The Secret Countess

13

A great deal had happened to Tchaikovsky’s sumptuously orchestrated showpiece to turn it into a suitable waltz for the ballroom, but Mr Bartorolli was not dismayed.

‘Told you,’ he said to his first violinist when Minna came with her request, ‘I had a sort of hunch,’ — and lifted his baton.

It begins slowly, this well-loved, well-remembered waltz. The preluding is gentle, the phrases soft and pleading, the dancers have time to smile in each other’s arms, to catch their breath. But not for long. Soon the familiar phrases try out their plumes, begin to preen, to gather themselves up until reality is swept away in an intoxicating, irresistible swirl of sound.

To this waltz, born in a distant, snowbound country out of longing for just such a flower-scented summer night as this, Rupert and Anna danced. They were under no illusions. The glittering chandeliers, the gold mirrors with their draped acanthus leaves, the plangent violins might be the stuff of romance, but this was no romance. It was a moment in a lifeboat before it sank beneath the waves; a walk across the sunlit courtyard towards the firing squad. This waltz was all they had.

So they danced and neither of them spoke. As the music began and his arms closed round her, he had felt her shiver. Then the melody caught her and she moved with him, so light, so completely one with him that he could guide her with a finger. Yet as he held her he had no thought of thistledown or snowflake. Here, beneath his hands, was tempered steel, was flame…

He checked, reversed, and she followed him perfectly. It seemed to him that she could fold her very bones to lie against his own. And tightening his arms, drinking in the smell of green soap, of cleanliness personified, which emanated from this changeling countess, he allowed his mind, soaring with the music, to encompass their imagined life together.

He had not wanted Mersham — had returned to it reluctantly as to a burden he must face. In the few weeks she had been there, Anna had changed all this. Her feeling for his home was unerring, as inborn as perfect pitch in music. Bending to arrange a bowl of roses, standing rapt, with her feather duster, before the Titian in the morning room, bringing in the mare at daybreak, each time she seemed to be making him a gift of his inheritance. Like those dark Madonnas on the icons whose patient hands curve up towards their infants’ heads, Anna’s every gesture said: ‘Behold!’

Anna, in his arms, was without thoughts, without dreams. Rupert had imagined her folding her bones to shape them against his. She had done more. She had folded her very soul, given it into his keeping — and danced.

‘Oh, God!’ said the dowager softly. And then to Minna, standing beside her. ‘Did you know?’

‘That Peter was her brother? I guessed almost as soon as he came. Or did you mean…?’

She did not finish. There had been no scandal yet — only a drama of the kind that any hostess must delight in. Her Harry had led Muriel first on to the floor; Tom, good soul that he was, was dancing with Lavinia; other couples had quickly joined in and were swaying and swirling beneath the glittering chandeliers. Yet it seemed to Minna and the dowager that there was no one in the ballroom except those two.

‘If only they would talk,’ said the dowager.

And indeed the silence in which those two danced was as terrible as an army with banners. Only Muriel, armoured by her outrage at Anna’s presumption as she gyrated heavily in the arms of her host, entirely failed to see what had happened.

‘What an extraordinary business,’ said the Lady Lavinia, lurching in her skirted codfish costume against the long-suffering Tom. ‘Is she really a countess?’

‘Yes.’

Tom had seen Susie come in. She was dressed as a gypsy and accompanied by her mother in the costume of a Noble Spanish Lady — and by that stout bullfighter, Leo Rabinovitch. If only he could get to Susie it would be easier to bear what he had seen in Rupert’s face.

‘Muriel doesn’t like it, does she?’ continued Lavinia with satisfaction. ‘She looks as though she’s swallowed a porcupine.’

Tom glanced at Rupert’s fiancée. Muriel certainly looked angry, but he could see no sign on her face of distress or pain.

But now the music was gathering itself up, manoeuv-ring for the climax. Mr Bartorolli had done all he could. With his fine social antennae he had understood exactly what was happening. The ball might be for the stiff, white-wigged lady in silver, but it was about the young girl with her ardour and her Byzantine eyes who seemed to be one flesh with the young Earl of Westerholme. So he had played the first repeat, the second, demanded — to the surprise of his orchestra — a reprise. But now there was nothing more to be done. For the last time, the melody soared towards its fulfilment, the dancers turned faster, faster… and with a last, dazzling crescendo, the music ceased.

