They were dining by candlelight. As always she had changed into an evening dress for dinner. It was silver lamé and the neckline was cut on a slant, boldly asymmetrical.

She put her wine glass down a little unsteadily. ‘Miscegenates? Just who, exactly, falls into that category?’

‘Anyone of mixed race,’ he said, sure she knew and was merely being annoying. ‘People with Negro or gypsy or Indian blood in their veins.’

‘Indian blood?’ Her voice had taken on a very odd quality, one he couldn’t place. ‘Native American Indian blood?’

‘Damn it all, Zelda, yes! Of course someone with Native American blood in their veins would be a miscegenate! But how many people, outside of a circus or a burlesque show, have such a background?’

She sat very still. In nineteen years she’d given hardly a thought to her third-generation Iroquois blood. In her New York days it had infuriated her that Stuyvesant and Vanderbilt matriarchs had looked down their noses at her because of it, but fury was very different to shame.

Shame was something she had never felt and was not about to start feeling now.

Josef’s question still hung in the air.

Knowing it was a Rubicon that, once crossed, there could be no retreating from, she looked him straight in the eyes and said coolly, ‘I do, Josef. I do.’

Chapter Eleven

Yorkshire and Berlin, July 1931

Vicky stood by the banks of the River Ure, her thoughts and emotions in such chaos she didn’t know where to begin untangling them. She was forty-three and she was pregnant.

She knew what Adam’s reaction was going to be when she told him. Though he’d be concerned for her well-being—she was, after all, anciently old to be having another baby—he would be over the moon with joy. It had always caused her deep guilt that because of his love for her he had not married and raised a family with one of the countless young women hopeful of becoming his second wife. Now at last he would be a father for the first time.

She stood looking deep into the river, knowing that at any moment she would hear his dear, familiar long stride as he walked towards her over the grass. His joy, and hers at being able to give him such joy, were one side of the coin, but what about the other?

Ever since the autumn of 1920, when she had returned from Berlin, she and Adam had been lovers. For her, in the early years, it had been a passion fraught with guilt. She wasn’t used to deceiving people, and deceiving her children and her father, as well as friends like Violet Ramsbotham, as to the true nature of her and Adam’s relationship had not come easily to her.

Time had eased her mental distress. Marital relations had never been resumed between her and Berthold and he had been pathetically relieved when he had discovered his inability made no difference to her loving affection for him. Two years later, when she had told him that she and Adam were lovers, he had been anguished about it, but it had been anguish he had slowly overcome.