As he ran lightly down the stairs he could hear movement in the kitchen and the sound of a wireless.

‘In Yugoslavia,’ a BBC newsreader was saying in plummy tones, ‘German reinforcements have arrived to fight Tito’s partisans. In the Indian Ocean, British troops have landed on the pro-Vichy French colony of Madagascar.’

Avoiding the kitchen he walked through the drawing room and stepped out of the house via the French windows that opened onto the terrace. It was a beautiful morning. The laburnum that grew against the house wall was in full glorious-yellow bloom and near to it a wisteria was a haze of misty violet.

Deeply grateful that Shuttleworth Hall was never likely to be blasted to smithereens by a Luftwaffe raid and feeling profound pity for the poor devils that were not so lucky, he strode off in the direction of the river.

Vicky saw him immediately she stepped out of the woods. At the sight of him striding towards her over lawn that had become a meadow, she was overcome by an intense feeling of déjà vu, her memory of when he had first done so, way back in the winter of 1918, so vivid it made her giddy. Then, the ground had been covered in snow and he had been home on leave from the horror that was Ypres, still in grief after Elise’s death. With his blue eyes and red hair, she had thought him the handsomest man she had ever seen.

Now, twenty-four years later, she still thought him the handsomest man she had ever seen. She loved the way the scar through his left eyebrow gave it a permanently attractive quirk. She loved his sheer masculinity. The firm, straight mouth. The slight cleft in his chin. The tough, uncompromising line of his jaw. She loved the fact that a man so physically strong could be so gentle. And most of all she loved his imperturbable good nature.

‘Get up any earlier, my love, and you’ll be down here in the moonlight,’ he said, walking up to her and drawing her towards him.

She slipped her arms around his neck. ‘Moonlight might be a good idea. Think how romantic it would be.’

‘Hussy,’ he said, amusement thick in his voice.

She giggled. One of the other things she loved about her husband was how young he made her feel. He was now fifty-seven and she was fifty-four. It didn’t seem like that. Where loving each other was concerned, it was as if they were no older than they had been in 1918.

She tucked her hand in his as they walked through the deep grass towards the house. ‘What’s your schedule for today?’ she asked. ‘The Keighley mill or the Bradford mill?’

‘The Keighley mill, though I might slip over to Bradford if time allows. What about you?’ He shot her a smile full of love. ‘Are you going to be gardening or marketing?’

‘Both, I expect, now there’s no delivering of groceries. Not that shops have much in them to deliver and you can forget all about choice. It doesn’t exist. You just take what you’re given and like it. If it wasn’t for the vast amount of fruit and veg we grow I don’t know how we’d manage.’