It was over.

They drew apart and for a moment Anna stood looking up at him, dazed by the silence.

Then, for the last time, she curtsied.

If it hadn’t been for that curtsy, Rupert would have left her then and there. He expected no more miracles. But what she made of that gesture, combining her former respect and humility with the elegance, the lightness of the ballroom — yet all of it, somehow, heartbreakingly on a dying fall — was more than he could bear.

‘Come outside for a moment. You must be hot.’

She shook her head. ‘No, Rupert.’

He did not hear the denial, only that she had used his Christian name — and followed by every pair of eyes in the room he led her out, still protesting, through the French windows and on to the terrace. Nor did he stop there but, as familiar with Heslop as with Mersham, led her down a flight of shallow stone steps to an arbour with a lily pond and a stone bench, protected by a high, yew hedge.

‘Anna,’ he said, guiding her to the seat, ‘I shall do what is right. I shall not jilt Muriel. The mistake is my mistake and I will live by it. But if you have any mercy tell me just once that you feel as I do? That if things had been different…’ He drew breath, tried again. ‘That you love me, Anna. Is it possible for you to tell me that?’

She was silent, and suddenly he was more frightened than he had ever been. Then she turned towards him and gave him both her hands to hold and said very quietly: ‘I have no right to tell you, you belong to someone else. But I will tell you. Only I will tell you in my own language so that you will not understand. Or so that you will understand completely. Listen, then, mylienki, and listen well,’ said Anna — and began to speak.

It was already dusk. The ancient yews which sheltered them stood black against a sky of amethyst and fading rose; close by the fountains splashed and from the ballroom came the sound of a mournful, syncopated melody filched from the negro slaves.

And Anna spoke. In the wonderful, damnable language that separated yet joined them, with its caressing rhythm, its wildness and searing tenderness. He was never to know what she said, but it seemed to him that the great love speeches of the world — Dido’s lament at Carthage, Juliet’s awakening passion on the balcony, Heloise’s paean to Abelard — must pale before the ardour, the strange, solemn integrity of Anna’s words. And allowing himself only to fold and unfold her pliant fingers as she spoke, he saw before him her whole life: the small child, shining like a candle in the rich darkness of her father’s palace, the awakening girl, wide-eyed at the horrors of war… He saw her as a bride, faltering at the church door, dazzled by joy, and as a mother, cupping her slender, votive hands round the head of her newborn child… He saw her greying and rueful at the passing of youth and steadfast in old age, her eyes, her fine bones triumphant over the complaining flesh. And he understood that she was offering him this, her life, for all eternity and understood, too, where she belonged because her sisters are everywhere in Russian literature: Natasha, who left her ballroom and shining youth to nurse her mortally wounded prince… Sonia, the street girl who followed Raskalnikov into exile in Siberia and gave that poor, tormented devil the only peace he ever knew.

‘Have you understood?’ she asked when she had finished.

‘I have understood,’ said Rupert when he could trust himself to speak.

Then he bent to kiss her once very lightly on the lips and went back to the house to find his bride.

Muriel, however, was nowhere to be found. She was not in the ballroom, nor in the great hall and Tom, the most recent of her partners, said that she had excused herself to go upstairs.

The sudden elevation of her lady’s maid to the status of a guest had infuriated Muriel, but she had suffered no personal anxieties. The thought that anyone could be preferred to herself was not one that had ever crossed her mind. And when she had danced with the admiring Dr Lightbody and the dutiful Tom, it seemed to her, Rupert being temporarily absent, a perfect moment to carry out her plan.

First, the cloakroom, where she had left a large parcel which she now retrieved, opening the cellophane-covered box and looking at its contents with a satisfied smile. Yes, the doll was a triumph! White porcelain eyelids with thick, blonde lashes closed with a click over round, china-blue eyes; golden curls clustered under a muslin bonnet and when up-ended she clearly and genteely pronounced the word: ‘Mama’. No, Muriel did not grudge the expense though it had been considerable. Ollie would love a doll like that and, after all, Dr Lightbody had been right that day at Fortman’s. Diplomacy was needed in a case like this — it wasn’t as though she was dealing with servants. Whereas if she carefully explained to Ollie how exhausting the ceremony would be, how harmful it would be for her to stand for a long time on her bad leg, how much better to rest quietly at home with this lovely doll, Ollie would surely cooperate.

