Chapter Two

FROM THE GROUNDS OF THE Buckingham Hotel on Berkeley Square, to the Limehouse docks and the rooftops of Whitechapel, rain was sweeping London in great sheets of grey. As Raymond de Guise stepped out of a taxicab on the Whitechapel Road and felt the full force of the storm, only his dancer’s feet kept him from losing his balance and tumbling into the heaps of refuse piled up at the side of the road. Thanking the driver and asking him to wait, he tightened his gaberdine overcoat and turned up his collar against the driving rain, then made haste between the awnings into a narrow cobbled alley. Halfway along, where light spilled out of the doors of a red brick chapel, he turned to climb the steps. Already, he was drenched to the skin.

So too was the man who stood at the top of those steps, keeping guard at the doors, his face hidden beneath the peaks of a tricorn hat, as if he’d stepped directly out of some bygone age.

‘Ray Cohen, come at last!’

Raymond de Guise in the ballroom; good, old-fashioned Ray Cohen here in the streets of his native Whitechapel. There was a time that he’d guarded the secret of his true identity with the zealousness of an undercover spy – but no longer. Now Raymond lived with one foot in the world of the ballroom, and one foot in the streets where he was born. So far, it seemed to be working.

‘Artie!’ He took his brother by the hand. ‘You’d think they could afford you an umbrella.’

Artie grinned. ‘Go on, get yourself inside. Nancy don’t know you’re coming. Me and Viv, we kept it a secret, just like we promised. She’ll be surprised to see you.’

Viv?thought Raymond, as he stepped through the doors.

They called this place the Daughters of Salvation, and for close to a year it had occupied these premises – once a derelict chapel, abandoned to vagrant sleepers. Now, when Raymond looked around, it was unrecognisable as the place he’d first seen a year before. The renovation work over the past months had transformed the shabby interior into a collection of rooms every bit as worthy as a church hospice.

It was a hive of activity. The body of the old chapel was a semicircular reception area, at which Mary Burdett – the founder of the organisation – talked with one of her volunteers. Around her, doors led into private rooms, some dormitories and some with single beds where guests recuperated. Through one door, a small office was home to the visiting physician, one of several doctors from local surgeries who gave up their evenings to come and minister for the needy – and to help patients overcoming their opiate addictions, the very reason the Daughters was first founded. Through another door, volunteers were busily bulking out the evening soup – and the cold breeze coming in from the back of the kitchen area told Raymond that the doors had been opened to the courtyard at the back, and here the vagabond people of London’s East End were being welcomed in for hot tea and food. Old loaves were bought up from the Whitechapel bakeries, bad apples and bruised potatoes taken in from the grocers’ refuse, pared down and put to use. Not a scrap was wasted at the Daughters of Salvation.

Nodding at Mary Burdett, Raymond crossed the chapel floor, then slipped through the door at the very back.

The Salvation Office, as this corner had come to be called, was tiny – just a desk and a few cabinets, loaned by the charity’s benefactor George Peel. Peel’s was old money, inherited from his forebears who had owned the blacking factories in Charing Cross, but at least it was being put to good use. As Raymond hovered in the office door, he could hear the voice of Warren Peel, George’s son – once an opiate addict himself, and now an integral member of the Daughters of Salvation itself. As he stepped inside, he saw that Warren – slight and boyish, with hair the colour of a cornfield in summer – was bent over the table with Vivienne Edgerton. And there, hidden behind them, sitting at the desk, was his own Nancy Nettleton.

The Daughters of Salvation might have been founded by Mary Burdett, but it was Vivienne and her investment of time and energy – and the allowance her stepfather gave her – that had first begun to transform it. And it was Vivienne, too, who had convinced Warren Peel’s father to give generously to the charity, allowing for its further expansion. For several years, Vivienne had lived, at her stepfather’s instruction, at the Buckingham Hotel instead of the family home, and she had once been the kind of girl who needed the intervention of a charity like this herself. Spoilt and lost, she’d found solace in opiates. But at twenty years old – still with her striking red hair, but holding herself more confidently than ever – Vivienne was a changed woman. Raymond had barely seen her at the Buckingham in the last months, for she’d sequestered herself here, driving the Daughters of Salvation onward. She intended it to be an empire.

