Vicky looked over the sea of heads, saw that Nancy was safely with her grandpa, and allowed herself to be ushered out of the Great Hall and into the school grounds.

The pressure of his hand beneath her arm made her feel faint. She was aware of curious—and envious—glances in their direction. If Adam noticed them, he showed no signs of it.

‘That’s better,’ he said, as they stepped out into the crisp fresh air. ‘I’d like to know more about your husband’s position; it sounds complicated.’

‘You mean in reference to the factories? It isn’t really.’

They’d come to a halt beneath a large beech tree. The breeze was chilly and she adjusted her fur so that it lay closer to her throat.

‘Berthold was arrested because of the general belief that he is head of the House of Remer. But he isn’t. Even before the war started he handed over control to Josef, his younger brother. And it was Josef who involved the House of Remer in armaments contracts and shipbuilding, not Berthold.’

‘I see. He must be quite a man to have relinquished a business empire of that scale for pacifist principles.’

Considering his own gallant war record, his attitude to a man he thought a pacifist was remarkably generous.

She said uncomfortably, ‘It wasn’t quite like that. Berthold simply didn’t want the responsibility of managing the steelworks and factories and, unlike Josef, hadn’t been brought up to do so.’

‘And so there was pressure brought to bear on him?’

‘Yes,’ she said, remembering her father’s insistence that if Berthold hadn’t given in to that pressure, the German army would have had fewer munitions and the German navy fewer ships.

Beneath his officer’s cap, Adam’s brows pulled into a slight frown and she knew that he was reviewing his opinion of Berthold and probably thinking exactly what her father had thought. If his face wasn’t quite as haggard as when she had last been with him, it still bore the marks of his loss. There were shadows beneath his blue eyes and deep lines about his mouth. Neither the signs of sleeplessness nor the lines detracted from his physical attractiveness.

‘He’s right about it not being safe for you and the children to return to Berlin,’ he said, moving his cap back a little so that it sat at a rakish angle on his curly hair. ‘There’s a Red revolution going on in central Europe at the moment. With its army no longer operative, Germany could fall either way. Did Berthold fight? Is he now in the Freikorps?’

‘The Freikorps?’ She was beginning to feel as ignorant as she had once been about the goods the Remer factories produced.

‘The Freikorps is the nearest thing Germany now has to any organized body of men opposed to the communists. It’s comprised mainly of former front-line soldiers. I thought it was something your husband might be involved in.’

‘No.’ She didn’t say that though Berthold wasn’t a paid-up pacifist, he most certainly wasn’t a fighter. Berthold’s kind of inadequacies weren’t something a man like Adam Priestley would be able to understand. She wondered what his DSO had been awarded for, knowing that for ranks below Lieutenant-Colonel it was awarded only for gallantry just short of deserving the Victoria Cross.