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  It was a relief to her agency as much as to her when she finally decided to quit modeling and go into business for herself, as a jewelry designer. With no formal design training, never mind business experience, even her friends privately thought her latest career change offered little prospect of success. But Scarlett had proved them all wrong. With the modest nest egg she’d saved from modeling, she put down a deposit on the tiny premises in Westbourne Grove just before the area exploded as a property hot spot and watched it triple in value in the space of five years. During this period, as well as learning on the job and from the veritable library of self-help books she’d picked up from Waterstone’s—Small Business for Dummies, Make Jewelry Design Work for You, Be Your Own Book Keeper—she had diligently attended night classes at the London Business School. Armed with her newly acquired business acumen and a natural flair for design and eye for beauty that no course in the world could have taught her, she launched Bijoux with a small party the day after her twenty-second birthday. By the end of the first year she had established suppliers and a steadily growing customer base, with a good smattering of repeat business. Eighteen months in, she was turning a consistent profit, and it wasn’t long before her store became synonymous with all that was hip and vibrant about Notting Hill, a bastion of boho, young London style.

  Now, at twenty-seven, Scarlett was a reluctant regular on the pages of Tatler and Harper’s Bazaar UK, and rarely did a month go by without one of her pieces being featured in Vogue or In Style. Now that they no longer had to deal with her flakiness professionally, her old colleagues from her modeling days were more than happy to support Scarlett as a designer, and she often found model friends and photographers willing to work for her for knock-down rates, or even sometimes for free. Once she started her Trade Fair campaign, raising awareness about corruption in the jewelry industry and the widespread use of “blood” diamonds—diamonds originating from war zones, usually in Africa, and smuggled onto the market illegally—the goodwill toward both her and Bijoux had snowballed still further. These days, Trade Fair was almost on par with PETA, the antifur animal rights group, as the London fashion crowd’s cause of choice.

  Picking up a diamond-and-emerald brooch in the shape of an apple with a single bite taken out of it—she’d christened the piece “Eve’s Temptation”—Scarlett lovingly ran a finger over the shimmering stones. To her, each of her creations was like a child, unique and beautiful in its own way. She poured so much love and care into her work that she still found it hard to sell a much-loved piece to a buyer who seemed unworthy of it—a spoiled housewife or a rich man buying thoughtlessly for a girlfriend who’d be more impressed by the Bijoux box than the work of art inside it.

  The polished diamond beneath her fingertip felt cold and smooth. Closing her eyes, she tried to imagine what it had felt like to the hands, almost certainly black and impoverished, that had first plucked it from the earth, ending its fifty or perhaps even a hundred million years of subterranean existence. Very different, that was for sure. It would have felt warm. Rough. To all outward appearances, worthless. The long journey each stone made before becoming part of a brooch or ring somewhere on the other side of the earth had always seemed impossibly romantic to Scarlett. She knew she represented the safe, sanitized, wealthy end of the diamond food chain, but she still felt a close emotional connection to everyone who had helped each stone along the different legs of its journey—the miners, drivers, cutters, polishers, and appraisers—before it arrived at her workshop.

  Her overdeveloped social conscience, already an irritating thorn in the side of the diamond cartels and multinational retail chains, was part nature, part nurture. Always a sensitive and loving little girl, she grew up in a uniquely sheltered and privileged world in her family’s ancestral, stately home in Scotland, Drumfernly Castle. Had it not been for the many long childhood summers spent in South Africa, at her Aunt Agnes’s game reserve near Franchoek, she might never have seen a black face until the day she left St. Clement’s Girls’ Boarding School in Inverness to make her own way in London. As it was, by the time she began modeling she had long since developed a passionate interest in African affairs and the injustices of globalization. Never, ever would she forget her first trip to Cape Town, driving past the corrugated iron shacks of the shanty towns, where thousands of AIDS-stricken people sweltered in the hundred-degree heat, while less than two miles away their white neighbors lounged by swimming pools, plainly visible from the shacks, congratulating themselves on how cheaply they’d bought their property and wondering aloud where else in the world could you enjoy a full lobster supper with a decent bottle of Pinot Grigio for the equivalent of five US dollars.

