, the dismembered remains of which lay smeared across his face.

Melvyn stood looking down at the swollen cheeks, the pendulous chins and bulging arms of his offspring and his fatherhood, never a sturdy plant, wilted and died.

‘Meat,’ he said wearily to himself. ‘That’s all they are. Just blobs of meat.’

He went out and closed the door. ‘They’re asleep,’ he said to Myrtle. ‘I’ll tell them in the morning. But it’ll work, you’ll see. It wouldn’t have done if we were going all the way to Mersham, but they’re sending the car to Maidens Over. There’ll be enough of a crowd there.’

Myrtle got into bed and reached for the cold cream. ‘I suppose it’s better than being locked in the lav,’ she said. ‘But your Aunt Mary’d better come up with something good once we’re there.’

‘She will. She’s got a soft spot for me on account of I look like her Rupert. I’ve got the Templeton eyes, see.’

Melvyn, for once, was not boasting. Both his own features and the twins’ dough-like countenances, were unexpectedly pierced by the wide, grey eyes, with their gold-flecked irises, which the dowager had bequeathed to her son.

‘Mind you, I’ll have to get past that old sod of a butler,’ said Melvyn, remembering Proom’s unequivocal stand over the gold sovereigns and the Meissen figurine. ‘He hasn’t half got it in for me.’

‘Oh, leave ’im to me,’ said Myrtle. ‘If ’e’s a man I’ll ’andle ’im,’ and began to giggle, delighted at her double entendre.

Melvyn was less sanguine. From what he remembered of Cyril Proom, Myrtle was on a losing wicket there.

Prince Sergei Chirkovsky, sitting in his neat, grey uniform at the wheel of the huge, plum coloured Daimler with the Nettleford Arms (a serpent extended in fess, the head raised…) embossed on the door, steered his way expertly between the carters’ drays, the buggies and dawdling delivery vans of the interminable stretch of road between Darlington and York and wondered how long he could endure his present post.

He was the most easy-going of men, his incredible good looks reinforced by a serene and undemanding acceptance of what life brought. ‘God was in a good mood when he made Sergei’, the matrons of Petersburg used to say, looking fondly at the charming, handsome, unassuming boy. But Sergei, who had accepted without complaint the hardship of exile from the land he deeply loved, was fast meeting his Waterloo at the hands of Honoria Nettleford and her ‘gals’.

The duchess’s snobbery and meanness, her rudeness to him as an underling, were deeply unpleasant but not unexpected. It was what he had to put up with from Hermione and Priscilla, from Gwendolyn and Beatrice and the equine and haughty Lady Lavinia, all of whom he was now conveying southwards to the Earl of Westerholme’s wedding, that made Sergei wonder how much longer he could hold out.

All his life, Sergei had been pursued by women. He was six years old when the tiny, dimpled Kira Satayev, eluding the vigilance of his Miss King, had ambushed him behind the Krylov Monument in the Summer Gardens and informed him that he found favour in her eyes. The peasant girls on his parents’ estates, the gypsy dancers on the islands, the ingénues in the ballrooms of Petersburg and their worldly mothers in its salons — all had made it clear to him, in their different ways, that they were his for the asking. He had learned very early to accept with gratitude and pleasure where acceptance was appropriate, to refuse with tact and gentleness where acquiescence might involve impropriety or pain. But never in all his life had he encountered anything as crude and displeasing as the advances of these snobbish and lascivious girls.

He accelerated to pass a Model T Ford and though his skilled driving had effected the manoeuvre with perfect smoothness, the Lady Lavinia managed to hurl herself, as if impelled, against his side. She was the worst by far. When it was her turn to sit in front there was nothing to which this high-born lady would not stoop, yet when there was anyone looking on she spoke to him as his reactionary old grandfather would never in his life have spoken to the humblest of his serfs. And in the back of the car he could hear her four sisters snickering and bickering and awaiting their turn. How had Hudson wangled it, Sergei wondered, so that he went ahead conveying only the duke and duchess and the trunks? True, Hudson was the senior chauffeur, but he might have distributed the load a little less unevenly.

