The Dreams of Fair Women

by Alexander Cordell

Genres: Action & Adventure; Historical Fiction; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

Hong Kong in the nineteenth century: a heady, overwhelming mixture of worldly commercialism, moral corruption and Eastern tradition. Into this strange and exciting world, on board the S.S. Mongolia comes Milly Smith, daughter of a Hong Kong tycoon, destined for a marriage of convenience to a greedy financier. But during the course of her journey Milly has attracted the attentions of fellow passanger, the wild and dashing pirate, Eli boggs. Set against a turbulent historical backdrop of Hong Kong's piracy, the slave trade and the infamous Opium War, The Dreams of Fair Women is a classic historical adventure from the author of The Rape of the Fair Country.

Release date: September 4, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 384

Sample

Milly Smith, at the rail of the old S.S. Mongolia, watched the coaling coolies filling up the ship’s bunkers. The sun slanted rays of incinerating light and oppressive heat from a sky of blue: summer, it appeared, had replaced spring in an otherwise typical Malayan morning. Earlier, Captain O’Toole, as Irish and diminutive as a Galway leprechaun, had come fussing down the deck to join her. ‘Top o’ the morning’ to ye, girl! Is it me you’re hanging about for, or the big handsome tea-planters comin’ aboard from the jungle?’

‘Forget about tea-planters,’ said Milly, mimicking his Irish brogue. ‘Shave off that beard, lose twenty years, and you’re me boy.’

The captain leaned on the rail beside her, his eyes narrowed to the strickening light.

So far on this trip he carried only this passenger aboard, and he liked her: though young she was unpretentious, had a happy outlook on life, and since leaving Liverpool the pair of them had enjoyed interesting conversations; a rare commodity on a broken down old tub like this one, carrying a German mate and a mixed crew of Chinese and Lascars. In a minor way it was for O’Toole a finale to his forty years at sea; a tom-boy affinity which reminded him of someone out of his past. Vaguely the old captain hoped that their relationship would not be spoiled when the noisy, ill-mannered, up-jungle planters came aboard at midday.

‘Dear God, it’s hot.’ Milly wiped her perspiring face. ‘They tell me you can fry an egg on the pavement.’

‘Aye, and worst of all is hanging around here before we slip moorings.’ Cupping his hands to his mouth, he shouted, ‘Hurry it along, Bo’sun, we’re due out on the afternoon tide, remember!’

The pygmy coolies on the wharf below quickened under their loads; in varying hues of gold and quicksilver the harbour reflected rays of refracted light, slanting down upon the surrounding Malayan hills, dancing in the rippling wastes of translucent water.

‘How long before we reach Hong Kong?’ asked Milly, and O’Toole stared about him. White duck-suited Europeans and their servants scurried amid shrieked commands and flapping P and O bills of lading. Beyond the cranespiked dockland the white façades of colonial government houses shimmered under the molten sun of a tropical midday. Somewhere out there, beyond the stink and swirling coal dust, thought O’Toole, clutches of civil servants eased their collars under the coolie-operated ceiling fans, chattering aimlessly about nothing in particular while their white-gowned wives and mistresses idly contemplated, within the soporific haze of lunch-time gin and bitters, the scandals of English social gatherings.

Out of the corner of his eye the captain saw Milly’s youthful profile; beautiful with a very English quality, he thought, had it not been for the schoolgirl’s freckled nose. Her hair was the colour of jet, a lustrous black which hung in plaits either side of her face. Privately the captain pitied her.

‘I asked how long before we get to Hong Kong?’ repeated Milly, her voice invading his thoughts.

‘How long? About a week if the weather holds, though the glass is dropping.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘A rainstorm, if we’re lucky. A typhoon if we’re not. Then all hell breaks loose.’

‘You’re a happy soul!’

O’Toole patted her hand as it rested on the rail. ‘Don’t you worry. Come hell or high water, this old tub will make it. She’s weathered South China Sea hurricanes, was nearly overturned by sand-piles in a dust storm off Port Said, and has been set afire by pirates – she’ll see us safe in Hong Kong harbour.’

‘Pirates?’

He gave a grin. ‘This is the Far East, and we’re steering a course through the opium smuggling routes.’

‘I thought pirates only appeared in story books.’

‘Off the English coast they do, but this is the China Run, and we’re a century behind the times.’

Milly looked at the sky.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

Milly did not reply.

