Chapter Twenty-seven

IN HER QUARTERS HIGH ABOVE the suites of the Buckingham, Nancy awoke to the creaking of pipes.

These were the sounds of the hotel waking up, slowly coming back to life after its hours of slumber. She lay there a moment longer, until she heard the chatter of the other chambermaids through the walls – and then, rolling over in the twilit room, she looked at the calendar on the wall. December had dawned, so she reached up and took the pencil she kept at her bedside to mark an ‘X’ against the 1st. Then she looked down.

Only nine more nights separated her from married life.

She stared at the date, and allowed herself to feel a thrill of wonder. The girls said she was a stick in the mud, that she wasn’t excited enough – but they were wrong. Nine days until she wore Raymond’s wedding ring and counted herself his wife. She could not wait.

Her eyes took in the wardrobe on the other side of her room. When she opened it up, it stood barren – with only her chambermaid uniforms hanging there. If there was anything that prickled her about the wedding day, it was only this: with nine days to go, there was still no dress. She had resolved to solve this particular problem today, and by mid-afternoon she would be back at Regency Bridal. Without Ruth and Rosa to pour their own thoughts and dreams at her, she felt certain she would find the one. No matter what, she was coming home with a dress tonight.

Nancy was late coming out of her room, so it wasn’t until breakfast was already being dished up that she approached the housekeeping lounge. Today, Mrs Moffatt seemed in better cheer than she had all year long; perhaps, the girls said, it was because of those letters she kept carrying around with her. Or perhaps, Rosa had cheekily suggested, it was because of Archie Adams – who had, on more than one occasion now, delivered flowers to the housekeeping lounge.

‘See, Ruth,’ Rosa had laughed, ‘you can fall in love at almost any age. You’re not an old maid yet!’

‘Girls!’ Mrs Moffatt announced, once the crumpets were being passed around. ‘It’s nice to see you all here, bright and early. And at such an auspicious time!’ At this, Rosa elbowed Nancy in the side, grinning broadly – but Mrs Moffatt demurred. ‘I was speaking of Christmas, girls, not Miss Nettleton’s coming nuptials. Though what a day that will be as well.’

The girls cheered – and Nancy, who was blushing too much this month, purpled further.

‘Come on. You old hands know what I’m speaking about. You new girls are about to see something magnificent.’

Mrs Moffatt led them, in procession, down the housekeeping hall, and at last into the pre-dawn of the reception hall, where the black and white chequers were speckled with a trail of green foliage and the art deco obelisk had been taken away for winter storage.

Now, in its place, five workmen balanced on ladders, with ropes in hand, as together they heaved a towering Norwegian fir into place. Braced in position by the men up their ladders, the tree stood resplendent, filling the reception hall with the scent of a winter forest.

It was still dark in Berkeley Square and, in the reception hall, the only light that illuminated the tree came from the little lamps at the check-in desks. But when the first guests emerged for breakfast, they would not see a naked fir tree casting its shadow over the hall.

‘We have one hour, girls,’ said Mrs Moffatt. ‘One hour, in which to capture the magic of Christmas!’

She stepped aside. Behind her, Frank Nettleton was approaching, bearing the big chest of Christmas decorations out from the basement store cupboards. One of the porters’ trolleys held the main trunk and, on top of that, were all the other boxes and crates that hadn’t seen the light since last Twelfth Night. Frank, who couldn’t stop smiling – it’s good to see him smile, thought Nancy – opened it up, revealing a pirate’s treasure of glittering baubles, garlands and stars.

‘Let’s get started, girls,’ Mrs Moffatt announced. ‘Let your hearts sing!’

As Rosa, Ruth, and all the rest of the housekeeping staff descended on the trolley, Frank reached out for the smallest of all the boxes, a parcel of yellow crêpe paper wrapped in a length of silver ribbon. This he clutched close to his heart as he urged Nancy to join him underneath the archway leading down to the Grand.