  Loading the last of the jewelry trays into the safe, she closed and locked it with a satisfying cl-clunk and reached up to the hook by the door for Boxford’s leash.

  “Come on, you big lug,” she said, ruffling his tangled fur and clipping the lead onto his collar while simultaneously removing her tattered left Ugg boot from his slobbery jaw and slipping it onto her foot. “We’d better get a move on if you want to eat.”

  Outside, the rain was even colder than it looked. Stepping into it from the warm cocoon of the shop felt like getting out of a sauna into one of the showers at St. Clement’s, so freezing it made you gasp for breath. Dressed for the cold but not the wet—the sky had been as crisp and blue as a butterfly’s wing when she’d set out for work this morning—it wasn’t long before Scarlett was soaked to the bone. Her Ugg boots squelched audibly with each step, and icy water ran off the sleeves and back of her sodden suede coat like hundreds of miniature mountain streams, joining forces with the torrents running in the gutters as she crossed Portobello Road.

  “You need an umbrella, love!” shouted the fish ’n’ chips man from across the road. “Wanna borrow mine?”

  “Thanks,” Scarlett yelled back. There was very little traffic, but the noise of the rain was deafening. “But I think it’s a bit late for that now. We’re almost home anyway.”

  Cheered by this exchange, she stepped up her pace, dragging poor Boxford from puddle to puddle on their way to the local organic supermarket. Even on a horrid, gray day like today, Scarlett adored Notting Hill. The friendliness, the sense of community, the quirky, boutiquey shops of Portobello competing for space and custom with super chichi stores like Matches and Anya Hindmarch. In the eight years since she’d moved here, she’d seen the area go from genuinely bohemian, a home to artists and artisans from all walks of life, to its current status of “Belgravia of the North,” a stomping ground for hedge-fund millionaires and their tacky Russian wives, with their furs and Bentleys and round-the-clock nannies for their baby-Dior-clad offspring.

  But she could never bring herself to join the new breed of Notting Hill–haters. Yes, there was a lot of new money coming in, an inevitable result of the crazy property hike. But there was still a mix of rich and poor, alternative and mainstream, arty and financial, that couldn’t be found anywhere else in London. Ten-million-dollar mansions still stood cheek to cheek with public housing, and the Woolworths on Kensington Park Road did every bit as brisk a business as the Paul Smith on the corner. People talked to each other here, on the street, in shops and cafés. There was a palpable sense of belonging, so much so that as a single girl Scarlett never felt uneasy walking home alone late at night, as she would have elsewhere in the city.

  Fresh & Wild was closing up as she arrived, but Will, the manager, took pity on her bedraggled state and let her in anyway. “As long as you’re quick,” he added, holding Boxford’s leash for her while she darted inside, slipping through the empty aisles, all beautifully hung with holly and mistletoe for Christmas. “The football starts in an hour, and I’m not missing kickoff for anyone.”

  Five minutes later, armed with some smoked tofu, leeks, expensive organic chocolate, and a quarter of a pound of lean minced beef for Boxie—a terrible extravagance, especially at these prices, but he’d been such a patient boy today she decided h
e deserved it—she was off again, head down against the wind, walking back toward Ladbroke Grove and the beckoning warmth and comfort of her apartment.

  Having ploughed almost all of her savings into the business, Scarlett’s two-bedroom conversion in a dilapidated Victorian villa was at the distinctly cheap and cheerful end of the market. But with her flair for color and innate sense of style, she’d transformed it into a haven of warmth and homeliness, her refuge from the cut and thrust of the jewelry business and from life in general. A passionate hater of minimalism, in jewelry as well as interior decor, she’d crammed the flat with colorful treasures from her travels. African masks and brightly woven textiles from Mexico and Bolivia were thrown together with a carefully selected handful of inherited antiques: an inlaid mahogany-and-walnut desk of her grandmother’s, Victorian and over-the-top ornate; a library full of ancient atlases and bound maps that she loved chiefly for their dusty, leathery smell; and in the so-called master bedroom, her pride and joy, a Jacobean four-poster hung with vintage lace-and-linen curtains, so big that she couldn’t fit so much as a bedside table next to it and had to climb out the foot of the bed every morning.

