He glanced up, met the understanding in Rowland’s eyes, nodded, and pushed the photograph to one side.

“How much longer is Lamartine staying out there?” Rowland asked, rising and beginning to prowl Max’s office. “I thought he was coming back with Genevieve Hunter?”

“That was the original plan.” Max shrugged. “When he’s ready, I assume. Lamartine’s a law unto himself.”

Rowland made no comment. He returned to his chair and sat down.

“So. Shall we get on with it, Max?” He glanced at his watch. “You were going to fill me in on Genevieve Hunter.”

“Was I?” A slightly evasive look crossed Max’s face.

“Yes. You were. As you well know. Come on, Max. We’ve got ten minutes before your meeting. I want the details. All the details. A to Z.”

“Rowland, we’ve been over this. You know most of it already.”

Rowland’s expression became obstinate and concentrated. He leaned forward.

“Possibly. Tell me again,” he said.

Chapter 2

IN THE MORNINGS NOW, Genevieve Hunter walked. Sometimes she walked for one hour, sometimes two, and always at random. Walking was beneficial: it occupied her body, lulled her mind, and made the day shrink. If she stayed in her apartment, she felt obliged to try to write, but the words that came up on her computer screen refused to cohere or make sense. If she stayed in her apartment, she felt the absence of Pascal too acutely. This was the first home they had ever shared: they had found it together, furnished it together; it was a place that proclaimed their love—and they had lived in it together for less than five months.

It was on the fringes of Notting Hill, on the top floor of a huge, extravagantly turreted house designed for his pre-Raphaelite artist friends by an architect whose work was regarded as radical in 1868. Though Rossetti had once had one of the studios in the building and Ruskin had been a frequent visitor there, Gini could not sense her building’s past life. For her, its existence only truly began the moment she and Pascal first saw it: after weeks of searching, of losing heart, of viewing one overpriced gimcrack conversion after another, suddenly, like a miracle, they had come upon this.

There was one vast studio room, as tall, as spacious, as the interior of a church. A spiral staircase led up to a gallery bedroom lined with shelves for books. One entire wall was window, a tall, arched north-facing window. Light flooded through its panes and moved upon the walls. It was a spring day, a glorious spring day, a day in which regeneration sang out in the air, and that window let spring into the room. From it, the city was invisible: still transfixed in the doorway, they looked out at a pale azure sky, at small high clouds that raced, at the branches of plane trees just green with new leaf; the brilliance of the sunlight dazzled their eyes. “It’s ours,” Pascal said after a long silence. “It was intended for us. It has to be ours—yes?”