Sergei sighed, assisted the Lady Lavinia to right herself and apologized for the non-existent jolt. If only, he thought, any of the girls had had just one redeeming feature: pretty hair, nice eyes, a fondness for little children — it might have been possible to snub them even if, as seemed likely, they would retaliate by seeing that he lost his job. But how could one rebuff girls of such unredeemed ugliness, girls who had only to appear at any social gathering to send every young man in the room running for cover?

“Boch ti moy,’ sighed Sergei, calling on his Maker. And at Heslop, where he was to spend three nights, there would be the lady’s maids, the upper housemaids… And another complication. For one of his duties there would be to drive the Lady Lavinia to and from Mersham where she was staying. And Mersham was the place where Anna, so Pinny had told him, was also staying as a guest. He’d have to be very careful not to be seen by her in his role of chauffeur. Anna was quite incapable of acting sensibly and cutting him dead.

Anna… As he thought of her, Sergei smiled — that dazzling, tender smile of his — and the Lady Lavinia, seeing it, edged closer. But Sergei was far away now… In the birch woods round Grazbaya as Anna ran towards him cupping fresh-picked wild strawberries for him in her hands… Anna, whose cry of ‘Look, Seriosha, oh, look!’ had been the thread running through their childhood as she shared with him her delight in a ring of white and crimson toadstools, a new foal, a skein of wild geese flying south to the Urals. If only he could find a job that would make it possible for him to look after her, and Petya too. She’d looked so tired when he saw her last at the club, so thin. Or should he, after all, marry Larissa Rakov like the grand duchess wanted? He’d fled from the baroness’s pallid plainness, her boring conversation, but compared to the Nettleford girls, the grand duchess’s dumpy lady-in-waiting seemed a miracle of propriety and intelligence and she was certainly very rich. Her banker father had seen the catastrophe coming long before anyone else and transferred all his assets to London. If he married Larissa, he could make a home for his parents and the Grazinskys too.

Beside him, the Lady Lavinia, watching the tender lines of his mouth as he thought of Anna, felt her heart miss a beat. There was no question, of course, of her losing her head. She was travelling towards her destiny in the person of the Honourable Tom Byrne, in whose arms, as Undine the Water Sprite, she would, in less than twenty-four hours, circle the ballroom of Heslop Hall. But really this foreigner was shatteringly attractive. Would a small pinch on the thigh be going too far?

They had reached York and, following instructions, Sergei drew into the courtyard of the King’s Hotel where Hudson was already parked. He opened the doors and the girls swept haughtily past him into the restaurant.

‘We’re to wait here by the cars, her grace says,’ said Hudson. ‘No gallivanting off.’

Sergei nodded. He had been less than six weeks in the service of the Nettlefords, but long enough to know that their chauffeurs need not expect anything as vulgar and mundane as lunch.

‘You’re late,’ said Hawkins, Heslop’s awe-inspiring butler, staring disapprovingly from his great height at Anna.

It was the evening of the ball. Anna had been conveyed to Heslop by the carter, an uncle of Peggy and Pearl, and now stood nervously before Hawkins, her eyes cast down. She had not thought of Selina Strickland for some days, but now she felt a pang of longing for the Domestic Compendium. For Heslop, with its labyrinthine corridors, its vast staff and rigid protocol, was a different world from Mersham.

And she was late. Furious at being deprived of Anna’s services, Muriel had kept her to the last second, finding a dozen unnecessary jobs for her to do, so that if it hadn’t been for the dowager’s Alice almost pushing Anna out of the door, she could not have come at all.

‘I’m very sorry, sir,’ she said — and immediately came under fire from the other half of Heslop’s Dual Monarchy: the formidable housekeeper, Miss Peel.

‘Pull your hair back, girl. We don’t allow waves!’

Anna pulled dutifully at her hair. Louise, consulting with Mrs Bassenthwaite in hospital, had put Anna into the uniform the maids had been issued for Lord George’s Twenty-first: a black silk dress to the instep, a white fichu, a short apron of snowy lawn finely tuckered and edged with lace. A frilled cap of the same lawn was set demurely back on Anna’s dark head.

‘It’s old-fashioned but it’ll be right for Heslop,’ Mrs Bassenthwaite had said, ‘with Miss Peel being such a stickler.’

Unable to find fault with Anna’s appearance, yet aware that the girl somehow did not look as she wanted her to look, Miss Peel said, ‘Let me see your fingernails.’