Raymond coughed to announce his appearance. Both Vivienne and Warren looked up, but Nancy remained bent over the desk, working through the ledgers that she kept for the organisation.

‘Sorry, Mr de Guise!’ Vivienne laughed, her thick New York accent filled with mirth. ‘Miss Nettleton’s far too important for the likes of you now. Who needs a debonair dancer when they’ve got columns and figures to be working through?’

‘It’s time to put the pen and paper down, Nance. I’m here to take you out.’

Nancy finally looked up. As she took in his face, his coiffured black hair, and that look in his eyes he saved for her alone – the look that no guest dancing with him in the Buckingham ballroom ever saw – something inside her soared.

‘Raymond,’ she smiled – and, for a moment, in spite of the hustle and bustle through the partition walls, it was as if there was no one else in the world.

At twenty-five years old, Nancy Nettleton was eight years Raymond’s junior. She’d taken on so much in the last year and become so adept at organising the Daughters of Salvation, all the time fulfilling her duties as a chambermaid at the Buckingham. Raymond was quite sure she could, one day, be as adept as Maynard Charles at keeping an organisation as big as the hotel going.

Nancy never ceased to amaze him, and his heart beat hard at the thought of tonight.

It was going to be the most special night of their lives.

‘Warren,’ Vivienne said, beaming, ‘let’s leave these lovebirds to get their things together. We’ll be needed out back.’

‘At your service, Miss Edgerton!’

‘Oh, do stop calling me that!’ Vivienne laughed as she and Warren strode off. ‘I’ve told you – you may call me Viv.’

Watching them leave, Raymond said, ‘Those two seem to be becoming firm friends. You don’t think, perhaps, that there might be .?.?. more love in the air?’

‘Anything’s possible.’ Nancy shrugged. She’d come to the Daughters straight from her morning shift at the Buckingham, and her mind had been lost in the balance sheets ever since. Nancy had kept her father’s household finances in order from the age of nine until the day that he’d died. Mathematics, she sometimes thought, was as artful as dance. But right now she knew where she’d rather be.

She snapped the balance book shut. It could wait for another day.

‘Shall we?’ she asked.

Raymond beamed. ‘We shall!’

By the time Nancy had packed her books away and joined Raymond out in the main hall, Vivienne Edgerton was standing with Artie at the front door. As Raymond linked his arm with Nancy, they heard Vivienne explode with laughter. He looked back at his brother and Vivienne over his shoulder, before glancing sidelong at Nancy.

Nancy shrugged. ‘This is a world away from the ballroom, Raymond,’ she whispered. ‘Miss Edgerton might be blue blood, but the truth is, she’s happier with the likes of Artie and Mary than she is with the lordlings and Right Honourables she used to consort with.’

‘Yes, but Artie.’

‘Artie’s charming, Raymond.’

Yes, thought Raymond, wryly.

There was a time his brother Artie had been pretty adept at charming the locks off back gates, or the seals from the windows of the rich families. He’d been pretty good at charming necklaces from around the necks of pretty ladies too.

‘You two have a glorious night!’ Artie chortled as Raymond and Nancy stepped back into the veil of rain.

‘I’ve never seen Artie so chirpy before,’ said Raymond as he helped Nancy into the taxicab, still idling out on Whitechapel Road. ‘Not since before Pentonville. Not since we were small.’

‘Well, your little brother’s a changed man. A steady salary can do that. Three square meals a day. It’s knowing where he is in the world, not wondering where the next penny’s coming from. He’s got something to depend on.’

Raymond nodded. He still felt guilty about all the years he’d been off chasing his own dream of ballroom stardom while his family made ends meet however they could.

