Dressed for dinner in a ravishing sea-green gown that emphasized her luscious curves, she seated herself on one of the spindly legged gilt bedroom chairs. ‘You look tired, Vicky darling. You shouldn’t have stayed so long in Yorkshire. It’s Wundervoll to have you back here again!’

Faced with Zelda’s blazing pleasure at seeing her again, it was impossible to hold on to her suspicions of a moment ago. She decided not to bring up the new steel contract but instead wait and confront Josef at the dinner table. She would take him by surprise.

‘Take me to see Claus Heinrich now,’ she said, taking hold of Zelda’s hand and rising to her feet. ‘And tell me how you managed to get your figure back so quickly. You don’t look as if you are the mother of one child, let alone two.’

Minutes later, as she stood looking down at Claus Heinrich in his lavishly draped cradle, Vicky had to admit that a baby so blond-haired when his mother was so dazzlingly dark-haired was, indeed, some kind of a miracle.

‘He’s beautiful,’ she said, knowing how much Zelda had longed for a baby who would possess none of her grandmother’s Iroquois characteristics.

‘Isn’t he just?’ Zelda glowed with self-satisfaction. ‘Josef says he wants another six just like him.’

‘Then tell Josef to have them,’ Vicky said drily.

Zelda’s laughter lifted Vicky’s spirits as nothing else could have done. Whatever the hideous state of affairs of the House of Remer steel plants and factories, she and Zelda were as they had always been—as close as sisters. And with her strength behind Berthold—a strength she knew was going to surprise everyone—the House of Remer would extricate itself from the nightmare Josef had plunged it into.

‘Let’s go down to dinner,’ she said, slipping her hand into Zelda’s just as she had been in the habit of doing ever since she had been a two-year-old and Zelda had been seven.

With no intimation that it was the last time she and Zelda would ever be so close—that it was the last time she would have even the faintest optimism that what had gone so wrong could be put right—they left the nursery together, walking down the grand marble and bronze staircase, her midnight-blue gown a perfect contrast to the shimmering sea-green of Zelda’s Poiret-inspired creation.

The dining room was candlelit and Berthold and Josef were already waiting for them, glasses of brandy and soda water to hand.

For a fleeting moment Vicky was hopeful that Berthold had reconsidered his defeatist attitude of earlier and had already begun a discussion with Josef as to the best way of approaching the Admiralty with news that the two promised battleships would not now be built—at least not by Remers.

And then Josef walked towards her, greeting her with the heel-clicking formality with which he would have greeted a stranger. There was no tightly controlled fury in his eyes, no burning resentment, and she knew with stinging disappointment that Berthold had said nothing.