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Camilla Balcon felt the enormous rush of orgasm wash over her and bit her lip to muffle her moans of desire. Even so, the sound of sexual climax still filled the room as Nat Montague thrust deep inside her one last time, shouting out with pleasure as he collapsed onto his girlfriend’s naked breast.

‘Will you please be quiet,’ hissed Camilla, pushing him away until his cock slid gently from inside her. She had felt a real illicit thrill when Nat had grabbed her on the four-poster bed as she had shown him around her old room in the east wing of Huntsford Castle, but now Camilla was annoyed that she’d allowed him to seduce her. It was the only time she ever lost her poise. Nat wasn’t to be so easily brushed off, however, lowering his head to seek out her hard, round, raisin-like nipple with his tongue.

‘Scared someone will hear us?’ he teased, kissing his way down her long slender body.

Nathaniel Montague, one of London’s most eligible bachelors, had bedded half the models and society girls in the capital, but Camilla Balcon was something else. Her honey-blonde hair, usually held up in a prim ballerina bun, was now spread wantonly across the pillow, surrounding an angular but striking face still flushed from her pleasure. He loved her contradictions, the way Camilla was outwardly a severe, upright career woman but in bed was bold, hungry and passionate. Many times he had met her after work in Lincoln’s Inn, just to seduce her in the close confines of her legal chambers, tearing off her starched suit and taking her across her wide desk, papers and files flying. He felt his groin stir at the thought and reached for Camilla again, a sly grin on his face, but Camilla slapped his hand away.

‘No, Nat. We’re supposed to be downstairs for dinner in ten minutes and I want to take a bath,’ she said, her lily-white buttocks perched on the end of the bed, ready to leave. ‘Do you want to use the shower room next door?’

Nat wrapped his chunky rugby player’s arm around her waist and pulled her back. ‘Why don’t we just go down reeking of sex?’ he whispered into her ear. She pulled away and threw a white fluffy robe at his head.

‘Go down smelling of sex?’ She laughed harshly at the suggestion. ‘Daddy would just love that!’

‘I thought you didn’t care what he thought,’ said Nat, his ardour finally cooled.

‘I don’t, but you know how the slightest thing can set him off.’

Sighing, Nat bounced off the bed, pulled on the robe and made for the door, rubbing himself against Camilla’s naked body as he passed her. ‘You’ll be begging me for it later, baby, you know you will,’ he smirked.

As Nat’s footsteps faded away down the polished wood of the hallway, Camilla walked over to the claw-foot bath and slid one leg into the water that had now gone cool. The bathroom was dark, lit only by two candles that sent an eerie shadow of her naked body dancing up the rich red paintwork.

I thought you didn’t care what he thought?

She sunk down into the tepid water and soaped her skin vigorously, irritated by Nat’s observation. If Nat was so right about her ambivalent feelings towards her father, why was she here? She was almost thirty, a strong, intelligent, independent woman, old and wise enough to recognize that she despised her father’s company. Unlike her sisters Venetia and Cate, who seemed to feel obliged to visit Huntsford no matter how bad Daddy’s behaviour became, Camilla Balcon was ambitious, ruthless, tough – that’s how she’d been described in a recent Legal Week article – and, as one of the most feared young barristers in London, the word ‘sentimental’ didn’t even enter into her vocabulary. As far as Camilla was concerned, the only positive thing her father had given her was a desire to get away from his crumbling castle and the drive to succeed in spite of what he had done to her – to all the girls – when they’d lived under this godforsaken roof.

So what did bring her back? And why was she feeling so on edge? Of course, deep down, Camilla knew the reason; she had spent years suppressing it, pushing it down into a corner of her mind where it couldn’t do her any harm. But here, where the memories were still so fresh … Suddenly a rush of dark images filled Camilla’s head and she squeezed her eyes tight, not allowing herself to think of the one thing that pulled her back to Huntsford. She rubbed soap into her face, blew the bubbles from her nose and submerged her head under the water before she could think about it any further.

Downstairs in Huntsford’s Great Hall, Lord Oswald Balcon, tenth baron of Huntsford, paced around irritably, glancing at his watch in the vain hope that there might be time to take one of the classic cars parked outside the house for a quick spin. Driving hell-for-leather through his Sussex estate, hood down on the car, the precision engine muffled by the wind in his ears was the only time he really felt happy these days. Certainly bombing through the grounds at top speed was far preferable to the pointless socializing he was about to subject himself to that evening.

For years Oswald had been the Great Entertainer, throwing open his doors for huge Christmas balls or shooting weekends – kings, dukes and celebrities had all visited Huntsford during those glittering decades. But of late playing host had been far more inconvenient than enjoyable for Oswald, not to mention expensive. His friend Philip Watchorn in particular had impeccable and gluttonous taste in wine, and Oswald knew that by Sunday his reserves of Dom Pérignon, Châteauneuf du Pape ′58 and vintage Rothschild would be gone.

