“Oh, I’m quite sure he is.”

“You have some proof? Some new fact?”

Katherine sighed. “I have a connection with Pierre, a connection with him no other woman will ever have.” Her eyes flared. “None of you has known him as I have. If he were dead, I should know it.”

The old woman is delusional, Judy decided.

“You have never taken another lover,” Katherine said. “But now you wish to commence some affair with Thomas. Yes?”

Judy’s mouth opened.

“You may as well tell the truth. I shall find out sooner, rather than later, I assure you.”

“Tom looks a great deal like his father.”

“But he has none of his spirit,” Katherine said. “His disposition he has inherited from his mother, almost entirely. Except perhaps for a little stubbornness, and even that may be hers, too, if recent events are anything to go by.”

“I do like him,” Judy said.

“You don’t love him. Yet you are prepared to annexe him. Is it not so?”

“You don’t understand me, Madame.”

“Oh, I think I do,” Katherine said. “I think I do. Tom will be very rich. And of course, he is Sophie’s boy, as well as Pierre’s.”

Judy opened her mouth to respond, but couldn’t think of the right thing to say.

“You realize that once you begin with Tom, it will be finally over between you and Pierre?”

Judy stared. Over between her and Pierre? The man was dead. It had been over for almost a decade.

“I understand that, Madame,” she said.

“Then I will not stand in your way. But if you want some advice, move swiftly. Sophie will be trying to reconnect with Thomas, as soon as she can.”

Judy was dumbfounded, but said carefully, “Thank you, Mme Massot.”

The old woman smiled. “You may call me Katherine, Judy.”

The parlour door opened again and Tom walked through it; silhouetted against the warm noonday sun and azure sky, he was so like Pierre that Judy’s breath caught in her throat.

He looked at the two of them warily. “Everything go well, Grandmother?”

“Oh, very well,” Katherine said sweetly. “Judy and I are going to be great friends.”

Tom looked relieved. “Shall we all have some lunch, perhaps?”

Katherine shook her powdered head. “I am tired, chéri; it’s time for my nap. And anyway, I think you should be calling . . . M. Stockton, is it?”

Judy nodded.

“You have no time to lose,” Katherine pronounced. “Goodbye, my dear.”

Judy stood as Tom kissed his grandmother on the cheek; she shook hands with the woman, clasping her bony fingers in her own vigorous ones, and then the butler was bowing them out, and they emerged from the elegant gloom of the dower house into the blazing sunshine of August, with the hired limo purring impatiently on the gravel semicircle of her drive.