This wedding in Berlin’s most prestigious church and with the Kaiser in attendance was a case in point. Anyone not knowing differently would assume it was the wedding of the elder son of the family—and in every way, big and small, that was exactly how Harald Remer treated Josef. When she and Berthold had returned from their honeymoon in the Lake District, she had been shocked to discover the disregard with which Berthold was treated by his father and brother.

‘But Josef and I are very different,’ he had said when she had first dared to mention her feelings. ‘I wasn’t brought up to take an interest in the steelworks, Josef was. My father took him with him on inspections of the steel plants when he was only twelve—and down a coal mine when he was thirteen. I never went. I didn’t want to go. Because they share the same passion for the steelworks it naturally makes my father and Josef very close. And think how uncomfortable our lives would be if I were his favourite, not Josef. I doubt we would have been able to marry in Yorkshire with only family and friends present—and they were real friends, weren’t they, Liebchen? I doubt if Josef will know half the guests who have been invited to his and Zelda’s wedding.’

As the organist launched into the Wedding March from Lohengrin and as all heads, hers included, turned for a first glimpse of the bride, Vicky wondered if Josef would have been allowed to propose marriage to a Yorkshire girl of no great fortune only days after meeting her, and knew that he would not. It had not been magnanimity that had prompted Herr Remer to be so happily accepting of her as a daughter-in-law. It had been something else—and that she didn’t yet know what that something was, deeply troubled her.

As Zelda began her progress down the aisle on her father’s arm, Berthold sucked in his breath. Vicky didn’t blame him. Wearing a blue silk dress that fell into a long train behind her and carrying a spray of crimson roses, Zelda looked magnificent. Her wide hat, tilted at a seductive angle and the same lavender-blue as her dress, was veiled and wreathed in roses identical to those in her spray.

‘Being a widow, I can’t wear white and so I shall have Monsieur Worth create me something utterly wonderful,’ she had said at the time of her engagement, and her Paris gown, adorned with exquisite hand-embroidery in patterns of peacock feathers decorated with seed pearls, was certainly that.

Walking behind her, flushed with excitement at being his mother’s trainbearer, was Paul.

As Zelda took her place at Josef’s side, Vicky knew that Zelda had achieved her aim. Amid the grandeur of the surroundings and the ceremony necessitated by the presence of the Kaiser, her progress down the aisle attended solely by Paul had been a masterpiece of understatement and good taste.

The backache she had been feeling all morning intensified and Vicky arched her spine to try to relieve it, reflecting that Zelda’s determination to speak German fluently as quickly as possible was all of a piece with her fierce resolve to cut all links with America. Though her father had crossed the Atlantic in order to give her away, no other members of her family had been invited to make the journey with him and no invitations had been extended to family in England other than to her uncle Arthur.