‘You’re happy, then?’ he asked, looking down at her tenderly.

‘Happy! My dearest, you can’t imagine…’ she gazed reverently at the vast, brocaded backside of the Archduchess Frederica undulating two feet away in the heroic clasp of the Prince of Spittau. ‘All these people here — and as your guests!’

‘Our guests, Nerine. All this is for you.’

She looked up at him under her lashes, smiling — that long, slow, curving smile which had entranced him all those years ago. ‘You spoil me, darling.’

It was all worthwhile, he told himself again. He would have endured for eternity the company of these relics of the Almanach de Gotha (now proposing to eat him out of house and home) to see her look like that.

The Pfaffenstein Serenaders, engaged for the first night so as not to offend the susceptibilities of the locals, paused for an instant to wipe their perspiring faces before thundering into the ‘Gold and Silver Waltz’. Guy, steering Nerine between the couples, resolutely ignoring the spectacle of the Princess of Pfaffenstein supporting, without seeming to, the creaking form of the aged Prince Monteforelli while that disgusting old creature whispered his gallantries into her small, pricked ear, pulled his fiancée closer and said:

‘Do you remember, darling? This is the first waltz we ever danced to? At the Academy…’

The high, bare room, the young girls in their pale dresses, the Hungarian killed on the Eastern Front who had been his friend and loved the freckle-faced American… that incredible moment when the music allowed him to do what would otherwise have been unthinkable: to take Nerine into his arms…

‘Do you remember?’ he asked again.

Panic flickered for a moment in Nerine’s eyes. Guy had been asking her if she remembered things ever since they had come to Vienna, and the long and the short of it was that she did not.

‘What was I wearing?’ she prompted.

Guy frowned in concentration. ‘Something pink… soft… floating.’

Relief spread across Nerine’s face. Of course: the rose georgette, high-waisted, with puffed sleeves. The maid at the Academy had made an appalling mess of ironing the flounces and she had had to be very sharp with her.

‘Yes, yes, my dear,’ she said happily. ‘I do indeed remember.’

The Unconscious, lately discovered by Professor Freud and used by others to store their joys, fears and frustrations, was for Nerine a gigantic subterranean wardrobe.

Nerine’s brother was hardly less ecstatic than his sister. True, the oil-stained lady with whom he was dancing resembled nothing so much as a stranded sea cow patiently awaiting a gift of fish; true, her moist round eyes seemed unable to tear themselves from Farne — but what did it matter? She was the Countess Waaltraut von Waneck and could trace her descent back to Bohemian kings. Of course, to dance with the Princess of Pfaffenstein would really be something, but there was not much hope there. They were queueing up for her in order of rank, as was proper. Incredible, the catch Farne had turned out to be! What must all this be costing him, thought Arthur, and began happily to calculate again.

‘Jolly good show, this,’ said a captain of the Uhlans who was stranded, on account of a wooden leg, beside the Bath chair of Waaltraut’s mother. ‘Everything being done just as it should be. And the fellow seems to know how to behave too.’

The gouty old countess nodded. ‘If he hadn’t been engaged,’ she said, ‘I might almost have let Waaltraut demean herself.’

‘Oh, I say, no!’ said the Uhlan, shocked.

David Tremayne, standing unobtrusively by the great double doors, keeping an eye on everything, was satisfied. There had been numerous problems, and even this afternoon the director of the opera company had pursued him with some complaint about a missing wardrobe mistress — a complaint which David found hard to take seriously. Surely massive Viennese sewing ladies did not vanish into thin air? But now everything felt right. Farne’s guests were clearly having the time of their lives and Farne himself, waltzing with the lovely widow, must surely tonight be the happiest of men? How beautiful she was — staggeringly so, thought David — and turned to look yet again at the Princess of Pfaffenstein.

Already it seemed incredible to him that when she had first appeared in the aunts’ Tower Room just before the reception, sleepy and bewildered, he had been disappointed. From the talk which had preceded her, he had imagined someone sweetly pretty with curls and dimples, and the grave, narrow little face and shorn head had come as a shock. Then she had hugged the aunts and smiled at them and it was as though a flame had been lit inside her. Long before her old nurse had come and led her away, protesting, to dress, he had not imagined how she could look otherwise.

