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its bright red and gold painted stand. She couldn’t recall anything before that day, when she had been guided into her bedroom with her hands over her eyes. ‘No peeking,’ her father had said, but she had. Perhaps she was just a baby when she and Archie first met, neither having any clue as to what their parents had planned for them.
    Those were such carefree times, she thought, and her memories made her smile. ‘It’s quite all right, Mother,’ she said. ‘I shall be glad to see him again.’
    ‘It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I don’t believe you’ve seen him since the wedding.’
    ‘No, I’m sure I haven’t,’ Alice said. ‘I suppose he’ll barely recognise me.’
    Her mother gave a small laugh. ‘Oh, I’m certain he will.’

    Dinner was at eight, although the guests at Hamberley had all arrived by six thirty for canapés and cocktails, and Alice, who wasn’t in any kind of mood for small talk was glad to have missed it. She arrived in the dining room along with the creamed chicken soup, and without looking at anyone, she followed her mother to the head of the table, where they each took a seat beside her father, Lord Charles Metcalfe.
    ‘I’m sorry I’m late, Father,’ Alice said.
    ‘Are you? I was beginning to think you weren’t coming to your own dinner party at all.’
    There was more than a hint of sourness in his tone, and Alice, when she glanced at him, could see that pinched expression she knew so well, hiding beneath his beard. It told her to choose her words carefully, or better still to say nothing at all.
    ‘Charles.’
    It was her mother, speaking softly. Alice saw her pale hand land as gentle as a butterfly on her father’s arm, and it seemed that all the tension drained from him. He sat back in his seat, and Alice turned away, thankfully distracted by the bowl of soup that had been set before her. She was aware that the general conversation, which had been lively when she first entered the room, had now stopped, and as she forced a smile and nodded to each of the guests in their dinner jackets and evening gowns, she saw that the reason was because everyone was already smiling back at her. The dining room, with its many old family portraits, always felt overcrowded to Alice, no matter how many guests had been invited to dinner. Tonight, though, the attention of all those eyes, which now seemed to stare at her, was close to unbearable.
    ‘How have you been, Alice?’
    Frank Saxby’s silky tones drew Alice’s eye, and she turned to him.
    ‘We don’t see much of you these days, do we, Bea?’ Saxby continued, addressing her as he turned to his wife, Beatrice, who was sitting opposite him.
    ‘No,’ Beatrice said. ‘Hardly at all since the wedding.’
    ‘I’m very well,’ Alice said, smiling politely to disguise the truth.
    She knew Frank as Uncle Frank, although he was no relation—just a good friend of her father’s since long before she was born. She had never directly asked, but Alice was of the impression that their friendship harked back to their school days. Saxby was a businessman who had made his money selling asbestos to the building industry, and according to her father, was someone so adept at his profession that he could sell snow to Eskimos.
    At the opposite end of the table were Lord Abridge and his wife, whom Alice had only met a few times at one event or another in connection with the Admiralty. Then there was her Aunt Cordelia and her husband, Oscar Scanlon, whose poorly advised business ventures had all but left them in financial ruin, and was the reason why they had now been in residence at Hamberley going on five years—much to her father’s displeasure. They had a son, Edwin, whom Alice thought as disagreeable as his father. Thankfully, he was away at university, which was something else her father’s estate was paying for.
    Archie was sitting immediately to Alice’s right, and the years since she’d last seen him had done little to alter his