A devastated, hysterically sobbing Griselda had to be carried off the set by a buckling Lucy and Simone. Everyone was outraged. They loved Griselda: indefatigable, gossipy old trout. They knew she was good. The crew would have walked out if Rannaldini hadn’t built massive penalty clauses into all their contracts. Instead they went slow, with Oscar waking up to relight every ten minutes.

All the crew were putting in impossibly long hours, but no-one more so than Wolfie. Once again, his greatest headache was stopping Pushy Galore appearing in everything. Having waved a flag as a member of the hoi-polloi and simpered as a lady-in-waiting, Pushy was determined to star as a heretic, and was utterly incensed when Tristan chucked her out.

‘You wait till Ay tell Sir Roberto.’

Fortunately Rannaldini had flown off to Vienna and was not expected back until the evening. Pushy was even crosser when Tristan chose Tab instead. She would look so touching, a dunce’s cap on her blonde head, her deadpan face smudged. Tab was terribly excited; Wolfie less so. Supervising the filling of petrol cans with water, he couldn’t bear the thought of her beautiful body being torched.

The drought was so terrible, it was as if Meredith had carpeted the surrounding fields brown. Wild flowers that had survived were a quarter of their usual height. Wolfie disappeared in a cloud of dust as he drove his Land Rover round the park. All the cast complained non-stop about not being able to breathe. Wolfie could have burnt the lot of them on the bonfire.

It was the last set-up before lunch as, surrounded by leather-clad paparazzi, with Tristan’s four black cypresses in the background overseeing things, Granny as Gordon Dillon took up his position on the battlements of the cathedral. While the heretics were tied to the stakes below, shredded piles of the Scorpion were thrown under their bare feet.

‘As people in the sixteenth century flocked to see heretics burn, today we devour the papers and gloat over reputations being destroyed,’ explained Tristan. ‘Think of the poor Duchess of York.’

‘Think of Chloe in a week or two,’ murmured Flora to Baby.

Out in the park, through the heat haze, they could see Chloe, ravishing in palest pink, having her photograph taken for the Scorpion. Hotfoot from a very promising Samson and Delilah audition, she had returned to Valhalla for an in-depth interview with Beattie Johnson, the Scorpion’s most dreaded columnist. Beattie had written to Chloe direct, claiming she was a long-term fan of Chloe and the opera.

‘I can handle the press,’ Chloe had told Hype-along haughtily when he expressed horror at the planned interview.

Having read Chloe’s cuttings and a page-long synopsis of Don Carlos in the limo driving down, Beattie Johnson was highly diverted to see the identical twin of her notorious boss, Gordon Dillon, on the battlements and was now shredding reputations, ‘off the record, of course’, with Chloe.

Lucy, who’d already had to make up Chloe as well as the cast, was having a day from hell. The gruesome concept of an auto da fe upset her dreadfully. Her passport had gone missing and she’d spent two hours looking for it. Her back, from so much bending, was killing her. She’d have gone straight to James Benson, if she hadn’t given more money to Rozzy who’d been in tears all morning. This was because, after a weekend at home, Rozzy had forgotten Flora’s newly repaired puppet fox and done a U-turn only to find her horrible husband Glyn and his glamorous housekeeper, Sylvia, opening a bottle to celebrate her departure.

I can’t go on shoring everyone up, thought Lucy in despair.

Having not had any breakfast, she was feeling faint and decided to grab a salad from the canteen, where she found Chloe and Beattie Johnson, two glamorous blondes, sharing a bottle of Muscadet.

‘Bernard, the first assistant, has a thumping great crush on Rozzy Pringle,’ Chloe was whispering.

‘Who’s she?’

‘Oh, Beattie,’ giggled Chloe, ‘you must have heard of Rozzy. She’s so refined she pees eau-de-Cologne.’

Both women shrieked with laughter. Lucy’s blood started to boil.

‘Here comes Tristan,’ hissed Beattie. ‘You must introduce me.’

She’s got the hard, set little face of a terrorist waiting to lob a bomb into all our lives, thought Lucy.

‘I’ve seen all your films,’ Beattie was now telling Tristan.

Lucy was on her way out when she heard Tristan, who’d taken an empty seat at the table, explaining the auto da fe to Beattie. ‘The Spaniards are experts at ritualistic torture,’ he was saying. ‘Look at the ballet of killing the bull. In the same way, auto da fe sets fire to humans in dunces’ caps to humiliate and express power of Church.’

‘I love Spanish men,’ said Chloe, who hadn’t been listening.

‘Me too,’ sighed Beattie.