Since then he had admired, increasingly, her determination to stay out of the limelight. She had refused to let the band serenade her for her birthday, and had left the ballroom on some pretext before the first dance so that Mrs Hurlingham and Guy could open the ball alone. Not that it helped, thought David. Those dotty aristocrats, one and all, seemed to adore her.

Now he watched as she deposited her ancient, creaking kinsman in a gold-backed chair beside her aunts — and was immediately claimed by the man everyone said she was going to marry, the Prince of Spittau.

‘Nice tune, isn’t it?’ said Maxi happily, as the band broke into yet another waltz.

‘Yes,’ said Tessa. ‘Though I must say, Maxi, I would simply love to Charleston.’

‘To Charleston! Can you?’ Maxi was shocked. No wonder his mother worried about Putzerl!

‘A bit. Some friends took me to a jazz club and they taught me.’

But Maxi was bent on business. The music was heady and he would have been foolish not to know that in his sky-blue tunic and white trousers piped in red, he was looking his best. If he could propose and be accepted now, even without the dogs, he could really settle down and enjoy the house party.

‘They should make a very suitable couple, shouldn’t they?’ said Nerine as Maxi and Tessa drew level. Her rage at Tessa’s entry had been soothed by Arthur, who had informed her that the Princess was soon to be removed, and permanently, to the Prince of Spittau’s Wasserburg. ‘The prince so handsome and she — thanks to you — so rich.’

‘She won’t have all that much,’ said Guy. ‘Her father left a pile of debts.’ Though not naturally an ostentatious dancer, he now performed a chain of double reverse-turns which took them rapidly to the other end of the ballroom.

‘Putzerl, you know how fond I’ve always been of you,’ Maxi began.

‘And I of you, Maxi.’

Oh, please, not tonight, thought Tessa. My head aches so much and I just can’t face hurting him again. It seemed to her that the ball had been going on for ever and Guy had not spoken a single word to her all evening, had not once glanced her way.

But it looked as though there was no way of avoiding it. Maxi had tightened his arm and his duelling scar was pulsating, always a sign of deep emotion. There was no doubt about it, he was going to propose.

‘Putzerl, don’t you think you could—’

The prince was halted by a scuffle and the sound of laughter. Then, eluding two flunkeys in crimson and green, a tiny boy in awesomely striped pyjamas tottered barefoot into the ballroom and stopped, blinking in the light of the chandeliers.

Bubi, having gained his objective, now took stock. The people were there, and the music, but where were the men with the hammers, where the rows of seats? And where was she?

A lady in a red dress tried to seize him but Bubi, used to nipping between scene-shifters, easily wriggled free. The laughter was growing now; more and more dancers had stopped and now the music, too, came to an end.

Had he made a mistake? Bubi’s lower lip jutted out, began to tremble…

‘Bubi!’

In an instant the little boy’s face was transformed. Joy and relief shone in the coal-black eyes. It was her voice. She was here! And then she was bending over him and as she picked him up and he put his arms round her, he heard the words he longed above all others to hear.

‘You’ve got pyjamas, Bubi,’ said Tessa, her voice full of awe. ‘Real, proper, grown-up, striped pyjamas!’

Thus the Rhinemaiden, alerted by some sixth sense to her son’s disappearance and making a Wagnerian entrance, a shawl over her nightdress, put aside the images of Bubi impaled on iron spikes or drowned in a dark well, and saw him safe in the arms of a slim girl in white satin, light dancing from the tiara on her lovingly bent head…

And saw, too, that the search for their under wardrobe mistress had ended.

Tessa slept badly the night after the ball and not because Bubi, refusing to be parted from her, shared her bed in the turret in the West Tower.

Shortly before daybreak she rose, carried the still-sleeping child to her nurse next door and extracted the working smock which the old woman, clucking with disapproval, had washed, dried and ironed the previous day. Then slipping it on, she crept downstairs.

In the castle no one was stirring yet, but carrying up from the village she heard the familiar sounds of a country dawn: a cockerel crowing, the clank of a bucket, the creak of bolts pulled back on a stable door.

She passed the chapel, hesitated and went on. God, she felt, would not be very pleased with her this morning, and crossing the main courtyard she passed through the gatehouse arch, crossed the drawbridge and climbed the worn, stone steps which led to the eastern ramparts. The sunrise place, she had always called it, as she now stood looking out to where, from the rim of the plain whose inhabitants had once brought devastation and sorrow to her house, a silver disc of brightness had begun to lift itself above the haze.