Property of a Noblewoman (21 page)

Phillip left Long Island on Sunday afternoon a little earlier than usual. It was raining, he knew there would be traffic, and he was anxious to see his mother. He stopped and bought a bottle of rosé wine he knew she liked, and at five o’clock, he rang her doorbell, and she looked surprised to see him.

“You’re early!” she said with pleasure as he handed her the wine, which pleased her too.

“It sounds like we have a lot to talk about, so I thought I’d give us some more time,” he said easily as he walked into the apartment. He could tell she’d been working – he could smell the fresh oil paints, a familiar scent he loved and always associated with his mother, and had all his life.

She poured them each a glass of wine a few minutes later, and they sat down in the cozy living room. She was in her favorite old leather armchair, and he on the couch, as he looked at her quizzically. “So what’s up? You first.” He’d been worried about her for two days.

“It’s kind of a long story,” she said with a sigh, and took a sip of the wine. “I knew about it the last time I saw you, but I needed some time to think about it. It came as kind of a shock.” He was more sure than ever, as he listened to her, that she had a health problem, and he nearly held his breath as he listened, but in spite of what she was saying, she looked healthy to him, and no different than before.

“I told you that I went to see Fiona, my old nanny. I wanted her to help me make sense of something. When I looked at the photographs you gave me of Marguerite, nothing earth-shattering struck me about her. I guess I could see some vague family resemblance, but all she had were American Anglo-Saxon good looks, and let’s face it, all WASPs look the same,” she said dismissively, and he laughed at his mother’s typical irreverence.

“Well, not always,” he responded, and she smiled.

“I didn’t see anything remarkable about her, in terms of looks. But what rocked me to the core were the photographs of the little girl. There aren’t a lot of photographs of me as a child, as I didn’t have doting parents, to say the least, but when I looked at those pictures, I was certain that they were me. There is no name written on any of them, but I was the same age as that child on those dates, and in a couple of them, I was absolutely sure. What I couldn’t understand was why my photos were in the safe deposit box, what were they doing there?

“I went to see Winnie about it, and I had a strange idea. I was suddenly suspicious of the fact that there were no photographs of my older sister Marguerite. Supposedly, my mother was so devastated by her death that she destroyed them all, and any physical evidence of her, which always seemed odd to me. Wouldn’t she have carefully preserved every shred of memories of her lost daughter? Your grandparents were unbearably uptight, cold, judgmental people, and I suddenly began wondering what if Marguerite didn’t die? What if she had fallen in love with an Italian count, of which they would have strongly disapproved I’m sure, and what if they only said she died, and she had been alive and living with an Italian husband for all those years? What if it was not a coincidence of name, and Marguerite di San Pignelli was in fact my oldest sister? They are the same age, and I don’t know why but I suddenly became overwhelmingly convinced that might be the case. Winnie was only four when she left, and I was a baby, but I wondered if she’d ever suspected Marguerite was alive, or heard something that made her question what we’d been told.” Valerie looked at her son intently.

“And what did she say?” He was intrigued by what she said.

“That I was senile. That I’m insane, that our parents would never do a thing like that. She liked them a lot better than I did, and they were nicer to her. More important, she was just like them, I never was, so they always tried to pound me into thinking and behaving like them, and I couldn’t. She told me what I thought was preposterous, that our parents would never lie to us, and the photographs weren’t me of course, and all children looked and dressed like that at the time, which is partially true. But that child’s face was so like me, and my eyes. I got nowhere with Winnie, and we had a huge fight.

“And that night it occurred to me to go and see Fiona, and ask her what she knew. I figured she might know more about the circumstances in which my sister left. Years later, we were told that she had gone to study in Europe, in Switzerland, since there was a war on. But why would you let your daughter go there during a war, and if she went to England, why did she die in Italy? We were never allowed to ask questions about her, or even mention her name, and I was always curious about her. So I thought maybe Fiona could tell me something, and she’d recognize the photographs of Marguerite, if it was she, since she came to work for us two years before my sister left. So I drove to New Hampshire to see her. She’s ninety-four, but clear as a bell.” Valerie seemed breathless as she went on with the story, and Phillip listened, with no idea what would come next.

