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‘We can leave now if you’d prefer.’

‘No, no! Papa. I want to see Ophelia again.’

‘It ends tragically, you know.’ He spoke gently, putting his hand on hers.

‘I know. I read the play with Miss Stafford, but we can’t leave now.’ Her eyes returned to the stage. Many in the crowd knew the great soliloquies and intoned them along with Kean.

Lady Linus was obviously irritated by how much interaction the audience in the pit thought they could have with the play. She leaned across to catch Ivor Asprey’s attention and said clearly in her crisply enunciated voice, ‘I wish the lower orders would hold their tongues so we could enjoy Shakespeare’s words, spoken by the actors alone.’

A tall man below them in a neat coat and with hair waxed into a frozen seascape glanced up with a frown and lobbed a half-eaten currant bun into their box. It landed plumb in Lady Linus’s silk lap. Elinor suppressed a giggle and quickly picked it up and lobbed it back, hitting another man on the back of the head.

‘Elinor! Don’t encourage this unruliness,’ Portia Linus said crossly, her colour rising.

Ivor looked across at his daughter’s bright face with an inscrutable expression and said quellingly, ‘I don’t expect my daughter to start a bread-throwing war with the pit.’ His tone was remonstrative but his eyes gleamed as they met hers.

The restive audience stilled. Onto the stage drifted a vision that made Elinor and half the audience gasp. Ophelia was almost unrecognisable in her floating chemise, her cascade of golden hair released from the formal powdered wig curling in fine ringlets down her back.

‘Papa!’ The word was more an exhalation.

‘This is the scene where Ophelia has gone mad. Recall now, she’s only acting.’ The audience had fallen into a tense silence. Elinor’s eyes were fixed on the figure as she meandered through the glade, playing her lyre and singing disjointed phrases in a distracted voice.

‘She is so beautiful. Like an angel.’ The young girl was mesmerised by the sight of her flitting through the shadows to the back of the stage where a stream appeared to flow under a willow tree. She knew from her reading that Ophelia drowned but was unprepared to see it happen on stage. ‘No!’ she cried, turning to her father. ‘She can’t die with us watching, doing nothing.’

Some women in the audience seemed to agree with her for there were stifled cries at the sight of Ophelia slipping into the stream. Audiences had a life of their own and each night was different. This time there was a palpable sense of the tragedy of it all as her lifeless form, dripping with water, was carefully carried away, her hair almost sweeping the ground. A mournful lament from the pit followed her tragic passage.

Elinor Asprey turned her face and buried it in her father’s chest, sobbing with a heart-rending whisper, ‘She can’t die. She’s so young. It’s too sad.’ Her father put his arm around her thin shoulders and patted her gently, aware of the echo of the tragedy that had befallen their own family.

Lady Linus leaned across to stroke her hand as she said consolingly, ‘It’s only acting, Elinor. She’s not really dead.’

‘She looked dead.’ The girl hiccoughed.

‘The actress is very good at her craft,’ her father said, his expression grim.

‘Will she come on at the end and show us she’s alive?’

‘No, I don’t think she will. She will be warming up backstage.’

‘Well, then can I see her? Or I’ll be haunted for ever,’ Elinor said with melodramatic emphasis.

‘Now you’re being a bit affected and missish, Elinor.’ Lady Linus was disapproving of girlish histrionics.

‘Well, I am just a miss, so why should I be any different?’ was her tearful but defiant reply.

Her father stepped in with a soothing drawl, ‘Come now, Elinor. I’ll take you to see Miss Leigh after the play is over, but we can’t stay long.’

‘If so, I’ll wait for you in the chaise,’ Lady Linus said in a clipped tone of voice. ‘You know I don’t approve of the thespian professions.’

‘Of course, my dear. I’ll only take Elinor backstage after I’ve found my groom and can settle you comfortably.’

* * *

Angelica was particularly exhausted by the evening’s performance and was feeling the cold more acutely. Her teeth were chattering as Mary put her chilled fingers around the cup of hot chocolate. Her damp hair tumbled round her face and she pulled her gown close. There was a light tap at the door and Mary opened it to the dissolute face of Lord Rackham. ‘May I enter for a moment?’ he purred.

Angelica’s heart sank. Cato Rackham was a determined and practised seducer who enjoyed as sport the pursuit of reluctant lovers. This was his fifth visit backstage. She knew how influential he was, in Parliament and Society, and she was reluctant to cross him. He was capable of ruining her in many different ways. She rose to her feet and extended a hand.

‘My dear, how chilled you are,’ he protested as he brushed her fingers across his lips, prolonging the gesture for just a few seconds longer than propriety decreed.

‘Lord Rackham, how kind of you to come.’