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I would have said I am sick, and sunk straight back down, for the world felt particularly cold and dusty outside my quilts and my imaginings.

But a question had occurred to me sometime in my dazed slumber, and it was wanting an answer that got me up and made me pin up my hair and reluctantly take off my nightgown, which smelled, oh so very faintly, of beeswax and wool and roses.

Getting out of bed instantly reduced my memories of the night to a misty blur.

I wanted to cry and leap back in, but Aunt Irene was tapping her foot outside, so I went.

Mr Lewis sat gaunt and strange and silent at table, his face tied up tight in its bandages, and my father was making conversation with that unthinking flow he’d learnt in Washington.

Susan sat on Mr Lewis’ other side, and I could almost see the air quiver in the space between their bodies, alive with all that they were not saying.

It was not so with my Edward, I thought, complacently – we talked like old friends.

The question that had occurred to me in my dreams was still with me and that was, if the grand ball was not a dream, is it a memory?

A haunting? A symptom of brain-fever? So I said ingenuously, “Father – was there ever a grand ball in this house? There must have been. The ballroom is so lovely.”

Sue gave me a hard look, but Father and Aunt Irene smiled – probably they thought I was being gracious, filling the razor-edged silence with innocuous conversation.

My father said instantly, “Why yes – didn’t I say?

I was sure I said – it’s why I took this house, I thought you girls would like it.

This is the house where the Duchess of Richmond had her ball.

” Aunt Irene nodded, but seeing me and Sue tolerably blank, with the bandaged Mr Lewis as ever unreadable, he went on: “Well, of course it was during the Napoleonic wars, when the Duke of Richmond was in charge of the troop defending Brussels. The duchess came to join her husband for the summer season and gave her ball for Wellington’s officers.

” My father was a fine speaker; he had no ambition to be an ambassador or run for Congress, but he could still turn a story better than anyone I’d heard.

“It was the grandest ball in history, they said later. Wellington came, and all the senior staff of the allied forces, and they danced until midnight with waltzes and gallopades and reels, before they went in to supper. But Wellington received a note at supper to say that Napoleon had stolen a march on him, had advanced to Quatre-Bras and the army must march instantly to meet him at Waterloo. And so they did. The officers left straight from here, straight from the ball. Many officers fought in evening clothes, and so died.”

I felt the blood creeping in fear towards my heart, leaving my toes and fingers cold. “Died? The next day?”

“Many of them, yes,” said Father.

I wanted to ask more, but Susan had turned aside to talk to Mr Lewis, who did not answer but got up stiffly and walked away.

Sue bit both her lips nearly bloody and I held her hand under the table, with rage at war and the world in my heart.

I asked no more questions. Perhaps I didn’t want to know.

I could not imagine Edward as I’d seen the men in the hospital, gray and stinking and empty.

With eyes like holes, like Mr Lewis’ eyes.

Or splintered bone and blood on trampled earth.

My whole being shrank in horror at the thought.

Later that night Susan and Mr Lewis quarreled.

I did not mean to listen, of course; I am not actually a girl who listens at keyholes, except when it’s particularly warranted.

But I could not help hearing; her voice was raised, and so was his, quite unmuffled, so that I thought his bandages must be off.

His fine, deep voice was hard-wrought with tension.

“Will you give over? Must you take me in like a dog? I did not write you because I wanted you to forget me.”

And Susan, almost spitting like a cat in her fury, answered straight back, “Well, I did not, did I? How could I? Didn’t we make promises?” She might have stamped her foot, which would be very like Sue, the sound muffled by a sock on a floorboard.

“You made promises to a different man, my girl,” he said. “In a different world. Do you think I love you so little that I’d tie you to a monster? What do you think we can have together, if your husband cannot go outside without the little children screaming?”

“Well then, if they scream I’ll smack them and make them stop,” said Susan furiously.

“And you’ll have your own children.” Her voice broke on a sob, and I tried to imagine what Mr Lewis was doing, probably shaking his head, for his next words were, “It’s no good, Sue.

I’m for a boat as soon as I can walk about reliably, straight off to where no one knows who I was. It’s better that way.”