“I showed her the photographs and asked her if Marguerite di San Pignelli was my sister. And I was heartbroken when she said no. But I was in no way prepared for what she said next. She told me that Marguerite was my mother. She got pregnant by a boy she loved at seventeen. He was just shy of eighteen at the time. Both sets of parents were outraged, and wouldn’t let them get married and separated them. Marguerite was sent away to a home for wayward girls in Maine, to have the baby in hiding and give it up for adoption. A few weeks after she left the city, the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor, the boy was drafted and sent to boot camp, and then to California for training, and was killed in an accident almost immediately, and apparently Marguerite refused to give up the baby, so her parents, my grandparents, disappeared with her, and returned to New York a few months after the baby was born, pretending the baby was theirs, but obviously hating every minute of it. They put Marguerite on a neutral Swedish ship to Lisbon, from where she went to London. She was never going to Switzerland. And a year later they said she died of influenza, and got rid of her forever, as far as they were concerned. In actual fact, she met the count in London when she got there. She was alone at eighteen in a foreign country, with a war on. He was kind to her, they married very quickly, and he took her back to Italy with him, to live at his family home in Naples. But her parents had banished their own child, Phillip. Their firstborn daughter, just to avoid a scandal,” she said with a look of outrage, and tears in her eyes. “They just cut her out of their lives forever, and kept her baby, even if they didn’t want it, and never loved it. Fiona says that Marguerite and the count tried to get her baby back several years later, and her parents did everything to defeat her and scare her off and threaten her, to keep the story quiet, and she eventually gave up. And all Fiona could do was send her photographs of her daughter periodically, until she left us ten years later.

“But Phillip,” Valerie said, her eyes welling up with tears, which overflowed now, “that baby was me. Marguerite was my mother, not my sister, and my grandparents stole me from her, and pretended to be my parents and hated me forever because of the disgrace my birth would have meant to them. I lived a lie all my life, and was robbed of my mother, because of them. Marguerite Pearson di San Pignelli was my mother. I have no idea what to do about it, or who one tells something like that to, or even if it matters at this point. She’s dead.” She felt like an orphan again as she said it, just as she had the day she found out. “But there’s no question. She was my mother. It is the weirdest of coincidences, even more so than we ever thought it could be, or than I thought when I started to wonder if she was my sister. It was like I was meant to find her, when you got called to do that appraisal from Christie’s. She was your grandmother, Phillip. And the mother I never knew, and should have.” The tears spilled down her cheeks and Phillip put his arms around her and held her. He had never seen his mother as bereft except when his father died. Valerie cried softly as he held her.

“Did you tell Winnie?” he asked her, and she nodded.

“This time she believed me. She still made excuses for them and said she’s sure they thought they were doing the right thing. But keeping my mother from me all my life, treating me like an unwelcome intruder, banishing their daughter and pretending she was dead, could hardly have felt like the right thing, even to them. Winnie begged me not to make a fuss about it, or even say anything. Originally, she accused me of being after the jewelry, but in a way this is all much more shocking than wanting to be the heir to a fortune in jewelry. It’s a hideous lie propagated by my grandparents, and they must have ruined Marguerite’s life, having stolen her only child from her. And the poor woman died alone.” Valerie dried her tears and looked deeply moved by it, as Phillip thought about what she had just said.

“I wasn’t thinking about the jewelry, just about what all this meant to your mother, and to you. I agree, it’s an awful story.” But now there was the jewelry to consider too. “The truth is, Mom, you are the heir to the jewelry. You’re her only child. And if that’s true, you should have it.”

“It belongs to Winnie too – she was her sister. But I really don’t care about the jewelry. It won’t bring my mother back now.”

“No, but she would want you to have it. I think there’s a reason why she hung on to it for all these years, even when she had so little money left. Either she kept it out of love for Umberto, or she hoped to find you one day and give it to you.”

“If that were true, she’d have written a will, and she didn’t,” his mother reminded him.