She was thinking that her life to date, initially quiet and uneventful, was now racing towards its destiny, carrying her along with it at an alarming speed.

Within a few months of her seventeenth birthday her father’s letter had arrived – a rare event that sent her into a flurry of excitement. But his message, as usual, was brief.

A marriage, apparently, had been arranged; James Wedderburn, a business associate, was to be the groom and Milly the bride. Which, she now thought bitterly, was apparently the way they did things in Hong Kong: without emotion, affection, and often without the agreement of one of the parties. In which respect she was lucky, some told her; other girls had been whisked away to the Far East as prospective concubines to fat gentlemen old enough to be their fathers.

Now, with the prospective bridegroom coming up on the port side, so to speak, the closer she got to the Hong Kong waterfront, the more appalling the prospect appeared. The one consolation, perhaps, was that Mamie, her beloved Mamie, would be there to greet her.

The black housekeeper, now over forty and employed since her childhood in the Smith household, had proved Milly’s friend and companion in the days following the death of her mother. Indeed, had anyone asked Milly Smith who her mother was in those far off days, she would probably have said it was Mamie. But when, at the age of eleven, her father, returning to Hong Kong, had packed her off to the boarding school, he had taken Mamie with him: which meant that there was not even an adopted mother to come home to. School holidays were therefore usually spent within the confines of a deserted school; wandering down empty, echoing corridors and taking tea with resident teachers who didn’t really want to be bothered.

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ said Captain O’Toole.

‘Perfectly,’ she answered, coming out of her reverie.

In his time O’Toole had shipped many such young women East for marriage to prospective suitors. When it came to shot-gun weddings, he thought, the British colonials weren’t far behind the Indians.

Beauty, of course, was the criterion when fulfilling a young woman’s marital hopes; and often the hopes weren’t hers, but those of a calculating relative. And while many a duke had been waylaid by the impoverished uncle of a beautiful serving-maid, mostly such marriages of convenience were nothing more than business negotiations.

Sweating badly, the captain moved uncomfortably in his white uniform. This poor child was just another such marriage contract, he thought, for he happened to know Sir Arthur Smith, her father: a man with his fingers in a dozen financial pies, including a directorship of the Peninsular and Oriental Shipping Company, which owned this old rust-bucket.

Milly’s situation had become immediately clear to O’Toole; she was a commodity of doubtful value brought straight out of a dormitory school to be sold off as an old man’s darling. Earlier, he had seen her portrait hanging in Sir Arthur’s Marine Department in Pedder Street, Hong Kong: she was scarcely high value in the marriage stakes. However, what she lacked in womanly looks Milly made up for in personality, he thought: an unimportant attribute, perhaps, when it came to a society match. Reflectively, O’Toole cursed the system where unwanted daughters were brutally shipped back home to Britain or condemned to lives of unpaid and mistreated companions to some old hag twice their age. He hoped that Milly didn’t prove to be one of these.

‘Have you met your prospective husband?’ he asked.

‘No, but I know what he looks like.’ Milly fingered a little silver locket hanging at her throat and snapped it open.

O’Toole saw the face of a middle-aged man, fleshy, florid, with greying side-whiskers; fifty if he was a day, he thought. He happened to know James Wedderburn Esquire, of Smith and Wedderburn, the shipping agents, and from what he’d heard Wedderburn’s business activities were anything but savoury.

‘What does your mother think about it – marrying by proxy as it were?’

‘My mother died when I was born.’

‘How do you feel about it?’

‘It’s what Father wants. He worries a lot, he says, about us being so far apart.’

‘Sure to God,’ said O’Toole, his anger emphasising his Irishness, ‘it’s what you are wanting, isn’t it? What’s it to do with yer feyther?’

A breeze blew between them, touching their faces with hot fingers; the deck beneath them trembled to the loading. O’Toole sensed a greater affinity growing between them.

‘Are you making a mistake, young Milly?’

‘Probably.’ She lowered her face, then, glancing up, smiled brilliantly, instantly beautiful.

‘Wedderburn’s twice your age.’

The reply came quickly. ‘The younger ones have all been snapped up by local beauties.’

This was true; the extraordinary good looks of the Chinese and Eurasians captivated the most diffident Hong Kong bachelors though not before they had served the usual male apprenticeship in the Mist and Flower bordellos then flourishing along the waterfront. Now the captain said, with a bold attempt at humour, ‘Why not hold your fire until you take yer pick o’ the savages due aboard?’