  As soon as she’d squeezed through the door, dumping her shopping bags unceremoniously on the hall floor, she ran to fetch two towels from the bathroom, one for Boxford and another for herself. It was a further five minutes before either one of them was dry enough to progress through to the living room, Scarlett having shed her boots, coat, sweater, socks, and sodden jeans and wearing nothing but a red tank top, matching bra, and pair of M&S white cotton underwear. Happily, the flat was already toasty warm. Having grown up in a draughty castle in Scotland, central heating was one of the few ecologically unsound luxuries in which Scarlett indulged to the full, and she didn’t hesitate to turn on the gas fire full blast so that Boxford could settle down comfortably in front of it on his favorite tatty armchair.

  “Bloody bills. Honestly, don’t they know it’s Christmas?” she grumbled, going back into the hall and scooping up a huge pile of brown envelopes along with a smattering of white ones—Christmas cards, probably—and carrying them into the kitchen along with the groceries. Flicking the radio on to Classic FM for the carols and lighting a Diptyque Myrrh candle, the ultimate smell of Christmas, she set about warming Boxford’s mince and chopping leeks for herself, intermittently opening post as she went.

  Making the cardinal sin of opening the white envelopes first, she was punished when the first one turned out not to be a Christmas card but a letter from her mother, Caroline.

  Looking forward to seeing you, darling, it began, unconvincingly. I’m writing to remind you to pick up my food order from Harrods before you drive up, and all the decorations from Peter Jones. You can help me with those when you get here. Pa’s been complaining that the parlor looks awfully drab.

  Scarlett felt the first stirrings of annoyance prickle across her skin. “Help you, my arse,” she mumbled crossly. “I’ll be doing the whole darned thing, just like every other year.” And why on earth couldn’t her mother get the Harrods Hamper delivered like everybody else? Last year the stench of the stilton sweating on the backseat for fourteen hours had made the drive almost unbearable, and she kept having to reach into the back to prize Boxford away from the apple-and-clove-spiced sausages. Not to mention the fact that a trip into Harrods tomorrow on the busiest weekend of the year, followed by a second detour to her brother Cameron’s house in Chelsea, would mean they wouldn’t be able to set off until close to lunchtime, slap-bang in the middle of the worst of the holiday exodus traffic. Next year she was definitely taking a plane home for the holidays, carbon footprint or no carbon footprint. She’d rather plant a rainforest with her bare hands than go through that nightmare drive one more time.

  Also, darling, I know Cameron will want to share the driving, Caroline went on, but I do think it’s important you let him rest as much as possible. He’s been terribly busy at the office lately and he desperately needs a break.

  And I don’t? thought Scarlett furiously. Cameron, her older brother, sole heir to Drumfernly and the rest of the Drummond Murray family fortune, had always been the apple of their mother’s eye. Now an investment banker, clawing his way up the ladder at Goldman Sachs and already earning a second small fortune, he’d become even more insufferably self-important recently, glued to his BlackBerry as though the world would stop if it lost contact with him for even a minute. Scarlett wouldn’t have minded so much if he, or any of her family, had taken her own career a bit more seriously. But none of them had given her the slightest praise or encouragement for her achievement with Bijoux, or for the huge strides she’d made in her Trade Fair campaign. The only thing Caroline Drummond Murray was interested in for her daughter was a successful marriage, which in her book meant marriage to the eldest son of one of a select group of Scottish families, no matter how dull or uninspiring he might be. And on this front Scarlett was determined to remain an abject failure.

  Too pissed off to read any more, she ripped open another white envelope and pulled out a glossy, stiff-backed card with a picture of the Rockefeller Center ice rink and Christmas tree on the front. Inside, to her joy and relief, was a letter from Nancy, her oldest and closest girlfriend, crammed with gossip and plans for Scarlett’s New Year’s shopping trip to New York. Nancy was based in LA, trying to make it as a scriptwriter, but her family were dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers, and she always spent the holidays there. The thought of her five-day vacation with Nancy was the only thing keeping Scarlett even faintly sane as another Christmas at Drumfernly loomed.

  “Oh, shit! Bugger, bugger, bugger!”