Anna extended her hands. The obvious antagonism she had felt the moment she set foot in Heslop hurt and puzzled her. She was too inexperienced to realize what an affront her arrival was to servants jealous of their privileges and rights. As though they couldn’t provide all that was necessary for the ball without an upstart and a foreigner being wished on them! Not only that, but she was to be employed upstairs, in a position of prominence, serving drinks in the great hall when the guests arrived and showing the ladies to the cloakrooms. Unable to take their resentment out on Lady Byrne, who had given these instructions, they prepared to give no quarter to the foreign girl, who by all accounts had been thoroughly spoilt at Mersham.

‘I’ll take her along to get started,’ said Hawkins now. ‘She’s too late for tea, the girls are just coming out.’

Anna, who due to Muriel’s bullying had had no lunch, repressed a sigh, curtsied to the housekeeper and followed Mr Hawkins down a short flight of steps, along a winding corridor and through an enfilade of sculleries and store rooms to the pantries. Minna had done everything she could to provide her servants with comfort: the floors were carpeted, there were electric lights, new boilers, glass-fronted cupboards — but the tone of an establishment is set by those who run it and Anna was not surprised, passing the kitchens, to hear a scream and see the door burst open to eject a hysterically weeping kitchen maid, who gave a gasp of terror at the sight of Hawkins, threw her apron over her head and scuttled blindly away.

Mr Hawkins stopped at the door of a large pantry where three girls, under a barrage of admonitions from the first footman, were laying out trays of glasses and cutlery.

‘Here’s the Russian girl, Charles,’ said Mr Hawkins, pushing Anna into the room. ‘She’s to go upstairs at eight, but there’s plenty of time for her to make herself useful before then.’

‘There is indeed,’ said the first footman with a sour smile. He turned to Anna. ‘You can start by rinsing all those knives through hot water and polishing them. Hot water, mind, and no fuss about it hurting your hands. The sink’s over there.’

Watched by the hostile eyes of the other girls, Anna went to work.

Upstairs, Heslop was en grande tenue. The great hall blazed with lights, tubs of poinsettias and camellias glowed like captive fireworks against the rich darkness of the tapestries. In the ballroom with its triple row of chandeliers, Minna, remembering that she was welcoming a bride, had kept the flowers to white: delphiniums, madonna lilies, roses and the quivering, dancing Mexican poppies that she loved so much. Garlands of white ribbons and acanthus leaves wreathed the long mirrors, and the end windows, on this lovely summer evening, stood open to the terrace with its fountains of rampaging gods, its lily ponds…

Minna had dressed early and now walked quietly from room to room checking details; the French chalk spread evenly over the dance floor; the clustered grapes arranged in a suitably dying fall over the chased silver bowls; velvet cushions placed on the chairs put out for Mr Bartorolli’s orchestra… She wore the dress her Puritan great-grandmother had worn for her Quaker wedding: dove grey silk with a wide, white collar. Like her husband, Minna did not care for fancy dress, but she was glad now of the dignity lent by the old-fashioned dress. If she was to welcome Muriel Hardwicke as she should be welcomed, she had need of every aid to mannerliness and poise. Now, pausing for a moment at the door of the state dining room, where two whispering footmen were putting the finishing touches to a dazzling cold collation on the sideboard, she nodded, well pleased. There had been disasters and clashes below stairs, the chef had given notice no less than seven times, but now, like a prima donna who forgets her rehearsal tantrums, Heslop was ready to go on stage.

Minna went upstairs, smiling as she passed her husband’s dressing room and heard the choleric expletives which attended the efforts of his lordship’s valet to button him into the dress uniform of an eighteenth-century hussar, and hurrying quickly past the suite she had allocated to the Nettlefords, she entered Ollie’s room.

‘Look, Mummy, look at Hugh and Peter, aren’t they smart!’ Ollie’s eyes shone with pride as she pointed to her brother and the schoolfriend he had brought down from Craigston — and indeed the two boys sitting side by side on the window-sill in their cadet uniforms were quite spectacularly scrubbed and brushed. ‘Peter says he’ll stay up in the minstrel’s gallery with me at the beginning to watch the guests arrive and afterwards he’s going to creep up and bring me things to eat. I can stay up long enough for that, can’t I?’

