‘No.’

‘Or Thiérry…your brother.’

‘Thiérry died almost twenty years ago.’

She frowned. ‘I guessAlice wouldn’t have known that when she wrote the family tree. But…he was in line to inherit after Bernard.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then why aren’t you next?’

‘Because the parental names on the birth certificate are different.’

‘The names on the birth certificate…’ She blinked. He stared right at her, giving her a silent message.

Finally he saw the penny drop.

‘Oh,’ she said.

‘Can we talk about this later?’ he asked.

But Pippa seemed too shocked to continue. She blinked a couple more times, then crossed to the back door.

‘I have to milk.’ She faltered. ‘I…If you’re here when I get back we’ll discuss this then. I’m sorry, but I need to think this through. Look after Max, kids. I just…need time.’

‘If there are any questions…’

‘Not yet.’

She left. Max was left with Marc and the twins. And Dolores. They were all gazing at him with reproach. Accusing.

‘You’ve made Pippa sad,’ Sophie said.

‘I haven’t,’ he said, flummoxed.

‘She always goes outside when she’s sad,’ said Claire.

‘She’s gone to milk the cows.’

‘Yes, but she’s sad,’ said Marc. ‘Maybe she thinks you’ll take us away from her.’

‘I won’t do that.’

‘We won’t go with you.’

‘I don’t blame you,’ he said, feeling more at sea than he’d ever felt in his life. ‘Kids, I promise I’m not here to do anything you don’t like. My family and yours were connected a long time ago and now I’m here I’m really upset to find that you’re cold and you’ve been hungry. I want to help, and I won’t do anything Pippa doesn’t like.’

‘Really?’ Marc demanded.

‘Really.’ He met Marc’s gaze head-on. Adult to adult.

‘I won’t be a prince if Pippa doesn’t want me to be one,’ Marc said.

‘I don’t blame you.’

He really was a good kid, he thought. Maybe…just maybe this could work. But Marc would have to be protected. And he couldn’t be separated from Pippa and the girls. The thought of taking Marc to a distant castle and leaving him with an unknown nanny died the death it deserved. All or nothing.

‘I think your Pippa is a really great aunty,’ he told them.

‘We’re lucky.’ Marc’s expression was still reproving. ‘Pippa’s ace.’ He thought for a minute, his head tilted to the side. ‘Is there a castle?’

‘In Alp d’Estella, yes.’

‘Does it have dragons?’ Claire asked.

‘No.’

‘I don’t like dragons,’ Sophie said.

‘We don’t like Pippa being sad,’ Marc said, moving the topic back to something he understood. ‘She’s gone to milk the cows by herself and she’s sad.’

‘She shouldn’t be sad.’

‘She gets sad when she thinks about money,’ Claire said in a wise voice. ‘Did you make her think about money?’

‘No. I-’

‘Yes, you did,’ Marc said. ‘So she’ll be sad and she’s cold and it’s raining.’ He stared at Max, challenging, and his message was crystal clear.

‘You think I should help?’ Max said weakly and received three firm nods.

‘Yes.’

‘I’d better go, then,’ he said.

‘Don’t tell her about dragons,’ Sophie said darkly. ‘We don’t want you to scare her.’

His clothes were still damp. He put them on straight from the tumble-dryer and within minutes they were cold and clammy. He hauled Donald’s waterproofs back on-more for the wind factor than anything else as he’d learned by now they made lousy waterproofs.

‘Which way’s the dairy?’ he asked and Marc accompanied him to the edge of the veranda and pointed.

‘If you run you won’t get too wet,’ he said, so Max ran, his oversized gumboots squelching wetly in thick mud.

The dairy was a dilapidated brick structure a couple of hundred yards from the house, with a long line of black and white cows stretching out beside it, sodden and miserable in the rain.

Max walked through a room containing milk vats. The milk wasn’t going into the vats, though. It was being rerouted to the drain.

Through the next door was the dairy proper. Pippa was working in a long, narrow pit, with cows lined up on either side.

She had her handkerchief to her eyes as he walked in. She whisked it away the moment she saw him, swiping her sleeve angrily across her eyes and concentrating on washing the next udder.

She’d been crying?

He tried to think of this situation from her point of view. Surely help with the responsibility of raising three kids had to be welcome?

But, he thought with sudden perspicacity, he was related to the children and she wasn’t. She loved these kids. Maybe he’d scared her.

Hell, he hadn’t meant to.

‘I’m here to help,’ he told her, and she finished wiping the udder of the nearest cow and started fitting cups.

