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‘But it’s also deadly dangerous, Freddie.’ Lucie had jumped up and grasped Lord Lynwood’s hands. ‘I couldn’t bear you to risk your life like that. Look what happened to Sybella’s Captain Lovatt! What a ruin of happiness.’ Her voice was full of emotion. ‘Promise you won’t enlist.’

‘I promise.’ Then a wicked gleam came into his eyes. ‘Unless Val does!’ All but Lucie laughed, for Lord Ravenell, despite being a skilled horseman, both dashing and courageous, and surely would be more handsome in a Hussar’s uniform than any other man, was mercifully untroubled by a desire for military heroics.

‘That puts my mind at rest. All I now have to do is shackle Val by the leg.’ Lucie released Freddie’s hands.

He gave her a piercing look and seemed about to say something before thinking better of it. ‘Well, I must be off. Val and I are due at Tattersall’s. He’s on the look-out for a sweet-going hunter for his father.’

‘We’ll see you at Vauxhall Gardens tomorrow then.’ Sybella rose from the sofa to bid Lord Lynwood farewell while Lucie accompanied him to the door.

The day of the Duke of Ely’s engagement party at Vauxhall Gardens dawned rainy and cold. Samson, with a gloomy view of the world, gazed at the grey skies and sucked his teeth. ‘Ah, a hubble-bubble day. Only good for quacking cheats.’ He looked quite pleased with his doleful pronouncement.

Lady Godley was less impressed. ‘Samson! Don’t be such a croaker, always boding ill. It’s going to clear up and we’ll have an excellent evening. I feel it in my bones.’ Despite the threat of thunder, Lucie was more excited than she had expected to be. The Gardens were legendary and this would be her first visit, with all the people she most loved in attendance. She intended to get dressed in plenty of time as she wanted to savour the pleasure of the outing. She had one particular evening dress that she had been keeping for an important occasion and this she intended to wear. Lady Godley had taken her to her French modiste in Bond Street to choose a special dress as a present. They had decided on a beautiful filament-fine gold silk gauze. This overlaid a Meissen-blue satin under-dress. When she had tried it on, Lady Godley had cried. She said her goddaughter looked like a goddess, with her golden hair and blue eyes made even more brilliant by the shimmering interplay of the gold and blue fabrics, embellished by small French knots round the neck and hem and on the band of the small puff sleeves.

‘Bella, why don’t you wear your silver evening dress? We’ll really look well together,’ Lucie called from her room, where Alice was busy dressing her hair into an artful tumble of golden curls intertwined with ribbons, after a charming engraving in La Belle Assemblée evocatively named souffle de Diane.

‘We’ll look like day and night!’ Sybella laughed as she retired to her room to dress.

Lucie was right, she thought. The silver dress did look rather becoming on her. It was not new, but the fit was wondrous flattering and the satin under-dress, of a particularly lovely shade of silver-grey, was enlivened with a shimmering top layer of silver organza with silver rope detail at the neckline and under the bosom. This harmonising of colours seemed to emphasise the creaminess of her skin and the contrasting smoky darkness of her hair. Sybella clasped her mother’s pearls around her neck and for the first time in years thought herself beautiful. There was something lustrous about her skin and hair in this ethereal silvery dress. Could it be that there was still a life for her larger than the one for which she had settled as sister, mother, country landowner? Could she even risk the thought of love?

‘Bella, Bella.’ Lucie was at her door. ‘The carriages have arrived.’ The sisters met on the landing and were each amazed at the beauty of the other. ‘Oh! You look so lovely, Bella. And your hair. How has Alice managed that so well?’ She was gazing at the fine plaiting that created an intricate chignon with curling fronds of loose hair round her sister’s face, emphasising her fine cheekbones and elegant neck.

Sybella’s green eyes were sparkling as she appraised the vision of Lucie in gold as fine as a dragonfly wing. ‘You look like one of the three Graces!’

