Then she smiled up at Walter, who was clearing the plates from the main course. ‘Do your puddings match your mains?’

‘They certainly do, miss,’ Walter said, and he beamed.

‘I’d like something rich and sticky.’

‘I believe we can accommodate that, miss.’ Walter was smiling down at her like an avuncular genie. It was as if she had him mesmerised. Well, why not? Nick thought. He was feeling pretty mesmerised himself.

‘Pudding for you, too?’ Walter said, beaming still, and Nick nodded before thinking about it.

What was he doing? He seldom had pudding. He had to get his mind back into gear. Now.

‘I don’t know the first thing about you,’ he said weakly to Rose as Walter headed off to fetch puddings for all. ‘How can we think about marriage?’

‘Are you worried?’ she asked. ‘I’m not an axe murderer. Nor a husband beater. Are you?’

He ignored the question. ‘Erhard says you’re widowed.’

‘Yes,’ she said in a voice that suddenly said ‘don’t go there’.

‘There’s no impediment to marriage,’ Erhard said, stepping into the breach.

‘Except that I don’t much want to be married,’ he said. Or he didn’t think he did. He hadn’t thought he did. There seemed to be two strands of thought here. The strand that he’d had before meeting Rose, and the post-Rose strand. Actually the ‘post-Rose’ was a really convoluted knot.

‘Neither do I,’ said Rose. ‘Isn’t that lucky? We wouldn’t need to stay married, would we, Erhard?’

‘Of course not,’ Erhard said. ‘This isn’t a happy-ever-after scenario I’m demanding of you. The idea is that you marry almost immediately. I’ll put the necessary paperwork in train, and then we present you to Alp de Montez as the Jacques-Julianna alternative.