Though highly entertained by the deep and ingrained snobbery of these old women, whose country on the map now looked like a severed and diminutive pancreas, whose court and emperor were totally defunct, Guy felt it was time he made his position clear. So leaning back, gently lowering a wedge of fragrant ash into the Louis Quatorze spittoon with which he had been provided, he said placidly that if they felt unable to introduce Mrs Hurlingham to European high society he regretted that the sale would be cancelled.

The ladies now retired behind a screen to confer. Though they spoke in whispers, they were sufficiently deaf for their deliberations to be perfectly clear to Guy, who gathered that their desire not to deprive Putzerl of her dowry, along with the lure of the word ‘banquet’ was fast overcoming their reluctance to offend their friends by introducing them to a lady whose aunt, though an Honourable, was unrelated to the great ducal families of Britain.

‘Very well, Herr Farne,’ said the Duchess with a sigh. ‘We will present your friend.’

‘Good,’ said Guy. ‘You should hear from my lawyers in a few days, by which time I trust your great-niece will have been in touch, and then I will send in the workmen. Mr Tremayne here,’ he continued, grinning at David, ‘will see to everything. There is one other condition. I want complete secrecy. My name is not to appear in the transaction; the deeds will be made out in the name of one of my companies. I would prefer that even the local people do not know that I am the new owner until everything is completed. I suggest June the eighteenth for the reception and the opening ball?’

‘Very well, Herr Farne.’

‘Oh, and I want to hire an opera company. Is there one that you can recommend?’

Even the ladies of Burg Pfaffenstein were impressed by the high-handedness of this.

‘The International Opera Company in the Klostern Theatre is said to be very good. Putzerl often speaks of it.’

‘And she’s extremely musical. In fact she’s studying music’

Guy thanked them, removed a spider which had fallen into his wineglass and took his leave.

It was not until they were halfway back to Vienna, eating supper in the candle-lit dining room of the White Horse Inn, that Guy, crumbling a roll in his long fingers, chose to give his secretary some kind of explanation.

‘You’ve been very patient, David. You must think I’ve gone quite mad. All that for a woman… Only, you see, she’s had a rotten life — forced into an unhappy marriage, then watching the poor devil take four years to die.’ He was silent for a moment, his eyes on the candle flame, the customary mocking look momentarily absent from his face. He looked years younger and to David, who worshipped him, suddenly and frighteningly vulnerable.

‘I want her to have everything she wanted at seventeen, however absurd,’ he went on. ‘Everything. She doesn’t even realize I’m rich — we only met a fortnight before I came away and I didn’t tell her. When I knew her before, I was twenty years old and penniless. I want her to come upon Pfaffenstein lit up for a ball and peopled with princes. I want her to walk into a fairy tale — and know that all of it is hers.’

‘She must be very beautiful,’ said David quietly.

‘The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. She’s lovely now but at seventeen — oh, God!’

And for the first time in his life, Guy began to speak of his love for the girl who had been Nerine Croft.

2

Whether it was the sheer beauty of the city, then at the height of its imperial splendour: a city from whose every window came music, a lazily grey and gold-domed city framed in the cherished hills and vineyards of the Wienerwald… whether it was Vienna itself or the cosmopolitan society Guy experienced there, or the fizz of new thought as Schönberg revolutionized music, Klimt’s golden, exotic ladies scandalized the world of art and Sigmund Freud produced the outrageous theories which were to change men’s views of themselves for ever… or whether it was simply that he was young and at the height of his powers, Guy now paused in the conquest of knowledge, the world, himself — and began simply to enjoy life.

What happened next was of course inevitable, but to Guy it was the miracle that a first love, truly and violently experienced, is to every man who is worthy of the name.

Vienna, in those halcyon years, was not only a gay and fashionable capital but also the centre of a thriving international industry: Europe’s most popular marriage mart. To the finishing schools of Vienna came the daughters of American millionaires, British industrialists and the French nouveau riche, nominally to learn German, study music and appreciate art — actually to take the preliminary steps which would secure, in due course, a husband both nobly born and rich.

Housed generally in some magnificent Schloss whose owners had fallen on hard times, protected by high walls and splendid iron gates, these girls, who often could scarcely add two numbers together, nevertheless understood precisely the subtle arithmetic by which a German ritter with land might equal a Hungarian count without… how a French vicomte with a pedigree could nevertheless be set aside for an Italian marchese with factories discreetly out of sight somewhere which made him a millionaire. As for a prince, he needed nothing else. To be addressed as ‘princess’ these girls, well-trained by their mothers, would have embraced a man of fifty with dentures and the pox.

Meanwhile, enchantingly dressed in their muslins, frantically chaperoned by hatchet-faced and underpaid ‘companions’, the girls trooped through museums, attended concerts and military manoeuvres and took excursions into the surrounding countryside.

This beguiling, hot-house world was one to which normally Guy would never have had access. But coming into the university lobby in his first month in Vienna, he found a pale, frightened, long-haired young man pinned to the wall by two cropped louts from the Jew-baiting Burschenschaft who were questioning him about his ancestry.

Guy had been leading a life of exceptional docility but a look of pleasure now spread over his face. Taking one of the louts by the shoulder, he said he would be obliged if they would leave his friend alone.