‘Well, you’re both stupid bitches,’ said a furious voice.

Looking round, everyone was amazed to see a trembling, red-faced Lucy holding a tray, off which a glass of orange juice and a salad were sliding.

‘I hate Spaniards. Hate, hate, hate them,’ she went on hysterically. ‘When greyhounds are past their sell-by date in England, they’re sold to Spain where they’re raced into the ground.’

‘Oh, pur-lease.’ Chloe raised her eyes to heaven.

‘But the fucking Spaniards are too stingy to shoot them or put them down so they string them up in the woods with their toes just touching the ground and have bets on which is going to die first. It takes hours. The poor dogs scream in agony like the heretics. And you like fucking Spaniards?’

The appalled silence was broken by Lucy’s salad crashing to the ground, and orange juice spilling all over Chloe’s new pink dress. Flora, Baby and Granny leapt to their feet, but Tristan reached Lucy first.

‘It’s all right, sweet’eart, of course it’s terrible, whether it’s greyhounds or heretics.’

But Lucy had wriggled out of his arms and, shouting, ‘Why don’t you have a word with King Carlos? I bet he shot partridge with your father,’ she fled, sobbing, back to her caravan.

‘Dear, dear,’ drawled Chloe. ‘When make-up artists start having tantrums, the rot has set in.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ yelled Flora.

Tristan was about to go after Lucy when Bernard seized his arm and dragged him off to an urgent meeting in Sexton’s office. This Tristan did not enjoy. The budget, Sexton told him bleakly, had hit twenty-two million and was still climbing: Tristan must hurry up the crew. After a snide piece in the Stage, picked up by the nationals, the backers were getting antsy. Rannaldini must be persuaded to release more money when he returned tonight.

‘He won’t unless we allow him to do his sodding introductions.’ Tristan unwrapped another piece of chewing-gum. God, he needed a cigarette.

Sexton was just saying he couldn’t pay this week’s wages when Tab barged into the room. ‘What’s that bitch doing here?’

‘Get out,’ bellowed Bernard.

‘She was Daddy’s mistress between marriages,’ stormed Tab. ‘She nearly ruined him. She stopped him and Taggie adopting babies in England, she got Abby Rosen sacked, and she outed my brother Marcus. She’s the most evil woman in the world.’

‘Who are you talking about?’

‘Beattie Johnson, who’s interviewing Chloe,’ said Tab. ‘In that big black bag are a hammer and nails to crucify her victims.’

‘That’s blasphemous,’ exploded Bernard.

‘But a shrewd assessment,’ agreed Sexton. ‘If Beattie stitches us up, the backers really will pull out.’

Tristan wrinkled his brow. ‘I think she’s a friend of Rannaldini. We’d better throw her out before he gets back.’

He found Beattie buttering up Pushy.

‘If you weren’t so lovely, people would take you more seriously as a singer.’

‘Sir Roberto’s always sayin’ that.’

‘He says you stand out from all the other extras.’

‘Ay’m not an extra, Ay’m a featured extra,’ said Pushy haughtily.

‘Off the record, how well do you know Alpheus Shaw? What a hunk.’

Tristan had heard enough. Beattie was incandescent with rage when he told her that a car, with her suitcases all packed in the boot, was waiting to take her back to London.

‘Do not say Liberty Productions does not evict with style,’ he added, as he opened the door for her.

Chloe was also insane with anger.

‘We hadn’t even begun the interview yet. Everything was off the record.’

‘Every inch of that evil frame is taped,’ said Tristan.

Spurred on by his meeting with Sexton, he returned to the set determined to dispatch the last gruesome seconds of the auto da fe in one stint. It was even hotter. Hermione was flushing up in her new red dress from Versace. Flora and Granny sweltered in their dark suits, but not nearly so much as Alpheus in his gold regalia, or Baby, Mikhail and the courtiers in their ermine-trimmed peers’ robes.

As Lucy, tearstained after her outburst at lunchtime, rushed round trying to cool people down with a chamois leather soaked in cologne, Baby could be heard grumbling that he’d be barbied without going near any stake.

‘If you confessed at the last moment, you could be strangled before you were burnt to death,’ volunteered a listless Flora, who hadn’t heard from George since her night with Baby.

To capture the intense drama, Tristan was using a crane to film from above, with Valentin and his camera on a tiny platform hanging twenty feet above the funeral pyre. It would be a wonderful shot, tracking over the excited crowd, the bigwigs of church and state in their gilded regalia and the poor, doomed victims. The head of Props waited with his finger on the button of the smoke-machine. The flames would be added later by special effects.