Chapter Seven

London, May 1920

Queen Charlotte’s Ball was Eve’s first formal dance as a debutante. There were oodles of rules to remember and strict etiquette to follow, and she felt as though there was a swarm of bees in her tummy when she arrived and contemplated the crowded room.

She had only come out the week before, at Buckingham Palace. The whole uninspiring event consisted of one queue after another. First of all, her car crawled in a line waiting to get into the Palace forecourt. Hundreds of girls queued up the steps inside, all wearing the obligatory ankle-length white evening dress with a long train, and ostrich feathers secured in half-veils.

“We look like brides-in-waiting,” she remarked to the girl next to her. “I suppose that’s what we are.”

Next they queued to have their formal photographs taken, posing on a gilt-backed sofa. And then there was another queue in the antechamber before they were led into the throne room to curtsey to Queen Mary.

Eve repeated the instructions in her head, nerves knotting: step, step, deep curtsey, reverse without turning your back on Her Majesty. Afterward, she was grateful to have gotten through it without being sick on the Queen’s pearl-encrusted shoes.

At Queen Charlotte’s Ball, once again dozens of girls dressed in white had to line up and parade into the ballroom. Eve felt self-conscious because the ones in front and behind her were several inches taller, making her look like a child dressed as a grown-up who had wandered in by mistake.

After the parade, she was handed a dance card. She stared in dismay at the blank spaces alongside the twenty dances of the evening. It looked as though she would be sitting them out, because the men huddled on the opposite side of the room were not paying her the slightest bit of attention.

“You look as though you need to borrow my brother,” a voice remarked over her shoulder, and Eve turned to see a girl with short dark hair and a glint in her eyes that signaled amusement at their predicament. Straightaway Eve knew she wanted to be her friend.

“Oh, yes please!” She extended her gloved hand. “I’m Evelyn Herbert.”

“Maude Richardson. Stay there and I’ll fetch him.”

Maude dashed off and returned only moments later dragging a thin lad with a toothy smile. “This is Charlie. Charlie—fill in three of her dances, won’t you? And ask your friends too.”

“Won’t you take the first dance?” Eve begged, handing over her card. “I’m terribly nervous and want to get it out of the way so I can start to enjoy myself.”

The card was signed, the orchestra struck up a foxtrot, and they took to the floor. Charlie wasn’t a proficient dancer—Eve would have a bruised toe the following morning—but he was chatty and natural and she enjoyed herself.

As the dance finished, a girl with sandy blond curls and pretty doll-like features approached and asked, “May I poach him? Maude said it was alright.”

“Of course,” Eve agreed. “He’s all yours.”

Charlie was good-natured about it: “I don’t mind being passed on like a used book. Maude tells me that’s what little brothers are for.”

“Emily Bramwell,” the girl called by way of introduction, before swinging him onto the dance floor. It rather looked as if she was leading, but Charlie gamely did his best to keep step.

Maude joined Eve, followed by a girl with wide green eyes, auburn hair, and perfectly shaped eyebrows. “This is Lois Sturt,” she explained, “and she has a cousin James who has promised to dance with all of us. Give me your card and I’ll get him to sign.”

Eve handed it over and Maude dashed off. “She’s terribly efficient,” Eve commented to Lois. “I should have been sitting out the entire evening without her.”

“Goodness, I’m sure you wouldn’t, not with your looks,” Lois said.

“I was about to say the same about you,” Eve replied. “I love the way you’ve done your eyebrows. I saw it in a magazine and didn’t dare try in case I made a fearful mess, but it’s very fetching.”

“Come for tea and I’ll show you how it’s done,” Lois promised. “We need to keep in touch.”

At the end of the evening—which Eve found exhausting and exhilarating in equal measure—Lois presented her “at home” card to Maude, Emily, and Eve, and invited them for tea at four o’clock on Friday.

Eve was beside herself with excitement. She had always longed for female friends. None of the men she had danced with had made much of an impression, but she already knew she was going to adore these girls.

* * *

Two days later, her mother’s chauffeur took Eve to Lois’s family home in South Kensington, where tea was set out in a formal drawing room decorated in shades of rose pink and gold.

“We’ve survived our first ball,” Maude said, helping herself to a scone. “But this Season could prove tricky, given the ratio of about four girls to each eligible man. We need to stick together and pool our resources.”

“Is your mother putting pressure on you to find a husband?” Eve asked. “Mine has said she will consider me an abject failure if I’m not engaged by Christmas. Frankly, I intend to put off the dreaded decision for as long as I can.”

