Property of a Noblewoman

by Danielle Steel

  “So you just cheat on me and get your next romance going? That’s how you tell me?”

  “I’ve had a great opportunity. Her father is going to give us seed money to start a business. It’s a start-up. This could be a big deal for me.”

  “Great. It would have been nice if you ended it with me first. Why keep up the charade? Why bother? What’s wrong with you?” What he had done was hopelessly sloppy. She had been sitting at home, waiting for him, while he slept with Cara, and her father gave them money for a business.

  “We don’t want the same things,” he said, sounding lame.

  “I thought we did. My mistake. You should have explained it to me when you figured it out. And Cara does want the same things?”

  “We’re both from L.A. It was her idea to go back.”

  “Terrific,” Jane said, as tears stung her eyes while she packed. She didn’t want to look at him.

  “You’re from Michigan. That’s different.” He thought he was cool, and instead he was just a jerk. He had completely changed, or finally exposed who he’d always been. It no longer mattered which.

  “Yeah, we’re stupid, boring people, who tell the truth. That must have sucked for you.”

  “You’re too wholesome for me,” he said honestly. “Cara is a ‘dirty girl.’ That’s who I am right now.” He sounded proud of it, and he had gone from denying that he was sleeping with her to tacitly admitting it and bragging about it.

  “Whoever you are, or think you’ve become, why don’t you just let me pack in peace. I’ll stay somewhere else tonight, and you can tell her ‘the bitch is gone.’”

  “Come on, babe, don’t be like that. Let’s not end it like this after three years.”

  “You already did,” she said quietly, went into the bedroom, took out her suitcases, and dumped whatever was left into them. All she wanted to do now was get out. She felt ridiculous being there while he told her she was too wholesome and made fun of her. She felt as though he had ripped her heart out through her throat. And he had obviously been cheating on her for months, and laughing at her. She had been a total fool. It was hard to remember what she’d ever loved about him while she listened to him now.

  He sat on the couch, drinking beer and watching TV while she packed the rest of her things. Half an hour later, there were four suitcases in the hall full of her clothes; the rest was in the boxes she had packed that afternoon that she was going to send to storage until she got her own place. She was leaving him everything she’d bought for the kitchen and didn’t care. Cara could use it if she cooked for him. Her skills seemed more appropriate to the bedroom than the kitchen.

  Jane put her coat on and picked up one of her bags. The apartment already looked barren. She could see that he was half drunk, and he looked stunned.

  “That’s it? You’re really leaving?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “What happened to talking about it and working it out?”

  “You can work it out with Cara. I heard enough.” And what was the point, if he was moving back to L.A. with her? Jane pulled open the door to the apartment then, and carried her bags into the hall. He got up to help, and she put up a hand. “Don’t. I can do it myself.”

  “Like everything else you do so perfectly. Not everyone is as smart as you are, with your perfect grades and scores. Life hands everything to you. Some of us have to hustle for it. You never do.” She realized then that he was jealous of her and maybe always had been. There was no love in his eyes when he looked at her, and hadn’t been in months. She understood it now. And Cara was part of the hustle for him. She would help him set up a business, and her father would pay for it. Jane had nothing like that to offer him. So they were through.

  “Good luck in L.A.” The bags were heavy for her, but she didn’t want his help. It disgusted her to look at him. She got all four bags into the hall and from there into the elevator, and then went back into the apartment. “I’m having someone pick my boxes up tomorrow, and then I’ll send you the keys. You can tell her the coast is clear.”

  “This isn’t about her,” he said, slightly disoriented from the beer. She wondered if he’d been drinking all day.

  “No, it isn’t,” Jane agreed, “it’s about us. You and me. I should have left months ago. Or maybe we should never have started.” She was still convinced he had changed, but it didn’t matter now. “Goodbye,” she said quietly, looking at him for a last time.

