To her horror he looked aghast.

‘You don’t understand, Vicky.’ With his free hand he ran his fingers through his hair. ‘These are not contracts for private companies. They are state contracts. They’ve been signed by government ministers and by the President of the Ordnance Board. To try and cancel them or renege on them would be the end of the House of Remer. It would be ruination.’

‘Then let it be our ruination,’ she said fiercely. ‘Far better that, Berthold, than the name of Remer becoming as linked with war as the name Krupp is.’

He broke free of her hold and sat down on the edge of their bed. ‘To be as mighty as the House of Krupp was my father’s and my grandfather’s dream, Vicky.’ He buried his head in his hands. ‘It’s been Josef’s dream too. I can’t rob him of it. It isn’t possible, Liebchen. Don’t you see?’

There was a tight band crushing her chest. She did see. For the first time since their marriage she was seeing things clearly. She was seeing Berthold as others saw him. A kindly, endearingly hopeless man who was head of a steel dynasty, but had no steel in him.

The band around her chest grew tighter. It was, of course, what she had wanted in a husband. Mildness. Gentleness. A lack of threatening masculinity. In the situation they were now in, though, she desperately needed him to summon up other qualities as well. She needed him to be strong. And surely him being strong wasn’t too much to expect? She thought of her father. Like Berthold, he was kind, rarely angry, never quarrelsome—and yet he wasn’t weak. And in this situation Berthold could not be weak either.

Josef could not be allowed to plunge the House of Remer into the moral morass of full-scale armament production and Berthold was the only person who could prevent him from doing so. Though Josef had organized all the contracts Berthold had spoken of, he wasn’t head of the House of Remer. Berthold was. And as the head of the House of Remer, if he wanted to bring it to ruination, that was, surely, his prerogative.

She took in a deep, steadying breath. As Berthold was so reluctant to confront Josef then she would have to do so on his behalf.

‘Are Josef and Zelda here, or at Schloss Niedernhall?’

He lifted his head from his hands. ‘Here, Liebchen,’ he said eagerly, vastly relieved that the previous subject appeared to be miraculously at an end. ‘And Claus Heinrich is a wonderfully healthy baby. He’s not as big as Max was when he was born, but he’s sturdy and…’

There was something so pathetic about his relief, something so childlike, that she felt a stab of despair. How could he believe a subject of such monumental importance could be shelved so easily? For the first time it occurred to her that those who thought her dearly loved husband inadequate were very probably right.