“My mother wants me to marry the son of some family friends,” Lois said. “We’ve known each other since we were children and I like him a lot, but I’m not sure I feel about him the way one should about a husband.”

“Try kissing him,” Maude advised. “That’s the crucial test. You’ll either feel ‘it’ or you won’t.”

Eve wondered if Maude had experience of this test. What must it be like to kiss a man? Wouldn’t his moustache prickle against your lip?

“My mother died when I was a baby,” Emily said. “And my aunt doesn’t have the first clue about the Season. I’m relying on you girls to advise me on etiquette, dress codes, the whole kit and caboodle.”

“We will,” said Maude. “Although it seems the dress codes our mothers swear by are changing. Hems are creeping ever higher and gloves are no longer the be-all and end-all of civilized life.”

They talked about the new fashions—coat dresses were said to be au courant but it was hard to think when you might wear them. Lois lent Eve a magazine that described how to pluck the eyebrows into inverted V shapes that made the eyes look much bigger, and Eve announced she would try as soon as she got home.

“If I’m wearing a low-brimmed hat next time you see me, you’ll know why!” she said. “The style makes you look intriguing, Lois, but I may just appear startled.”

It wasn’t all fashion and frivolity. Their conversations roamed through the topics of the day: the Spanish flu, which had caused mass panic the previous year but now seemed to have tailed off; the Paris Peace Conference setting terms for the war’s end; and Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle’s new book, The Vital Message, in which he claimed that human beings were on the verge of discovering an entirely new way of understanding life and death.

“Sir Arthur is a friend of my father’s,” Emily said. “He told us he has absolutely no doubt that he communicates with his son Kingsley, who died in 1918 at the Somme, as well as his brother Innes, who passed last year. He thinks God has sent us new revelations about the afterlife at precisely this moment to comfort those who lost loved ones in the war.”

“My mother’s a believer,” said Lois. “She’s forever attending séances.”

“My father too,” Eve admitted. “He has a Romany woman called Sirenia who holds séances at Highclere. I’ve been to a couple but I have to admit I’m skeptical.” She described to them a night when she watched Sirenia surreptitiously tug on a string to make a vase of flowers topple over. And she had seen her stuff gauze into her mouth, then regurgitate it, pretending it was ectoplasm. “But my father is utterly convinced he’s communicating with his late mother, so it would be cruel to contradict him.”

They agreed there were charlatans in every trade, and it seemed especially far-fetched that so many self-proclaimed “clairvoyants” were appearing out of the woodwork.

“We are clearly heathens,” Maude announced. “And there are four of us. So I christen us the ‘Unholy Quadrumvirate.’ Such will be our name forever after.”

“Can you be a heathen and still talk about christening?” Emily quibbled. “Alright, why ever not!”

Eve felt like the luckiest girl in the world to have made such interesting friends so early in her first Season. After the isolation of her teenage years at Highclere, it felt as if she had struck gold.

* * *

One of the Pine Trees nurses brought a tray of tea for Eve and Maude, with some digestive biscuits on a plate decorated with painted bluebells. Eve was glad that Maude poured the tea because her left hand was shaky. She’d had many a spill trying to pour herself a glass of water from the jug by her bed.

As they sipped the tea, Maude told Eve about Lois’s visit the previous week. She rarely came to town so they had had a lot of catching-up to do. They’d gone shopping on Bond Street and then to see a show, and they scarcely stopped talking for ten hours straight.

“How’s Em-m-ly?” Eve asked. “Have you seen her r-rec-ently?”

Maude frowned, twisting her lips to one side before answering. “Emily died, Eve. Over twenty years ago. It was breast cancer, like her mother before her. You came to her funeral, at Holy Trinity Brompton. Remember?”

Eve clutched her face in shock and burst into tears. How could Emily be dead? She could picture her as a young girl, swaying to the music of a jazz band, with her pretty blond curls and wide brown eyes. Poor Emily. The first of them to go.

Brograve bustled in at that moment, carrier bags in hand. He took in Eve’s tears and glanced at Maude for an explanation.

“She’d forgotten Emily had died,” Maude told him, passing Eve a hankie and patting her hand.

Brograve put his arm around her and stooped to kiss her forehead. Maybe now wasn’t the time to ask her about Egypt and Tutankhamun. Loads of people died after that, and it would be cruel to remind her while she was still so fragile. Imagine how awful it would be if she mourned each one anew—like losing all your loved ones in one fell swoop.