Minna nodded and smiled affectionately at Hugh’s new friend who, in the space of two days, had become the object of Ollie’s hero worship. Not only the boy’s nationality but his temperament had been a surprise and delight to Minna. Peter was a first class boxer, Hugh said, and had won the Junior Fencing Cup within a few weeks of arriving at school. And yesterday, when the boys had gone out riding, Tom, with whom horses were almost a religion, had offered Peter his own hunter to ride whenever he wished. Yet he was interested in matters which most English boys would have considered effete or embarrassing: textures and fabrics, even flowers. It was to Peter that Ollie, slowly recovering from the wound that Muriel had inflicted, showed her bridesmaid’s dress and his unfeigned interest, his support during the wedding rehearsal on the previous day, had enabled Ollie to hold her head high and to aquit herself with distinction. If Ollie was once again looking forward to Muriel’s wedding, it was largely due to the Russian boy.

Back in her room, Minna sat for a few moments, absently dabbing scent behind her ears. If only things had been different she might have hoped, in years to come, of a marriage between Ollie and just such a boy as Hugh’s new friend. Whereas the way things were…

Then there was a knock at the door and Peter’s blond head appeared round it. ‘There has been a disaster with the head of John the Baptist,’ he said, grinning. ‘Lady Hermione has sat on it and wishes to know if—’ He broke off, came into the room. ‘You are sad?’

‘No…’ Minna shook her head, then remembered that the ‘nothing-is-the-matter’ technique had never gone down well with the Russians of her acquaintance. ‘But it won’t be easy for Ollie later… at dances… at balls…’

The boy closed the door and came to stand beside her chair. ‘We have a proverb in Russia,’ he said. ‘It goes: “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog only knows one thing”. Ollie, I think, is a hedgehog — like her Alexander.’

‘And what is the one thing that she knows?’

‘How to make people love her,’ said Peter quietly.

Minna looked up, tears in her eyes. She had never known a boy of thirteen who could speak like that — who could use, so unaffectedly, a word which even her own boys shied away from — and the suspicion she had entertained from the moment she met him hardened into near certainty. But she only brushed his cheek lightly with her fingers and said: ‘You know, Peter, I think I shall change my plans and get you to take Honoria Nettleford into supper!’

Anna had been in the pantry for an hour, bent over a sink of near-boiling water. After an exchange of giggles, the spiteful girls who worked with her had made a point of tipping a treble load of soda into the water every time she changed it and her hands, already chapped and raw, hurt so much that it was all she could do not to cry out. But she kept on and at last even Hawkins could not postpone her journey upstairs any longer.

The main entrance at Heslop led into a domed vestibule from which the grand staircase swept upwards and the original Elizabethan hall, raftered and galleried, opened on the right. It was in the hall that the guests would be greeted and assemble for conversation and light refreshment before ascending to the ballroom, a later addition reached by a flight of shallow stairs at the far end.

Anna, following Hawkins up the service stair, received a spate of instructions over his shoulder. ‘There’ll be two footmen at the entrance and two at the foot of the stairs and I’ll be doing the announcing. You’re to stand out of the way in the great hall beside the service table. Mr Briggs is in charge there,’ he said, referring to the tyrannical and sour-faced Charles. ‘He’ll tell you when you’re to take up a tray and offer drinks. There’s to be no putting yourself forward — and no slacking either. And remember, the ballroom’s out of bounds — you’ve no call whatever to—’

He stopped with an exclamation of annoyance, aware that Anna was no longer following closely. She had suddenly stumbled, had put out a hand to the wall of the corridor, trying to steady herself.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ he asked sharply, but he was anxious too. What if the wretched girl should faint on him? Perhaps he should have let her have some tea?

But it was no longer hunger or exhaustion that had made Anna stumble, though she was tired enough. It was a fragment, a haunting, insiduous snatch of melody carried across the well of the servants’ courtyard by a suddenly opened door. A tune known and loved from childhood which came, now, as only music can, to break down her defences and flood her with such longing, such an agony of homesickness for the world that was lost to her for ever, that she thought she would die of it.

‘What on earth did you bring that for?’ said the first violinist, putting down his bow. ‘It’s as old as the hills, that.’

‘Oh, I dunno,’ said Mr Bartorolli, alias Bert Phipps of Bermondsey. ‘I just put it in at the last minute.’ He shrugged and put the yellowing sheets of the ‘Valse des Fleurs’ back on the piano. Then he continued to hand out freshly bound copies of the latest hits: two-steps and tangos, to the musicians now arranging their places on the dais.

