‘Would you like me to get you a brandy, Vicky darling?’ Zelda asked in deep concern.

Vicky looked across at her. Her sense of being betrayed by both her husband and her cousin was enormous. How long had Zelda known? Had she known ever since she had married Josef? Had she, perhaps, known even before then? Had she known as far back as when she, Vicky, had married Berthold?

She rose to her feet. ‘No,’ she said in a voice she scarcely recognized as her own. ‘No, you can’t get me anything, Zelda. And now if you will all excuse me, I want to be alone.’

She remained alone for a long time, sitting in Max’s lamplit nursery, watching him as he slept.

In not fighting for what was rightfully his, Berthold had also not fought for what was rightfully Maximilian’s—and she wasn’t sure if she would ever be able to forgive him.

A few weeks later, at the end of September, she made a momentous decision. No matter what Berthold’s feelings were on the subject, this child was going to be born in Yorkshire.

Berthold, conscious of how badly damaged their marriage now was, agreed to her decision with deep unhappiness and acute concern for her welfare and the welfare of their unborn child.

Zelda, well aware of Vicky’s still-simmering rage over the machinations that had taken place in Berlin during her last trip to Yorkshire, said bluntly, ‘Is this your way of getting back at Berthold? Ensuring his second child’s nationality will be British, not German? Because if it is, I think you should be ashamed of yourself.’

‘Do you?’ Vicky’s clear eyes held Zelda’s sloe-dark ones unflinchingly. ‘Where shame is concerned, Zelda, I think you should first look to yourself.’

For once Zelda didn’t swiftly retaliate. She sucked in her breath, colour mounting in her cheeks. From then on nothing more was said about her decision to leave Berlin for Yorkshire.

In the third week of October, at Shuttleworth Hall, she gave birth to a second son and named him Hugo. Fighting the temptation to remain in Yorkshire, as soon as she and the baby were strong enough to travel she returned to Berlin. Then, in the spring, she was back at Shuttleworth Hall again, this time both her children were with her. Paul, who would love to have gone, was not given permission to do so.

When she returned at the end of the summer, it was to find that life in Berlin had become one endless military parade. The Kaiser and his six sons, all resplendent in uniform, plumes decorating their spiked steel helmets, were to be seen regularly at the head of great processions. In the autumn, the rumbling trouble in the Balkans intensified as the Turkish army reeled under an assault by Bulgaria and her Serbian allies.

Though she read every newspaper report she could lay her hands on concerning the precarious political situation in Europe, it was a subject never discussed between Berthold and herself. To talk of the growing possibility of a war that would see Germany and Britain camped on opposite sides was to raise the subject of the armaments being produced by the House of Remer, and that was a subject both of them now avoided.