The Ballroom Blitz

Book 0: Buckingham

by Anton Du Beke

Genres: World War II; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

The stunning new Buckingham novel from Sunday Times bestselling author Anton Du Beke, featuring an audio exclusive introduction from the author.

September 1940. As the skies split apart and bombs rain down on London, it's all the staff at the famed Buckingham Hotel can do to keep their guests in the luxury they're accustomed to, and evoke the magic of the Grand ballroom for them each night.

Home on leave and still reeling from the tragic events at Dunkirk, the dashing Raymond de Guise struggles to define his role in this new world, and to do his duty both to his country, and his beloved wife Nancy- who needs him now more than ever.

With profiteers skulking the London streets, and devious rivals plotting the Buckingham's downfall, the hotel staff must all hold onto what matters most- and decide where their loyalties truly lie.

As the bombing intensifies and Christmas fast approaches, somehow the show must go on...

Release date: October 13, 2022

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 368

Sample

Welcome to the Buckingham Hotel …

There were very few souls in London’s high society who had not, at one time or another, entered the doors of the Buckingham Hotel’s feted Grand Ballroom and stood in awe, taking in its ostentatious chandeliers, the elegant sweep of its glistening dance floor. There were even fewer souls who, on stepping into the arms of one of its troupe of illustrious dancers, had not felt their hearts take flight. This was the singular magic of the Grand Ballroom – and never was it more manifest than in those dark days of September 1940, when the good souls of London awoke each morning to find their city changed, when the only things in shorter supply than bacon and butter were wonder and joy.

But they didn’t ration wonder, not at the Buckingham Hotel.

You could not ration the human heart.

This afternoon, the ballroom was alive. On the dance floor, Mathilde Bourchier, the Buckingham’s dark, elfin princess, sailed in the arms of Frank Nettleton – sometime hotel page, sometime ballroom dancer, sometime hero from the beaches of Dunkirk – while around her the ballroom filled with applause. Up on stage, the Archie Adams Orchestra were driving their latest number, ‘Blue, Blue World’, to its urgent climax – and Mathilde, who’d been lost in the song from the very beginning, was on the cusp of throwing herself upward in Frank’s arms, to glide to the front of the dance floor and be presented to the assembled guests. The afternoon demonstration dances had been a fixture in the Buckingham Hotel since the ballroom opened its doors a decade ago, and for Mathilde – who had long been understudy to the troupe’s principal dancer – they were her chance to show the guests what she was truly capable of, that she too could imbue a moment with magnificence, that there were stars in the ballroom beyond the troupe’s leading players: the striking Karina Kainz, who’d fled from Vienna for a new home at the Buckingham Hotel; the imposing Marcus Arbuthnot, who’d once trained dancers for world championships and had returned to the dance floor to guide the troupe valiantly through these years of war. The demonstrations were Mathilde’s chance to shine, perhaps even eclipse, the better-known dancers who dominated the Grand Ballroom, and they’d become so much more important in the months just passed – when an evening could be suddenly curtailed by the wail of an air raid siren, when a ball could be abruptly stopped and a shrill whistle blown, directing guests, cocktail waiters, ballroom dancers and musicians to the fortress of shelters beneath the hotel itself.

Joy.

Wonder.

Magic.

The world might have been on fire; the headlines might have preached about the calamity on the Continent and the madman whose eyes had turned, zealously, on Mathilde’s little island nation; but Mathilde knew that, in the moment she completed her turn, arcing elegantly through the air above Frank’s head, every soul in the Grand would be filled with the same rapture that buoyed her. Music was man’s escape from the nightly horror of this thing they’d started calling ‘Mr Hitler’s Blitz’. The ballroom was where people came to remember this feeling. The feeling that the world had once been filled with wonder and light – and that, one day, it would be again.

Not today, though – for, in the same moment that Mathilde swooped back to the ballroom’s sprung dance floor, the same moment that the Archie Adams Orchestra brought their number to its end in a cavalcade of trumpets and piano, another music started playing outside the ballroom doors. It was the familiar music of the air raid sirens. The familiar whomp and whirr, spreading from police station to police station like the warning pyres of old being put to the torch.

Magic died in a moment.

Wonder, snuffed out like a guttering candle-flame.

Across the Grand Ballroom, dancers stepped out of hold; up on the stage, the white-whiskered gentleman Archie Adams – dedicated bandleader, with his ageless good looks and air of quiet calm – took leave of his grand piano and, with a single clap of the hands, marshalled his musicians.