‘Savages?’

‘The equivalent – the jungle tea-planters from upcountry.’

A smile touched her mouth. ‘Now that sounds interesting!’

‘If we survive them – because, from what I hear these days they’re the spawn of the Devil.’

‘Have you met any of them?’

‘Only one, their present foreman. Time was he was respectable; came down from Shanghai when he was still a boy and became a compradore – a supplier of goods to the shops and clubs. But that wasn’t enough for Eli. He was a Baltimore lad and bound to get on. He wanted big profits and to get rich quick, so he went into tea-planting.’

‘He’s an American?’

‘And as tough as they make ’em. Take my tip and stay locked in your cabin – he’s a devil for the women.’

‘Now it becomes even more interesting.’

‘You behave yourself. It’s my job to get ye into the arms of your feyther in one piece: a month from then ye’ll be a respectable married woman, they tell me.’

‘Don’t remind me!’

The first mate, a big fair German, called him then, and O’Toole left to supervise the loading. But before he went Milly flashed him a smile, one he would always remember; most people he thought, smiled with their mouths, but this girl did it with her entire soul.

‘You should smile more often, Milly Smith,’ he said.

Sweetcorn, a pig-tailed Chinese waiter, so named because of his addiction to things American, brought Milly a cup of morning coffee as she sat in a deck-chair. His Mission English was good.

‘You wait looksee for tea-planters come aboard, Missy?’ And he pointed. ‘Quick, kwai-kwai, they come now, eh?’

At the rail again Milly saw a gaggle of rickshaws come racing along the coaling-wharf: hooting like Sioux Indians their occupants arrived, all save one clearly drunk, urging their runners to greater speed.

‘You know these people?’ she asked.

Nodding, his round, yellow face regarded her. ‘Sweetcorn knows everybody on the China Run, Missy.’

‘You know their names, then?’ She nodded down at the quay.

‘Only one – Big Eli, the foreman. Others just drunks. All very bad men, Missy, and chase wicked, bad women.’ He pointed to where the rickshaws had stopped, their six passengers getting out shakily; one, a big man in a white pith helmet to match his white suit, was paying off the coolies.

‘See him – big fighter? That’s Foreman Eli.’

‘Big fighter?’

‘Velly bad man. One time I work up-jungle way. Always fighting and chasing pretty ladies. For many months they all pick tea with natives, and Malayan girls run quick with Eli after them – I see it. kwai-kwai runnin’, but that Eli quicker. You never heard such a hollerin’ when he do catch ’em. Me Mission-trained, Missy, and read Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. You know Bible, Missy?’

She gave him a smile. ‘Pretty well.’

‘You know how many words in Old Testament?’

‘I’m afraid not!’

‘Then Sweetcorn say and one day you tell your children! Old Testament nearly 60,000 words, New Testament 182,000. I count them.’

‘Good gracious!’

‘No words in Bible more’n six syllables – you know this?’

‘Really?’

‘And littlest verse is 35 of 11th Chapter St John. You want more?’

‘I can see you know your Bible, Sweetcorn!’

‘Better’n Eli Boggs. Hell-smoke comes out o’ his ears! Velly bad man.’

‘What else do you know about him?’

‘On Hong Kong side they do not like him in the English clubs. He got bloody rough talk, too, beggin’ your pardon, but that’s a fact. One time, too, I serve dinner at English table in Hong Kong Club, but I have not seen him since. You know this club?’

‘Not yet,’ replied Milly.

‘Me waiter there when Eli was compradore man, selling groceries, see? And fat old English lady says to me: “Boy”, she says, “you serve these shelled oysters frozen, do you? Not in Hong Kong you don’t, so take them away and unfreeze them properly”, she says. “Also, you call this meat lamb, do you?”

‘“Very lambin’, Missy,” I told her. “Also, oysters out of ice-box from England, very cold, beg your pardon.”

‘“Don’t argue with me, or you’ll go out on the street,” says she. And sitting beside her is that Eli getting stiff with whisky, but very kind to Chinese people, mind you. And he says, polite, “Ma’am, allow me to assure you on one point. You say this meat on your plate is not lamb?”

‘“It is pork, young man. Allow me to know the difference.”

‘“Spring lamb, Ma’am,’ says Eli, “for I am the compradore and I smuggled it in myself. As for the oysters, they always arrive frozen or don’t keep.” Lots o’ gents up on their legs and with fists up at Eli, and the lady shouted, “Can anyone tell me how this drunken American got in here?’”