‘Your Daughters of Salvation turns out to be about helping more people than just the homeless, Nancy, or the opiate addicts.’

‘Nobody’s beyond hope,’ Nancy smiled, ‘and for every life we can change, even just a little, a dozen more can eventually be touched. It’s like ripples – every little good thing you do, rippling out into the world.’

There were other things like that, thought Raymond. He’d seen the newspapers this morning, and the reports of the demonstrations down on the Horse Guards Parade: London’s malcontents, stirred up by the idea that too many refugees from Europe were somehow pouring, unchecked, into the country. It was those headlines that stirred it up. Ripples of hatred and bigotry, just like Nancy’s ripples of charity and light, could echo out into the world as well.

‘So where’s it to be?’ grinned Nancy as the taxicab wheeled away. ‘Kettner’s again? Simpson’s on the Strand?’

In the last months, with the ballroom out of commission, Raymond had been free to indulge his sweetheart, whisking her off on a tour of London restaurants. The Cornish steak at Simpson’s had been a delight, the sea bass at Rules in Covent Garden delicate and refined – and though sometimes Nancy hungered for nothing more than the Lancashire hotpot of her childhood, she had to admit that the taste explosions at Veeraswamy on Regent Street had been an experience she would never forget.

Which made it all the more surprising when the taxicab took them a mere mile deeper into the East End terraces, and deposited them outside a taproom in Stepney Green, barely a stone’s throw from the house where Raymond and Artie Cohen had been brought up.

Nancy stepped out into the swirling rain. The taproom in front of her was called the Oak Tree, but it was to a side door and its staircase that Raymond pointed. With a knowing smile, he took her by the hand and led her in. Nancy’s leg was aching today – it was an old injury, from the polio of her childhood, and on damp days it pained her still – but, when they reached the top of the stairs and stepped into a quaint little dining room, the pain seemed to evaporate away. It was cosy here, with a dog curled up on the fireside hearth and only a handful of tables around which locals were dining. A waiter took their coats and, soon after, came back to lead them to a table in the window. There, by the light of a single candle, Raymond said, ‘Well, what do you think?’

Rain was pouring in sheets down the window. Outside, night was coming on – but, inside, Nancy could not have felt finer.

‘Why here?’

Raymond tried hard to suppress his smile. ‘My mother knows the cook here. I’ve put in a special request. Lancashire hotpot.’

Nancy’s eyes opened wide. ‘Raymond, you old fool!’

But she was delighted, all the same.

‘I know you love the Buckingham almost as much as I do. I know what it means to you, being in that world. But I know what it means to you to be in this world too. So tonight was simply to say, I look at you, Nancy, at the Daughters of Salvation, and I see someone doing more good for the world than I’ve ever done, waltzing in my ballroom.’

‘I think you underestimate yourself, Raymond. The joy, the enchantment you bring.’ She thought of the first time she’d seen him, in those early days after she’d just started at the Buckingham: how he’d been gliding across the dance floor, and how her heart had started hammering when he first spoke her name. ‘The world needs a little of that magic this year.’

‘I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Every newspaper I look at. Every time I hear the wireless crackling out the BBC News. Jewish refugees flocking into the country. People just like me, Nancy. Like Artie. Oh, perhaps we’re not the most observant family. We never were! But it’s only by an accident of where I was born that it’s not me uncertain of my future, not knowing if I even have a place in the world. And now, all these refugees flooding into London.’

Nancy nodded. One of the chambermaids, Ruth, had been near the Horse Guards Parade when the demonstrations began. She’d come back to the staff kitchenette in the chambermaids’ quarters filled with the tension of it. All that hatred in the air – and from the very same Englishmen whom they passed on the streets each day. There is such goodness in the world, thought Nancy, but there is such disquiet too. The eternal battle was for which would win through: the darkness, or the light.

‘Nancy, about the magic .?.?.’

Before Raymond could go on, the waiter appeared and deposited two bubbling Lancashire hotpots in front of them, their caramelised crusts erupting with geysers of steam.