‘Nancy, it’s for you.’

She took it, with a bewildered expression.

‘I know it isn’t normal,’ said Frank. ‘I know gifts should be for your wedding day. But I heard you were going back to Regency Bridal today and I thought, if I don’t show it now, I never will. Open it, Nance.’

The girls were already organising the baubles and stars into piles of different colours. The workmen, meanwhile, were shifting their ladders, bracing a single one in place so that they could help the girls reach the uppermost branches.

All of the colour exploding behind him couldn’t tempt Frank to look away from the parcel he’d just given Nancy. He watched, eagerly, as she pulled on the ribbon, allowing the paper to unfurl and reveal a little spotted box within. When she opened its lid, it revealed a dress made of decades-old silk, worn in places, still shimmering in others. She allowed it to fall down, held it up against herself as its wrapping clean fell away.

‘I remembered I had the silk from Ma’s wedding dress. All those years, we used it to line my old toy box. And I had that box over at the Brogans’. Well, Mrs Moffatt helped. She sent me to the hotel seamstresses, and they did their best. I know it ain’t perfect, Nance, and I know it’s late. I’ve been lost, after what happened to Ansel, and .?.?.’

Nancy could still smell the old toy box on the fabric. She lifted it to her nose. It smelled of home.

‘It’s like the one she wore,’ she whispered, remembering the wedding portrait she still kept in her drawer upstairs.

‘Not perfect. I showed them a picture. There wasn’t enough left to make it as it should be. But Ma’s in it, isn’t she?’

‘She is.’

‘I should think she’d like that, Nance.’

Nancy put her arms around her brother and held on to him. Then, together, their eyes turned to the tree, as the glitter and colour spread up its branches, bringing every bough to life.

Arms around each other, they gravitated closer to the tree.

‘Just like we used to do, isn’t it?’

Nancy gazed up and ever upwards. ‘We never had a tree quite this big, Frank.’

‘Still reckon I can climb up and put the angel on top though!’

‘Go on then, Frank!’ Rosa chipped in.

She was holding, in both of her hands, an enormous angel made of satin and lace, her face embroidered with silk and gold thread. Marching forward, she placed it delicately in Frank’s hands.

‘Shall I, Nance?’

‘Go on, Frank!’ Rosa cheered.

The workmen at the ladder stepped aside, inviting Frank aboard – but, although he cantered up the first steps, after that he needed it no longer. Halfway up the ladder, and having first tested its balance and strength, he took to the tree itself, shimmying up between the branches with all the talent and skill of a boy who’d grown up in the country.

At the top, Frank balanced himself with his legs wrapped around the trunk, reached up – and delicately slipped the angel over the tree’s highest point. Then he turned around, opening his arms wide as if he was some circus acrobat – Rosa cheered, while Ruth’s eyes flitted admiringly between them both – and opened his mouth in an uncontrollable smile.

Frank Nettleton: the king of the world!

Christmas had come to the Buckingham Hotel.

*

Throughout the day, there was not a guest who didn’t stop and stare in awe at the traditional Norwegian fir in the reception hall. During the midnight hours, decorations had appeared across each restaurant and hall as well. Wreaths of mistletoe and holly materialised on every door of every suite. In the Queen Mary restaurant, the menu had become their traditional Yuletide fare of pheasant and venison, roast chestnut and sage; sprigs of plump red berries adorned every table.

But as the hotel buzzed with preparation for the festive season and the forthcoming wedding, the worries of one member of the Buckingham Hotel blinded them to the beauty of the coming Christmas.

The middle of the afternoon, the skies once again paling towards darkness, and Billy waited by the check-in desks, with Maynard Charles at his side. A long morning listening to Mrs Farrier’s tales of Christmases past had dulled his senses, so that, when he emerged to take in the new magnificence in the reception hall, it took him a long time to readjust. Now he waited in solemn silence, the reception hall bustling around him, Maynard Charles’s voice tolling in his ear.

