‘Are Lotti and Nancy still setting the trestle tables on the terrace?’ she asked, her mind half on the table setting and half on the gooseberry fools she had made and which were still in the coolest recesses of the larder. Had she made them too early? What if the London to Harrogate train was late? What if Claus and Hester didn’t arrive when they were expected to arrive?

‘They are, but they’re squabbling again. Lotti thinks the napkins should be in napkin rings and Nancy wants to do something fancier with them.’

There came the sound of a baby crying. ‘It’s all right,’ Emily Elise said, before she could query who was looking after her precious grandson. ‘Max is doing his devoted-father bit and Jonathan Hugo never cries for long when his daddy is holding him.’

Adam entered the kitchen from the cellar door, a bottle of wine in each hand. ‘This is the last of the Sauternes that your father laid down in 1937,’ he said, triumph in his voice. ‘I knew there were a couple of bottles left somewhere. And speaking of your father, he’s asked not to be disturbed until everyone is here. He wants to be as sprightly as possible and so he’s conserving his energy.’ He cocked an ear in the direction of the terrace. ‘Does that baby need feeding? Where’s Lotti?’

‘Laying the table for our grand family celebration lunch,’ Emily Elise said, pitching in as usual before the person spoken to had a chance to answer. ‘Do you think I’ll recognize Claus and Hester? I haven’t seen either of them since Ilse married Nicholas and I was only six then. Do you think that having been in prison for so long, Claus’s hair will have turned white?’

‘I don’t want to disappoint your sense of the dramatic,’ her father said drily, wiping the dusty wine bottles with a damp cloth, ‘but Claus has been in prison for eleven months, not eleven years, and it was a prison under British jurisdiction, not the Bastille.’

Emily Elise took another raspberry, caught her mother’s eye and decided it was time to exit back to the terrace, where it was likely something more interesting was going on.

‘That child is growing more and more like Nancy,’ Adam said in pretend despair. ‘Let’s just hope that somewhere in her future there’s a Leo waiting.’

‘She’ll be very fortunate if there is.’ She took her apron off and checked that her pearls were lying as they should on the softly draped neckline of her dress. ‘I think I’ve got everything as prepared as I can. Claus hasn’t been to Yorkshire for eleven years. Not since Nancy finished her relationship with him. Do you think he’s going to find it all a little disorientating? Especially after having been held in close confinement for so long?’

‘You’re beginning to sound like Emily Elise,’ he said, love thick in his voice. He stood the two wine bottles on the kitchen table and closed the distance separating them, putting his arms around her. ‘Everything is going to be fine,’ he said comfortingly. ‘It’s a measure of how strong his Yorkshire ties still are, that he and Hester have arranged to marry in a Register Office here, and not in Berlin.’