‘That’s lucky because my hairstyle is called souffle d’ Aphrodite, so I have quite a set of goddesses to aspire to.’ They linked arms and descended the stairs, collecting Lady Godley from the drawing room on the way.

‘Oh la la! Vous m’avez coupé le souffle!’ She kissed them. ‘I am proud to be seen in your company,’ she said in a surprising rush of emotion.

‘Godmama, we are so grateful to be accompanied by you. Without you, we would never have had any of this. You have made it possible.’ They took an arm each of this small slight figure and escorted her down the stairs to meet the beaux who awaited them in the hall.

The Duke of Ely had brought both of his smart town carriages, liveried in midnight blue and with his crest on the sides. Omnia superat virtus graced his noble line and although as a young man he had flown in the face of this family motto, now, in old age, he was living it to the hilt. Virtue, even virtuosity, in his mode of being, conquered everything.

He was as magnificently dressed as ever in his eighteenth-century gold dress coat, his lean, high-cheekboned face above a foaming lace cravat. Only someone as imposing and full of amour propre as the great Duke could carry off this old-fashioned dress and cast everyone else into the shade. He bowed low over Lady Godley’s hand and then kissed the hands of Sybella and Lucie, keeping hold of Lucie as he led her towards his son and passed her gloved hand into his.

Lord Ravenell was dressed up to the Brummell mark of perfection in his fine dark blue worsted coat, tailored to every muscle and sinew of his shoulders and waist. The plainness of his clothes was all the more effective a foil for his angelic face, his golden hair poetically ruffled as if by an Elysian breeze. He smiled and offered Lucie his arm. Lord Lynwood lounged by the door, not quite as immaculately dressed but broodingly handsome, Lucie thought, as Lord Byron’s likeness in Childe Harold.

The Duke led the party out. ‘I thought Val and Miss Carey and Mrs Lovatt should go in the first carriage. And Lord Lynwood and I will accompany Lady Godley in the second.’

It was eight o’clock in the evening and dusk was falling fast, for the day had been dull with thunderous clouds.

Lord Lynwood looked up at the sky. ‘We’ll be lucky to escape the rain.’ The carriages set off in convoy towards Westminster Bridge as their most convenient crossing of the River Thames to Surrey on the south bank.

‘I have never travelled in such a handsome equipage, Lord Ravenell. This is so comfortable,’ said Sybella as she settled back into the cream velvet cushions with a fur rug beneath her feet.

‘I thought we had agreed that as you’re to become my sister, you would call me Val like everyone else.’ His blue eyes sparkled as they met hers. Looking across the carriage at him sitting close to her sister, Sybella was struck again by his irresistible looks and charm. No wonder so many people loved him. It was striking how Lucie, thoughtful by his side, matched him for beauty but did not have that scintillating brilliance of eye and smile that set Valentine Ravenell so apart in the pantheon of dashing young blades.

‘I know I agreed to call you Valentine, as your papa does. But equally, please call me Sybella.’

‘When I hear Papa say Valentine, I am half expecting a scold.’ He smiled ruefully.

‘Have no fear, Bella never scolds, not even James.’ Turning to him, Lucie continued, ‘What are the Gardens like, Val?’

He gave her a wicked smile. ‘’Tis prodigious pretty with all the lights. You’ll find a mix of thieves and light-skirts and personages of the highest ton, princes even. Such a wild mêlée certainly kicks up some larks. But the entertainment’s all a bit tame for me, Loo. Too much Handel and Pandean Minstrels.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, Handel appears to be the patron saint of Vauxhall Gardens. They have a handsome marble statue of him as Orpheus, and the Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks is played by the orchestra until you’re half-mad with it. Like Odysseus’s crew, you’ll be begging for beeswax to block your ears.’

Lucie laughed, but her elder sister was in a reverie of remembrance. ‘I love the Water Music.’ Sybella recalled when she had first heard it played at a concert when she was just married and how she had struggled to teach herself ‘Air No. 5’ on James’s violin.