‘No, he won’t,’ Emily Elise said, giggling, knowing she was being teased. She nuzzled her face against the fox fur. Of all her half-siblings and cousins, Lotti was her favourite because Lotti always let her dress up in her clothes, and they were such fun to dress up in. Nancy’s clothes weren’t any fun at all. Apart from a turquoise dress that Nancy wouldn’t allow her to even touch, all her clothes were sensible suits and blouses, and her shoes were always sensible too.

Lotti’s shoes weren’t sensible. Lotti’s shoes were all dizzily high-heeled and some had black satin flowers on them and others had red spangles. Her clothes were always glittery and spangly as well and she had lots of long, elbow-length satin gloves and, her favourites, black lace gloves that had no fingers in them.

She supposed that if she asked, Hester would let her dress up in some of her clothes, but though Hester’s clothes were pretty they weren’t spangly. And Ilse’s clothes were all white and pale beige silks and chiffons or, in the wintertime, cashmere. Even at four years old, Emily Elise knew there was no fun to be had in dressing-up in clothes that spent their wardrobe life wrapped in tissue. The risk of getting into troubling for spoiling them was far too great.

Only allowing Lotti to take off her fox-fur hat and shrug herself out of her coat before she grabbed her hand again, she skipped along at her side into the drawing room where there was a log fire roaring in the grate and a huge spice-scented fir tree waiting to be decorated.

‘We put up all the paper-chains and the holly yesterday,’ she confided as they bagged a comfy corner of the sofa, ‘but Mummy said we must wait till you and Hugo and Hester arrived before we decorated the tree.’

‘So how are things in Berlin?’ her cousin Paul asked Hugo.

Paul was in his favourite armchair, his lean, big-boned frame far too lanky to look comfortable in it unless, as now, he draped one leg over the arm.

Emily Elise always thought it very strange that someone who was an adult, like her daddy, was also her cousin or, in Hugo’s case, her half-brother. ‘Why aren’t they my uncles?’ she had constantly asked her mother and Josephine when she had first discovered that the cousins and brothers of little girls her own age, were children also. ‘No one else I know has grown-up cousins or a grown-up half-sister and half-brothers. And why is Nancy only half my sister and Hugo and Max only half my brothers?’

Her mother had explained to her that Nancy, Max and Hugo had a different daddy, which had only perplexed her more. Her own daddy was so nice, she couldn’t understand why they should have preferred to have a different one. There were, though, lots of thing she didn’t understand. The conversation taking place now, for instance. It was Christmas and yet, for some reason she couldn’t fathom, everyone had become very serious, even her ebullient cousin Lotti.