‘Here they come. Keep your eyes on them. They’ll dine in the Queen Mary tonight, and tomorrow be about their business. We’ve seated Herr Bauer on the other side of the restaurant, but he’ll have his eye on them throughout. There’ll be a missive tonight, Billy. You’ll know what to do.’

Billy watched as the revolving brass doors turned, disgorging a tall lion of a man, with hair the colour of a cornfield and a prominent jaw that made him seem like a hero from one of the ha’penny children’s stories Billy used to read.

‘Reichsgraf von Amsberg,’ Maynard whispered, watching the burly man, dressed in a suit of dark green, with a gnarled oak cane in one hand and his gentleman’s umbrella in the other. ‘Moorcock says his line goes back to the Holy Roman Empire, though there’s some would dispute it. Fell out of favour in 1919, by all accounts – like so many did.’

Billy tracked him with his eyes, as the day manager received him at the check-in desk, and stopped studying him only when the revolving doors turned again, revealing a man of much swarthier complexion, with hair as black as pitch and tight coils of beard. This man, smaller and portlier than the lion who’d first stepped through, resembled nothing more than a big, black bear – and one, by the look of him, who had just come out of hibernation, for there were dark rings of exhaustion around both of his eyes.

‘Reichsritter Wittekind,’ Maynard explained, ‘though he can’t go by that name any longer – traces his ancestry back to the last free knights. According to Moorcock, he holds to much the same dogma as his ancestors did – vassalage to no more powerful noble. With a heart like that, it’s little wonder he hasn’t bent the knee to Herr Hitler. Billy,’ Maynard went on, more softly now, ‘you have a heart like that as well. You know that, don’t you?’

Billy whispered, ‘Mr Charles?’

‘I’ve asked you to do some underhanded things in this hotel, Mr Brogan. Never without good reason. Never without hope that, in our own small way, we’re helping to forge a better world. I’ve asked you to sneak and spy for me often – but never in a moment of greater import than this.’ Billy felt Maynard’s hand resting in the small of his back. Such a strange thing; he was quite certain Mr Charles had never deigned to touch him before – not even to shake his hand. ‘There’ll be letters from von Amsberg and Wittekind too. I’d wager my soul on it. When they come, deliver them as you would Herr Bauer’s. And, Billy, look over your shoulder at all times. Do I make myself clear?’

‘You do, Mr Charles.’

‘Then it’s settled. Another day, another two, and we might be seeing the back of Herr Bauer, Billy. Let us hope it is so.’

*

That night, Billy circled the Queen Mary restaurant twice, keeping his eyes on the two German nobles dining with a third gentleman, and on Tobias Bauer, in a secluded corner of the restaurant, pretending to peruse the evening newspaper. Not once did he venture within. For a time, he retired to his quarters, meaning to rest – but sleep did not come and, when he closed his eyes, all that he saw was Ansel Albrecht, lying at the bottom of the guest stairs. He did not realise that the image had been imprinted on him so vividly.

Unable to sit still, he prowled up and down, stopping intermittently to look out upon the serene beauty of Berkeley Square. When even this did not still his mind, he decided that he ought to go and find Frank – until he remembered that he was bound to be in the chambermaids’ kitchenette, cosied up with Rosa and a pot of hot cocoa. Billy would have liked to have gone there too. Perhaps he would have taken himself there straight away, if only the idea of Rosa bullying Ruth into sitting beside him hadn’t weighed on him so heavily. Nancy had been right, that night in the Starlight Lounge: you couldn’t cajole it into happening; Ruth had to want it.

The wedding was mere days away now. Billy had his invitation propped up on the desk by the window. He’d given up on the idea of dancing at the reception. The dream, he supposed, had died with Ansel. Frank hadn’t wanted to rehearse much after that either. But perhaps if Billy were to put in a little time on his own, that might ease things along? There were worse ways, he decided, to rid his body of the jitters he was feeling right now. With a bit of lubrication – and he had a half bottle of cherry liqueur that Diego from the Candlelight Club had ferreted away for him – he might just be able to jitterbug the jitters away.

