The Jewels of Tessa Kent (22 page)

“Why, Mimi, why? I could carry it off, I’m an actress, he’d never guess …”

“Maybe not, but I’m thinking of you, living each day fooling him and fooling her and trying to fool yourself, what is quaintly known as ‘living a lie.’ You wouldn’t make it, Tessa, not for long.”

“You can’t know that!”

“I’ve been your friend forever, remember? You and your crazy sense of guilt and sin. Teresa Horvath, the last of the big-time sinners, do you think I’ve forgotten, or that you’ve basically changed? Sooner or later, as Maggie grows up and gives you the usual problems kids give, the big sister facade would disappear and the maternal instinct to tell her what to do would take over. You’d crack, Tessa! You couldn’t avoid making a slip, or you’d give up and just confess the truth, but before that happened, you’d be a wreck. Always nervous, always watching yourself trying not to act too motherly, always keeping an eye on Luke’s reaction to the two of you together, always afraid of doing too much for Maggie, or worse, not enough.”

“You’ve always loved to tell me what to do!” Tessa protested.

“You wouldn’t be the woman Luke married anymore,” Mimi continued, paying no attention, “and he wouldn’t understand why, and of course he’d blame Maggie. My God, Tessa, you had exactly four days together before this happened. You’re a couple of barely newlyweds with a lot of adjustments to make like everybody else—you hardly know each other when it gets down to that, to say nothing of the major age difference, which I’ve been too polite to mention till now. Luke’s a guy who can have anything he wants, and children haven’t been high on his list. Don’t tell me
that’s
an accident. Or is there something I don’t know?”

“He’s never wanted children,” Tessa admitted miserably. “He said, maybe in ten years … I’ll only be thirty …”

“Well then! You simply
cannot
take on the burden and responsibility of a five-year-old child on top of everything else, not when there are four aunts, each one of whom made a point of telling you that she wanted Maggie to come and live with her, each one of whom has plenty of child-rearing experience.”

“My mother was the youngest of them all. The aunts are in their forties, some even in their fifties, and their kids are mostly grown up.”

“So what? Do you imagine that at twenty you’ll be better and smarter about bringing up a kid?”

“They’re not her mother,” Tessa said stubbornly, seeing Maggie’s set, plump, big-eyed face, the long, dark braids she tugged at, the valiant way she walked, never dragging her feet no matter how new the situation.

“Her mother died, come on! She’s already accepted that. You’re her sister, who visits her whenever you can and brings her wonderful presents and ends up being the person who understands her best, the person she can really talk to and confide in, the person whose advice she follows—you’re her fairy godmother, instead of the person who tells her to finish her homework and eat her peas. You get to spoil her to your heart’s delight!”

“Oh, Mimi, you should have your own advice column.
‘Ask Mimi, the All-Wise One,’ circulation one hundred million. You’re so quick to jump at a decision for someone else, imagining that they think the way you think. Hasn’t it occurred to you that I
know
I’m not Maggie’s sister, that I
know
I’m her mother, that I
know
I have a duty toward her?
Don’t you understand that I love Maggie?
I was never allowed to mother her the way I yearned to, but there was never a minute when I didn’t love her. I gave birth to her, for the love of God, I carried her for nine months, all the good reasons in the world can’t change those facts. Oh, Mimi, I’m in agony. No matter what I do, I’m going to be wrong, there’s no way out of this, no honorable way.”

“Will you think about what I said?”

“Naturally, but I can’t let you make up my mind for me.”

“God forbid.”

Tessa wondered angrily why she was still awake. After the last guest had left, after Maggie and blessed Fiona, without whose help she’d be utterly lost, had settled down in the neighboring suite, she’d planned to go to bed no matter how early in the evening it was, and sleep as long as she possibly could. Jet lag, her parents’ funeral, followed by an Irish wake—the longest, saddest day of her life—surely all that would put her into a state of immediate and necessary unconsciousness. But after trying to let go and relax for a half hour, thinking about Maggie each minute, she gave up and went to find Luke, who was reading in the sitting room next to the bedroom.

“What are you doing here, sweetheart? You look like Ophelia on a bad day,” he said, plunking her down in his lap and kissing her neck under the tangle of hair she’d been too tired to bother brushing.

