As he drove the Lanchester down the tree-lined drive, he pondered the mystery that was Zelda. The present situation at Shuttleworth Hall was a case in point. All his German halfsiblings were, as usual, spending their summer holidays at Shuttleworth Hall as was a school friend of Lotti’s, a quiet, grave-eyed child by the name of Hester. Berthold was there too, but Zelda, despite Vicky’s urging, was not.

‘I vowed in 1918 I would never set foot on British or American soil and it’s a vow I intend keeping,’ she’d said to him tartly when he’d told her how much everyone wanted her to be with them.

Little Ridding’s stationmaster, who had been elderly for as long as Paul could remember, was now stationmaster in name only and, as his slim-shouldered grandson officiated for him, he spent his days seated on a bench outside the waiting room, watching the world go by.

At the sight of Paul, his eyes lit up. ‘Well, then, young fellow-me-lad, how’s tha’ doing?’ he said, greeting him with all the familiarity of an old friend as the train steamed into view. ‘Who is it coomin’ ‘ome now? Ah’d think Shuttleworth Hall was full to bustin’ already, what with all them young German tykes ‘ere agin.’

‘They do make the place a little crowded,’ Paul said with a grin, knowing there was no rancour in the remark. ‘And I’m here to meet my American grandfather. He’s visiting as part of my twentieth-birthday celebrations.’

‘Americki, is it? Then ‘e’s coomin’ a long road. He’ll be needin’ a good pint of Yorkshire tea when ‘e gets ‘ere.’

At the thought of his grandfather drinking from a thick china pint pot—which was the way Yorkshire workingmen drank their tea—Paul’s grin deepened.

He’d been fourteen, when, in the heady days after the end of the war, his suavely sophisticated grandfather had previously crossed the Atlantic to visit him. It was a visit that had been a success. Three years later, in the company of a friend of his great-uncle’s who was making a business trip to New York, he had travelled to America to spend his long summer holidays with his grandfather.

The ostentatious and ornate Fifth Avenue mansion had been disconcertingly similar to the Remer mansion on Unter den Linden and, for the first time, he had been able to understand why his mother had always felt so at home there. His own reaction had been the exact opposite, as it had been when living in Berlin. Both he and his aunt Vicky found that grandiose luxury gave them claustrophobia.

He’d left America when only five but he was well aware that in looks and manner there was still something decidedly American about him, something that set him apart not only from his half-brother and half-sisters in Berlin, but also from his Yorkshire cousins. That something wasn’t, though, enough to make a New Yorker out of him. If he was ever to settle in America he knew it would be in up state New York, or Vermont or New Hampshire, somewhere there were woods and rivers and small townships. For the moment, however, he was happy to be living in Yorkshire and happy to be welcoming his grandfather back to it.