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Despite Maltby’s arm barring the way, the library door was smartly opened and Miss Payton burst in, immaculately dressed but with an unfamiliar wild look around the eyes. For a moment, she did not understand the significance of what she saw; Mr Shilton standing very close to that unexceptional drab of a young woman, both of them looking rosy-countenanced and reckless. The message Miss Payton had come to deliver mattered more than anything and she blurted out, ‘Ferdinand, I’ve made a mistake.’

Madeleine was immediately roused from Ferdy’s embrace and knew her presence thus in his library was scandalous. Signalling to Dot, they made a hasty retreat.

‘Just wait a moment, Miss Rose,’ Ferdy Shilton called out in a choked voice.

‘Goodbye, Mr Shilton,’ Madeleine said weakly as she closed the library door behind her.

They were on the pavement before either woman spoke. Dot said, ‘Bless me, Miss! That lady’s Mr Shilton’s betrothed, ain’t she?’

Madeleine was overcome with shame and misery. ‘I know. What was I thinking in letting Mr Shilton kiss me? Just a common Jezebel! Oh, Dot!’

‘Well, it’s clear he esteems ye and ye think well of him. No harm’s done.’

‘Don’t say that! Mr Shilton is a gentleman and has promised his hand to Miss Payton and on his honour, he cannot go back on that.’

They were hurrying up Grosvenor Street, keen to escape the sharp raindrops falling out of a sunny, blue sky. Even the weather seemed to be flouting the received conventions.

Dot pulled on Madeleine’s sleeve. ‘But Miss Rose, didn’t you hear Miss Payton say she had changed her mind. Could be she doesn’t want to be married after all?’

Madeleine stopped dead and turned to look at her, the rain bouncing off their bonnets and pelisses. She said to her maid in a fierce whisper, ‘If Miss Payton has rushed in to say the marriage is off, then she’s even more dull-witted than she looks!’ She was then ashamed of her jealousy and, taking Dot by the hand, hauled her into her cousins’ house and dashed to her room. Removing her bonnet, she gazed in dismay at the bedraggled coquelicot feather, symbol of her courage and optimism, and was close to tears as she saw the break in its fine quill.

She threw herself onto her bed and gazed at the ceiling. Why did the Fates sport with her thus, tantalising with undreamed-of felicity, only to snatch it away? Feeling the bitter injustice of coming unexpectedly upon paradise only to find it was desert, and remained desert, she sat up abruptly and remembered there was at least one recompense. She now knew what it was like to be kissed by someone you loved. She could write her final scene. But then Madeleine realised she had left her precious book in Mr Shilton’s library. Perhaps in the afternoon she could ask Dot to go and fetch it for her?

In the meantime, she had to distract herself with something and, turning to her small desk, pulled a parcel towards her. The lending library had wrapped Frances Burney’s Cecilia and as Madeleine opened the paper, the volumes glowed before her, asking to be read. It had taken five volumes for Miss Burney to tell her story of a young innocent, already an heiress. Madeleine thought hers, of a young nobody who becomes an heiress, would only fill three. Being autobiographical, she determined to publish it anonymously, as had, she noticed, the author of Sense and Sensibility, who only permitted herself to be known as ‘a Lady’. She liked that appellation, it added a gravity to the work.

She was interested to see that the great Miss Burney had her full name, Frances Burney, emblazoned on the flyleaves of her volumes. Madeleine turned the pages of the first of Cecilia with suppressed excitement at entering an alternative, more romantic world. So immediate was the prose and so vividly drawn were the characters, she was quickly engrossed. From the first page, Madeleine had determined that Cecilia herself was a heroine worthy of the name. It would take a harder heart than hers to resist; ‘Her form was elegant, her heart was liberal; her countenance announced the intelligence of her mind, her complexion varied with every emotion of her soul, and her eyes, the heralds of her speech, now beamed with understanding and now glistened with sensibility.’ Gazing unseeing from her window, Madeleine thought what a remarkable friend such a young woman would make her, as much in need of companionship as she was.

Lost in thought, she was startled by a knock on the door and Moss’s voice. ‘Someone to see you, Miss. I’ve shown him into the breakfast room.’

She was sprung out of fantastic reverie into the much less satisfactory present. Madeleine leapt up, feeling quite unprepared for visitors. Her heartbeat speeded up, the blood began to pulse through her veins. Did her body understand what her mind had yet to apprehend? She noticed with surprise that her hands were trembling. A rogue thought insinuated itself: Could it be? Could it really be?