  “I love you, babe,” he said, trying to put his arms around her, and she pushed him away. He didn’t know the meaning of the word. “Maybe we should try and work this out.” As far as Jane was concerned, it was way, way, way too late for that, and she was sure that Cara would be in their bed that night. It was what she had always wanted, and apparently so did he. They were kindred spirits. They were two users, who were using each other and had lied to her.

  Jane didn’t say another word – she just walked out and closed the door to the apartment, got in the elevator with her suitcases, and went downstairs. She dragged them through the lobby and across the sidewalk and hailed a cab. The driver put her bags in the trunk and on the front seat, and she gave him Alex’s address. Jane had told her she’d be there that night.

  And as the cab sped downtown on the West Side Highway, she got a text from John. He was just drunk enough to have sent it to the wrong person. She was sure the message was meant for Cara, but he had sent it to her instead. All it said was, “She’s gone. Come on over. J.” He was pathetic and she was tempted to send him a reply that said “Fuck you.” But she didn’t. She erased his message, and stared out the window as they drove downtown. She felt empty and numb, stupid and used. Three years of her life had just gone up in smoke.

  Phillip and Valerie were having dinner that night at a Thai restaurant she liked, and he found her strangely subdued.

  “Are you feeling all right?” he asked, concerned.

  “Of course. I’m fine.” She smiled at him, but there was something melancholy in her eyes that he had never seen before.

  “You’re very quiet,” he said, worried about her.

  “I’m just tired. I drove to New Hampshire and back yesterday.”

  “You did? Why?” It made no sense to him.

  “I went to see my old nanny, Fiona McCarthy. Do you remember her? You met her when you were about fifteen.”

  “Yes, I do. She was funny. She’s still alive?”

  “Very much so, at ninety-four. But I thought I should visit her before too long, at her age.”

  “Why didn’t you spend the night?”

  “I wanted to come home.”

  “You’re crazy, Mom. I didn’t even know you were gone.”

  “I was fine,” she said, smiling at him, and seemed more like herself again.

  “Have you looked at those photographs, by the way?” He was referring to the ones Jane had emailed him, of Marguerite.

  “Yes, I have,” she said quietly.

  “Recognize anyone you know? Or some family traits?” He was teasing her, and she didn’t comment. She was definitely more serious than usual.

  “Not really,” she said, and changed the subject. “She was such a pretty woman. I can’t wait to see the jewels at the exhibition for the show.”

  “You can come in and look at them anytime you want. I have them in the safe. We’re trying to work out the estimates now. I think the prices are going to go through the roof.” She nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  They talked about his upcoming trip to Paris then, for a big Christie’s sale. And he told her he was planning to go to Cartier and Van Cleef, to get more information about the pieces, when they’d been purchased, and for what occasions. It had taken three days to hear back from Cartier’s archive department in Paris, in answer to his inquiry. They were looking for the files on the pieces he had inquired about, and promised to get back to him in the next two weeks, and would be ready to show him their archives when he got to Paris. They were extremely gracious and assured him that
they were making every effort to find the records and working drawings of the pieces he was interested in. And Van Cleef had said the same.

  “Having the working drawings in the catalog will give life to the show,” he explained to her.

  “How long will you be gone?” she asked him quietly.

  “A week. I have to go to London too, and maybe Rome.” He wanted to trace the Pignelli pieces at Bulgari. He wanted to do as thorough a job of it as he could. Even if jewelry wasn’t his preference, he gave the sales his all, particularly this one, which he had developed a personal interest in. And clearly, his mother had too.

  After dinner, he walked her back to the building, and she went upstairs. She hadn’t told Phillip any of what she had discovered from Fiona. She wanted time to digest it, and she wasn’t ready to talk about it. She had no idea what would happen when she did, or how it would affect the sale. She didn’t want to upset the apple cart yet, although in time she’d have to if she was Marguerite’s heir.

