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in the coffee bar, there must have been a good chance of Mary Quant coming in and spotting her. Only her sister could be old-fashioned enough to think that the ritual of ‘afternoon tea’ actually mattered and not understand that just to mention it in the circles in which Janey moved at once rendered a person hideously unhip. A person would never have thought that Ella herself had graduated from St Martins, but then Ella had been happy to go and work in
Vogue
’s offices, whereas nothing other than creating her own fashion designs would do for Janey. She had wanted to be a dress designer for as long as she could remember. As a little girl she had always been begging scraps of silk from Amber to make clothes for her dolls.
    ‘Well, I just hope that this party is respectable,’ Ella warned, ‘because Mama has enough to worry about at the moment with Emerald, without having to worry about you as well.’
    Ella wished that Janey was more like Amber. She worried dreadfully about her younger sister’s casualattitude to life and its dangers. Where Ella frowned anxiously, Janey laughed; where Ella retreated warily, Janey stepped forward and embraced; where Ella saw danger, Janey saw only excitement. But Janey could not remember what Ella could, and she did not know what Ella knew either. Their real mother had loved excitement. She had craved it. Ella had heard her saying so in that wild manner she had sometimes had as she paced the floor like a bird beating itself against the bars of its cage. Her mother had laughed wildly with their aunt Cassandra, the two of them disappearing upstairs into Ella’s parents’ bedroom.
    Janey had been their mother’s favourite too, somehow always managing to win a smile from her, where Ella got only cross words.
    Janey didn’t understand how afraid Ella was of either of them possessing the traits of their mother, and Ella couldn’t tell her why she feared that. Janey didn’t remember their mother as well as she did–she was lucky. Even now Ella sometimes woke up in the night worrying about what their lives would have been like if their real mother had lived. She remembered vividly her mother’s moods, the rages that could come out of nowhere and then the tears, the way she had screamed at them.
    The truth was that their mother had been a little mad–more than a little. Her madness had been brought on by the births of Ella herself and then Janey, so Blanche, Amber’s grandmother, had once let slip. Ella hated to think of her mother’s illness. In fact, Ella hated to think of her mother at all. She envied Emerald having Amber as her real mother.
    Whenever Ella found herself beginning to feel upsetor angry about anything she deliberately reminded herself of her mother and then she shut her feelings away. She would never marry–or have children–she didn’t want to end up like her mother.
    But what about Janey? Janey didn’t know why she had to be afraid of what they might have inherited from their mother and Ella couldn’t bring herself to tell her because, much as she worried about her young sister and her giddiness and recklessness, Ella also loved her dearly. She didn’t want to take away Janey’s happiness and replace it with the fear she had herself.

Chapter Four
Paris
    ‘Well, your father might have been a duke, Emerald, but you certainly aren’t a duchess.’
    Emerald only just managed to stop herself from glaring at Gwendolyn.
    The three of them, Emerald herself, the Hon Lydia Munroe, and Lady Gwendolyn, her godmother’s niece, were all going to be coming out together.
    Gwendolyn might be as plain as her dull-looking and boring mother, whose sharp gaze had already warned Emerald that she had not found favour with her, but Emerald knew how highly her godmother thought of her. Gwendolyn’s father was Lady Beth’s brother, the Earl of Levington, and she thought the world of him and his family. If Emerald gave in to her longing to put ‘Glum Gwennie’, as she had