“And what about me?” she demanded. “Where do I fit, in all your grand plans?”

“You marry a fine gentleman, who’s whole from hair to heel, and you have little girls as pretty as any that ever were and you forget . You’re not being sensible now, you’re like a kid with a lost puppy, so I’m being sensible for both of us. Go away, Sue.”

He must have turned his back, or some such thing, for I heard a moment of silence, and then Susan’s footsteps as she left his room and closed the door.

She ought to have slammed it, but there was only the click, and her footsteps as she passed her own room and came to mine.

She saw my face, naturally, although I was trying for an attitude of unconcern, and she said, “I suppose you heard, you little spy,” but the rancor in her voice was not directed at me.

“Yes,” I said.

Susan was silent. Her face was hard and pale and dry, lifeless as a world in drought when all the moisture has gone deep underground. She didn’t cry.

“I’m sorry,” I ventured. “But if his face is very bad, then – perhaps it’s for the best?” I said this quite tentatively, half-expecting an explosion, but she was quiet. “He wants you to have a fine life,” I added with more confidence.

“And yet,” said Susan, getting up with a kind of macabre gaiety, “no one can explain to me why you and he and Aunt Irene and Father are all better qualified than me to decide upon the kind of fine life I am to have. Do you think we will hear the music again later?”

I’d more than half convinced myself it had been a singular event, a memory preserved in the ballroom’s walls, a one-time haunting. But I said, on the wings of my desire, “We might. I hope we do…”

We waited up that night, and in a fit of fierce optimism I put on a party dress, although Susan merely watched me in tolerant silence.

But she did up the back of my dress when I asked her to, and wove the white rosebud into my hair.

We heard the clocks sound at midnight, and I was at the highest pitch of tension, and I think Sue was too, although we never said a word to each other, and then, after the sound of the clock in the foyer died away, we heard the music in the ballroom.

We went together, clasping hands, and it was just the same as the night before: flowers and perfume and the smell of a fine supper, lamplight and candlelight combining to make of it a dreamland.

As before, Susan was instantly borne off, laughing wildly, into the dance; I glimpsed her waltzing with a tall highlander, her wrapper flying alongside his kilt, and then, as before, a deep, tender pair of blue eyes caught my own.

“I have not had the pleasure,” he said to me, very softly, and for an instant I was sad, thinking, he doesn’t remember .

And then I realized I could meet him properly this time, with none of the girlish gaucherie that had tongue-tied me the night before, so I curtseyed and said, smiling, “Nor have I. But may I hope to remedy that?” And I saw his eyes kindle with a kind of wondering fire.

That night I told him I was an heiress from New York, and for the space of the dance, I even believed it.

We danced until dawn, again. Susan with her partners, and me with my Edward, my body drawn heedlessly to his.

By the end of the dancing we were clinging together, both of us half-dazed with love and wanting.

And when, just as before, the word came that they must march, he kissed me on my wet eyes and then, after a pause, full on my quivering lips.

I wept to watch him go, and I also thought my heart would stop with joy, even as the men disappeared one by one and the room went silent once more. For if we’d had two nights then why not three?

Next moment, I found myself standing with Susan in the empty ballroom.

I looked down and saw without much interest that my feet were bleeding, and so were my sister’s.

A small price, for such delights. We went to bed, both of us this time, and slept until Aunt Irene woke us with consternation and asked what ailed us.

After that we went to the ball each night.

I think Mr Lewis was getting stronger, for certainly I heard his voice more often, less and less muffled by bandages, and Susan still went to him dutifully and tended him.

But there was no fire in her voice, hardly any interest, even, and finally one day, I heard him say, “Are you all right, Sue? You’re limping. ”

“As though you care,” said Susan, in a flat voice, and left him soon after, to come to me.

Our feet indeed were rather rough, for every night we went to the ballroom to dance.

I think Susan did it to forget Mr Lewis, to lose herself in the whirl of all those beautiful men’s admiration, but I of course did it to be with my Edward.

“I am a general’s daughter,” I would tell him. Or sometimes, “I’m a bluestocking naturalist.”

And no matter what I said, or how we met, or who I seemed to be, every night we fell in love again.

I was the luckiest girl alive.