“Can’t sleep. I still have jet lag on top of everything else. Look, that damn old sun hasn’t even set yet. I wonder what time it is back in Èze.”

“Almost dawn.”

“I feel as if I’ve left some hugely important piece of my soul there.”

“We’ll go back, darling, I promise, we’ll go hundreds of times.”

“But when? And anyway, it’ll never be the same.”

“Nothing is ever exactly the same, but we’ll be there together.”

“How long could we have stayed if …?”

“I’d been able to carve out ten days after our wedding. Counting from the day I met you, I haven’t attended to business, and normally I never take more than a week or two off, maximum. After Èze we have to spend a week in Melbourne; there’s a major board meeting that’s been planned for months. Then, we fly to Houston for a few days and go up to Anchorage to take a look at …”

“So even if we hadn’t had to come back here, we’d have had only another few days in Èze anyway?”

“Four more, but I could be wrong by a day.”

“So it wouldn’t make sense to go back there now and then have to turn around and leave for Australia when we’re halfway to Australia already?” Tessa asked in a forlorn, willfully blind attempt to roll back events and recapture her honeymoon.

“Is that what was keeping you up? Impossible confusions of time changes, the International Dateline, and travel schedules running through your head?”

“Everything is keeping me up,” she said, bursting into tears, pressing herself tightly into the shelter formed by Luke’s lap and chest and arms and letting herself go completely, weeping as loudly and unselfconsciously as a child locked away in a closet, wailing and moaning in a raw wordless lament that went on and on. Luke did nothing to stop her, gripping her as tightly as he could without hurting her. High time, he thought, high time.

After a long while, with a final descent into a diminishing series of sniffs and whimpers, Tessa started to dab at her eyes with the hem of her nightgown. “I need
a bath towel,” she said in a choked voice, “but I feel better.”

“I’ll get you a wet washcloth and a face towel,” Luke said.

“No, don’t go away, not for a second, don’t let go of me yet,” she pleaded.

“I won’t,” Luke said, picking her up, carrying her into the bathroom, grabbing a couple of towels and a box of Kleenex, and returning with her to the chair. “There, everything you could possibly want. How about a drink? Or vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce?”

“Just a kiss. And another kiss. God, I love you. What a honeymoon you’ve had. Aren’t you glad you didn’t get married before?”

“I’m glad I didn’t get married to anyone else.”

“Even now?”

“Especially now. Tessa, I know I told you that I didn’t want to share you with kids for ten years, but darling, that was before and this is entirely different, and what I said shouldn’t count anymore.” He set his lips sternly. “We’ll bring up Maggie.”

“Oh, Luke, you just said we have to go to Melbourne, Texas, and Alaska and that’s only in the next few weeks.”

“Darling, we’ll hire the best nanny in the world to travel with us. Kids are flexible, Maggie’ll have fun seeing so many new things, and then when she’s old enough for school, we’ll get her a tutor too, several tutors if necessary, and by the time she’s, oh, eight or nine, whenever little girls usually go away to boarding school, we’ll send her off, so she could make friends of her own age. There are some marvelous schools in Switzerland or England, even in Australia, wherever she’d be happiest, and she could be with us on vacations.”

“But Luke, Maggie’s in kindergarten now, she’s already had two years of preschool, and next year she starts first grade. Children need to be ‘socialized’ from practically day one, not three or four years from now.”

“They do?” Luke looked blank. “Socialized?”

“I honestly didn’t remember either, until you started making those sweet, impossible, mixed-up plans. I’d forgotten what it was like when I was little, all those happy hours throwing sand into the other kids’ eyes, playing games, making friends. Look, all of my mother’s sisters want Maggie to go and live with them.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“I think that the most important thing is for her to be brought up in a family with kids roughly her age, so she has a normal family life. Each of my aunts assured me that Maggie would be treated like a little princess, and I know only too well what they meant.”

“What, exactly?”

“She’d become a fabulous, glamorous orphan, someone to concentrate on completely now that most of their own children are grown and out of the house. She’s the little sister of a movie star, protected by a man, her brother-in-law no less, who has more money than they can begin to imagine, a man who naturally would want Maggie—and, by extension, themselves—to have the best of everything. A new house, a new car, and all expenses paid for them. For Maggie, private schools, riding lessons, ballet lessons, beautiful clothes—”

“Well, of course she should have all those things,” Luke said indignantly.