He caught sight of himself in the long looking glass above the fire and allowed himself a smile. He was sixty-five but looked fifty. Still a handsome man, he thought, adjusting the collar of his Ede and Ravenscroft dinner shirt. His tall frame was still strong and wiry from years of competitive polo, his eyebrows were thick and grey but distinguished, framing bright blue eyes that, in his glory days, had frozen enemies and melted admirers.

Thoughts of the old days reminded Oswald of the profile piece the Telegraph had run on him last month and he frowned, swilling his Scotch around in its tumbler. What Oswald had thought was going to be a glowing piece about his life in politics had turned into a hatchet job describing him as ‘the robber baron who frittered away the family fortune on harebrained schemes, gluttony and excess.’ He had briefly considered legal action before he realized he really didn’t want certain details of his life being dredged up in court. But what had annoyed him more was the way the piece had dwelt so much on his daughters. He could still remember one particularly galling sentence: ‘Queens of the scene, the Balcon Girls are Huntsford’s crown jewels and saviours of the Balcon legacy.’

It was a raw nerve for Oswald. He still hadn’t pinpointed the exact moment when his daughters had become a national obsession. There had always been some interest in the Balcon family, of course. His wife Margaret had been a beautiful model and a sixties’ icon – an aristocratic foil to Twiggy’s East End quirks. Wealthier than Jean Shrimpton and David Bailey, better-looking than John Paul and Talitha Getty, Oswald and Maggie Balcon had been society’s power couple. But Maggie’s death, shortly after Serena’s birth, had dulled some of the Balcon glamour. It wasn’t until Serena’s career took off that the media began to take an interest again, especially when they realized that Serena was one of four beautiful, successful sisters.

As if those ungrateful wenches had done anything except spend his money.

The whoop of a helicopter’s blades snapped Oswald from his thoughts and he peered out through the long windows to see Philip Watchorn’s ink-black helicopter settling on the lawns. Typical of Watchorn to arrive in such a vulgar fashion, he thought. He’d better not scratch my cars with his damn rotors. Flash bloody Jew.

‘Philip. Jennifer. So glad you could make it.’ Oswald embraced Watchorn at the door and gave Philip’s wife the benefit of his broadest smile. A fellow homme du monde during the sixties and seventies, Oswald had met Philip Watchorn on their first day at work at a city stockbroker’s. The two men had been close friends throughout those heady years, cutting a swathe through the miniskirts of the ‘swinging’ nightclub scene before Oswald inherited his title and Philip disappeared to become one of the most formidable corporate raiders of the eighties.

‘We’ve brought Elizabeth with us for the evening, hope you don’t mind,’ said Philip as a short redhead in a velvet suit bustled through the door. Oswald groaned inwardly. The Watchorns had a terrible habit of bringing Jennifer’s younger sister with them to social occasions, apparently under some deluded matchmaking pretext. It wasn’t that he resented the sentiment; after Margaret had passed away, he had been more than open to the possibility of marrying again, but in his mind there were two types of women that circled in the top flight of society – beautiful, well-off girls of one’s own station whom one could marry and who might well be useful in terms of money or land. And then there were the cheap, gold-digging sluts who wanted to marry you and take you for every penny. Elizabeth was very much in the latter category. Just like Philip’s wife, Jennifer, in fact: a former air-hostess turned society wife. Cheap whores, the pair of them.

‘Dear Elizabeth, how wonderful to see you again,’ gushed Oswald, taking the woman’s brown leather suitcase and handing it to Collins the butler.

‘You ladies go and settle in. Collins will show you where you’re sleeping and I’ll see you for a drink in a minute.’

Philip put an arm around Oswald’s shoulders and led him towards the drawing room. ‘So, tell me. Who’s up this weekend?’

‘Charlesworth, Portia, Venetia, Jonathon. Camilla and her chap Nathaniel Montague. I think you know his father? Eleven, including myself and Catherine,’ said Oswald, as Collins appeared at their side with a silver tray bearing two generous Scotches.

‘Eleven? Not like you, Oz. What happened to “the more the merrier”?’

The more the merrier! Did Watchorn think he was made of money? Besides, Oswald was keen to keep numbers down after the Telegraph piece. He didn’t want people accepting his hospitality and sniggering at him behind their dessert spoons.

‘Just a select group tonight, old boy,’ said Oswald, slapping Philip on the back a little too hard. ‘Speaking of which, where the bloody hell are my children …?’

Venetia Balcon pulled up outside Huntsford Castle in her BMW four-by-four. She was in a very bad mood. Her husband Jonathon hadn’t said one word since she’d scraped the car’s wing mirror against a stationary truck twenty miles back, and she knew better than to force conversation when he was in this frame of mind. Cate had been no help either, sitting sullenly in the back seat for the entire ninety-mile journey. And they were late. Venetia hated being late for anything, especially one of her father’s soirées – she knew she’d get blamed for their tardiness, even though she’d sacrificed having an eyebrow wax and an Alpha Beta peel to be early.

