He held up one hand through the noise, tried to speak, and couldn’t—it was all so easy. Judy, picking up her cue, jumped on the mike.

“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, that will be all. Please allow Mr. Massot some time to get over his grief. I am about to drive him to the château where he will be reunited with his mother.”

“Yes, thank you; yes, I have heard. Goodbye.”

Hugh replaced the receiver and stood up. His face was grey.

“Mrs. Percy . . .”

“Yes, sir.” Elizabeth rushed out. “I’ll close the office.” She hovered by the door. “Mr. Montfort—Hugh—I’m so terribly sorry.”

“Thank you,” he said bleakly. “Where is . . .”

He had intended to say “Mrs. Montfort,” but the words died on his lips.

“In the studio, with the Brandts.”

“Does she have her cell phone with her?”

“No, sir. She left it with me. She didn’t want them to be disturbed in a creative session.”

“Thank you.” He glanced at his watch as he walked out of the door; only nine thirty-three in the morning, her meeting was due to last another hour. He hoped they had not taken a break for coffee. This was something she should hear only from him.

On the street, the traffic was ridiculous; even with the charge to drive in London now, at rush hour one still could not move. Hugh would not risk being stuck in traffic. Covent Garden was three miles as the crow flies; despite his Savile Row suit and John Lobb shoes, Hugh started to run.

People stared, but he paid them no mind. Sophie, his wife—not his wife, his love, his hope, his life—she was all he cared for, now. If he lost her, there was no point in being alive. Hugh took his soldier’s training, and used it. He ran, as though hell were pursuing him—and after a fashion, it was.

Sophie held the brooch in her hands and sighed for pure pleasure.

It was a glorious piece of work. A tulip, with folded petals of creamy white mother-of-pearl spiked with tiny lines of yellow sapphires; the stalk a row of channel-set emeralds, and the three leaves of peridot, Russian chrome diopside, and tsavorite garnet. All cheap gemstones, but the brilliance lay in the variant colors of green—pale, dark, spring—they gave the flower a delicate verisimilitude that one might expect in a museum piece.

“Fourteen karat?”

“Yes,” Rachel Greenberg answered her. “The price point will be four ninety-nine.”

“No,” Sophie exclaimed. “You can get it that low?”

“Manufacturing cost will be barely a hundred and ten. I expect to sell out the range,” she said proudly. “There’s a red one done using cherry opal and a yellow one done with citrines, they have white and blue spikes in seed pearl and iolite.”