Ollie’s marigold head had been absent for a while now from the minstrel’s gallery. The child would certainly be in bed by this time. Muriel had found out where she slept. The problem now was seeing that she got to her alone.

Tom had been assiduous so far in the performance of his duties. He detested dressing up but he was wearing the navy sweater and bell-bottoms of a sailor in His Majesty’s Navy. He was indifferent to dancing, but he had waltzed with the detestable Lady Lavinia and snatched Muriel Hardwicke from Dr Lightbody’s arms when the music ceased, so as to give Rupert a few last minutes of happiness.

Now, however, he felt entitled to some solace and by this Tom meant — and had meant for the past two years — the company of the plump and bespectacled Susie Rabinovitch.

He found her, as he might have expected, with her mother, making easier by her uncomplicated presence the first emotional meeting between Hannah and the dowager since the day at Maidens Over.

‘I should have known,’ Hannah was saying. ‘I should have known that Miss Hardwicke’s note had nothing to do with you. It was so foolish — but this particular thing… we make jokes about it but for us it is like a deep, black hole, always there. Sometimes we don’t wait to be pushed, we jump.’

‘Oh, my dear.’ The dowager, already deeply shaken by what she had just learned about her son, pressed her friend’s hand. ‘What a wretched tangle it all is. I suppose you couldn’t come to the wedding just the same? It would make it all a little more bearable—’ She broke off. ‘Ah, here comes Tom! Have you come to claim Susie for a dance?’

‘To claim her at all events. I thought she might like some lemonade.’

Susie smiled and followed him. But she was destined to get no lemonade that night. Tom led her out of the ballroom, through the great hall, and into an anteroom where they could be alone.

‘Susie,’ said Tom, and she saw that he was in an unusually grim and serious mood. ‘How many times have I asked you to marry me?’

‘I think, seventeen,’ said Susie in her quiet, pedantic voice, looking up at him and wishing yet again that he wasn’t quite so handsome. ‘But it may only be sixteen; I’m not completely sure.’

Tom had found a silver ashtray and was picking it up, putting it down again…

‘You saw Rupert and Anna just now?’

‘Yes, I saw them. Can nothing be done? They are so completely right for one another.’

‘Nothing,’ said Tom savagely. ‘Muriel will never let him go. She’s after that title like a stampeding buffalo. And Rupert’ll never jilt her because he’s a gentleman and because of some idiot promise about Mersham that he made to George before he died.’

Susie was silent and Tom stood looking down at her. Since the day he’d first seen her in her parents’ over-furnished drawing room, blinking like a plump owl through her spectacles and marking the pages of her book with a determined finger, he’d wanted ceaselessly to be with her. Hitherto, he’d been prepared to wait. Now, seeing what had happened to Rupert, he was prepared to wait no longer.

‘Susie, are you really going to ruin our happiness because of your parents’ wretched religious prejudices? Even though I’ve told you a hundred times that you can bring up our children in any way you like?’

Susie hesitated. She, too, had been badly shaken by seeing Rupert and Anna dance. ‘It’s not that. My parents aren’t so orthodox any more. They’d moan a little, but there’s no question of them disowning me or saying a kaddish over me. They’re far too kind and too concerned for my happiness.’

Tom stared at her, amazed. ‘But why, then, Susie? Why do you keep on saying no?’

Susie studied him carefully. ‘Tom, have you ever looked at me? At me? Not someone you’ve made up inside your head.’

She stepped forward so that the overhead light shone full on her face. The gypsy dress, as she well knew, was extremely unbecoming to her and she was flushed and mottled from the heat.

‘I’m plump now,’ she continued in her level, unemotional voice. ‘In ten years I’ll be fat, however much I diet. I have a hooked nose; most of the time I need glasses. My hair is frizzy and my ears—’

‘How dare you!’ Tom had seized her shoulders; he was shaking her, hurting her. The famous Byrne temper, scourge of his red-haired ancestors since Doomsday, blazed in his eyes. ‘How dare you talk to me like that! You are insulting me!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘How dare you suppose that I don’t know who you are or what you are? That I don’t understand what I see? Do you take me for some kind of besotted schoolboy? It is unspeakable! You could weigh as much as a hippopotamus and shave your head and wear a wig and it wouldn’t make any difference to me. I never said you were beautiful. I never thought it. I said that you were you.’

