‘Not so long as I ‘ave mi teeth in.’

‘You’re on,’ Nancy said, finding it a reasonable stipulation. ‘Has the snow delayed the trains? The Harrogate train should be coming in now.’

‘Aye, well. Mebbe it will be and mebbe it won’t. Is that yon rose man’s coit. It looks as if it’d fit ‘im.’

‘My coat is my own. If it was Paul’s it would be trailing on the ground.’

‘Aye, well…’ The old man was just about to say that it wasn’t far from doing so when there came the sound of a train approaching.

Nancy headed out of the waiting room like a shot from a gun.

As the train hove into view, she could see someone leaning out of a window and knew it would be Lotti.

She began waving, thinking how wonderful it was to be part of such a united, extended family. And it was a united family even though they were of different nationalities—American, British and German—and had totally different interests—who, for instance, could be more dissimilar than Paul and Claus, with Paul passionate about roses and Claus passionate about the Remer steelworks and factories? Or her and Lotti, with Lotti spending her life hurtling from party to party and nightclub to nightclub, while she spent her life as a cub reporter on the Yorkshire Post, reporting on births, deaths, fetes and traffic accidents? There were even more glaring disparities when one took into account Claus’s Nazi Party membership and Hester’s Jewishness.

As the train steamed nearer and she could see Lotti clearly, she gave her head a sharp shake, not wanting to think about Claus’s Nazi Party membership. Though the family knew why he had joined the party, his continuing to be a member, now that Hitler was showing his true colours, was becoming a problem to everyone apart from his father.

The problem was an especially big one for her, for she’d no intention of marrying a Nazi, which meant that Claus was going to have to face up to a very difficult situation where the House of Remer was concerned. Personally, like nearly everyone else in the family, she didn’t give two hoots about the vast wealth that came from the steelworks. Her mother hadn’t touched a penny of House of Remer money for decades. Lotti had cut herself off from it when she had outraged Josef by becoming a chorus girl. Ilse, she suspected, never gave House of Remer wealth a thought. As for Max and Hugo, neither of them was materialistic and had never, to the best of her knowledge, expressed hopes that a fortune might one day come their way via their father.

Claus, though, was of a different stamp. Claus had always known he was destined to one day take over the steelworks and it was a destiny he’d never had any problem accom—modating himself to. Neither had he ever had any problem in accommodating himself to being an exceptionally wealthy young man who would one day be wealthy on a vast scale. He had a passion for fast cars. He owned a powerful speedboat that was berthed at Wannsee and a small plane for when he wanted to fly down to the Alps to ski. Though she could happily live without Remer wealth—and would prefer to live without it—Claus would not be able to. It was a problem and she didn’t yet know how she was going to solve it.