  He took a cab back to Chelsea, and when he got back to his apartment, he thought about Jane. He still wanted to see her, but didn’t know when. He didn’t want to be a pest since she had a boyfriend. He had no way of knowing that at that exact moment she was sitting in her friend Alex’s apartment, telling her what had happened with John. The whole thing seemed sordid and humiliating and she wanted to put it behind her. She was surprised that she wasn’t sad, just angry and relieved for now. Maybe disappointment and loneliness would come later, but not yet.

  “Now you can go out with the guy from Christie’s,” Alex said after they brushed their teeth and climbed into bed. Jane’s bags were standing in the hall, still packed.

  “Not yet,” Jane said, thoughtfully. “I need some time to sort this out and get over it.”

  “Don’t wait too long,” Alex cautioned her and Jane laughed. “Good guys don’t stay on the market. They get snatched up fast.”

  “I’m fine without a man,” she said as much to herself as her friend. She could do anything she wanted now. And the best part of it was that she was free. And she knew she had done the right thing, leaving John. It was the best decision she’d made in years and long overdue.

  Chapter 12

  WHEN JANE WENT to work on Monday morning, she noticed that Harriet looked exhausted and had circles under her eyes. She looked as though she’d had a rough weekend, and Jane cautiously inquired about her mother later that morning, and Harriet looked touched. As much as she had resented Jane in the beginning, and assumed she was a spoiled rich girl, she had come to discover what a kind person and hard worker she was, and was growing increasingly fond of her. She had discovered that she could count on her to go the extra mile at work, and realized that she would miss her when she left. There was a freshness and energy to her that their regular employees just didn’t have. She looked up at Jane with a bleak smile.

  “My mom had a setback this weekend, her MS seems to be getting worse at a rapid rate. I don’t know if I’ll be able to bring her home, and it’ll kill her if I have to put her in a nursing home.” Worse, Harriet had come to understand how dependent she was herself on having her mother there, and having someone to take care of. They had always been very close, and the prospect of coming home to an empty apartment, living alone, and visiting her in the nursing home in the coming years depressed Harriet profoundly, and Jane could see it in her eyes.

  “I’m so sorry,” Jane said softly, and meant it. Her own troubles and upsets seemed insignificant compared to Harriet’s, and she felt foolish for being disappointed in John. A broken romance didn’t compare to a slowly deteriorating mother, whom Harriet obviously loved.

  “You look a little rocky too,” Harriet commented, having noticed Jane looking less put together than usual. She hadn’t unpacked at Alex’s, and had come to work in jeans, which was rare for her.

  “My boyfriend and I broke up this weekend, I moved out,” she admitted, feeling sheepish about it, as though somehow it were indicative of a failure on her part for not realizing what a loser he was while he cheated on her and set up his business plan with Cara, financed by her dad. It made her feel stupid as much as hurt. And she’d had the same feeling when she told her mother about it the night before, who had told her she should have figured it out sooner, and she had always known the relationship wouldn’t go anywhere. Jane’s mother thought all relationships should lead to marriage, and told Jane that this was what she could expect if she was avoiding long-term commitment, living with men, and focusing only on her career. So she wound up with John, who only cared about his career too. But despite what her mother said, Jane didn’t feel ready for marriage, and wasn’t going to be shamed or rushed into it. And Alex was right. He was the wrong guy for her. It had taken him three years to show his true colors, but now she knew.

  “Are you heartbroken?” Harriet asked her gently, with a sympathetic expression Jane had never seen before, and she slowly shook her head.

  “Not really. Disappointed. And I feel kind of stupid. Sometimes my mother is the master of ‘I told you so.’ I guess she was right.”

  “Then he wasn’t the right guy.”

  “No, he wasn’t,” Jane agreed, and it was hard to admit. It was a rare exchange between them, and she could see that Harriet felt sorry for her.

