Looking at her, Vicky was sure that not only was she going to be a huge success in Hollywood, but that if ever a woman would never have to husband-hunt, that woman was Ilse.

‘Time to go,’ Max said for the third time and then, to Vicky, ‘I’ll explain to Claus that there wasn’t enough room in the cars for everyone and that you and his mother preferred staying behind in order to greet them when they arrive here. Now come on, everyone, for the love of Pete, let’s go.’

There was a mad scramble for the two cars, a flurry of doors slamming, the revving of engines.

Throughout it all, Zelda never stirred and neither did Jonathan Hugo. As the two cars careened off down the drive in the direction of Little Ridding, Vicky stood for a moment at the top of the terrace steps, so deeply happy there was no way she knew of expressing it. For the first time in years her family were around her again in the home that meant so much to her.

It was very hot, very still.

At her back, against Shuttleworth Hall’s walls, the roses her father had planted forty years ago still grew. Veilchenblau, a mass of tiny bunches of dark magenta flowers fading to lilac, reaching to the bedroom windows. Zéphirine Drouhin, rose-pink and wonderfully fragrant. At their roots lavender grew the length of the house and the slumberous air was heavy with scent and with the sound of bees.

Beneath the two trees there was movement.

Zelda swung her legs over the side of the hammock, her feet as naked as if she were a young girl.

‘Have they gone?’ she called. ‘Are we on our own?’

Vicky looked towards the pram, saw that beneath his parasol Jonathan Hugo’s eyes were fast shut and called back, ‘Yes. Apart from the baby, and he’s sleeping.’

She walked down the steps well aware of just how special this moment was. Not for six years had she and Zelda been alone together—and it was thirty-seven years since Zelda had last been at Shuttleworth Hall.

‘Let’s walk down to the river,’ she said, as Zelda walked to meet her across the grass. ‘The last time we did so must have been just before we left for Berlin in 1909.’

Companionably, they linked arms.

‘I can hardly remember back so far,’ Zelda said frankly. ‘I was very much an American then, wasn’t I?’

‘You could be very much an American again if you wanted to be.’

Zelda shook her head, light shining on hair that was once again a defiant blue-black.

‘No. That’s not on the cards at all, Vicky. I’m a Berliner—and once a Berliner, always a Berliner.’

‘Even now?’ There was incredulity in Vicky’s eyes. ‘Even after all that has happened?’

Zelda’s mouth, glossily scarlet, curved in a wide smile. ‘I’ve been a Berliner since the day the two of us walked with your father into the mansion on Unter den Linden as Harald Remer’s guests. That transformation never happened to you, did it? Not even in the early days of your marriage to Berthold?’