Susie loosened his hands. Then she smiled, that tender, wise smile that made nonsense of her ugliness and said, ‘Well, in that case we must just hope that our children don’t inherit your awful temper. Or my nose.’

‘Oi, Gewalt!’ said the Noble Spanish Lady, seeing their faces as they returned to the ballroom. ‘Look, Leo! It has happened! What shall I tell Moyshe and Rachel? And Cousin Steffi? You know she wanted Susie for her Isaac!’

‘To mind their own business,’ said that stout bullfighter, Leo Rabinovitch, hitching up his cummerbund. ‘That is what you shall tell Rachel and Moyshe, and Cousin Steffi also,’ — and went forward resignedly to greet his new son-in-law.

The Duchess of Nettleford, helmeted and lightly daubed with woad, for she was nothing if not thorough, surveyed the dancers with an unusually benevolent eye. Things, it seemed, were going well for the girls. Like the Ancient British Queen she represented, she had led her troops into battle and she had conquered. Tom had opened the ball with Lavvy and was quite clearly interested. Beatrice (an undoubted and very yellow daffodil) was dancing with a young subaltern whom Minna had led up to them. And Gwendolyn, too, was on the floor — almost literally, for the poor girl could never master the tango and the wooden clogs of that staunch Northumbrian heroine, Grace Darling, did not really help. Fortunately the good-looking sunburned gentleman dressed as some kind of Greek who partnered her had seemed to be perfectly aware of the honour of standing up with the daughter of a duke. True, Hermione and Priscilla, clutching respectively the head of John the Baptist and an asp, were still sitting unclaimed beside her and there had been a disappointment about Tom Byrne’s younger brother. At thirteen he was too young, even for Beatrice, though in the old days when marriages had been sensibly arranged, no one would have bothered about nonsense like that. Still, on the whole, things were going well. As for that scandal at the beginning when some serving maid had turned out to be a countess or the other way round, the duchess had scarcely heeded it except to notice with pleasure how furious it had made the grocer’s daughter who had ensnared young Westerholme.

‘Ah, Lavvy,’ said the duchess as Lavinia, looking complacent and freshly caught, came up to her. ‘How’s it going, eh?’

‘Very well, Mother,’ said Lavinia, smirking. ‘Tom says he knows he can trust me to look after Ollie at the church.’

‘Ah, knows he can trust you, does he!’ The duchess was delighted. ‘Did you… you know, give him a bit of a hint?’

Lavinia dropped her eyes. ‘Well, Mother… you know…’

‘Look, there’s Tom now,’ said Priscilla, pointing with her asp. ‘What’s he doing with that dumpy Jewish girl, do you suppose?’

‘He took her out just now,’ said Lavinia. ‘I expect she was feeling ill.’

The music stopped. With an alacrity that was proper but not quite pleasing, the Ladies Beatrice and Gwendolyn were returned by their partners to Boadicea’s side, and on the dais, Mr Bartorolli wiped his brow.

‘The Byrnes are very democratic, aren’t they,’ drawled Hermione. ‘Lady Byrne’s kissing that Jewish girl now.’

Lavinia, perfectly confident, waited. And her confidence was justified. Tom, his deep happiness assured, moved by his stepmother’s unforced pleasure on his behalf, had determined to do everything that was needed to make the ball a success. And what was needed, as Minna had just assured him, was for someone — anyone — to dance with the Nettleford girls.

So Tom, radiant with happiness, approached the Boadicean Camp and aware that he had already danced with the eldest and the worst of them, bowed before one who seemed to be dressed in a great many muslin nappies and to be nursing a papier mâché head dipped in tomato juice.

But Hermione’s triumph was short-lived. They had scarcely circled the ballroom half a dozen times when the music stopped abruptly and was succeeded by a fanfare. And looking up at the dais, the dancers saw Lord Byrne standing beside Mr Bartorolli and holding up his hands.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I have an announcement to make. An announcement which I know will give great pleasure to everybody present…’

Anna stayed for a while in the garden, standing with her back to a great cedar as though thereby she could draw in some of its strength. She was as cold, as still, as stone.

Rupert had gone. She must live without him. It was done.