  “I have a project for you.” Harriet changed the subject then, as a relief for both of them. “I thought about it this weekend, I just want to make sure we’ve been completely thorough in the Pignelli case. I know we didn’t find a will among her documents, but I was thinking about the letters. The ones in Italian appear to have been written by someone else, but the ones in English may have been written by her. I’d like you to copy them, and read through them, just to make sure we haven’t missed something, the name of a relative or an heir, a letter of intent to leave the jewelry to someone, even a friend. Sometimes things turn up in old correspondence like that. Will you give them a quick read just to be sure we checked everything?” Jane was surprised at the request and hadn’t thought of it herself. She nodded agreement, and Harriet gave her a permission slip to get the letters out of the vault where the documents were being kept.

  “I think that’s a really good idea,” Jane said enthusiastically. For all of Harriet’s appearances of being bored by her job, she was good at what she did, and conscientious about it.

  “There’s probably nothing in them, but you never know. Stranger things have happened.”

  Jane went straight from Harriet’s office to the vault for documents being stored, handed the slip to the woman in charge, and was given the bundle of letters a few minutes later. She went to the copy machine, and made copies of all of them, and then returned the original letters to the vault. It was a thick stack of letters, written in a small, old-fashioned handwriting, and she took the copies back to her desk, poured herself a cup of coffee at the office machine, and settled down to begin reading. She flipped through them before she started, to see who they were addressed to, and saw that all of the salutations were similar and began with “My Beloved Angel,” “My Darling Girl,” or “My Darling Child.” There was no name at the beginning of any of the letters. And when she checked the signature at the end, in most cases they were signed with the initial “M,” and only a few were signed “your loving mother.” It was impossible to say, before she read them, if they were written by Marguerite, or to her by her mother. And they had few examples of Marguerite’s handwriting to compare them to. But instinctively Jane had the feeling that they were written by her. Not all of them had dates, but most did, and the first one was dated September 30, 1942, and beneath the date, the author of the letters had written “London.” The first letter was addressed to “My Beloved Angel.”

  “I still can’t believe that I have left you. Unthinkable, unbearable, the most agonizing of all possible events. A tragedy for me. They took you from me, and now I am here, in London, living at a small hotel. I need to find an apartment. But where will I live? How will I live without you?
How could this happen? How could they do it? I don’t know if I will send you these letters one day, but if so, I must let you know how much I love you and miss you, and tell you of the agonizing hole in my heart that happened the day I left you.

  “I have met a very nice man, who has been so kind to me. He is here by special permission, on a diplomatic passport from Italy, and will only be here for a few weeks, and then he will return to Naples, where he lives. I met him the day after I arrived, when I tripped and fell in the street and he picked me up and dusted me off and then insisted on taking me to dinner at a very nice restaurant. He acted like a father to me, and I told him about you. I think only of you now, and wonder what you are doing, how you look, if you are healthy, and if they are being good to you. I know that Fiona will be loving to you, even if my parents are not. Please know that if they had let me stay with you, I would have. They gave me no choice.” The letter went on to describe what she had done with the Italian man – dinners, lunches, a drive to visit a friend at a manor house outside London. She wrote constantly about how kind he was to her. They had gone to the library, and in the next letter, he had found her a better place to stay and bought her a warm coat. There was something very young and innocent about the letters, as Jane read them, one after the other. Sometimes the dates were very close together, sometimes there was a gap of weeks or even a few months.

  At the end of October, she said the kind man was going back to Italy and had invited her to go with him. She also said that he had asked for her hand in marriage, and she had accepted, and they were to be married shortly as soon as it was arranged. Jane couldn’t tell from what she’d written, somewhat demurely, if she was truly in love with him, or clinging to her only friend and protector in London. There was a war on, American and British soldiers were everywhere in London, and she was totally alone. She had mentioned in the first letter that her parents had given her money to live on, so she was not without means, at least for some time, but she had been set adrift in an unfamiliar world, with no contacts, friends, family, or protection at eighteen, and the Italian man she referred to was kind and loving, and she felt safe with him. She said that they would be married before they left for Italy, and he was taking care of everything. He was traveling on a diplomatic passport, and they would live in Naples when they went back to his home.