But when he stole down to the little studio behind the Grand, it was to discover that the room was already occupied. To the music of the tinny gramophone in the corner, Raymond de Guise was turning Nancy in a classical waltz.

Nancy stumbled out of hold the moment she saw Billy come clattering in. Billy, who stood there with the bottle of liqueur clutched in his fist, began to retreat almost at once. Even when Nancy called after him, he stuttered an apology and stepped backwards, through the closing door.

When Nancy’s focus remained on the closing door, Raymond said, ‘There’s been something troubling him for days.’

The record was not over yet, so Raymond swept her back onto the studio floor, taking her through the motions one more time. When Nancy danced, she always held something back. Raymond was quite certain it wasn’t the old injury to her leg; rather, it was the way she thought about her leg, the little idea that had taken root in her that she had to focus on it, to make up for it. Only by dancing could thoughts like that be forgotten.

And so they danced.

Raymond had something a little more devilish planned for their wedding as well.

‘The Grand Ballroom has never seen a jitterbug, Nancy. It’s never seen a jive. Why, they’d nearly faint if they saw it, all those stuffed-up ladies and lords. But on our wedding day .?.?.’

Secretly, he thought it might help Nancy as well; a dance like the jitterbug didn’t care whether one leg was weaker than the other, nor even whether you knew its movements or had studied its lines. All it cared about was that you loved it.

‘Raymond,’ she said at last, ‘there’s something I want to show you.’

She did not take him by the hand, for there was still decorum to consider, but he followed her all the same, all the way to the service lift and up, up, up to the chambermaids’ corridor high above. There, past the kitchenette where the girls were idling away their evening and Frank was being roundly beaten at backgammon by Rosa, Nancy took Raymond into her room and opened up her wardrobe. There hung the dress which Frank’s seamstress friend had brought back to life.

‘What do you think?’

Raymond fingered the new gown, picturing her in it.

‘It’s bad luck to see the dress before—’

‘Oh, hang traditions!’ Nancy exclaimed. ‘We’ve been hanging traditions all along, you and me.’ She paused. ‘Frank had it made for me. It’s the silk my mother wore on my parents’ wedding day. And .?.?.’ She sighed. She smiled. ‘I have everything I need, now. I have you, and I have Frank, and I’m going to have my parents with me as well. That’s everything. The whole world.’

Raymond’s fingers were still caressing the fabric. In a bridal boutique they might have called it a ruin; they might have called it patchwork. But Raymond fancied he could feel, in its touch and weave, the real love of its creation. She would look beautiful in it. He told her so.

‘I hope so,’ said Nancy, softly. ‘But I’ll feel loved, and that’s what matters. That’s my family – just the two of us, everything I need.’

Raymond paused. He could hear laughter radiating out from the chambermaids’ kitchenette.

‘Well, not just the two of us,’ he ventured. ‘Our trip to Lancashire yielded more secrets than one. You see, Nancy, there’s something else I haven’t been telling you. Something I was sworn to keep to myself. But .?.?. well, you’re to be my wife – and this isn’t the sort of secret I could ever keep for long. Nancy, your family’s about to get bigger.’

‘Raymond?’

‘It seems I’m not the only Cohen boy who’s fallen in love. And it seems I’m not the only Cohen boy whose life is about to change beyond all recognition.’ He paused, watched the look of confusion ghosting across her face. ‘There’s a reason Vivienne didn’t confide in you about her pregnancy. It’s my brother, Nancy. Artie and Vivienne are in love. He’s the father of her child.’

*

Midnight on Berkeley Square. In the middle of the snowy expanse, a lone fox startled, its eyes catching the glow of the street lamps as it watched the straggler hurry past.