‘Stay back. Cows don’t like strangers.’

‘They can handle a bit of unease. Let me put on the cups.’ He stepped down into the pit before she could protest. ‘You bring them in for me. Once they’re in a bail they’ll hardly notice I’m not you.’

She looked up then, really looked, blatantly astonished. ‘You do know how to milk?’

‘I don’t tell lies, Pippa,’ he said gently. ‘I’ve spent time on a dairy farm, yes. And our farm had an outdated herring-bone dairy just like this one.’

Without a word she backed a little, then watched as he washed the next udder and fitted cups. The cow made no protest. Max was wearing familiar waterproofs and in this sort of weather one waterproofed human was much like another.

Satisfied-but still silent-she headed into the yard to bring the next cow in.

This would essentially halve her time spent in the dairy, Max thought. If Pippa had been forced to bring cows in herself, stepping out of the pit and back down time and time again, it’d take well over three hours, morning and night. Six hours of milking in this weather as well as all the other things that had to be done on a farm, plus looking after the children-and now the vats were contaminated and the milk was running down the drain.

What the hell was she doing here?

But he wasn’t the first to ask questions. ‘So tell me about this royal thing,’ she called as the next cow came calmly into the bail. She had a radio on as background noise, so she had to speak loudly. ‘What do you mean different parental names? Is that why Alice put a question mark against your name on the family tree?’

‘You’ve seen the family tree?’

‘Alice drew me one for us, a long time ago. It’s what she remembered and heard from friends back home, but it’s sketchy. You’re on there. So’s Thiérry. But there’s a question mark after you. Why?’

‘It’s a sordid family story.’

‘It can’t be any more sordid than mine,’ she said flatly. ‘If it affects Marc, then I need the truth.’

He shrugged. He’d hated saying it, but then it had achieved what it was meant to achieve. ‘My mother was married to Edouard, the Crown Prince Etienne’s grandson. Bernard’s cousin. She and my father had Thiérry. Then my mother had an affair. She was still married when I was born but my father doesn’t appear on the birth certificate.’

There was a moment’s silence while she thought that through. Then: ‘So you can’t inherit?’

‘No.’

‘But you’ve had a lot to do with royalty?’

‘No. My mother had nothing to do with Bernard or his father. We’ve been in France since I was a baby.’

‘You speak great English.’

‘My Grandma on my mother’s side is English. She drummed English into me from the time I was a tot, refusing to let me grow into what she called a little French Ruffian. She’d be delighted you noticed!’

‘Right.’ She nodded, more to herself than to him. She hauled her handkerchief from her pocket and gave her nose a surreptitious blow. Then she put her shoulders back, as if she was giving herself courage. She ushered another cow forward, and then, astonishingly, she started to sing.

An old pop song was playing on the radio. Max recognised it from years ago. Many years ago. His grandmother had liked this song. ‘Tell Laura I Love Her’ was corn at its corniest, but Pippa was suddenly singing as loud as she could, at full pathos, relishing every inch of tragedy.

The cows didn’t blink.

He did. He straightened and stared. Pippa was a wet, muddy, bedraggled figure in a sea of mud and cows. Five minutes ago she’d been crying. He was sure she’d been crying.

She was singing as if the world were at her feet.

He went back to cleaning, putting on cups, taking cups off. Listening.

‘Tell Laura’ was replaced by ‘The Last Waltz’ and she didn’t do a bad rendition of that either. Then there was Olivia Newton-John’s ‘I Am Woman’ and she almost brought the house down. He found himself grinning and humming-but a lot more quietly than Pippa.

‘You don’t sing?’ she demanded as she sang the last note and gave her next cow an affectionate thump on the rump.

‘Um…no.’

‘Not even in the shower?’

‘I’m admitting nothing.’

She chuckled. ‘That means you do. Why don’t you sing along?’

‘I’m enjoying listening to you.’

‘So sing with me next time.’ But the next song was one neither of them knew, which was clearly unsatisfactory.

‘I’ll write to their marketing manager,’ she said darkly. ‘Putting on newfangled songs I don’t know the words of is bad box office.’

‘So what do you have to sing about?’ he asked into the lull.

‘I can’t find anything to sing about with this song.’

He glanced at the source of the music-a battered radio sitting at the end of the bales. ‘You want me to change the channel?’

‘There speaks a channel surfer,’ she said. ‘Men!They spend their lives looking for something better and miss out on the good stuff.’

‘Good stuff like “I Am Woman”?’

‘Exactly.’

‘So what’s put you off men…exactly?’