There were just a few things to do before she slipped away. Explain to the dowager that she was leaving, thank the Byrnes, say goodbye to Ollie… And after that, Mersham, to pick up her things and wait for the milk train to London. It was ten miles by road from Heslop to Mersham, but from her dawn rides on the mare she knew of a short cut across the fields which she would find even in the dark. By the time the other servants woke, she would be gone.

But first, Petya. She had promised him a dance. Back to the ballroom, then, whatever it cost…

He had been searching for her. ‘Ah, there you are, Annoushka,’ he said, beginning to talk excitedly in Russian. ‘You’ve missed such an exciting thing! Tom is engaged to marry Susie Rabinovitch and they stopped the orchestra and announced it and everyone clapped. And you know that girl dressed like a fish — only she’s not meant to be a fish, Hugh says — well, I was standing next to her and she sort of whooped when Lord Byrne announced it and went purple, just like in a book, and then she rushed out! Tom’s very happy and Susie’s really nice and there’s going to be lots and lots of champagne. And Lady Byrne’s going to ask you to stay here instead of Mersham — she says you’ve been there long enough as a guest and it’s her turn to have you, so do come, ’Noushka, because they’re so nice and their horses are fabulous!’

‘Petya, I must go back to town,’ said Anna. ‘I’ve been away so long and it isn’t fair on Mama.’

‘Oh, no! We’d have such fun! There’s the wedding, too — you must stay for that!’

‘I can’t, love. Maybe I’ll come back,’ she lied, ‘but it’s Pinny’s birthday next week and you know I like to be there for that: she’s done so much for us. So now let’s have our dance and then I’ll slip away quietly. Listen, it’s a polka! We’ll show them!’

And they did. But when it was over and Anna, under cover of the supper break, tried to gain the double doors, she was suddenly arrested — for sweeping into the ballroom, still laughing at Hawkins’ efforts at pronouncing their names — there came the Ballets Russes!

They came in costumes borrowed from Firebird and Sheherezade and all the other costumes immediately looked drab and uninteresting. They came as guests, not performers, but all eyes were instantly fixed on them, such was their vitality, their ‘otherness’. There was La Slavina, darling of the Maryinsky for two decades and still, in her forties, a woman from whom it was almost impossible to avert one’s eyes. There was the ineffably stylish designer, Lapin, with drooping eyes and a white streak in his jet-black hair. There was the silent and beautiful Vladimir on whom the mantle of Nijinsky seemed likely to fall, a choreographer with a bald and yellow skull, a pale, tragic-looking girl straight out of a ‘blue’ Picasso…

They surged forward to greet their host and hostess, embracing everybody in their path, seizing glasses of champagne from the passing footmen — and the temperature of the party soared. Then La Slavina paused, threw out an arm, and let out a high and enchantingly modulated scream.

‘Mon Dieu! C’est la petite Grazinsky!’

‘You look charming, Countess,’ said Lapin approvingly. ‘But not, I think, the cap. One wishes only to suggest a costume.’ He unpinned Anna’s cap, tossed it away, plucked a white poppy from an urn and tucked it unerringly into her hair.

‘Ah, but it is magnificent to see you, ma chère,’ said La Slavina, hugging Anna. ‘And look, there is the little brother also!’ She turned to Lady Byrne. ‘You have no idea how good the Grazinskys have been to us in Petersburg! Such benefactors, such hospitality! Of course they always loved the ballet. Do you remember, Countess, when you ran away? You were seven years old and all the police in Petersburg were searching — such a scandal! And where was she?’ she enquired of the bystanders. ‘In Theatre Street, in the ballet school, trying to audition for a place!’

‘And when she tried to sell her rubies to pay for Diaghilev’s first tour of Europe?’ said the choreographer. ‘Do you remember? All by herself she went to see old Oppenheim in the Morskaya! Often and often he has told the story: how there comes this little girl whose head is not over his desk and brings up her arm with in it her shoe bag and out falls this necklace which has been insured for fifty thousand roubles!’

‘You have lost everything, I have heard?’ said La Slavina in a low, sympathetic voice.

Anna shrugged. ‘We’re all right.’

‘Ah, you have courage. And a fine brother!’ She pinched Petya’s cheek. ‘But tell me,’ her voice, this time, dropped half an octave, her splendid boudoir eyes became veiled in a profound and personal nostalgia. ‘What has happened to your so beautiful Cousin Sergei? I have heard that he was safe, but no one has seen him in London and the Baroness Rakov is désolée.’

