Walking out of the church between her husband and her father, another thought occurred to her. Because Berthold was so little interested in his father’s steel empire and because he had so little to do with the running of it, perhaps they would be able to move to Yorkshire permanently. It would mean their baby growing up in the home she had grown up in, a home as different to the Remer mansion as it was possible to imagine.

At the thought of cream-papered walls patterned with roses, instead of walls covered in blood-red silk, and of window seats looking out over undulating lawns towards a river and woods, instead of windows so heavily swathed in dark velvet hardly any sunlight permeated, her throat tightened so that she could hardly breathe. To live with Berthold at Shuttleworth Hall would be very heaven.

As the royal carriage and then Zelda and Josef’s carriage rattled away down the Kurfürstendamm in the direction of Unter den Linden and the chauffeur handed her into Berthold’s Austro-Daimler motorcar, she thought of nothing else.

Her stomach muscles were tight with excitement. That evening, when the reception was over and she and Berthold were on their own, she would speak to him about it.

When they arrived back at the Remer mansion her stomach muscles were still tight so she knew the cause was something more than excitement.

‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to last out the reception, Berthold,’ she said, leaning against him heavily. ‘I feel most peculiar and most uncomfortable.’

One look at her face and alarm rushed through him.

‘Is the baby coming? Should I send for Dr Soller?’

Aware that the baby probably was coming, but not wanting the doctor sent for before it was absolutely necessary and not wanting to cause any disturbance just as Josef and Zelda were beginning to receive their guests, she said, ‘There’s no need to call Dr Soller just yet. I do want to lie down, though. Give my apologies to Zelda, will you, Berthold?’

Leaving him under the impression that all she needed was a short rest she left him to enter the flower-filled, white and gold ballroom alone and made her way upstairs, Wastl at her heels.

When she asked for Indian tea, Josephine, her snub-nosed, freckle-faced, Yorkshire-born maid, stared at her with almost as much alarm as Berthold had. ‘Certainly, ma’am, but don’t you think I should also call for a doctor?’

‘I don’t think so, Josephine. Not yet.’

She eased her feet out of her cream kid shoes and lay down. Very faintly, she could hear the sound of music and chatter floating up from the ballroom. It meant Josef and Zelda had finished receiving their guests and that the refreshment part of the reception was now under way. Despite the fact that she was now very definitely having contractions she smiled to herself, hoping that her father and her uncle were enjoying themselves and, as the only non-Germans, were managing to hold their own socially.