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’.

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.