‘You’re not even thirteen,’ she’d said crushingly. ‘You’ll stand out like a sore thumb and if Max were to meet a beautiful actress, you’d cramp his style.’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’ Lotti’s curiously attractive face—in which eyes that were a shade too large and a mouth that was far too wide fought for living space with a nose that was anything but classical—was fiercely determined. ‘I’d be very entertaining company and she might tell me how to get a job as a dancer. Because that’s what I’m going to be. I’m going to wear feathers and sequins and have a jolly good time.’

Aware that it would mean Max wouldn’t be spending time with Claus if Lotti did manage to coerce Max into taking her somewhere so blatantly unsuitable, Nancy had clamped her mouth tight shut and said nothing.

Leaving the window still wide open she turned back into the room now and took out the first dress her hand touched when reaching inside the enormous wardrobe. This was a favourite ploy of hers. It meant she never had to make a decision about what to wear and there was always an extra surprise to the start of her day. The maid who had unpacked and hung up her clothes for her, had done her a favour. Her dress for the day was one of her favourites, a rose-pink polka-dotted silk with a sweetheart neckline and a quite grown-up low waistline, even if the length was too childishly long.

When she had washed and dressed and brushed and re-plaited her hair, she looked critically at herself in the cheval glass. Because she was short and stocky she never looked quite as she would have liked to look, and her mother’s refusal to allow her to have her fair hair cut short until her sixteenth birthday—which was years away—didn’t help.

Her hair was thick and too naturally curly to ever plait sleekly and in Berlin she had got into the habit of plaiting it in one long thick braid, much to her aunt’s approval. ‘You suit a Brunnhilde look, Nancy,’ she had said in her distinctive cracked-ice voice. ‘It makes you look every inch a Berliner.’

Because she admired her aunt so much, the approval had meant a lot to Nancy. Aunt Zelda was exactly the sort of woman she wanted to be when she grew up. Aunt Zelda never suffered fools gladly and nor did she attempt to hide her intelligence. Claus had once told her that his mother was as much the head of the House of Remer as his father was, and she had never forgotten it.

Whether she would ever be able to look as glamorous as her aunt, was doubtful, she knew, but one thing she was determined on and that was that she wouldn’t spend her life pottering in a garden as her mother did. She would become a professional woman—a journalist.

As she headed out of the room and made her way down the sweeping stairway to the Remer mansion’s cavernous breakfast room she mentally added a rider to her last thought. When she became a journalist, she would become a journalist in Berlin, perhaps for the Neue Berliner Zeitung or the Berliner Tageblatt or even the Berliner Börsen-Courier.