“You don’t know what she was thinking or what condition she was in, in the end. The simple fact is that these things belonged to her, and you’re her only daughter. I’m not sure what we do now. But there’s a lot more to the story than meets the eye here, other than your grandparents’ terrible behavior. Your mother left a fortune in jewels, and they belong to you.” It was an outcome he had never in his wildest dreams expected, even when he had asked her about the coincidence of maiden names. He had thought Marguerite might be some very distant cousin, but not his maternal grandmother. It was an astounding revelation, for all of them. And they couldn’t let the story lie where it had fallen. Now they had to do the right thing. Phillip didn’t know what that was yet, but he wanted to think about it and make the appropriate decision.

When he calmed down from the shock of the information his mother had shared with him, he told her about his visits to Cartier and Van Cleef, and what he knew about the jewelry now, and its origins and the meaningful occasions on which it had been given. And he told her about visiting their home, the château, and meeting Saverio Salvatore in Naples, the current owner of the château, what a charming man he had been, and the little he had known about Marguerite and Umberto. It all fit together now, a perfect puzzle, with few pieces missing.

“I’d like to see it one day,” Valerie said wistfully, about the home where her mother had lived for thirty-two years with the stepfather she had never known. Valerie was slowly acquiring a family she never knew she had, who even posthumously seemed more real to her than the parents she’d grown up with.

They talked long into the night, eating in the kitchen, and putting all the pieces together as they looked at the photographs again. Valerie admitted to him as they finished the wine that she wanted to do a portrait of her mother from the photographs he’d given her. She seemed to want to cling to her now, like the motherless child she had once been, and heal the tragic losses of the past.

Phillip was deeply moved by all of it when he left and went home that night. There was so much to think about, about the past, present, and future, and some decision had to be made about the jewelry. And all Phillip could think of was that he had to call Jane in the morning. She probably wouldn’t know any more than he did about what his mother had to do now, but clearly they had to do something. What, remained to be seen.

PHILLIP CALLED JANE
the next morning before she had time to take her coat off in her office. He was still at home.

“How was your trip?” she asked him, obviously happy to hear from him. She had been thinking about him that morning.

“Very interesting,” he said, feeling distracted and sounding serious. He had been awake most of the night, thinking of what his mother had told him, and what he had to do now to help her. He cut to the chase. “I was wondering if we could have lunch today. I have something I’d like to discuss with you.” Given the tone of his voice, it sounded like business, not romance, and she couldn’t imagine what it was.

“Sure. Of course. Where would you like me to meet you?” He suggested another restaurant near his office, that wasn’t too noisy, and had good sandwiches, burgers, and salads. He didn’t want to be distracted by fancy food, intrusive waiters, or noisy customers. They agreed to meet at twelve-thirty, and he was already at the table when she got there. He was wearing a blazer and a sweater and gray slacks, and she had dressed casually as well, not expecting to have a lunch date. And she could see from the look in his eyes that he was worried about something.

They both ordered club sandwiches, and agreed to share a salad, and as soon as the waiter had taken their order, Phillip turned to her, and told her about his trip to Europe, the visits to Van Cleef and Cartier, and the château in Naples. She was touched to hear everything he told her, and then he took a breath and decided to plunge into the deep end and tell her the rest. It was very personal and very moving, but having shared the adventure this far, he thought she ought to know.

“Jane, my mother has been doing some sleuthing herself, and some amazing information has turned up. As it turns out, there was more than a coincidence of names here. A lot more.” He told her then what Valerie had learned from Fiona and what she had told him the night before, that he hadn’t yet fully absorbed. “It seems incredible and stranger yet that you would just happen to call Christie’s for this appraisal, and it led to my mother discovering the truth about her birth, her mother, and a whole mystery has unraveled right before our eyes. Fact is definitely stranger than fiction. And weirdest of all, my mother turns out to be Marguerite di San Pignelli’s direct heir, and Marguerite is my grandmother. Talk about strange.” He looked bowled over as he said it, and Jane was amazed. As she listened to him tell his mother’s story, the similarity of what she had gleaned from the letters had struck her, and she was stunned. “I’m not sure what we do now, or how we prove to the court that my mother is Marguerite’s rightful heir. She can’t just walk into surrogate’s court and say ‘Hi, she was my mom.’ And since her grandparents faked the birth certificate in some way, claiming her as their own, I don’t suppose that will be easy to prove either. Not to mention the fact that the auction is in two months. I’m sure it will all fall into place in the end, but I’m not sure what the next step is, and I wanted your advice. What do you think?”