‘There is no “down the room and back” at Cremorne, Miss Maitland. As you can see, the dancing area forms a circle round the orchestra.’
‘Then we shall go round and round,’ she said firmly, standing and holding out her hand.
With the young woman already on her feet, Adam could not be so churlish as to refuse. He pushed back his chair and stood himself. The two of them moved through the gathering crowds to the circle of the dance floor. It was not a galop that was now playing as they made their way through one of the gaps in the low fence that surrounded it. The orchestra, doubtless sweating from their exertions in the raised box above the dancers, had turned to a slower measure. Adam took the young woman into his arms and the pair of them began to swirl decorously across the circle. He was acutely aware of the pressure of her body in his arms. Should his hand be there, he asked himself, as they swept past two flagging couples, perhaps themselves exhausted by the galop? Should he move it higher? Lower? No, definitely not lower. He wondered how closely he could hold her without causing offence. It was not a dilemma that he had faced before. With the girls that he and Cosmo picked up in the dance halls in town, and indeed occasionally at Cremorne, it was not a question that arose. Provided he paid for their drinks and their supper, he could hold them just as tightly as he wished. With the young ladies he had partnered on the rarer occasions he had attended what might be called a society ball, the etiquette was also clear. The young woman was to be held with lightest of touches, like a porcelain figurine in the delicate hands of a connoisseur. But where did Emily fit into the social equation? She was undoubtedly a lady. Everything about her appearance proclaimed that fact. And yet what lady would have come unannounced and unaccompanied to Doughty Street? What lady would have chosen to meet him in the early evening at Cremorne Gardens? More questions raced through Adam’s mind but Emily herself answered many of them by moving closer into his tentative embrace.
‘You have deceived me, Mr Carver,’ she said with a smile. ‘You dance very well. Your left foot knows exactly what your right foot is doing.’
‘No, it is partnering you that has worked a miracle, Miss Maitland. I assure you that I am usually as clumsy as a carthorse when I dance.’
The two of them moved beneath the large sign that read ‘All the Nations of the World are Welcome to Cremorne’ and continued to circle the orchestra. At this time of the day, only a handful of couples were dancing. Other groups of men and women, and some solitary men, strolled around the perimeter fence, watching those who had taken to the floor. Adam felt proud to be seen with such a beautiful woman as Emily but his curiosity about her remained. He decided that directness was, perhaps, his best policy.
‘I am puzzled by the affairs of consequence to us both to which you referred in your letter, Miss Maitland. I am uncertain what affairs we can have in common.’
‘Oh, the dance floor is no place to talk of them!’ Emily moved even closer into his arms. Adam was only too aware of the warmth of her body pressed against his as they completed a first circuit of the orchestra and embarked upon another. However, he was determined to find out more about his mysterious partner.
‘I was delighted by your visit to my rooms in Doughty Street,’ he persisted, ‘on the day that Quint’s clumsiness with the plates seemed to frighten you away. But I was perplexed as to the reason for it.’
He paused and strove to catch the young woman’s eye. She looked away from him, as if scanning the rows of spectators for a familiar face.
‘And for the call you made upon me the previous Friday,’ he added.
Emily now turned her head and stared at him, almost sullenly. As if by mutual agreement, the two of them began to move even more slowly than the music demanded. After a moment they came to a complete halt. Another couple, surprised by their stopping, nearly collided with them, before laughing and reeling off at an angle.
‘My landlady, Mrs Gaffery, saw you come down the stairs,’ Adam said. ‘I do believe she has as many eyes as Argus Panoptes.’
Emily continued to gaze at him. For a few seconds, he thought that she was about to speak. Instead, she leaned in towards him, her head uptilted and her lips slightly parted. Adam’s own head moved downwards. They began to kiss. To his surprise, the young man felt Emily’s tongue enter his mouth, gently probing. He responded. For what seemed to him like many minutes, they stood entwined on the dance floor. Then Emily broke free from his embrace and began to make her way swiftly towards one of the breaks in the perimeter fence. Rooted to the spot, the taste of her still within his mouth, he watched her go. She did not look back. He debated whether or not to follow her. By the time he decided that he should and must, she had disappeared from sight.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
At Sir Willoughby Oughtred’s house in Eaton Square, a pigeon-breasted and melancholic servant, whose face suggested profound disillusionment with the world and all it contained, took Adam’s card and disappeared. Left in an entrance hall tiled in squares of black and white marble, Adam felt like a chess piece awaiting the next move in a complicated game. The servant returned in a surprisingly short time and led him up to a first-floor drawing room. Sir Willoughby was already there, warming himself in front of the fireplace. Above his head, on either side of the hearth, were portraits of disgruntled-looking men in eighteenth-century costume. Adam assumed they were earlier baronets. The Oughtreds were an ancient family, so ancient that even the present-day members of it had lost track of its exact origins. They had not come over with the Conqueror. That, at least, was certain. In fact, when William the Bastard had crossed the Channel, he had found that the Oughtreds were already there. They had been waiting for him and, in alliance with King Harold, had attempted to bloody his nose. When this failed, one Oughtred had disappeared into the East Anglian fens with Hereward the Wake. Over the centuries, having made their peace with the Norman invaders, the Oughtreds had quietly prospered. They were granted land in Lincolnshire by Henry I. They fought on the side of this Henry and several of those that followed him in wars against ambitious noblemen. They were granted more land in Lincolnshire.
By the time of Henry VIII, the Oughtreds already had more acres in the county than they really needed, but as stalwart supporters of the king they accepted thousands more which had once belonged to the monasteries. During the Civil War and the rule of Cromwell, their fervid royalism proved costly to them for the first time in several hundred years. Several Oughtreds were obliged to join Charles II in impecunious exile in the Netherlands but luckily this proved to be only a temporary downturn in their fortunes. In the two centuries since the Merry Monarch’s triumphant return to his throne, they had continued to sit comfortably in the upper ranks of English society. They had faced only minor setbacks. In the reign of George III, one Oughtred had sunk so low as to marry a brewer’s daughter. The social stigma had been unavoidable but the young woman in question had brought compensating gifts to the marriage and to the Oughtred fortunes. A quarter of a million pounds of them, in fact.
Today, the family was as ubiquitous in the life of the nation as it had ever been. Half a dozen Oughtreds or more were currently serving in the army and were kept busy dealing with potentially restless natives in the furthest-flung corners of the empire. At least three were in the Church and one held a bishopric. And Sir Willoughby Oughtred sat in the House of Commons, as he had done since the day after his twenty-first birthday many years before, helping in his own particular way to shape the laws that governed his fellow Englishmen.