‘The Earl of Westerholme, The Lady Lavinia Nettleford, The Dowager Countess of Westerholme, Miss Muriel Hardwicke, Miss Cynthia Smythe, Dr Ronald Lightbody,’ announced Hawkins, and the party from Mersham moved through into the hall and towards the great fireplace, where Lord and Lady Byrne, with Tom, were waiting to greet their guests.

Minna embraced the dowager, who was becomingly and, she herself considered, aptly dressed as Mary Queen of Scots Ascending the Scaffold, and turned to welcome what appeared to be an outsize codfish or perhaps a trout.

‘You’ve met Lavinia, of course,’ prompted the dowager. ‘And this is Cynthia Smythe, Muriel’s other bridesmaid.’

Cynthia, who to no one’s surprise was dressed as Little Bo Peep, gushed her way towards her hostess and was followed by a man with knees like carriage lamps, who bent obsequiously over Minna’s hand, clouting her as he did so with his lyre.

But now the Earl of Westerholme came forward, escorting his fiancée. Rupert’s instructions to his butler to ‘for heaven’s sake find him something to wear’ had yielded a perfect replica, used in theatricals years ago, of the costume that his disreputable ancestor, Sir Montague Frayne, had worn to be painted in by Romney. The velvet breeches, the ruffled shirt and high stock suited him to perfection and Minna, seeing him approach, thought she had never seen him look as handsome — or as tired.

But it was Muriel, the guest of honour, who rightly drew all eyes. Muriel’s dress was of blue and silver, the colours that the Sun King used above all others for the glory of Versailles. A myriad bows glittered on the satin bodice; the elaborately flounced overskirt was sewn with tiny bunches of gauze roses and forget-menots. Priceless lace edged the sleeves and the low décolleté, diamonds sparkled on the high, white wig and in the heels of her silver slippers — and round her throat, perfectly matching the blue of the dress and of her eyes, she wore the sapphires that were the bridegroom’s present to the bride. If Muriel looked pleased with herself she had every right to do so, for here was a Pompadour to silence all beholders.

‘My dear, what an unbelievable dress!’ said Minna, genuinely impressed. ‘You’ll set everybody by the ears.’ She turned to Rupert. ‘You’ll have to surrender her for the first dance, I’m afraid. Harry will want to open the ball with her, but after that…’

Meanwhile, obedient to her instructions, Anna had remained quietly out of sight behind a potted palm which flanked the serving table over which Charles, the first footman, was presiding.

‘What the dickens are you doing, wool-gathering there,’ he hissed now. ‘Can’t you see the party from Mersham’s arrived? Why aren’t you out there offering them drinks?’

Anna took a tray, stepped out into the hall.

‘Ah, here’s Anna come to offer us some refreshment,’ said Minna. ‘That’s orange juice in the tall glasses, Muriel.’

Rupert had been standing a little apart from the others in the shadow of a high, carved screen. Now, hearing Anna’s name, he looked up sharply — and was flooded, suddenly, by a joy as violent as it was absurd.

She had not cut her hair.

He had had time to wince a thousand times at his behaviour in Maidens Over. He had been arrogant and mad and mistaken on all counts, for Anna would, as he had since realized, have looked enchanting with her hair cut short. He had deserved only to be snubbed and disregarded. Instead, she had given him this gift, this undeserved benison. And standing there, bound by the iron fetters of duty to a marriage he knew would bring him nothing but pain, he was nevertheless consumed by happiness because his under-housemaid had not cut her hair.

‘Rupert! Hello!’ The earl turned to see Hugh come down the last of the steps from the minstrel’s gallery with a handsome, fair-haired boy a little taller than himself. A boy who suddenly stood stock-still and then, with a whoop of delight, rushed towards them.

‘Annoushka! It is you! Oh, how lovely! I hoped and hoped you would come. Pinny said you were staying near here and I was going to ask if I could ride over.’ Ignoring the dismay in Anna’s eyes, the gasp of indrawn breath, he leant over the tray to kiss her, then circled her admiringly. ‘You look so good! That dress is most becoming! It’s clever of you to wear something so simple. Do you remember that ball that Mama told us about at the Anchikovs where the Princess Saritsin went as a nun and suddenly everyone else looked overdressed?’

