“I don’t think so, darling,” Sarah said quietly. “You have to learn the business first.” He had taken courses in economics, and gemology during the summertime, and he felt he knew everything he needed to know about Whitfield’s.

“You’re going to have to let Nigel show you the ropes at first.” William added his voice to hers, and Phillip was livid.

“I know more now than that dried-up old fruit will know in his entire lifetime,” he spat at them, and Sarah got very angry.

“I don’t think so. And if you don’t take a backseat to him, and treat him with the utmost respect, I won’t let you work at Whitfield’s at all, is that clear? With your attitude, Phillip, you will not be an asset to this business.” He was still furious with her after several days, but he agreed to work for Nigel. For a while at least, and then he wanted to review the situation.

“That’s ridiculous,” Sarah stormed afterwards. “He’s a twenty-two-year-old boy, almost twenty-three, all right, but how dare he think he knows more than Nigel? He should kiss the ground he walks on.”

“Phillip has never kissed anything,” William said truthfully, “except if it got him what he wanted. He sees Nigel as no use to him. I’m afraid Nigel is going to have a hard time with Phillip.” They warned Nigel, before Phillip started working there in July, that he had full control, and that if he felt that their son was unmanageable, he had their permission to fire him. He was deeply appreciative of their vote of confidence for him.

His relationship with Phillip was certainly tenuous over the next year, and there were moments when he would have gladly killed him. But he had to admit that the boy’s business sense was excellent, some of his ideas good, and although he didn’t think much of him as a human being, he thought that in the long run he would be very good for the business. He lacked the imagination and the sense of design that his mother had, but he had all his father’s business acumen, he had already shown that in helping him to run Whitfield.

William’s health in the past six or seven years had been anything but good. He had developed rheumatoid arthritis where all his old wounds were, and Sarah had taken him to every specialist she could. But there was very little they could do for him. He had suffered so much, and been tortured for so long, that there was very little they could do now. William was brave about it. But he looked ten years older on his sixtieth birthday in 1963, and Sarah was worried. Isabelle was seven years old by then, and she was a little fireball. She had dark hair like Sarah, and the same green eyes, but she had a mind of her own, and a disposition that defied any possible contradiction. What Isabelle wanted was law, as far as she was concerned, and no one was going to tell her anything different. The only one who was ever able to change her mind about anything was her brother Julian, who adored her. And she loved him with the same unqualified passion, too, but she still did exactly what she wanted.

Julian was thirteen, and he still had the same easygoing disposition he had had as a baby. Whatever Isabelle did, to him, or anyone else, it amused him. When she pulled his hair, when she screamed at him, when she took the things he held most precious and broke them in a temper, he kissed her, he calmed her, he told her how much he loved her, and eventually she calmed down again. Sarah always marvelled at his patience. There were times when Sarah herself thought she might strangle her daughter. She was beautiful, and enchanting at times. But she was most emphatically not an easy person.

“What did I do to deserve all this?” she asked William more than once. “What did I ever do to get such difficult children?” Phillip had been a thorn in her side for years, and Isabelle made her furious sometimes. But Julian made everything better for everyone, he spread the balm that soothed everyone’s ruffled feathers, he loved and he kissed, and he cared, and he did all the right things. He was just like William.

Their businesses were still prospering. Sarah kept busy with both of them, and somehow she managed to be with her children, too, while working on jewelry designs, and combing the market for fine stones, and still buying occasional rare and very important antique pieces. They had become the Queen’s favorite jeweler by then, and that of many illustrious people in both cities. And it amused her how Julian studied her sketches now, and made little changes here and there, suggestions that actually worked very well. And from time to time, he designed an original piece, completely different from her style, and yet really lovely. Recently, she had had one of his designs made, and wore it, and Julian had been absolutely thrilled. As much as Phillip had no interest in design, and concentrated on the business side of what they did, Julian had a real passion for jewelry. They might make an interesting combination one day, William often said; if they didn’t kill each other first, Sarah added. And she had no idea where Isabelle would fit into the plan, except that she would have to have a very rich, tolerant husband, who would let her spend part of every day throwing tantrums. Sarah always tried to be firm with her, and tried to explain to her why she couldn’t do everything she wanted, but it was always Julian who finally made sense to her, who got her to calm down and listen.