Nancy didn’t know where to turn. All of her senses had been set on fire.

‘Oh, Raymond!’ She beamed, and took a deep breath. ‘More magical than anything on the menu at Kettner’s.’

‘There’s something else,’ he said – and, for the first time, Nancy sensed some real trepidation in his tone. She reached across the table and took him by the hand. Finding his nerve, he said, ‘There’s something I’m going to ask you. I wanted to do it here – right here in Stepney Green, so that you know it’s the real me, not the King of the Ballroom, who’s asking it.’

He looked across the table at her. He held her eyes.

There’s the look, thought Nancy. The look that can take a girl out of her body. The look that can make her feel like she’s floating on air.

‘Will you marry me, Nancy Nettleton?’

In that same moment, Raymond flourished his other hand up from below the table, and in it he revealed a small box lined with velvet. Sitting in it was a simple silver band crowned with a single small diamond.

Not for the first time that evening, the rest of the world faded out of Nancy’s understanding – and there she was, in a hazy little bubble, just her and Raymond, cocooned from the world. She looked into his eyes. How long had she known him? Two years? Well, it felt like a lifetime.

‘Oh, Raymond,’ she began, looking at the ring in its little velvet case.

What thoughts tumbled through her head then? What visions of the life she would one day lead? For a time, there was only one image in her mind and, in it, she and Raymond stood at the door of their own little London home, his music playing on a gramophone inside the open window, the sounds of happy cheer and chatter coming from the children inside.

It was Raymond’s words that brought her back from the vision.

‘We’ve been through so much in two short years, Nancy. And time is marching on. All this talk of appeasement. All this talk of war in the air .?.?.’

‘There won’t be war, Raymond. How could men ever be so foolish again? The people wouldn’t countenance it – not after they’ve already lost so much. Mr Chamberlain says he’s finding a way, that there’ll be peace.’

‘It’s the uncertainty,’ said Raymond, looking deep into her eyes. ‘It’s hardened my resolve. I know what I want. I know the future I want to lie in front of me, the future it’s in my power to make happen. I want you, Nancy. I want you to be my wife.’

Nancy was the sort of girl who knew what she wanted as well. It hadn’t been a husband – not before she met Raymond. That wasn’t what she’d come to London for. Her head was full of dreams, yes, but not a dream like this. But it was strange how your dreams transformed.

Disentangling her hand from Raymond’s, she lunged for her fork and took her first taste of Lancashire hotpot. Its taste was as divine as anything she’d had in the fancy restaurants they’d been frequenting. She’d almost forgotten the taste of good, old-fashioned lamb.

She still wasn’t able to suppress the smile on her lips, and now she started laughing too.

‘Why are you laughing, Nance?’

‘Well .?.?.’ She grinned. ‘It’s like this .?.?. It’s a good job you asked, Raymond, because I’ve been thinking about it too.’

‘About the future?’

She slapped him on the back of the wrist. ‘About asking you to marry me! You’re right. We’ve come so far. Who knows where we’ll be in a year’s time? Who knows where the world will be? It’s all I’ve been thinking of, Raymond – you have to take your chances, whenever they come. You have to be ready to seize the things you want. So I was thinking of a way I might ask you. How I might get down on one knee and ask you to be my husband.’

Perhaps any other man would have balked at the idea, but not Raymond de Guise – and not for Nancy Nettleton. Conventions be damned! Hadn’t Nancy already shown him that life can be lived however you want to live it? Hadn’t she already taught him a little about not letting society hold you back, about following your heart, about always striving to do the next right thing?

‘Well,’ Raymond said, grinning, ‘what’s your answer?’

Nancy finished her forkful of hotpot. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘what’s yours?’

Then, in unison – as they would now be here and for evermore – they held hands across the dining room table and said, ‘Yes!’

The feeling of the ring, when he slipped it onto her finger, was crisp and clear, and held in it all the promises of their future to come. Her ring, a perfect gift from a perfect man.

A new chapter in their story was about to begin.