‘He is working in the north, somewhere,’ said Anna cautiously.

‘As a chauffeur, I have heard! Est-ce-que c’est possible?’

They had collected, inevitably, a crowd — and among its members were the Nettlefords, who had closed ranks after the dreadful news of Tom’s engagement and were conveying a stunned Lavinia to the supper room.

La Slavina threw out an arm to include the company. ‘Ah, if you could see the prince! Never, never have I seen a man so ’andsome. And fearless, too. Do you remember, Lapin, when he won the St Catherine Cup on that unbroken horse of Dolgoruky’s? But all the Chirkovskys were like that. It was Sergei’s father who gave me my first diamonds. I was still in Cechetti’s class at—’ She broke off to say with her enchanting smile: ‘I beg your pardon, mademoiselle.’

But the fault had not been the ballerina’s. A tall and avid-looking girl covered in scales had cannoned into her, en route for the open French window through which she now vanished. There was a short pause, then with assorted exclamations of fury, four more girls in an extraordinary collection of clothes raced after her, one of them dropping, as she did so, a rubber asp.

‘Drôle!’ said La Slavina, raising her eyebrows. Then she tucked her arm through Anna’s and led her entourage towards the supper room.

Anxious to avoid the servants’ hall, with its backbiting and gossip, Sergei had spent the evening in The King’s Head down in the village. Now he was smoking a quiet cigarette in the paddock which adjoined the stableyard until he should be summoned to take the Lady Lavinia and her fellow bridesmaid back to Mersham.

‘Sergei! Sergei! Where are you?’

‘Here, my lady.’

The Lady Lavinia, in full tilt, careered round the corner of the stables and panted up to him. Her scales caught the moonlight; an even fiercer glitter lit up her eyes.

‘Do you wish to leave early, my lady? The car is ready.’

‘No, no, Sergei! The night is young!’ She came closer. ‘But I’m very cross with you, Sergei! Very, very cross,’ said Lavinia, waggling a bony finger in his face.

‘I’m sorry to hear this, my lady.’

‘Very cross indeed! You’ve been a naughty boy, Sergei! A very naughty boy.’

Sergei looked round for a way of escape, but short of simply leaping the fence and racing away across the paddock there was nothing he could do.

‘Why didn’t you tell us your real name?’ said Lavinia, now fixing his arm in a vice-like grip.

‘But I did, my lady.’

‘No, you didn’t! Not all of it!’

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’

‘Oh, naughty, naughty!’ said Lavinia, entranced by her proximity to this devastating man. ‘What about the prince, hey? Prince Sergei Chirkovsky. You didn’t tell us that!’

‘I did not think it was important, my lady.’

‘Not important! Ooh, you are a funny man!’ She edged even closer, her shoulder digging into his side. ‘Don’t you see, it means you can take your place in society if you wish? That is if…’ She glanced up at him, her thin eyelashes fibrillating in the silver light, ‘if you had someone to support you and—’

‘Lavvy! Lavvy! Where are you?’

The pack was closing in. Furious at Lavinia’s head-on start, her sisters had rushed off down the terrace steps in hot pursuit. Unfortunately, Salome’s ankle bangle had caught in the turned-up spike of Cleopatra’s golden sandal, eliminating the Ladies Hermione and Priscilla, who rolled down the remaining steps in a vituperative and flaying tangle. But Gwendolyn, and the headless daffodil that now was Beatrice, had reached the stableyard.

‘Ah, there you are! You’ve found him. You’re a crafty one, Lavvy! Just as soon as you found out he was a prince you came running after him. Don’t take any notice, Sergei; it’s just cupboard love.’

‘It’s because Tom got away,’ said Beatrice who had perfected spite to a degree remarkable even for a Nettleford.

‘So now she wants to be a princess, don’t you, Lavvy?’

But Sergei had now had enough. His accent very pronounced, he bowed and said: ‘Ladies, I have two things to say to you. Firstly, as from this moment I resign absolutely my post as chauffeur to your family and you may tell the duke and duchess this. Secondly, I am engaged to be married.’

And before the girls could recover themselves, he had vaulted over the five-bar gate and vanished into the trees at the far side of the paddock.