The lout, swinging round to meet a pair of malachite eyes, asked what business it was of his? Guy, mustering his German, said that bullying did not amuse him, adding that if there was no objection to duelling with someone who had been found under a piece of sacking on the Fish Quay in Newcastle upon Tyne and was most unlikely to have been born in wedlock, then he would be delighted to meet him. Otherwise, if he did not go away, Guy would pulverize him into insensibility and knock his idiotic duelling scar into his earhole. The second lout, coming to trip him up, found himself rolling down the steps towards the Ringstrasse.

Nonplussed, the louts departed. The victim, who in spite of his tragic and semitic appearance was the scion of a noble Hungarian house, now became Guy’s devoted slave and invited him to his family’s box at the Opera. In the neighbouring box, displayed like the choicest flowers from Olympus for the gaze of the populace, was a group of girls from Frau von Edelnau’s Academy. Pretty girls, striking girls — and one, in the seat nearest to Guy, who possessed that unique quality: an unequivocal and breathtaking beauty.

The English are a plain race but just occasionally, borrowing usually from some Celtic ancestor, they achieve a breathtaking perfection. Nerine Croft’s dusky, abundant ringlets were tied high with a golden thong to dance on her bare shoulders: the forget-me-nots embroidered on her white muslin dress mirrored the heavenly blue of her wide-set eyes and her small nose, as though to ward off the accusation of a cold perfection, was slightly, tantalizingly retroussée.

If it hadn’t been The Magic Flute… if she had not, as the curtain rose, given the smallest of anticipatory sighs… if she had not, at the end of Pamino’s miraculous aria of exalted love, turned in the soft dusk of the lôge and smiled at him.

But it was Mozart’s masterpiece, and she did so turn. The parents of Guy’s friend were acquainted with Frau Edelnau, and in the interval he was introduced. Nerine, delighted to find that he was English, said, yes, the singing had been wonderful and, yes, he could procure for her an ice.

So it began. It was spring: violets in the Prater; Strauss in the Stadtpark; the café tables with their bright, checked cloths spilling out on to the pavements once again. Bells rang in this enchanted city, the Kaiser drove out in a carriage with golden wheels… It was Frau Edelnau’s policy to invite suitably vetted young men to private dances and outings with her girls. To this select band of officers and students Guy, who at twenty was a strangely compelling creature with his wolf’s eyes and air of compressed energy, was now admitted. And Nerine, trained almost from birth to beguile and flirt and please, was enchanting to her young compatriot whose physical courage and intellectual brilliance were becoming something of a legend in the University.

And so, in a city which God might have designed for the purpose, Guy experienced the miracle, the transforming alchemy of total love. Every plumed spray of lilac in the Volksgarten, every caryatid supporting Vienna’s innumerable pillars, every street-seller with her brazier of chestnuts seemed to him limned in light. He wrote songs to Nerine and sent them floating as paper boats down the River Wien; he kept vigil outside her window at night. Friends clustered round him like puppies, bemused by his happiness. He discovered the Secessionists, climbed the dizzying verdigris dome of the University, and hardly ever went to bed. That spring and summer of his twenty-first year, Guy was invincible.

Later, he was to ask himself how much Nerine had been affected. She was always enchanting, looking up at him with those artless, deep-blue eyes, and he was accepted by the other girls as ‘hers’. But Frau von Edelnau and her minions had brought chaperonage to a fine art. Guy was allowed to waltz with her at private dances but never more than twice, to walk beside her carriage in the Prater, to procure lemonade at the manoeuvres and military parades so beloved of the Viennese, but it was impossible to be with her alone.

Until the picnic in the Vienna Woods…

The word ‘picnic’, which to the British suggests a casual and relaxed approach to eating, suggested to Frau Edelnau something quite different. Rugs and hampers of food were piled into carriages; the ropy arms of the chaperones emerged from hastily donned dirndls, and the expedition set off for the ruined monastery on the Kahlenberg now suitably provided with wooden tables, carefully sited vantage points and hygienic toilets.

They arrived… picnicked… the chaperones dozed, overcome by salami and pumpernickl. The girls picked cornflowers and marguerites to twine into their hair.

‘There can’t be anything better than this,’ said a freckle-faced, sunny American girl, looking at the tapestry of the green and gold-domed city below them.

‘Yes, there can,’ said Nerine.

‘What, then?’

‘Oh, being rich… having marvellous clothes… Dancing the night through with princes at a glittering ball. Living in a castle.’

Guy, as always, was beside her.

‘I’ll buy you a castle,’ he said.

Nerine turned and stared at him, caught not by the words but by the tone in which they were spoken. It was almost as though this impecunious boy really had the power to grant wishes. She became dreamy, pensive… Guy had found a glade of wild orchids in which there danced a myriad golden butterflies. Now he offered to show it to the girls and a party set off. The others fell behind and in a sudden shaft of sunlight Nerine, dazzled, stumbled on a root.

Guy caught her and quite beside himself by now, kissed her with all the passion of his nature.

And Nerine kissed him back.

To Guy, adrift in a foreign city, reared by Martha Hodge, that kiss meant one thing and one thing only. When Nerine returned to England, he followed her and in a daze of happiness, presented himself at the Crofts’ ornate and over-furnished villa in Twickenham to ask for her hand.

It is hard to see why they were not kind. So simple, surely, to have spoken of her youth, his need to complete his studies, their conviction that at seventeen their daughter could hardly know her own mind. Instead, the Crofts exhibited a cruelty and arrogance that he had not known existed.