‘A daylight raid?’ Mathilde whispered to Frank, stranded as they were in the heart of the dance floor. ‘Frank, is it real?’

They’d come every night for the last week, pulverising the city from above while searchlights scythed through the black skies and the daring boys of the Royal Air Force took the battle to them. Since returning from Dunkirk, Frank, who spent three nights a week answering telephones for the Fire Service, had looked through the blackouts last night to see flames roiling somewhere beyond the palaces at Westminster, and willed the brave boys of the RAF on as their comet trails coloured the London skyline. Theirs was a battle like no other in history: a battle for supremacy in the skies.

‘Of course it’s real,’ he said at last. After a mere moment’s consternation, the ballroom had already sprung into action. ‘Quickly, Mathilde. We’ve got a job to do.’

In the days when she’d been a fledgling dancer, mercilessly drilled to perfection by a mother who was indulging her own dream as much as her daughter’s, Mathilde had never imagined it might one day involve being responsible for someone’s life. But so it was. They’d been dancing to disaster all night long, and now the disaster had arrived. She turned on the spot and made haste to one of the guests standing by the dance floor balustrade, a young woman who served as attaché to one of the Norwegian King Haakon’s ministers. Since the fall of Oslo, and the institution of that treacherous Quisling government, King Haakon and his family had taken up residence in Buckingham Palace, and so much of his government-in-exile now lived and operated out of the suites on the hotel’s fifth storey. That was the Buckingham now: a world within a world, where dignitaries and ministers from fallen nations picked themselves up, put themselves back together, and got on with the business of resisting the Continent’s new terror.

A terror which was, right now, raining from the London skies.

‘Shall we?’ she said, and gestured towards the ornate arched entrance of the Grand.

Mathilde took the attaché’s arm and steered her away from the dance floor. Every other member of hotel staff – whether they were cocktail waiters, musicians, or just the audit manager who’d happened to look in on the ballroom when the demonstrations began – was helping to shepherd guests back through the archway from which they had, a mere half hour ago, emerged. A small band of others were taking advantage of the stage doors to hurry others on their way. There was once a time when no guest would have been permitted to see the dressing rooms and rehearsal studio behind the Grand, for fear that the ballroom’s magic might suddenly have been dispelled, but things changed in a time of fire and devastation.

‘I know the way, Miss,’ the attaché said as Mathilde bustled her up the corridor, emerging into the hotel reception. Here, the black-and-white chequered expanse had been cleared of any obstruction, including the famous Art Deco obelisk which had stood here, an icon of the Buckingham Hotel, for a generation. No golden trolleys or potted ferns were permitted to pockmark the hall anymore, for fear of inhibiting the rush to the shelters.

‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ said Mathilde, ‘it’s more than my job’s worth to leave a guest alone. I’ll see you to the stairs, then go back for others.’

The reception hall was a hubbub of activity. Staff who weren’t escorting guests were generally instructed to remain at post until the last guest was secure and the rosters complete, but some were already streaming through to the Queen Mary restaurant, where the wine cellars had been converted into shelters for the staff. The guests were to be housed in the altogether more opulent surrounds of the old hotel laundries, converted this past year to a succession of suites almost worthy of the Buckingham’s uppermost storeys. Walter Knave, the elderly Hotel Director – a shrunken, amphibious-looking man, in a suit that dwarfed him and spectacles that made preposterous protrusions of his eyes – watched from the check-in desks, wringing his mottled old hands together. Mathilde knew how he was feeling; the hammering in her heart seemed to keep time with the whomp of the sirens.

Marcus Arbuthnot, the Grand’s regal leader, had a guest on each arm as he spun past Mathilde, heading for the passageway that opened up behind the golden cage of the elevators. The way he looked now, a guest might have thought he had come to the Grand specifically for the purpose of shepherding guests to safety – but nothing could have been further from the truth. Marcus was a titan of the ballroom, a statesman of dance. Too old to join the steady roll of men being drawn into the war decimating the Continent, he had been hired a year ago to shepherd the Grand through what promised to be its most tumultuous years. A lifetime spent training young dancers, even shepherding them to glory on the world’s stage, had, it seemed, given him an innate confidence in moments of terror such as this. Mathilde caught his eye across the spinning reception hall. ‘One more time, my dear,’ he mouthed to her; they were the words he used in the rehearsal studio behind the Grand, whenever he needed to urge the troupe through one more practise waltz, and they steadied her in the moment. She watched Marcus sallying on into the starrily lit passage that led to the shelters (praying that he was right, that this was but a rehearsal and not the last night of her life) and said, ‘We’re almost there, ma’am. Almost there.’

