Jewels (45 page)

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.

“You’re looking dreadful, Mother dear,” Phillip said coolly.

“Thank you.” Sarah was really hurt by his comment.

Emanuelle told her the same thing, the next time she came to Paris. She was practically green, she was so pale. It really worried Emanuelle to see her. But William’s heart attack had really frightened her. The one thing she knew in her life was that she couldn’t live without him.

By June, outwardly anyway, everything seemed to be back to normal. William was still in pain, of course, but he was resigned to it, and he seldom complained, and he seemed healthier than he had been before what he referred to as his “little problem.”

But Sarah’s problems seemed larger these days. It was one of those times when nothing went right and you never felt well. She had backaches, and stomachaches, and for the first time in her life terrible headaches. It was one of those times when the stress of the past months caught up with her with a vengeance.

“You need a vacation,” Emanuelle said to her. And what she really wanted to do was go to Brazil and Colombia and look at emeralds, but she didn’t think William was well enough to do it. Nor did she want to leave him.

She mentioned it to him the next afternoon and he sounded noncommittal. He didn’t like the way she looked, and he thought it was too much of a trip for her too. “Why don’t we go to Italy instead? We can buy someone else’s jewelry for a change.” She laughed, but she had to admit, she liked the suggestion. She needed a fresh start these days, she had been depressed lately anyway. Her change of life had come, and it made her feel old and unattractive. The trip to Italy made her feel young again and they had a wonderful time remembering when he proposed to her in Venice. It all seemed so long ago. Life had been good to them, for the most part, and the years had flown. Her parents were long gone, her sister had moved on to a new life, and Sarah had heard years before that Freddie had been killed in a car accident in Palm Beach, after he got back from the Pacific. It was all part of another life, a life of closed chapters. For years now William had been her whole life. William… and the children … and the stores. … She felt renewed when she returned from the trip, but annoyed at the weight she’d put on after two weeks of eating pasta.

She continued to gain weight for another month, and she wanted to go to the doctor about it, but she never seemed to find time, and she felt well otherwise, a lot better than she had two months before, but suddenly as she lay in bed with him one night, she felt a strange but familiar feeling.

“What was that?” she asked him, as though he might have felt it.

“What was what?”

“Something moved.”

“I did.”

And then he turned over and smiled at her. “What are you so nervous about tonight? I thought we took care of that this morning.” At least that hadn’t changed, even though she had. She was feeling better about things now. Thanks to William, the time in Italy had been incredibly romantic.

She didn’t say anything more to him, but she went to see the doctor in La Marolle immediately the next morning. She described her symptoms to him, all of them, and the fact that she had been certain she’d gone through the change of life four months before, and then she described the sensation she’d had the night before as she lay beside William.

“I know this sounds crazy,” she explained, “but it felt… it felt like a baby…” She felt like one of those old men with amputated legs who think they feel their knee itch.

“It’s not impossible. I delivered a baby last week to a woman fifty-six years old. Her eighteenth child,” he said encouragingly and Sarah groaned at the prospect. She loved the children that she had, handful that they were, and there was a time when she would have wanted more, but that time was no longer. She was about to be forty-eight years old, and William needed her, she was just too old to have another baby. Isabelle was turning eight that summer, and she was her baby.

“Madame la Duchesse,” the doctor said formally as he stood up to look at her after his examination, “I have the pleasure of informing you that you are indeed having a baby.” For a moment, he had even thought it might be twins, but now he was sure it wasn’t. It was only one, but a good-sized one. “I think perhaps at Christmas.”

“You’re not serious.” She looked shocked and for a moment she went pale and felt dizzy.

“I am very serious, and very sure.” He smiled at her. “Monsieur le Duc will be very pleased, I’m sure.” But she wasn’t even sure of that this time. Maybe after his heart attack he would feel differently. She couldn’t even imagine it now. She would be forty-eight years old when this child was born, and he would be sixty-one. How ridiculous. And suddenly, she knew with absolute certainty, that she couldn’t have this baby.

She thanked the doctor and drove back to the château, thinking of what she was going to do about it, and what she was going to tell William. The whole thing depressed her profoundly, even more than thinking she was going through the change of life had done. This was ridiculous. It was wrong at their age. She couldn’t do this again. And she suspected that he’d probably feel the same way. It might not even be normal, she was so old, she told herself. For the first time in her entire life, she considered an abortion.

She told William after dinner that night, and he listened quietly to all her objections. He reminded her that his parents had been exactly the same age when he was born and it hadn’t done him or them any harm, but he also understood how upset Sarah was. More than anything she was startled. She had had four children in her life, one had died, one had come as a late surprise … and now this, so unexpected, so late, and yet in his eyes so great a gift, at any time, he didn’t see how they could refuse it. But he heard her out, and he lay next to her that night and held her. He was a little shocked by how she felt, but he wondered, too, if she was just frightened. She had been through a lot before, and perhaps now it would be even harder.

“Do you really not want this child?” he asked sadly, as he lay next to her that night, holding her in his arms as he always did when they went to sleep. He was sad that she didn’t seem to want it, but he didn’t want to press her.

“Do you?” She answered his question with one of her own, because there was a part of her that wasn’t sure either.

“I want whatever is right for you, my love. I’ll stand by whatever you decide.”