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So we pulled our wrappers around us against the dank chill of the corridor and crept towards the ballroom, drawn by the sound.

With my sister beside me, it was just like before.

Before the war, before Susan had to go and fall in love with someone who had made her happy for moments and made her cry for months.

I had longed for that Before with all my heart; this perhaps was as close as I would ever get.

We tiptoed up to the ballroom archway like children, then stopped, awed.

“Is it real?” whispered Susan.

The ballroom wasn’t empty anymore. It was bursting with color, like a world tinted sepia had come suddenly to life.

It was also packed with people. The music that had drawn us from our beds mingled now with their raised voices, speaking English, their laughter.

They were all in ball-dress straight out of one of my romances, high-waisted dresses, scarlet uniforms. The gowns were like drooping flowers, colored saffron and ivory and raspberry and lime.

Everywhere I looked I saw gallant faces and fans and curls and jewels like hoarfrost at dawn, and garnet-colored wine casting rosy shadows.

It was utterly impossible. It was the loveliest thing I had ever seen.

I stared.

Sue stared.

“Are we dreaming?” said Sue. She looked a little fearful. She’d begun to step back towards the safety of that shadowed corridor, the quotidian smell of dust.

But I reached out and caught her hand, held her where she was. “Maybe,” I whispered back. “But with such dreams, who wants to wake up? Do you think they’d let us dance?” I couldn’t take my eyes off that glorious ballroom.

“Can they even see us?” demanded Sue. “Are they ghosts? Are they real? Maybe something horrible will happen if we go in.”

I was silent. It was true, no one had looked our way. I was the furthest thing from a lady just then. I was wearing a nightgown. My toes wiggled in their sagging wool socks. If it was a dream, all that wouldn’t matter. But was it a dream? It was probably a dream.

“I should be getting back,” said Sue.

“He made you wait,” I said, eyes still on the dancers. “He made you cry. He made you crawl through all of Brussels, looking, and now he won’t look you in the face. Maybe they’ll let us dance. If it’s a dream, they won’t notice our nightdresses.”

Susan said nothing. But she stopped moving back. The ballroom before us was as bright and pure as a meadow at sunrise, its people nodding like flowers.

We stepped tentatively into the room.

Nothing happened. No one looked. We took three steps, four, and then, one person smiled, a gentleman bowed, a woman gave us a curtsey and a friendly greeting, and without quite knowing how it happened, the party swept us up.

Soon Susan was dancing, even laughing. She’d always been a fine dancer.

I considered myself too clumsy to dance, too awkward to ask, despite all my dreams of romance, and so at first I tried to watch over her, as I had always done at parties, happy just to be in this glorious reverie that I knew I’d remember all my life.

I stood quiet, drinking some of the rose-red wine and watching my sister, when I saw a gentleman watching me.

He had quite an ordinary face, teeth a little crooked, big chin and bony jaw, with fair hair tied back like men used to do. When I caught his glance he lifted his own glass in salute and began to walk towards me.

I’d have flushed and turned away, if I were awake, but everything was weightless there as in the way of dreams, where actions have no consequence.

Suddenly bold, I lifted my glass to him in return and he smiled.

“Major Edward Griffiths, fifteenth Hussars,” he said to me, with a bow.

“I do not believe I’ve had the pleasure, miss—”

“I’m Alice,” I blurted, and felt my face flame, shyness knotting my tongue.

He looked taken aback, and of course a well-bred man in an officer’s red coat would be taken aback to be so baldly introduced, but his eyes were warm on my face, and he said, “Well then, Miss Alice, I am glad to meet you. May I have this dance?”

Dancing, in company, was one of those other things that had frightened me at home, and that I almost never did.

My natural awkwardness aside, I’d always felt that there is danger in dancing, that to dance with one man or another is an irrevocable decision – do you favor him or not?

– and that decision can lead to another and another – three dances then four, then calls and drives then a wedding and a house and a child.

And every single one of those steps was just one more trudging pace away from that supreme, longed-for moment, in a ballroom in candlelight, when anything in the whole world was possible.