Billy Brogan had wrapped up against the cold, drawn the collar of his overcoat high, and barrelled out of the tradesman’s entrance, off into the night. Tonight, cringing into the strafing snow, he was grateful for the scarf that hid half of his face. His heart was beating in wild percussion, his breath pluming raggedly. This was his thirteenth night making this odyssey for Mr Charles and the mysterious Mr Moorcock, but it never got any easier. Billy had often thought he’d make a diligent soldier, but he made a lousy spy.

The Merchant Colonial Club was on the other side of Piccadilly, with its windows looking down upon the open white landscape of Green Park. This late at night there were few patrons braving the bitter cold, but as Billy passed under the colonnades outside the Ritz Hotel, he caught the eye of the long-suffering doorman, and some flicker of solidarity passed between them. Then he was off, past the jaws of the sleeping Underground, along the edge of the park, and to the little black door where the lights still shone.

The doorman knew Billy, so stood back promptly when he arrived. At the desk, he asked for Christophe – a short, balding man with enough hair sprouting out of his ears to make up for the hair he lacked up on top – and, when he waddled out to greet him, Billy reached into his overcoat, produced a single yellow envelope and handed it over. Then, with his heart beating wildly, he returned to the night.

Something in him called out for home, so instead of returning to the Buckingham, he made for the river, the only soul in the streets around the abbey at Westminster, and crossed by the Lambeth Bridge. From there he hurried back into the old terraces of home, and slipped through the door at 62 Albert Yard. It was only here, breathing in the familiar scents of home, that his heart stopped pounding.

He shouldn’t be afraid. He was Billy Brogan. He was made of strong stuff.

Frank had the old bedroom, and would be up there now, no doubt dreaming about dancing at the wedding reception on Saturday night – and Billy did not begrudge him that; after Ansel, everyone deserved a little happiness this Christmas. But somehow he could not keep hold of any of his own. His thoughts strayed to Ruth. Dancing hadn’t swayed her. Well, Billy just didn’t have the knack – he could admit that to himself, at last. But maybe boldness and derring-do – maybe that was the thing. Maybe, if she knew what he was doing for King and country, she might give him a chance to prove himself then.

He pulled up a blanket, lay down on the sofa by the dying fire, and closed his eyes – but, when sleep came at all, he was quickly wrenched out of it. In his dreams, he was that fox out on Berkeley Square: desperate for survival, hunted from all corners.

*

Mere hours had passed before he returned to the barren Lambeth streets, back through the palaces of Westminster, through the monochrome dells of Green Park and to the doors of the Merchant Colonial Club.

The doorman, a dour Scot in his early sixties, allowed Billy to slip in without any fuss. Moments later, after Billy had received the envelope back from the understated fellow at the desk, the doorman let him back out. It had all happened inside a moment, and not one person had spoken a word.

There were still lights in the face of the Buckingham as Billy slipped in along Michaelmas Mews. Here and there, lanterns illuminated windows encrusted with frost, and from the reception hall, he could see the glittering baubles in the Norwegian fir. Billy paused, once, to look up at the tree. In any other year, it would have filled his heart with wonder. If only there was a way to bring that enchantment back tonight .?.?.

Alone, he slipped into the hotel basement. Alone, he fumbled a key into the lock of the post room. Alone, he slid the letter from the Merchant Colonial Club into the sack that the Royal Mail would pick up after dawn.

Then, alone once more, he slipped back out of the post room and hurried up the hall – his subterfuge finished, for another few nights.

But Billy was not as alone as he thought as he reached the basement stairs and, taking them three at a time, returned to the concierge desks.

A second set of eyes was watching him from the bottom of the guest stairs. A second set of eyes whose owner would soon step out of the shadows and shuffle off to the Queen Mary restaurant, where he would sit perusing the morning papers, taking account of each guest who arrived, making the detailed mental notes on which his trade relied.

At the bottom of the guest stairs, the man the Buckingham Hotel knew as Tobias Bauer waited and watched, and bided his time.