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of hanging at Denham. Emerald rather thought that she might become a patroness of modern art once she was married. She could imagine the praise she would receive from the press for her excellent eye and taste, and the entries in the gossip columns that would confirm her status: ‘HRH The Duchess of Kent is London’s premier hostess, as well as being a well-known patroness of modern art.’
    Her Royal Highness, The Duchess of Kent. Emerald preened, thinking how well the title suited her.
    Ella shivered as she stepped out of the building that housed Dr Williamson’s rooms and into Harley Street, not so much from the raw biting wind as from shockeddisbelief and excitement that she had actually done what she had done.
    She had been weighed and measured by a smartly uniformed nurse, had filled in a long form giving all her medical details, and had then been told by the serious-looking Dr Williamson that for the good of her health she really did need to take the course of medication he was going to prescribe for her in order that she could lose weight.
    She was to take two pills per day, one after breakfast and one late afternoon, and then after a month she was to return to him to be weighed and measured and given another prescription.
    It wasn’t cheating, Ella had reassured herself. All the diet pills would do was help her to control her appetite. And when she had controlled it and lost some weight, then no one, but especially Oliver Charters, would laugh at her behind her back ever again.

Chapter Three
    ‘Janey, I’m still not sure that we should be going to this party,’ Ella protested, feeling irritated and exasperated when she saw that, instead of listening to her, Janey was concentrating on drawing a thick black line round her eyes, the tip of her tongue protruding slightly between her lips as she did so.
    ‘We can’t not go,’ Janey announced, proving that she had been listening all along. ‘I’ve promised.’
    Promised Dan that she’d be there, was what she meant and she didn’t want to disappoint him. Not when things were getting so exciting.
    Ella made no response. She knew there was no point. She wished, though, that her sister looked more conventional. Janey considered herself to be bohemian, or at least she had done until she had started frequenting Mary Quant’s shop Bazaar on the King’s Road, and had fallen in love with her signature style. It was Janey’s greatest ambition to have her own designs admired by Mary–designs that Ella thought quite frankly were far too daring. Take the short-skirted, A-line, striped ticking fabric dress Janey had made herself and had insisted onwearing this afternoon when she had bullied and coaxed Ella and Rose into going with her to her favourite coffee bar, the Fantasy.
    The Fantasy, the only ‘proper’ coffee bar outside Soho, was owned by Archie McNair, friend and sponsor of Mary Quant, and Janey had told Ella and Rose excitedly that she hoped that her idol might come in and spot her in her new creation. That had not happened, but Janey had attracted a good deal of attention. No wonder people, or rather men, had stared at Janey so much. Much as she loved her younger sister, there were times when Ella couldn’t help wishing that Janey acted with more decorum and wore sensible proper grown-up clothes, not garments that made people stare.
    Attracting attention of any kind was something that made Ella feel anxious. As they were growing up, whenever she and Janey had been the focus of their late mother’s attention it had been because they had done something ‘wrong’–something that had made their mother cross and for which Ella, as the elder of the two, always got the blame.
    Her stepmother was nothing like her mother. Ella’s father’s marriage to Amber had been a blessed relief. Amber was a proper mother, who understood about things of importance, like not wearing wet socks or going upstairs in the dark without the light on.
    At least one thing she would