Walking into the family dwelling only served to depress her further. To most eyes, Huntsford would be an incredible place to call home. From the outside it was a rambling, honey-coloured stone wedding-cake of a building, with romantic castellated turrets, long mullioned glass windows and a vast oak front door approached by a sweeping arc of gravel drive. On either side of the building sprawled hundreds of acres of grounds, from woodland studded with foxgloves to open fields of lush grass – but inside the castle it was a different story. Despite the Old Masters that lined the panelled walls, and the hand-painted frescoes and chandeliers that decorated the ceilings, Huntsford just made Venetia shudder. As one of the country’s most successful interior designers, she saw the house as gloomy and tired and getting more faded by the visit. The once-lustrous walnut panels were cracked and mottled like old leather, the plasterwork was crumbling, the French crystal chandeliers hung unpolished and dull. Huntsford had become a shabby shadow of the immaculate palace it had once been. Venetia, whose career had been built on the sympathetic renovation of old family houses, had made countless offers to redesign her beloved home but, so far, her father was resistant to any modification of the place, apparently content to let it slip quietly into decay.

As she stood looking around the room, Oswald appeared at her side and placed a chilly hand on her shoulder. Venetia flinched at his touch, turning away to disguise her discomfort. ‘So you’ve finally decided to make it,’ he said tartly.

‘Sorry we’re late,’ she said, pushing her hair behind her ears. ‘Jonathon didn’t finish till six. Then we had to pick Cate up from home. The traffic was terrible.’

‘It would have helped if she hadn’t almost crashed the car on the way over,’ muttered Jonathon.

Oswald immediately sided with his son-in-law. ‘Yes, Jonathon, that can’t have helped, can it?’

The chilling disapproval of a childhood scolding flashed before Venetia.

‘And what’s wrong with Catherine?’ Oswald said tartly, pointing to his other daughter who was taking the bags out of the car boot. ‘Face as long as a racehorse’s. Tell her to perk up, can’t you? I need her to entertain Jennifer Watchorn and her ghastly sister with some London tittle-tattle. Perhaps that magazine job of hers is actually good for something.’

‘Oh actually, Daddy,’ Venetia said quickly, ‘Cate has had a rather horrid day at work today, so if you could keep away from shop talk …?’ She caught a whiff of his breath and immediately regretted her words. Her father was obviously in a belligerent mood and whisky always roused the devil on his shoulder. She certainly didn’t want to give him any more ammunition. She was just about to turn back to her father when her attention was caught by a shimmering blonde coming down the stairs. ‘Camilla!’ cried Venetia and Cate together as they both ran up the stairs to hug her.

Oswald stood watching them, his anger building. Saviours of the Balcon legacy indeed! He snorted into his whisky. Look at them! Venetia: airhead, a silly puppy desperate for attention. Cate, uptight and unsmiling, always on that bloody mobile phone of hers, as if women’s bloody magazines were high finance or some such, while Camilla was defiant, truculent …

With the exception of Serena – whose beauty and A-list celebrity secretly delighted him – he was increasingly disappointed in his girls. Every time they came down it was the same: clinging together like monkeys, gossiping and giggling in the corner without a thought for their father who had raised them with pain and sacrifice. Oswald took another pull of his whisky and looked across the room to where Jonathon and Nat were greeting the final guests, Oswald’s old friends Nicholas and Portia Charlesworth. At least Venetia and Camilla had had some success in attracting the right partner, conceded Oswald. Montague was from an established family – new money, of course, but he seemed solid enough – and Jonathon – von Bismarck, well, he was definitely cut from the right cloth. Of course he had recognized the ruthless City player as a scoundrel from the first. He had heard wild rumours about Jonathon: his exotic sexual preferences, the endless stream of discreet and not-so-discreet affairs. But Jonathon came from a long line of Austrian aristocracy, and that made him a useful addition to the Balcon line – whatever his extra-curricular activities.

Collins the butler clanged a gong and dinner was served in the Red Drawing Room. Rich scarlet curtains framed high French windows, the walls, hung with a rose-pink damask, blushed apricot in the candlelight, while the enormous marble mantelpiece was lined with photos of Oswald posing with various dignitaries: Thatcher, Reagan, Amin. A sharp observer might have noticed the lack of family portraits beyond the dark, disapproving faces of Balcon ancestors staring down from the gilt-framed portraits high on the walls.

Oswald took his place at the head of the table and surveyed the room, while animated conversations about politics, parties and business bounced around.

What was Watchorn going on about now? thought Oswald, catching the end of a story. Philip was telling Nicholas about his recent stay at Chequers. Although he nodded and feigned interest – Chequers! How marvellous! – Oswald was silently bristling at his friend’s growing proximity to the Cabinet. It wasn’t so long ago that Oswald had been the one with the high-flying political connections and tales of the corridors of power. As a proud peer of the realm, Oswald had taken his Lords’ duties very seriously, making the journey to London to sit three times a week in the upper chamber. But that was before New bloody Labour culled over eighty per cent of Britain’s hereditary peers in Parliament in one fell swoop. It was the end of the twentieth century and the end of Oswald’s life as he knew it. Now Oswald’s days were empty, occasionally dropping by the Balcon Galleries in Mayfair, which had been thriving for years with very little input from him. He had also written a well-received book about the Viceroy George Curzon and his time in India. But that wasn’t real work.