But there was no weight of decision on me that night. Dreams have no tomorrow. I looked for Sue, saw her smiling up into her current partner’s face, but even that did not worry me, for once.

I took the offered hand of Edward Griffiths, and he whirled me out onto the dance floor.

Perhaps it was the silkiness of the floor, so unlike the scraped thing I had scrubbed that day, or perhaps it was the momentary lifting of my shyness.

But I’ve never danced so well, nor agreed with a partner so well.

I do not even know how long we danced, and we talked, breathlessly, the entire time.

“Where are you from, my mysterious Alice?” he asked me.

“America,” I said. “From California.” Which I was not, but it made his eyes go large, and from there we were off, exchanging stories. I could be anyone at all to him. Anyone I wished to be, and it was the headiest feeling.

Very sincerely, he told me of his mother and a brother not yet in long trousers, a sister of a hoydenish disposition who had painted a whole sketchbook of scurrilous watercolors, to her mother’s despair. He had me laughing louder than my dying soldier ever had.

I don’t know how many hours passed before I realized how warm I was, how I’d begun to flush every time our eyes met.

He smelt of wool and gold bullion and the faint cedar scent of the clothes-press, to keep away the moths.

And of himself, the smell of his body. He was taller than me, broad and strong under his scarlet coat, and his blue eyes were brilliant when he looked at my face.

When he drew me nearer still, I went pliant as an apple-branch, and the warmth of his hand sank through his dancing glove and through all my layers of clothing into the skin of my back.

But even as we stared at each other, with me thinking, heartbroken, I’ve fallen in love at last, and it’s only a dream , the rhythm of the dance was faltering. I saw servants in wigs running. A very grand gentleman, with epaulettes, got up abruptly and left the room. Four others followed.

And Edward, dear Edward, as I called him in my thoughts, lifted his head, although his arm was still round my quivering body, and said, “Something is wrong.” Couples all over the dance floor were coming to a halt; one girl in china blue burst into tears.

Edward’s arm tightened around my waist and then the grand gentleman with the epaulettes came back into the main ballroom, wearing a great caped traveling cloak over his beautiful ball-clothes.

“He’s on the march,” this gentleman said simply. “We shall meet him at Waterloo. Come now, all of you.”

Edward’s face was full of high color. “We shall beat him there; I make no doubt. And then I shall see you again, my angel.” And, before I could protest, or even really understand, he crushed his face to mine, a shocking kiss that seemed to rend my veins with flame and remake me into liquid.

He seized a white rosebud from the nearest vase, pressed it to his lips and tucked it into the mess of my dance-snarled hair.

Then he was gone, hurrying across the floor with an eager step; nearly all the men were going, and the music was dying with them.

Susan was coming across to me, limping on her slippered feet.

“I don’t understand,” she said, but I hardly heard her, my eye following broad young shoulders, and a head of fair, tied-back hair.

And I blinked and I think Susan blinked and we were standing, sweat-drenched and shivering in an empty ballroom with only ourselves, reflected endlessly stunned in the tarnished mirrors. As we stood staring at each other like ninnies, Susan gasped and pointed to me. “Alice…”

And I, reaching up, following her pointing finger, touched silken softness in my wild hair, and nearly fainted. For there, caught up in the mess, was one perfect white rosebud.

***

I wanted for Sue and I to talk about it right away, of course.

It was the finest and strangest thing that ever happened to us in the whole course of our lives, and not a dream.

Was not my rosebud proof? But she had to go back to Mr Lewis.

I went to my bedroom, but I didn’t want to get dressed and have an ordinary day – my whole soul rebelled at the thought of an ordinary day – where washing and visiting and reading might dim the bright images in my mind.

So I went to bed and wrapped myself in all my quilts at once, like a caterpillar, and there I slept, full of hazy dreams. Aunt Irene woke me just before luncheon, saying that Father was home to eat with us, for once, and that even Mr Lewis had agreed to come and sit at table, although he did not choose to actually eat in company, and was I sick, to still be in bed?