Though Vicky was no longer wearing the flower bedecked hat she had worn at the Register Office there were flecks of confetti in her flaxen-blonde chignon. Her dress was of oyster silk, the skirt perfectly draped into a river of tiny, impeccably executed pleats. Three long strands of pearls—pearls he had never seen before and which he assumed were a wedding gift from Adam—hung from her neck at precisely the right depth of the softly draped neckline. Her lipstick was a soft rose pink and her lightly mascaraed eyes were a deep, cerulean blue.

‘And how long are you here for, my boy?’ his grandfather asked as Max sat down beside him in a chair Will Patchett had hastily gone to fetch.

‘Two days. Then I’m off to Berlin.’

Everyone was so accustomed to his regular jaunts to Germany that no one made any remark on the fact that it wasn’t so long since he’d last been there.

‘I think it’s time Vicky and Adam cut the cake,’ Violet said authoritatively, a large corsage of roses adorning her magnificent purple-swathed bosom, a Box Brownie camera at the ready.

Max settled himself comfortably to enjoy the rest of the wedding celebrations, seeing with amusement that Emily Elise, oblivious to her parents’ nuptials, was playing on the lawn with Tinker, who was sporting a huge pink satin bow around his neck in honour of the wedding and was allowing himself to be pushed around by Emily Elise in a toy wheelbarrow.

The harmony and contentment that eased into Max’s soul whenever he was at Shuttleworth Hall, eased into it now in full abundance. It was an atmosphere that was, he knew, due solely to his mother; an extension of her own contentment with life and her serene nature.

As he watched her cut her wedding cake with the man she so obviously loved with all her heart, he was well aware that many people in the North Riding would think his mother a very lucky woman to have snared such a wealthy, personable, war-decorated widower. As far as he was concerned, though, it was very much the other way around.

It was Adam Priestley who was the lucky one.

And if his stepfather was an exceedingly lucky man, his father had been an exceedingly foolish one.

As he thought of his mild-mannered father, he couldn’t help feeling a surge of exasperation—exasperation he knew his mother must have often felt in far greater measure. Why, when it would have been so easy for him to do so, had he always refused to leave Berlin to live with them, as a family, in Yorkshire? Surely, if he had done so, his parents’ marriage would have survived?

As slices of wedding cake were passed around the table, he reflected that the person most to blame for the breakdown of his parents’ marriage was his uncle. He’d been aware for years that it was Josef who had always brought pressure to bear on Berthold to remain in Berlin.