After the arrival of the Russians, no one could doubt that the ball was a triumph. But at its heart was not Muriel Hardwicke, stiff and disapproving in her elaborate dress: at its heart, her escape cut off, was Anna. Anna dancing a tango with Lapin, Anna drinking champagne with Mr Bartorolli, Anna and Vladimir demonstrating a polonaise… Anna besieged by partners and never, not for one minute, looking at Rupert, who never, for one minute, looked at her.

‘That girl seems determined to make an exhibition of herself,’ said Muriel, frigidly executing a two-step in the arms of her fiancé. ‘I hope you don’t expect me to have her back at Mersham after this?’

Rupert did not answer. Anna had paused at the end of her dance to thank her partner and straighten the flower in her tumbled hair. Caught off his guard for an instant, Rupert gazed at her just as her control, too, snapped and she raised her eyes, brilliant with fatigue and excitement, to his.

And at that moment it became clear to him with an absolute and blinding certainty that he could not live without her and that he must break his engagement even if it meant disgrace and ruin — and that he must break it that very night.

Sergei had taken refuge in the Italian garden, the statues and arbours of which gave shelter even in the bright moonlight. Here he would wait quietly till the Nettleford girls returned to the ballroom and then pick up his things from the coachhouse and make his way to the station. Thank heaven he had not spent his last week’s wages; at least he had money for the fare.

He was just beginning to make his way back when he heard a sound: forlorn and small and infinitely sad; the sound of someone resolutely not crying. And turning aside he saw, framed by a trellis of jasmine, a girl sitting on the rim of a fountain, her head in her hands. A girl whose pose, whose slender outline, seemed heart-rendingly familiar.

Rupert’s glance had cut through Anna’s mood like a sword, and excusing herself from her latest partner, she had slipped away, wanting now only that this long night should end at last.

“Annoushka! Mylienkaya! Eto ti?’

The voice, known and loved since childhood, the tender Russian words, brought her to her feet — and into the arms of the tall man coming towards her.

‘Seriosha!’

For a moment they stood locked together in an embrace of homesickness and love. If there was one person in the world that Anna needed at this hour it was the cousin who was now brother and father, protector and friend. If there was one person who could make him think well again of women, it was this girl with her steadfastness and courage, her spiritual grace.

‘I didn’t know you were here, Sergei. Why didn’t you come into the house?’

‘I’m not a guest, little idiot; I’m the Nettlefords’ chauffeur. Or I was.’ And he quickly told her what had happened, making her smile through her tears. ‘And you?’ he pursued, looking down at her. ‘You are in fancy dress? Or…’ his voice sharpened, ‘or have you been working also? Tell me the truth, Annoushka.’

There no longer seemed any point in concealment. ‘But Petya must never know, Sergei,’ she said when she had recounted the events of the evening. ‘He’d leave school at once if he knew we were penniless. So please just help me to get away quickly now. Then when I have seen Mama and Pinny I can begin to look for another job.’

‘No! You shall not work again like this! I forbid it absolutely!’ And as he spoke, Sergei knew exactly what he would do and that the lie he had told the Nettleford girls had been a prophetic one. ‘I’m going to marry Larissa Rakov,’ he went on. ‘She’s a kind, understanding person; it will be all right, you’ll see. And you and Petya and your mother shall live with us, and Pinny too. And if you’re good,’ he continued, gently flicking away a tear, ‘I shall find you a rich husband — one who will beat you only twice a week.’

She tried hard to smile. ‘No, Seriosha… I don’t want a rich husband. Or any husband except…’

Sergei took out his handkerchief. He had dried the eyes of countless weeping women, but none more tenderly than those of this girl. ‘Poor coucoushka,’ he said, settling her head against his shoulder. ‘Now, tell me everything, please. Of course if he has harmed you I shall kill him, whoever he is,’ he added matter of factly. ‘But otherwise, perhaps something can be done.’ He gave a last dab at her face. ‘Blow your nose, dousha,’ he commanded, ‘and begin.’

So she told him everything, always blaming herself for not seeing in time what was happening, and as he held her and stroked her hair, he caught from her voice the immensity of her love, her inexhaustible tenderness and the total lack of hope that came from the sense of another person’s honour. And it seemed to him that she had grown up and surpassed him, this girl who had always been to him a younger sister, such was her committal and her certainty.

It was thus that Rupert, looking for Anna in the garden, found them. Leaning against each other as if they were one substance, the man bending over her, holding her close, while she turned to him in total trust — and her hair, loosened by the dance, streamed across them both.