‘Then you should have listened to him.’
‘Look, I didn’t mean to upset you,’ said Amy, trying to catch her gaze. ‘But where I come from, friends and family care what happens to each other, and yet you spent Christmas alone. Well, with me, but I don’t count. I am worried about you.’
‘Amy, we have spent a sum total of four days together. That’s all. Really, you don’t know anything about me. Please do not get involved in my business.’
But Amy knew she had gone too far to stop now.
‘Will said that something happened when you were a girl. Something that has driven your family apart.’
Georgia looked away.
‘And I thought better of Will, too.’
‘Is that the reason you’ve never been to New York?’
Georgia flashed her a look of anger.
‘Perhaps you’d have better luck as a psychic than a choreographer.’
‘Come on, Georgia. Whatever it is, you shouldn’t hold it inside you. You told me that yourself. It’s not too late to change things.’
Georgia shook her head and sat down on the edge of a sofa. She looked suddenly very tired. As she sat there, Amy could see that the old woman’s eyes had welled with tears.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her voice thick with emotion. ‘I shouldn’t have snapped at you. It’s just . . .’ She trailed off, and Amy jumped up to pass her a box of tissues.
Georgia nodded, her head bowed, her whole body defeated. Amy could see her pale, veined hands trembling on her knees, twisting the tissue around her fingers.
‘Should I make the tea?’ she asked.
‘You better had,’ said Georgia. ‘It’s a long story.’
‘I’m not in a rush,’ said Amy quietly.
‘Make the tea and I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you about the night that changed my life.’
September 1958
Peter Hamilton pressed his nose against the glass of the car window and whistled.
‘Now that’s what I call a house,’ he said. Their taxi was slowly approaching Stapleford, caught in a queue of grand cars snaking around in a loop, each stopping before the steps to the front door, where uniformed staff were helping the passengers out.
‘Peter, stop leering out of the window like that,’ scolded Sybil, pulling her husband back. ‘People will see and think you’ve never seen a house before.’
Georgia was fairly sure she never had. Not like this, anyway. Oh, she had been to the Palace, of course, and she had strolled around Kensington Gardens – and obviously, many of the balls and parties during the Season had been held in amazing buildings with painted ceilings and minstrels’ galleries and fountains in the courtyard. But this? Stapleford was on another scale entirely, with wings that seemed to stretch off into the night either side of the blazing entrance. There had to be two hundred windows that Georgia could see, every one of them spilling warm yellow light out into the grounds. She had expected the Carlyle family to push the boat out for Christopher’s twenty-first birthday party, but clearly at Stapleford, pushing the boat out was more like launching a transatlantic steamer.
‘Isn’t it marvellous? The house, I mean,’ said Clarissa, her eyes wide. ‘Edward said it was big, but . . . Gosh, wouldn’t it be wonderful to live here?’
‘You never know, Georgia might be lady of this particular manor one day,’ said Peter with pride.
‘I think that might be a little previous,’ said Sybil, adjusting her stole around her shoulders. ‘They’ve only been friends two minutes.’
‘Well, it was jolly nice of him to invite us all here today,’ said Clarissa as the car pulled to a stop.
‘Very generous,’ whispered Estella as the footman opened the door and they were ushered up the stone steps and into the house.
Once inside, Georgia thought that Uncle Peter’s initial response to Stapleford was only natural: the entrance hall was exactly the sort of place that should make you gape. It was huge, as tall as the building itself, and seemed to have been carved from a single block of white marble. Directly in front of them a wide staircase that split into two and curved around the hall. There were oil paintings and sculptures and Orient
al ceramics; everything inside the hall seemed expensive and exotic and delicate. Georgia could no more imagine herself living somewhere like this than she could imagine going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.