A figure, leaning into a walking cane meant for a much older man, emerged from the hall tucked behind the reception desks. The former concierge, Billy Brogan, more recently private in the British Expeditionary Force, had been one of the first into France in those early weeks of war. Now he stood, his body pitched at a slightly crooked angle (though significantly less crooked than when he’d first appeared on his return from France), his red hair growing back in tufts from its old military cut. Billy’s body had been too broken to return to his division since Dunkirk – Mathilde had heard whispers that his mind was broken as well, for Billy had spent many long hours battling for life in the English Channel after the HMS Othello went down – but he’d been awarded a new role as head of the hotel post room. He emerged from there now, his face etched in deep, steadfast lines.

Mathilde hurried towards him. ‘Billy, perhaps you can take the attaché to the shelters, while I help in the ballroom?’

‘Can’t, Miss Bourchier,’ Billy announced, with a grim determination completely at odds with the happy-go-lucky boy the staff at the hotel used to know. ‘It’s my turn on the roster. John’s out front, but I’m on the tradesman’s entrance. Well, you can’t abandon station. Look what happened at the Savoy.’ The news had come yesterday: a group from the East End had marched brazenly through the Savoy to occupy its shelters in anticipation of the bombardment to come. Billy gave a wan, half-smile – and it seemed evident to Mathilde that he was trying his damnedest to summon up the fiery spirit of old. ‘You get these guests safe, Miss Bourchier,’ he grinned. Then he addressed the attaché directly. ‘You’ll be fine in the shelters, Miss. This hotel’s got an iron skeleton. It’s not going down.’ A shudder ran through him. He’d thought that about the HMS Othello too – and then there he’d been, flailing in the water, clinging on to the wreckage, desperate for some passing fishing boat to sail by. ‘Go on, Miss Bourchier. Quickly now. These Jerries won’t hold fire for us.’

Mathilde looked back as she swept the attaché on. The reception hall was milling, as busy as any ballroom floor she had ever graced – only it was not joy in the air any longer. It was not wonder. It was panic, barely controlled. With the attaché on her arm, she slipped round the back of the golden elevators – and then she was gone.

Billy didn’t wait to see her go. Angling through the bustle of other guests and staff, he limped along the Housekeeping hall, through the maze of other passageways, until he reached the hotel’s side entrance. Here, past a room piled high with old boxes and crates waiting for pick-up, a broad doorway opened onto Michaelmas Mews, the narrow lane that ran around the periphery of the hotel and eventually opened up onto Berkeley Square. The sun was shining along the mews; it seemed such an innocuous day for something so terrible.

Billy was standing there, listening to the whirr of the sirens, when the sound and fury of the first explosion reached his ears. He’d heard sounds like this too often, not only in this last week of constant bombardment, but all throughout his retreat from inland France. The German artillery had pounded the seaside town of Dunkirk; he still saw it, heard it, felt it in his dreams.

He shuddered.

He shook.

He felt the sea sucking him under, then spewing him out. He closed his eyes, but that only made the memory more vivid still.

He saw the sea on fire.

There was movement behind him. He turned, waving his cane as if to fend off some sudden assailant – but it was only Mrs Moffatt, the imposing Head of Housekeeping, tottering unsteadily forward beneath her tight curls of white hair.

‘Billy,’ she said, and took his hand, ‘how close are they?’

Close enough, thought Billy. Not for the first time, he was thankful that all of his brothers and sisters – the Brogan brood, as so many called them – had been shipped out of the city with the evacuation last year. He squeezed Mrs Moffatt’s hand, as if to give her strength. ‘You ought to get to the staff shelter, Mrs Moffatt. Leave this to me.’ Inwardly, he cursed. Billy Brogan would do whatever was asked of him – he’d done it in the British Expeditionary Force, and he’d do it for the Buckingham Hotel, which was where his heart truly lay – but there was something about standing sentry here that rankled. The enemies were in the skies above, not on the streets of London. Guarding the hotel against blackguards and thieves did not have the same ring of honesty and heroism that he’d felt doing his bit in France. Even that group who’d occupied the Savoy had a good point to make – in war-torn London, being rich was much safer than being poor. ‘Mrs Moffatt, are you OK?’