‘Good God,’ whispered Milly.

‘Yes, yes,’ added Sweetcorn. ‘Good God I say, too, for this English lady said, “Get him out, you hear me? Throw him out!’”

‘What happened?’ whispered Milly.

‘Then many people come, soldiers in blue and red uniforms, too, and get hold of Eli to throw him out, and the table goes over and the wine is spilled and men fallin’ unconscious with Eli hittin’ ’em out, and he shouted: “If she don’t know the difference between pork and lamb, she’s no housewife, damn her eyes! And if she wants her oysters warm, I suggest they go down here.” And he shovels them shelled oysters right down the front of her – very large lady, you understand, very big topside.’

‘No!’ shrieked Milly.

‘Yes!’ cried Sweetcorn. ‘And now there’s trouble, with the fat lady fainting, people fanning her, and her husband fishing down the front for oysters. I tell you, Missy, this Eli causes offences tremendous, so the men got hold of him and threw him out and the Hong Kong Club don’t get oysters off Eli Boggs no more. No sir.’

‘Eli who?’ gasped Milly, straightening.

‘Eli Boggs,’ said Sweetcorn, and Milly giggled helplessly.

‘Boggs? I don’t believe it!’

‘Here he comes now,’ added Sweetcorn, standing stiffly to attention.

Eli Boggs, striding down the deck, bowed low to Milly. His face was weatherbeaten; his hair a mass of black curls. ‘Aha,’ said he, ‘this must be the passenger Cap’n O’Toole mentioned. Eli Boggs, Ma’am, at your service.’

Still stifling laughter, Milly curtsied demurely, her eyes cast down.

‘I see you’re enjoying the company of our good friend Sweetcorn.’ And saying this he tapped his forehead and secretly pulled a face at Milly. ‘You workin’ aboard this old barnacle these days, my friend?’ he asked the steward.

‘Work for P and O now, Mr Eli. Don’t work Hong Kong Club no more.’

‘Thank God for that. Neither do I.’ And Eli bowed again to Milly, adding, ‘Later, with your permission, lady, we’ll become better acquainted.’

‘I look foward to it,’ she replied, and the moment Sweetcorn had left them, asked, ‘Isn’t he quite the ticket, then?’

‘Mad as a hatter,’ said Eli. ‘He’s a good cabin steward – I’ve travelled with him before – but anything Sweetcorn tells you you take with a pinch of salt, so ye do.’

Good gracious, thought Milly, another Irishman, and mentioned it.

‘As Irish as Killarney on me mother’s side,’ explained Eli.

Meanwhile Captain O’Toole was watching from his position on the bridge; knowing Eli’s reputation, he decided to keep an eye on the pair of them.

The ancient Mongolia steamed along at a merry rate. With dolphins showing the way and flying fish skimming the wave-tops, she headed eastward for the wastes of the South China Sea. Eli was in a fine hearty mood as he joined Milly and the captain at breakfast.

‘Top o’ the mornin’,’ cried O’Toole, his usual greeting.

‘And fair weather to you, me Irish friend,’ replied Eli. ‘Is the glass holding?’

‘As well as can be expected, but if it starts to blow we’ll be due for a tipsy. Do ye come this way often these days, Mr Boggs?’

Sweetcorn, his face expressionless, served egg and bacon to Milly and black coffee to Eli, who replied: ‘When the season demands, for Malaya is the work-place and Hong Kong the playground.’ He turned to Milly. ‘They tell me you’re packin’ your bag for marriage up there. That true?’

‘’Tis a lucky fella awaiting her, for sure,’ said the captain. ‘I’ve proposed to her twice this trip so far, but she’ll have nothin’ to do wi’ the Irish.’

Eli tipped back his chair, his hands round his mug of coffee. ‘Do I know the lucky man? I’m in Hong Kong a lot, and swear I’ve seen you before.’

‘This is my first trip East,’ she said.

‘Have ye been in the Marine Department lately, Mr Boggs?’ asked the captain, and Eli snapped his fingers and sat upright.

‘Got it! The portrait hanging in the Marine Superintendent’s office! Spit and image of the girl!’ He leaned foward, interested. ‘Then you’re the daughter of Sir Arthur Smith – I heard you were coming out.’

