As she swayed, a fraction away from fainting, she saw the expression on Zelda’s face.

If she was appalled, Zelda was poleaxed. Perfectly immobile, she stood as frozen as one of the mansion’s many statues.

‘I think I had Berthold and Josef’s relationship a little confused before we arrived here, Zelda,’ her uncle said to her, aware an apology was due. ‘If I caused you similar confusion, I’m sorry. The main thing is, no harm’s been done, eh?’

Zelda didn’t even attempt to make a response. Her fingers tightened on the stem of her champagne flute until the knuckles were white.

Watching her, terrified that the fragile glass was about to shatter, Vicky knew that her father had never been more wrong.

A great deal of harm had been done.

Harm that was, quite possibly, incalculable.

Chapter Two

Berlin, September 1910

The scent of the massed lilies in Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was so overpowering that Vicky, seated between her father and Berthold, felt giddy with nausea. Because she was heavily pregnant no one, apart from Zelda, of course, had wanted her to attend the wedding, but how could she not have done? She and Zelda were as close as sisters and she had been determined that nothing, not even the fact that her baby was due at any moment, was going to prevent her from seeing Zelda marry into the family she herself had married into ten months earlier.

‘Are you all right, Liebchen?’ Berthold asked anxiously, aware she was far paler than was normal.

‘I’m fine, darling.’ Vicky squeezed his hand reassuringly and smiled up into his concerned face.

In serried ranks behind them were other family members plus three hundred guests drawn almost exclusively from the worlds of politics, finance and government. Gold lacings on uniforms glittered. Orders and jewels shone. Nearly everyone was craning his or her head for a view, not of Josef, standing at the altar rail with his best man as he awaited the arrival of his bride, but of the Kaiser, the guest around whom the entire wedding had been arranged.

It was because of the Kaiser that the date of the wedding, set at the time of Zelda and Josef’s engagement at Easter, had been impossible to change, even though it had soon become apparent that Vicky would be too heavily pregnant to act as matron of honour. She had been disappointed, of course, but had tried hard not to show it.

Looking at the ramrod-straight figure of Count Ernst Schulenburg she still didn’t understand why he, and not Berthold, was standing at Josef’s side.

Neither did her father.

‘But Germans are sticklers for etiquette!’ he had said shortly after his arrival in Berlin for the wedding. ‘How can Josef not have his only brother act as his best man? I’ve never heard the like of it. Surely it will cause talk?’

Vicky slid her net-gloved hand inside her satin purse in search of a peppermint to ease the nausea she was feeling, knowing there probably was talk. Why Harald Remer had sanctioned Josef’s choice of best man was a mystery—and it wasn’t the first mystery she had been faced with. Why, for instance, had her father-in-law agreed so easily that she and Berthold be married in Yorkshire and not Berlin? At the time she had thought he was simply being kind to her and bowing to the tradition that the wedding take place in the bride’s parish church. Now she wasn’t so sure. For one thing, kindness was a quality she no longer thought of in connection with Harald Remer, for though Josef could do no wrong in his eyes, he most certainly wasn’t kind to her beloved Berthold.