Summary
Gas-light glow smothers Piccadilly’s midnight arcades where a Berlin-bred flapper, reputedly sired by a bankrupt countess and a vanished cavalryman, pirouettes between omnibuses and swishing silk scarves, her laughter ricocheting off the chromium-plated shopfronts like shrapnel from a crystal chandelier. She barters innocence for pocket change, pockets dreams for cigarette smoke, and smokes out every predatory gent who mistakes a cigarette holder for a sceptre of seduction. A monocled newspaper magnate—half Rupert Murdoch, half fallen Habsburg—covets her as circulation bait; a doughy Scotland Yard inspector, whose moustache quivers like a walrus in velvet distress, covets her as star witness; a bashful bank clerk, whose Adam’s apple jitters like a faulty metronome, covets her as salvation. Each suitor trails a separate London fog: one reeks of ink and hubris, one of handcuffs and moral panic, one of ledgers and timid poetry. Through jazz-splashed nightclubs that resemble Fabergé eggs flung open to reveal saxophones instead of sapphires, through boarding-house corridors wallpapered with yesterday’s racing forms, through Thames embankments where streetlamps bleed into black water like absinthe into lace, the heroine hopscotches among destinies, her mask slipping only when a tattered theatre programme flutters from her handbag—revealing the name of a forgotten Weimar playwright who once promised her the stars yet sold her for a train ticket. Part One ends with a vertiginous iris-shot: she stands alone in the echoing shell of theCriterion Theatre, footlights cold, her silhouette swallowed by velvet drapes while off-screen bells of St Martin-in-the-Fields toll the hour of every promise ever broken.