As she entered the room, there indeed was Ferdinand Shilton standing by the fireplace, one boot on the fender, his back to the door. At the sound of her step, he turned quickly, his face alight. ‘Miss Rose, I’m returning your book.’ His pleasure in seeing her again radiated from him and a lively, unrestrained and expressive delight animated his blue eyes. He held out the precious volume.

She took it, overwhelmed with shyness at the memory of their encounter just an hour or so before. ‘I must apologise for my behaviour in your house this morning,’ she mumbled almost under her breath.

‘You have nothing to apologise for. It was I who should ask your forgiveness, Miss Rose. If we had had more time, I would have told you that Miss Payton had called off our betrothal that very morning, and that I was free.’

‘So it’s only my honour that is impugned by our behaviour?’ Madeleine was still taken aback at how readily she had kissed him.

Ferdy stood beside her, looking down with a smile. ‘I thought that was a matter of research for your novel.’ Madeleine felt her cheeks grow warm as he laughed. ‘To kiss you once can be excused as a moment’s folly, but a second kiss would secure me to you forever. Why, I’d be duty-bound to marry you, Miss Rose.’ He looked at her with an amused question in his eyes.

In answer, she stretched on tiptoe to reach him and offered her face like a flower. Ferdy bent his head and their lips met once more. His arm tightened round her back and Madeleine could feel the blood beating in their veins, not certain if two pulses had become one. She was breathless with the fervour of the moment, luxuriating in sensation and lost in love. Was this the Paradise for which all longed? The subject of poetry and spur to ambition? Was it found so simply here in a loved-one’s arms?

As they separated, Madeleine sighed and stumbled slightly against him. His arms enfolded her again. ‘Oh Miss Rose, my mischievous, my mesmerizingly lovely Madeleine. You’re the writer, my darling, choose whatever alliteration you prefer.’ He chuckled, then kissed her again. ‘How have I lived so long without you, so blind to my deepest needs? Can it be that all I’ve dreaded has come to pass? That I’m at the mercy of my passions and all my hope, my happiness, is now vested in you?’

Ferdy’s arms held her so strongly that Madeleine was crushed into the folds of his crisply laundered linen; she could feel his heart beating secretly against her own. Everything around them, the room, the dancing light, the tree whispering outside the window, the clouds high in the still summer sky, rose like bright images in her mind and vanished on a wave of exultation. Madeleine was alone in the world with him. Were they suspended in time like this for five seconds, an hour, she could not tell, but knew it was no longer a dream, it was here she belonged.

She felt, rather than heard, his words, ‘Madeleine, will you marry me?’

Lifting her head, she met his intense blue gaze and said, ‘Yes, Ferdy, yes, a thousand times yes,’ and still in each other’s arms they collapsed on the sofa, laughing with sheer astonishment and joy at finding their way home at last.

EPILOGUE

Those members of the haut ton who still remained in Town were astounded to hear that the most eligible bachelor of the Season, Mr Ferdinand Shilton, had offered for the hand of a Nobody. The gossips could not even recall her name. And to add to the scandal, this had occurred on the very day when his previous betrothed, the estimable Miss Payton, had jilted him. There was something very morally amiss, and they all surmised where the fault lay. When news subsequently leaked out that this unknown bride was an unexpected heiress, then the tittle-tattlers resorted to the demeaning cliché that it was the money he intended to marry. Even the obvious truth that Mr Shilton had enough fortune himself and had no need of marrying an heiress courted the unanswerable riposte – rich men were greedy and enough was never enough.

Indeed, Madeleine had inherited the Lockhart fortune from her grandmother but had long decided that she would share it with Lord Lockhart, the young profligate at the head of the family. Of the Lockhart jewels she was happy to have her grandmother’s pearl earrings, a memento of the old lady she wore often. The Shilton jewels were a great deal grander, and they would all come to her.

Henrietta Lockhart, in triumph, had become betrothed to her chosen beau, Mr Paget. His father’s City wealth was splashed on the most extravagant celebratory ball at the Lockhart mansion. For an undisclosed sum, Miss Lockhart’s besotted fiancé jumped the queue to procure the services of the celebrated Sir Thomas Lawrence, portraitist of the age, to flatter his beloved in oyster satin. This Henrietta hung in pride of place in the drawing room of her new London house in Grosvenor Square.