He’d seen the way her face and neck had discoloured. The rush of blood to the head. Moments later, she was palming her way past him. She had to use the walls to steady herself. It seemed, to Billy, as if the earth was listing under her feet.

Then, she was out through the doors and into the sunlight that dappled Michaelmas Mews.

‘Mrs Moffatt!’ he cried out. ‘Mrs Moffatt, what are you doing?’

Mrs Moffatt was not a small woman. Having long been in the depths of middle age, she had a doughy frame, ankles permanently swollen by too much work, and a waddling look to her when she walked that had, on occasion, put Billy in mind of a duck. That was why he was surprised by the sudden burst of energy with which she sprang past. That was why, when he staggered out into the Mews and watched her cantering for Berkeley Square, he could hardly believe his eyes.

‘Mrs Moffatt! Mrs Moffatt!’

But his voice, if she cared to hear it at all, was lost in the thunder from above, as some defiant RAF boys banked over the rooftops in defence of the realm.

Billy heard some fresh hell being unleashed to the south – over the river, if he was any judge, and exactly where his mother and father would be hunkered down in the Anderson at the bottom of their yard.

He stood there a moment longer.

But that was as long as he could wait.

Whatever Mrs Moffatt was doing right now, she wasn’t in her right mind. Nobody could be, to willingly rush into a storm like this.

Billy had never let one of his friends down before, so he grasped his cane, grit his teeth against the old, nagging pain, and prepared to give chase.

By the time he reached her, she was standing in the middle of Berkeley Square, turning madly on the spot, her face upturned to take in the clear blue skies.

‘Mrs Moffatt?’ he called out, as he limped near. ‘Mrs Moffatt, please?’

Berkeley Square was a riot of colour. Roses of iridescent hue stood alongside the irises and magnolia that bordered the green expanse where Mrs Moffatt stood. Billy felt a rush of summer scents as he picked his way to her, the beauty of his surrounds quite at odds with the palpitating fear in his heart.

The shrill scream of some falling incendiary sounded to the south. Billy cringed and looked upwards, just in time to see the shapes of three planes banking overhead. He knew, by instinct, that these were RAF boys. Mrs Moffatt seemed to know it too. She lifted her hand – and, just when Billy felt certain she was cheering, she clasped it to her mouth in horror.

‘Mrs Moffatt,’ he breathed, ‘you’ve got to come inside.’

But she did not even look at him.

‘Mrs Moffatt, it isn’t safe out here.’

But she did not breathe a word.

‘Mrs Moffatt?’ Billy tried, and failed, one last time to get her attention. Only then, when her eyes remained fixed on the skies above, did he know it was futile. Mrs Moffatt couldn’t stay out here, like some sacrifice to the vengeful gods above, and nor could he. He just couldn’t do it alone.

The planes tumbling over Berkeley Square had already coursed across the rooftops of East London, but more roared in their wake. On the Whitechapel Road, where mothers swept children suddenly into their arms and made for the shelter of the old church halls, Lance Corporal Raymond de Guise looked to the skies and took his young companion Leah firmly by the hand.

Raymond de Guise, formerly the principal dancer at the Buckingham Hotel, had returned from his Salisbury barracks for five days’ leave before his inevitable new posting – but he hadn’t expected to be stepping directly into a theatre of war. Even so, a year in the armed forces had given him instincts enough to know he could cope with the sudden fluctuations of tension. That was life in the military: vast tracts of nothingness, punctuated by sudden flare-ups of drama, danger and death. As soon as the sirens had started to sound, he knew he had to act. Whether it was London or the Low Countries, being caught out in the open with the enemy incoming was no good thing.

At thirty-four years of age, Raymond de Guise stood more than six feet tall. His reflection, in the window of the florists where he and Leah had been browsing, showed a man with jet-black hair, cropped short to the scalp where it had once been a devilish, wild curl, a lean body and sun-burnished skin. He was wearing his standard issue uniform, graced now by his lance corporal stripes, as was required even when on home leave – but what use were a lance corporal’s instincts when the terror came from above? He watched, in the reflection, as he crouched down to meet twelve-year-old Leah’s face and said, ‘Just stay with me, sweetheart. We’ll get somewhere safe.’