‘Heir to the family fortune,’ interjected O’Toole, ‘and she’s already promised elsewhere.’

‘I asked her if I knew the lucky man,’ he said, watching Milly closely.

‘Ah, it’s a state secret till the date’s announced,’ replied O’Toole. ‘But you’ll know it soon enough, for there’s not much misses the gossipmongers of the Fragrant Isle. Meanwhile, are your lads settled in?’

‘Give tea-planters a bellyful of food and a hammock and they settle anywhere,’ said Eli. ‘I’m the one ye should be askin’ about – last time I was aboard a P and O I got the stateroom cabin.’

He grinned at Milly, his white teeth flashing in his brown face, adding with a sigh, ‘It’s entirely unfair, so it is. There’s the likes of me, out there in the jungle with never a lass to show a care, and these top Hong Kong fellas wi’ the pick of the English fillies.’

‘Me heart bleeds for you, Mr Boggs,’ said O’Toole, rising from his chair. ‘I’ve yet to see you up-jungle fellas go short on anything, includin’ English fillies.’ And he flickered a wink at Milly, and left them.

She stirred her coffee abstractedly, aware of the eyes of the man before her; they were dark brown beneath his jutting brows, eyes that constantly changed expression, she noticed; full of gentleness one moment, fiercely inquiring the next, silently voicing unspoken questions. Yet they were eyes that never betrayed the inner man.

Eli, for his part, was remembering a woman he had known long ago. The faint perfume of this girl’s presence brought memories rushing back with unbelievable force, transporting Eli to the time when one like her had stood beside him on a wind-swept deck: a moment from another age. Ten years ago? he wondered. Was it really so long?

When he was twenty he had married the woman and taken her East to make his fortune. Annette was her name, a girl from Paris. In the second summer of their marriage in Hong Kong she conceived, and in childbirth caught the fever along with her infant and died. Now, in the tranquil, clear profile of the girl on the other side of the table, he saw Annette again, and it was if the long intervening years – a time when he had relentlessly pursued and possessed Chinese, Malayan and Eurasian – had never been. Momentarily, he was gazing once more into the cornflower eyes of that first love; reliving the days when she, with all her French charm, had come to him in the rollicking nights of the voyages between Hong Kong and Macao.

Milly raised her eyes.

‘You are staring, Mr Boggs!’

‘I’m sorry!’ Eli moved awkwardly. ‘I was thinkin’ of your portrait in the Marine Office …’

The old ship trembled to the rotation of her engines; below the fathomless sea swept in unseen eddies, and above, a June sun slanted down with searing rays into cool, translucent depths: home of countless strange and wonderful sea-creatures and the littered sandbed of a thousand wrecks.

‘She was about your age, that’s all,’ he said.

‘Who?’

‘Oh, it don’t matter. But I knew you long before I saw that painting in your father’s office.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Of course not. Shall we go up on deck?’

Eli Boggs, thought Milly, was an enigma; a man of half sentences who expected a listener’s imagination to complete his subtle pauses. Together they surveyed the placid ocean.

‘Will you be staying in Hong Kong?’ asked Milly.

‘No chance. The lads and I work for eleven months of the year, then come east and let our hair down. There’s five of us – myself, a Malay, a black, and two Hong Kong Chinese who have wives in Shaukiwan.’

‘The pirate area?’

Eli glanced swiftly at her. ‘You know of it?’

‘My father wrote and told me. The scum of the China Sea, he called them.’

He shrugged. ‘Depends upon your views. Perhaps the really dirty people are those running the opium trade; compared to them the Bias Bay pirates work for a pittance. The big opium taipans are the ones who make the loot.’

‘He also said that the authorities are clamping down on smuggling and the British fleet is patrolling the Pearl River.’

He smiled. ‘You’re well informed.’

‘As I say, I get it from my father’s letters. And since we’ve become engaged, James writes almost every week. As head of the Marine Department under my father he knows most of what is going on.’

‘James Wedderburn, the Superintendent?’

Milly nodded. ‘The man I am going to marry.’

His face showed astonishment. ‘But he’s fifty!’

‘What of it?’

The sea below them parted in swathes of white-laced foam as the old ship, creaking and groaning, blundered on like a plump woman in tight stays waddling off to market. Eli opened his mouth to speak, but she said, ‘My business, I think?’

‘I’m just a bit surprised, that’s all.’

‘So are most people.’

