‘The Yorkshire Post?’

‘A very prestigious local newspaper. I’m going to become a journalist when I leave school.’

‘And what will you do when you come to live in Berlin?’

Nancy pushed her plate to one side and clasped her hands on the table. ‘I shall be a journalist for a Berlin newspaper. That will mean I shall know absolutely everything that is going on.’

‘You mean everything that is going on in the world of fashion and homemaking?’

Nancy stared at him, dumbfounded he imagined her interests and capabilities to be so narrow.

‘Absolutely not,’ she said when she had recovered from her shock. ‘I shall write about politics.’

Josef choked on his coffee.

‘I shall write about inflation and unemployment,’ she continued, not sparing him, ‘and assassinations and criminality and theatres and art and…and even about the stock exchange.’

He was just about to ask her what the devil she knew about the stock exchange when she looked beyond him and he knew by the way her face lit up that Claus had entered the room.

A second later he became aware that Claus hadn’t entered the room alone and that Max and Hugo were with him.

Abruptly, he rose to his feet. Breakfast with his niece he could just about stomach and had, this morning, positively enjoyed. Breakfast with his nephews was another matter entirely, however, and he had no intention of enduring it.

‘Politics!’ he said disbelievingly to Zelda when, instead of leaving the house to meet with one of his bankers as he had intended, he went back upstairs to speak with her. ‘Why would a thirteen-year-old girl imagine herself to be interested in politics—and especially in the murky world of Berlin politics?’

Lifting her breakfast tray to one side, she swung long shapely legs from the bed and stood up. Reaching for a cream silk peignoir she slipped her arms into its sleeves and said, ‘You like her, though, don’t you?’

‘Why does my liking her matter so much to you?’

‘Because she’s family and the older I get the more important family is to me.’

He stared at her, suddenly uneasy. ‘Are you regretting never visiting your father? Regretting never accompanying the children when they visit Yorkshire?’

She crossed to her dressing table and picked up a silver cigarette case. ‘I regret my father cutting me out of his will,’ she said drily, taking one of the small black Russian cigarettes she favoured out of the case and clicking it shut. ‘And I miss Vicky.’

‘She could be here now, if she wanted to be,’ he said irritably, not wanting Zelda to begin joining Berthold on tediously regular visits to Shuttleworth Hall.

Zelda made no response. Instead, she lit her cigarette and drew heavily on it, knowing very well why Vicky wasn’t now with them in Berlin. Max, Hugo and Nancy were old enough to travel from Yorkshire to Berlin without her and in their absence—and with her father spending most of his time at his mill or at his gentlemen’s club in Harrogate—Shuttleworth Hall was a rare oasis of privacy. And for Vicky and her lover, Adam Priestley, privacy was too precious a commodity to be lightly squandered.