No sooner had he said it than he heard the first planes screaming overhead. The sirens ordinarily pre-empted an attack long enough to reach shelter, but there was something about a daytime raid that discombobulated the system, throwing the engin­eers and signallers out of sync. Leah, who had been brought from her Polish home only months before the Nazis marched over the border, trembled and held Raymond tight. From one war-ravaged country, straight into the heart of another. She’d been fostered by Raymond’s mother Alma since her arrival at the Tilbury docks. Raymond didn’t mean to let her perish here. There’d been too much perishing already.

‘What about the flowers?’ asked Leah, in her unformed English.

Raymond brushed back her hair, dark as his own, and looked into the chocolate buttons of her eyes. They’d been standing here, deliberating which flowers they ought to buy for Vivienne, Raymond’s sister-in-law and the widowed wife of his brother Artie. Artie hadn’t made it back from France; three months had passed, but the wound still felt raw. Too raw for flowers to pacify, thought Raymond, but flowers were all they had – and Leah had her heart set on the gesture.

‘Here,’ said Raymond. He picked up a bouquet of orange and lilac roses and quickly palmed coins into the hands of the florist, who dashed about bringing in her wares. ‘Hold tight to them, Leah – and hold tight to me. We’ve got to move.’

Rags of people hurried down the Whitechapel Road. As Raymond started to run, steadying his pace so that Leah could keep up, he saw families vanish into side-streets, saw shop fronts go suddenly dark, heard shutters coming down and doors being slammed shut. At the Stepney Green Underground station, a huddle of panicked passers-by were piling down the stairs, only to be met by the crowd of travellers just disgorged by the railway below. ‘It isn’t far,’ said Raymond. He knew these streets like the back of his hand; he’d take her through the back alleys if he had to. Though he’d spent the better part of his life waltzing his way through the ballrooms and palaces of Europe, winning prizes for his tango, his foxtrot, his elegant Viennese waltz, these rough-and-ready East End streets were where he and his late brother used to roam. He still remembered the switchbacks and shortcuts of his boyhood. He took to them now.

He had just hustled Leah off the Whitechapel Road when the first quake shook the London streets. Instinctively, Leah threw herself against the wall. By the time Raymond had whispered some calm into her ear, the second explosion was coming from the east. The Luftwaffe were trying to raze the dockland again. That was their principal aim, Raymond thought – cut the city off, blockade it from help, grind it into submission. ‘Leah,’ he whispered, ‘Vivienne’s waiting. They’re safe at home, out back in the shelter. We could be too. We just have to get there.’

Leah picked herself up, tried to shake down her fear. It was only when Raymond gripped her by the shoulders and gazed into her eyes with his own rich, dark ones that his calmness washed over her. She nodded, nodded again, and clasped his hand. ‘How far is it?’

‘Mere moments, sweetheart,’ he told her. Raymond had no daughter of his own, but in this moment she might have been his; his heart called out to hers. ‘Vivienne’s there, and Nancy’s there, baby Stan and my mother too.’ Just a Sunday afternoon, a chance for the disparate family to unite over tea and cakes and pretend, for a few hours, that the war was happening somewhere else. Nobody had expected the bombs to rain down in broad daylight. The night was when battle happened; when the sun shone down, it was meant to be calm. ‘Just stay with me. Say no to the fear. I’m going to get you there.’

Raymond saw the effect of his words. The shimmer of tears retreated from her eyes; her jaw was fixed, the trembles gone. He drew back to his full height. ‘Stand behind me,’ he told her. He’d carry her if he had to; he’d carried his brother Artie in the end as well. ‘Let’s—’

But he never got the chance to finish that sentence, because before he took his next breath, the screaming of a falling bomb tore open the skies. Next second, the Whitechapel Road erupted in fire, smoke and devastation. A rampaging wall of dust and debris rushed outwards in an unstoppable wave. And all that Raymond could hear, through the ringing in his ears, was Leah’s petrified scream as she buried her face in his breast, the once-perfect flowers soiled and sandwiched between them.

Mrs Moffatt was so absorbed by the smoke trails scarring the blue sky that she did not hear her name being called, nor the cantering of footsteps as two figures clamoured to reach her in the heart of Berkeley Square. The summer scents filled her lungs with every breath – but the only thing that filled her heart was terror.

Not terror for herself.