He began to walk and she joined him. ‘I believe James Wedderburn is a good man and he’s done a lot for the Marine Office. You know him well?’

‘Fair to middlin’. I had a bit to do with him when he got the Piracy Ordinance through Government at the last Session – got a good legal mind.’

‘That’s what my father said.’

‘Which is not to say that he’ll make the best of husbands!’

‘I’ll be the judge of that.’

It was supposed to deter further questions, but did not.

‘Certainly he’s put the wind up the Big Eyed Chickens since he took over.’

‘Big Eyed Chickens?’

‘Pirates. When you see a Chinese junk with cannon aboard and two eyes painted on its prow, it’s up to no good, folks say.’

‘Until now I thought piracy went out with the last century.’

‘Not in these parts. China’s always behind the times. From here up to Bias Bay and west to Macau, the place is swarming with ’em.’

He was handsome, thought Milly. And like most handsome men he knew it, and was possessed of that lazy grace that is the hallmark of strength. His jacket, open to the waist, exposed ridges of muscle; when he smiled, which was often, he was every inch the predatory male. She judged his age to be thirty, and wondered if he was married.

As if reading her thoughts, he said suddenly, as they strolled along, ‘I saw my first Big Eyed Chickens ten years back, when I was just twenty. They came aboard off the Paracels – the day after tomorrow we’ll be abreast of those – a cluster of islands off the Gulf of Tonkin. There’s pirates and pirates, and these were the scum your father mentioned. The first thing they did was hang the captain, then threw half the crew overboard and tied up the rest.’

‘How terrible!’

‘I got away by lowering myself astern and hiding under the rudder. After they’d pillaged the ship they set it on fire and cast it adrift.’

‘You escaped?’

‘Or I wouldn’t be here, me darlin’! I climbed back on deck and untied the crew.’ He smiled up at the sun. ‘Ten years … it seems a lifetime. I was on my way to Hong Kong to be married, just like you.’

‘What was her name?’

‘Annette – about your age, but you’re dark, and she was fair. She had a waist like that,’ and he made a circle with his fingers.

‘And you’re going to her now?’

‘Good God, no. She died years ago.’ He shrugged as a man does when empty of emotion. ‘She had a French father, but her mother was Chinese. We were together for six months in Hong Kong, but being a Eurasian she was never accepted. Snobby damned lot!’ He swore for the first time, turning violently away.

‘To be of French extraction was frowned upon – Hong Kong never got over the Battle of Waterloo! But to be half Chinese … our marriage put the pair of us beyond the pale. Social conventions rule that place. We suffered, the pair of us.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be, Miss Smith. Just make sure, in your cosy little English corner, that you never get like that.’

She could not take offence, such was his sincerity.

‘How did your wife die?’

‘Childbed fever. The Chinese midwife had dirty fingers. I hunted the place for a European doctor, then couldn’t raise the money; in the end I finished up in the slum quarter.’

‘You didn’t marry again?’

‘At my age I’d be wantin’ me head examined! I’m footloose, fancy free, just take life as it comes.’

‘And the ladies too, I hear,’ said Captain O’Toole, joining them. He patted Milly’s hand. ‘So you’d be best advised, sweet colleen, to give this rogue a wide berth, like I said.’

‘Sure, I’m only after walkin’ the deck, and my intentions are innocent entirely,’ Eli protested.

Milly said happily, in her best Irish brogue, ‘For certain sure, with an Irishman either side, I don’t know who to believe!’

Later, with the midsummer moon hanging like a Dutch cheese on the rim of the world, Milly dressed for dinner, bringing out of her little cabin wardrobe the bright green gown that she had seen advertised in the Journal of Modes, a fashion magazine which had circulated the schoolroom. The gown reached to the floor, the skirt voluminous, the bodice cut low to a daring degree and off the shoulder. She remembered that somebody had said she possessed the best pair of shoulders in Broadhurst: ‘Make the most of them,’ a friend called Maisie had advised. ‘Like me, you’re better from the back than the front.’ Milly was indeed sadly aware that in the area of womanly curves she was almost totally deficient.

Pulling on her long white lace-trimmed pantaloons, she tied them at the waist with a large red bow, an act considered by matrons to be the height of provocation. Then, sitting at her little mirrored table, with utmost care, Milly applied the first powder and rouge she had ever used: sufficient to enhance her peaches and cream complexion but insufficient to label her a fallen woman. Pleased with the result, she stood . . .