“How is it possible I only have one reasonable child?” Sarah complained to William one afternoon in late November.

“Maybe it was some vitamin you were missing during pregnancy,” he teased, as she flipped on the radio in the kitchen at the château. They had just come back from seeing another doctor for him in Paris. He suggested a warm climate, and a lot of tender loving care, and she was about to suggest a trip to the Caribbean, or maybe even to California to see her sister.

But they were both startled when they heard the news. President Kennedy had been shot. And as they listened, and followed the news for the next few days, like the rest of the world, they found it deeply depressing. It all seemed so incredible, and that poor woman with her two little children. Sarah cried for them as they watched the news later on, on the television, and they marvelled at a world that could do a thing like that. But they had seen worse in their lifetime, the war, the tortures in the concentration camps… but still, they mourned the loss of this one man, and it seemed to cast a pall on both of them, and the world, almost until Christmas.

They went to visit the shop in London during the holidays, to see how Phillip was doing there, and they were pleased that he was getting along with Nigel. He was smart enough to have learned how valuable Nigel was to them, and now he argued with him less, and seemed to have made his own niche at Whitfield’s. He wasn’t exactly running it yet, but he was getting there. And their Christmas figures were beyond excellent, just as they were in Paris.

And then finally, in February, Sarah and William took the trip they had planned. They went away for a month, to the South of France. It was cool at first, but they went on to Morocco from there, and came back via Spain to see friends, and everywhere they went Sarah teased William about opening a Whitfield’s. She was worried about him most of the time. He looked so tired, and so pale, and he was so often in so much pain now. And two weeks after they got back, in spite of their pleasant holiday, William was feeling tired and weak, and absolutely terrified Sarah.

They were at the château when he had a mild heart attack. He had said. He wasn’t feeling well after dinner, a little mild indigestion, he thought, and then he started having chest pains, and Sarah called the doctor. He came from the hospital at once, far more quickly than he had when Isabelle was born, but by then William was feeling a little better. And when they checked him the next day, they said it had been a small heart attack, as the doctor said, “a kind of warning.” He explained to Sarah that William had been through so much during the war, that it had strained his entire system. And that the pain he was experiencing now only served to strain it further.

He said that William had to be very, very careful, lead a quiet life and take very good care of himself. Without hesitating, she agreed, although William didn’t.

“What nonsense! You don’t suppose I survived all that in order to spend the rest of my life sitting in a corner, under a blanket. For heaven’s sake, Sarah, it was nothing. People have heart attacks like that all the time.”

“Well, you don’t. And I’m not going to let you wear yourself out. I need you around for the next forty years, so you’d damn well better settle down and listen to the doctor.”

“Balls!” he said, looking annoyed, and she laughed at him, relieved that he was feeling better, but she wasn’t going to let him overdo it. She made him stay home all through April after that, and she was so worried about him most of the time, it actually made her feel sick. She was also sick about Phillip’s behavior to his father. The other two children had doted on him, and Isabelle absolutely adored him. She sat with him every day after school, and read to him, and Julian did everything he could to entertain him. Phillip had flown over from England to see him once, and only called once after that. According to the newspapers, he was much too busy chasing debutantes to be bothered with his father.

“He is the most selfish human being I know,” Sarah railed about him to Emanuelle, who always defended him. She had loved him so much as a child that she saw his faults less clearly than everyone else did. Nigel could certainly have catalogued a few of them, but nonetheless he seemed to have worked out a relationship of sorts with him, and the two worked very well together. Sarah was grateful for that, but she was still upset about his lack of attention to his father. And when he had come, he had looked at her in dismay, and told her that she looked worse than he did.