They had reached the doorway of the club and paused as a group of noisy drunks exited from it.

‘I was there last weekend,’ he said, his voice indicating it had been a pleasurable visit. ‘Paul thinks he’s nearly finished the groundwork for a perfect white rose to be named after my mother and the plant nursery is going great guns. It must be one of the biggest in Yorkshire. As for my little half-sister, she’s toddling all over the place.’

‘And doing so with curly red hair?’ she asked, a giggle in her voice.

‘And doing so with flaming red hair,’ he said, noticing that all the drunks were sporting swastika badges in their lapels. ‘Adam couldn’t deny her if he tried.’

‘And the gossip?’

‘Rampant,’ he said as they began to walk down the steps into the smoke-filled, noisy club. ‘But my mother has never been a social butterfly and no longer being on Harrogate highsociety guest lists is no hardship to her. Adam, of course, hasn’t been cut from anyone’s guest list—though as he refuses point-blank to go to any social function without my mother, he may as well have been. As to his reaction to all the gossip—he’s indifferent to it.’

He shot her a wry grin. ‘Which is the kind of reaction you’d expect from a man awarded the DSO for courage under enemy fire. They have the Ramsbothams as close friends and they have each other. It’s all they need. And once they are married, the scandal of Emily Elise being born out of wedlock will soon be forgotten, as will my mother’s divorce. If the husband she had been divorcing had been a Yorkshireman, memories would be a little longer. Divorcing a foreigner will be seen in a different light, and even if it isn’t, my mother will be oblivious. She may not look unconventional, but you have to remember there’s a deep streak of unconventionality in her. Only someone unconventional would have married a German. It would have made her the source of a good deal of gossip when war broke out in 1914 but I never remember her mentioning it. She would have been as unheeding of gossip then, as she is now.’

He gave a nod in the direction of the bar. ‘That’s Fritz over there. Good behaviour, Monkeyface. I want him to talk, not you.’

Wearing shiny high boots, breeches and brown shirt with swastika armband, Fritz was built like a stoker, with brutal shoulders and a corpulent, but powerful body. Disliking him on sight, Lotti took care that her feelings didn’t show on her face. Nor did she let her feelings show when, within minutes of their joining him at the bar, she realized Fritz had no idea Max had an English mother, had been brought up in England and lived in England.

‘The English are pigs,’ he said expressively as Max bought a round of drinks and the man next to him at the bar called out for a bottle of champagne, his appalling German blighted by an unmistakable English accent.