  Leaping to her feet, she turned off the gas and pulled Boxford’s charred mince in its smoking pan off the hob. Climbing up onto the table, still in her underwear and T-shirt and with her long, damp hair stuck to her back like seaweed, she hurriedly disabled the smoke alarm before it could go off and annoy the neighbors. “Sorry, Boxie darling,” she said, opening the tiny barred window a crack to let out the fumes and salvaging what was left of the good meat with a wooden spoon as the dog padded through into the kitchen, tail wagging. “I’m afraid it’s half rations. I got a bit distracted.”

  Deciding that the rest of the post could wait, she gave him his meal, padded out with a bit of regular soft dog food, and set about preparing her own meal. When focused, Scarlett was actually a decent cook and had been an ardent fan of fresh organic ingredients long before it became fashionable. Not usually a big drinker, the prospect of tomorrow’s drive and all the wrapping and packing she still had to do tonight was so depressing that she ended up opening a bottle of Jacob’s Creek and finishing almost all of it while she ate, flicking idly through the latest copy of Forever, the diamond industry’s quarterly trade magazine.

  “Oh, look, Boxie, look!” she slurred excitedly, stumbling upon a feature about her Trade Fair fund-raiser last month at the Dorchester. “They’re actually writing nice things about us for once. Can you believe it?”

  The event, an auction hosted by two of Scarlett’s more successful model girlfriends, had been attended by the usual dogooder crowd of charity junkies—bored, wealthy wives, mostly, who liked to soothe their consciences after a hard day exercising their husbands’ credit cards at Boodles by “giving something back” the only way they knew how: getting their hair and Botox done, slipping on a couture dress, and dropping five hundred pounds a head on a ticket for a glamorous charity dinner at one of London’s top hotels.

  “You must stop it,” Scarlett told herself firmly, skimming through the gushing review and accompanying pictures of Jemima Khan looking as horse-faced and inbred as ever. “Don’t be so judgmental.” As much as she might disapprove of her patrons’ lifestyles, she needed both their money and their high-profile support if her campaign was to have any chance of success. Thanks to the hostility of the cartels, Trade Fair got precious little good PR. She should be grateful for this article, however creepily sycophantic it might be, and for the socialite supp
orters who made it possible. Scribbling down the name of the journalist on the back of an envelope, she made a mental note to call and thank him in the morning.

  Skipping past a piece on the three-million-dollar revamp of Cartier’s flagship on Bond Street, her attention was caught by a picture of the Meyer twins, Jake and Danny, arm in arm and grinning at some trendy new jeweler’s in New York.

  Flying the flag for British bespoke expertise in the diamond trade, read the accompanying blurb, Solomon Stones’ founders Jacob and Daniel Meyer enjoy some Stateside hospitality at the new Max Peterson store on Park Avenue.

  “Wankers!” Scarlett heard herself yelling at the page. She’d definitely overdone it on the old pinot. “Flying the flag for grasping, unprincipled womanizers, more like it.”

  She’d met the Meyers only once, last year at an industry function in Amsterdam, but already knew them well by reputation and had disliked both of them on sight. Arrogant, vain, and immensely impressed by their own perceived “charm,” she’d watched them oil their way around the great and the good at the party like a pair of Cockney jellied eels. With their cosmetically white smiles, year-round tans, and loud, flashy suits, they radiated insincerity and self-interest like a pair of politicians running for office. Well known for their shady business practices and, far more unforgivably in Scarlett’s eyes, for their continued willingness to buy stones from tainted sources like Congo and Angola, they were nevertheless welcomed by high society in London and America, feted as much for their good looks and reputed prowess in bed as for their beautiful, cut-rate diamonds.

  Jake, the cockier of the two, had been foolish enough to make a halfhearted pass at her in Amsterdam, so she’d had an opportunity to examine the fabled “Meyer magic” at close quarters. Personally, she couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Fine, so he had nice features, but then so did Ted Bundy, and he wore enough Gucci Envy to fell an elephant at fifty yards. Was she really the only woman in London immune to his charms? The only woman who cared about the appalling conditions in Africa that Jake and his ilk were helping to perpetuate?