Terror for a loved one, in the heavens above …

‘Mrs Moffatt?’ a voice was calling. Billy’s voice, she knew. He’d been here some moments before, but then – when she hadn’t given in to his pleas and demands – he’d run away, left her there in the heart of Berkeley Square. Now he had returned, to find her sobbing and unmoved. ‘Mrs Moffatt, I brought someone who might—’

Another RAF plane banked overhead, its guns ablaze as it stalked one of the Stukas over the skyline. To the other onlookers at the Buckingham Hotel, it must have been a thing of hope – to see the good old boys of the Royal Air Force rallying to repel the invaders – but, to Emmeline Moffatt, no sight could have incurred more terror. Her heart nearly stopped in her breast. She found that she could take no breath. Only when the planes had vanished, leaving their ghostly contrails behind, did she gasp for air. By then, the pressure was nearly too much. She staggered, uncertain of her own feet – and would have pitched forward into the grass on Berkeley Square, if hands hadn’t reached out to catch her.

Not Billy’s hands, she realised.

It was Archie Adams.

‘Archie?’

‘I went to fetch him, Mrs Moffatt. I didn’t know what else I could do.’

‘Emmeline,’ came Archie’s softly spoken voice. Only a voice like that, thought Mrs Moffatt, could unknot the fear that had been building in her breast. Only a man like Archie could remain so calm and in control, while war was being waged all around him. She supposed Billy had found him where he always went when the bombs rained down – with his Orchestra, in the shelters beneath the Queen Mary restaurant, his eyes closed as he listened to the gramophone gently playing; music, the only true escape from the terrors of this mortal world. The girls in Housekeeping said that Mrs Moffatt and Archie were more than friends, though of course nobody had ever seen them step out on an evening together. But Archie Adams was known to take tea in the Housekeeping Lounge after hours, and to have ordered a bright bouquet for Mrs Moffatt’s birthday on Midsummer’s Eve. The girls said they could always tell when Archie had paid Mrs Moffatt a visit, for she was less strict about punctuality at the morning breakfast, and paid less attention to the details as she inspected their work at the end of each shift. Those stories had evidently found their way to Billy as well. In any other circumstance, Mrs Moffatt might have been mortified – but here was Archie, quite possibly the only man who could set her back on her feet.

‘Archie,’ Mrs Moffatt whispered, ‘he’s up there, I know it. It’s his turn, his turn!’

‘Oh, Emmeline.’

‘My boy,’ Mrs Moffatt quaked. ‘Fighting – fighting in the skies.’

How cruel, this feeling. How all-consuming, the fear that a love just found might so suddenly be dashed. Mrs Moffatt had only just rediscovered Malcolm, the son she’d been forced to give up for adoption when she herself was little more than a girl – and perhaps it was this that made the thought of losing him seem so acute. In her darkest moments, she felt as if she almost deserved it; why should somebody who’d never kissed a grazed knee, or brushed a boy’s tangled hair, suddenly be gifted with the beauty of becoming a mother? At nights, she would lie awake, imagining the horror of his death: trapped in a burning cockpit, tumbling from the skies, nobody to hear his final words, no body to grieve over, just as – once upon a time – there’d been no baby to love. All of the knots inside her had become unbearable. She wanted to sail into the skies and sit beside him, to be his gunner, to mop his brow, to whisper in his ear that everything was going to be all right – that he was her brave boy, that she was proud of him, that she was sorry, sorry, sorry … but of course it was all so foolish. She was Emmeline Moffatt, housekeeper at a luxury hotel; the feeling of it was powerlessness, pure and simple.

She was glad to have Archie’s arms around her.

Only Archie could lead her away from those darkest thoughts.

All of a sudden, she realised what she’d done, how irrespon­sible she’d been. It wasn’t just she who was standing in the middle of Berkeley Square. Poor Billy Brogan was here as well – and that was because of her. She imagined how his leg, maimed somewhere in the English Channel, must have played hell with him as he lurched back along Michaelmas Mews, hurtling to fetch help. She could imagine how he’d marched through his pain, across the barren Queen Mary restaurant – where the tables would be laid out like epitaphs to abandoned afternoon teas – and down into the cellars. What courage it had taken for Billy to return. What courage for Archie Adams too. And it was she, Emmeline Moffatt, who’d put them in that peril – all because of that uncontrollable feeling in her heart, the feeling that to lose her son again would be the end of everything.

She clambered to hold on to Archie, who lifted her up and held her tight.

‘Emmeline, dear?’

Mrs Moffatt trembled. ‘They buried his best friend last week. Peter. He went down somewhere over Liverpool. There’ll be boys being burned up tonight. They’re saying none of them will last. It’s suicide, Archie.’

‘Now, Emmeline—’

He held her even more tightly now. For a fleeting moment, she felt like a cornered animal – but something in Arch