“It would make Maggie the
power
in the house, the center of everything, overwhelmed by attention and spoiling, and she’d understand the dynamics quickly enough. It would be the worst thing possible for her. And any aunt we decided to send Maggie to would queen it over the others, just the way my poor mother acted with her sisters at the wedding. You missed seeing that, but I didn’t. It was ghastly.”

“But there’s no other answer,” Luke said, shaking his head.

“I can’t say I liked my cousins at the wedding, but at least some of them are the right age, with young families. I think that while you’re in Australia I should take a trip
back East, take Maggie with me, and get to know them better, spend time with each of their families. There’s got to be one family Maggie could fit into happily.”

“Hmm,” Luke murmured. “Let’s talk this over in the morning. I promise you we’ll find a solution. It’s too complicated to settle tonight, and anyway, you look so exhausted. I bet if you went to bed and I held your hand, you’d be asleep in minutes.”

“I’ll try,” Tessa agreed, yawning.

“What an accommodating girl you are.”

As Luke watched Tessa fall into a profound sleep, he thought about her cousins, a bunch of unfriendly, impolite, classless oafs, in his opinion, with a mob of ill-mannered, unappealing kids. Perhaps they’d been totally intimidated by the whole occasion, perhaps they were the salt of the earth in their own homes, but he didn’t mind admitting to himself that snobbish or not, he had no intention of letting his wife’s sister be brought up with yobs. There was, thank God, another solution.

Very early the next morning, Luke got up quietly, leaving Tessa still deeply asleep. He called his stepbrother, Tyler Webster, who was due to fly home in a few hours, woke him, and asked him to meet him in a half hour in the dining room.

“Good of you to have dressed so quickly, Tyler.”

“Least I could do, Luke.”

“No, Tyler, it’s only the beginning.”

“Huh?”

“Tyler, there’s something very, very important you can do for me.”

“Just ask,” Tyler replied, with his sweet and thoughtful smile.

“It’s something that won’t go unrecognized, in fact, something that will be most highly rewarded, even by your standards.”

“Luke, come on guy, you already do more than enough.”

“I’m aware of that,” Luke said, concentrating on spreading marmalade carefully on a piece of toast.

The Webster family lived entirely on Luke’s largesse. Charming Tyler combined fatal bad judgment with a talent for laziness. He had never been able to keep a job for more than two months. Luke’s father had thrown him out of the family business in less time than that, afraid of what promises his bumbling, incompetent stepson might make on no authority but his own desire to please. However, because Dan Blake loved his American second wife, Tyler’s mother, he had made Tyler a generous allowance, so generous that Tyler was able to concentrate on his one serious passion. Riding horses beautifully was the only occupation for which Tyler was fit, and horses were the only thing he cared deeply about.

After his father’s death, Luke had continued the allowance, and when an unresisting Tyler had been married by Madison Grant, a plain Jane of a good family, a clever girl who saw Tyler clearly and knew that he was her best chance at a good life, Luke had increased the allowance and bought them a handsome stud farm near Madison’s family’s home, in the New Jersey hunt country. There Tyler could live as one in that line of old-fashioned country gentlemen whose gene pool he had too liberally inherited. Luke paid for everything, from the children’s schools to Madison’s beautiful clothes and the parties she gave so well. The Websters’ neighbors, horse people like themselves, assumed that they had a large private income and Tyler’s mettle and judgment were never tested. The stud itself, even under a qualified manager, just about broke even, but in years when it lost money, Luke made up the difference without flinching.

“Luke, what’s up? You look so serious.”

“I want you and Madison to bring up Maggie, Tessa’s sister.”

“What!”

“There’s no one else who’ll do. Maggie’s aunts are too old and her cousins aren’t suitable. She’s a dear little
girl and she needs to be in a good, stable, loving family environment. Tessa and I aren’t going to be leading that kind of life—there’s a worldwide business to run and there’s Tessa’s career; we’ll rarely be in one place for long. How old are your children now?”