I have always preferred carved slices and thin gravy eaten off a table in a dining room with the potatoes cooked in a pot out of sight in the kitchen somewhere and not plucked out of the fire on a long fork and thrown around the assembled diners with a flick of the wrist. Still, one does not like to be above one’s company and so I sat down, laid my gloves in my lap and accepted a bowl of stew with gratitude, even managing to field my potato when it came. There was a considerable crowd at the start, since the artistes and their families were joined by half a dozen others whom Mr Cooke nodded vaguely towards and identified as tent men and grooms. There was a strict order of precedence in play, however. These workers, once their plates had been filled, took themselves off to sit cross-legged on mats, at the far side of the fire, downwind of the smoke. Those remaining upwind and lording it on boxes were all Cookes, Wolfs and Prebrezhenskys as well as Tiny, Andrew and me and two equally pretty although otherwise very different young girls who I guessed were the Topsy of whom I had heard mention and Anastasia, who I only then realised must also be Ana, my prey.