There was a titter from Little Bo Peep, and involuntarily the eyes of all the women went to Muriel Hardwicke. But Petya, unaware of any implications, rushed happily on. ‘Only you’re silly to have a tray, ’Noushka. How can you dance with a tray?’

‘How indeed?’ said an amused voice at Petya’s elbow. ‘I think you’d better introduce your sister,’ continued the Earl of Westerholme. ‘She is not known to everyone present.’

‘No, Petya, please.’ Anna’s hands, with their cracked knuckles, had tightened in desperation around the silver handles of the tray.

But Petya was concerned only at his breach of manners. ‘I’m so sorry.’ He turned with a charming bow to his host and hostess. ‘Permit me to introduce my sister, the Countess Anna Petrovna Grazinsky.’

There was a hiss from Muriel; the codfish mouth of Undine the Water Sprite fell open and Lord Byrne, who had not expected to enjoy himself, beamed on the company.

‘But I thought she was—’ began Cynthia Smythe, and found that the Dowager Countess of Westerholme had stepped heavily on her foot.

‘Petya, I beg of you,’ whispered Anna, and added a few words of entreaty in Russian, imploring him to leave her.

The certainty, the joy, drained visibly from the boy’s face. He looked at the hostile woman in the silver dress, at Anna’s desperate eyes… Had he made a mistake? Was it possible… but it couldn’t be! Uncle Kolya, he knew, was a doorman at the Ritz. But Anna! Half-remembered fragments of conversation at West Paddington came now to plague him. If she was working as a servant while he was lording it here… If…

‘Your hands,’ he said, his collar suddenly choking him. ‘They’re bleeding.’

Minna, who had seen the boy’s face, moved to his side. But the Earl of Westerholme had stepped out of the shadows. ‘You must blame your Stanislavsky and his Method Acting for that. Anna spent the whole afternoon at Mersham dipping her hands into soda so as to get the feel of the part! I told her it was unfair to her partners but she wouldn’t listen!’

The light voice, the amused tenderness with which he looked at Anna, partly reassured the boy. But Hawkins, waiting to announce the next guests by the double doors, had sent an irate signal to Charles. Now, the first footman approached, his face as purple as his livery. What was the wretched girl doing? She’d been hours serving drinks and now she was actually talking to the guests.

Lord Byrne, with his bluff kindness, prepared to intervene. It was unnecessary. Anna, too, had seen her brother’s face. Her head went up, she turned — and as the bullying footman approached she said with a serene and charming smile: ‘Ah, Charles. How kind! You have come to relieve me of my burden.’

And before he knew what was happening, the footman, responding instinctively to the practised authority in her voice, found himself holding the loaded tray.

‘Well, what are you hanging round for?’ said Lord Byrne to the goggling Charles. ‘You heard what the countess said. Take the thing away.’

‘Ah, that’s better!’ Anna had shaken out her skirt, straightened her apron, tilted her cap — and suddenly it was obvious that she was in fancy dress; no real uniform ever had such grace, such gossamer lightness. ‘How good it will be to dance again!’

‘With me?’ said Petya excitedly. ‘Will you dance with me?’

‘Of course, galubchik.’

‘No,’ said Tom Byrne. ‘First with me.’

‘I’m sorry to disillusion you both,’ said the earl, ‘but as Anna’s host at Mersham I undoubtedly have first claim.’

Petya’s face blazed with pride and happiness. This was like the old days, with men fighting to dance with Anna. What an idiot he’d been! For a moment he’d really thought…

‘She’s a marvellous dancer,’ he told the earl, of whom, as a partner for his sister, he thoroughly approved. ‘Especially when she waltzes. Fokine said when you play Anna a waltz you can see her eat the music. She goes round and round and she never gets giddy!’

Rupert smiled enquiringly at his hostess. ‘A waltz could perhaps be arranged?’

‘Very easily, I think,’ said Minna, to whom nothing that had happened had come as a surprise.

Rupert turned to Anna. ‘May I have the pleasure of the first dance, Countess?’

She lifted her face to his, not even trying to hide her blazing joy. ‘You may, my lord.’

And so they went together into the ballroom to dance for the first and last time in their lives, the ‘Valse des Fleurs’.