The Jewels of Tessa Kent (23 page)

“Uh … wait a minute … right, Allison’s eight, Candice’s ten, and Barney’s, gosh, four and a half.”

“Spot on. Does Barney have a nanny? Excellent, he can share her with Maggie. As I remember you have a guest suite, right? Good. Plenty of room for Maggie. What I’d appreciate your doing, right now as a matter of fact, is calling Madison and telling her to pack herself and the kids up and fly out here today. They can take the company’s New York plane; they’ll gain three hours, so they can be here before dinner.”

“Today!”

“The sooner Tessa knows that Maggie’s going to be happy in her new home, the better for everybody.”

“Oh, sure, I can understand that. Gosh, I wonder what Madison’s going to say.”

“She’ll understand, Tyler. You won’t even have to explain when she knows how important it is to me.
Essential
, as a matter of fact. Waiter, could you bring a phone to the table please?”

Madison Webster and her three children walked over the bridge in front of the entrance to the Hotel Bel-Air, as unrumpled as if they’d just driven over from Beverly Hills. Maggie stood shyly, but holding her ground, as the introductions were made.

“Well, well, so this is Maggie! What a dear little girl you are,” Madison said, bending down to kiss her cheek. “I’m so glad to meet you.”

“Thank you,” Maggie mumbled.

“Barney, why don’t you shake hands with Maggie,” Tyler suggested nervously.

“How old are you?” Barney demanded, looking Maggie in the eye.

“Five.”

“You’re older than I am but I’m taller than you. Much taller,” he announced with satisfaction, a big, warm, friendly grin splitting his freckled face. He took her hand in his and squeezed it tightly, pumping it up and down. “Wanna play?”

“Play what?”

“Just play, Maggie. Come on, I’ll show you. I know lots of good games, fun games, maybe we’ll build a tree house, you’ll like that.” Barney didn’t bother to say hello to his uncle Luke or his new aunt. Without letting go of Maggie’s hand, Barney tugged the little girl away into the gardens, both of them soon breaking into a run. Maggie’s laugh rang out as they rounded a corner and vanished from sight.

“Me Tarzan, you Jane,” Tessa said, smiling for the first time in days.

B
efore Maggie Horvath came to live with them, Madison Webster had formed for herself a number of complicated rules of domestic economy. All of her singularly expensive, marvelously simple clothes were bought at Bergdorf’s, but she took care of them beautifully and wore them forever; she’d never indulged in redecoration of their large country house, but instead cultivated the shabby English look. If a piece of furniture was on the verge of becoming too shamefully worn, she replaced its fabric with the same pattern, remaining consistent to the style already established.

She bought no jewels at all, contenting herself with those few simple pieces Tyler had inherited from his mother; she used a third-rate caterer for her parties, making all the most important dishes herself, for she had taken several Cordon-Bleu courses and could cook beautifully, although none of her friends knew it. She learned to care for indoor plants so she never had to pay for fresh flowers except for entertaining. She could still use her grandmother’s invisibly darned, heavy lace table linen for parties as well as the heavy, old-fashioned silver she’d inherited directly when her grandmother died,
along with a number of dark, impressive family portraits, which she’d hung carefully in places of honor.

She made sure that her station wagon and Tyler’s Jaguar were regularly serviced and then washed daily by one of the stable boys, so they could keep their cars until they became classics. Her sheets and towels were bought at white sales, all of her daughters’ clothes were bought on sale, she used drugstore makeup and supermarket generic brands of soap, toilet paper, paper towels, and canned goods. One of the maids was delegated to clip coupons, and Madison did all the shopping herself, never trusting her cook to find bargains. She kept two fridges, one for the help’s cheap food, one for the family’s. All four of her dogs came from the pound.

However, she spared no expense on certain details. She made it a point to have at least one more waiter than necessary whenever she entertained so that her parties ran with smooth perfection; her cellar was so excellently stocked that Tyler passed for a wine collector; she went for a trim every three weeks to the best hairdresser in New York; she never bought an item of leather that wasn’t from Hermès; her cocktail napkins and guest towels came from Frette; a chipped Waterford glass was promptly replaced with another; and her daughters both attended the hideously expensive Elm Country Day School, while Barney was destined for Phillips Andover.

This combination of invisible thrift and conspicuous luxuries was not imposed on Madison by the limitations of the allowance Luke made to Tyler. She could have spent far more money than she did and still stayed well within its yearly amount.

Luke didn’t know, and Tyler didn’t notice, that Madison steadily saved healthy amounts each year, investing them in a deeply conservative, no-load mutual fund with a steady performance record. Her personal dreaded rainy day would only come if Luke died. Without him, the Webster family would have no income at all. Not a bean. Unlike her grandmother, her parents
could leave her nothing, and Tyler … well, Tyler was a gentleman, not a businessman, to put it as gently as possible.

Maggie’s arrival four years earlier had been a guarantee that as long as the little girl lived with the Websters, they could count on receiving far more money from Luke, or his estate, than they had before—a guarantee made in writing by the chief partner in the law firm Luke employed in Manhattan.

Why couldn’t she like Maggie, Madison asked herself in irritation. Why couldn’t she feel even a flicker of genuine warmth for the nine-year-old who had made it possible for her to invest so much more than ever before? Maggie’s presence in their house had, from the day she arrived, ensured a minimum of thirteen years of respite from any rainy day, since she would certainly live with them until she was eighteen. Even when she went off to college, Madison told herself, Luke would unquestionably agree that she’d need a home to come back to for school vacations, no matter how often she was able to visit her sister.

It simply wasn’t possible that she could be so stupid as to still resent the imperious, high-handed, arrogant way in which Luke had taken it for granted that she would welcome a strange child into her home. He hadn’t even had the courtesy to ask her to do it as a favor to him … yet she could never forget that oversight, try as she had. To be perfectly honest, his presumption
had
, in the most cold-blooded way, rubbed their noses in their indebtedness to him. It was not as if there had ever been any question that they owed him everything … but could they be blamed for not liking to be reminded of it? It made her feel so … 
powerless
, so deeply humiliated, Madison told herself, as she had done far too many times in the past four years, ever since Maggie had been dumped on their doorstep.

True, Luke had never asked them to do anything for him before. Perhaps those early years of scrupulously hands-off treatment had dimmed her understanding of
the ignominious position her husband was in, a position which, in moments of gloom, made her feel exactly like the wife of a worthless remittance man.

But even now, every time she laid eyes on Maggie, she was reminded of how much she owed Luke, or was it how much she owed Maggie? One thing came down to the other, if you considered it with any precision—which, thank you, she would prefer not to have to do, although she couldn’t help being obsessed by it. God knows, Tyler never gave their position a thought. But then Tyler didn’t consider anything with precision, and she’d always known it, so why should she resent being made conscious all over again of the deliberate bargain she’d made? She had, sensibly, preferred marrying an incompetent fool to remaining single. What woman wouldn’t?

But there was no getting away from it: when Maggie called her “Aunt Madison” she rejected the term in her mind. When Maggie’ came to live with them, they had decided it was the least confusing form of address for a child of five who was—too ridiculously for words—Tyler’s stepbrother’s wife’s sister. Or, to make it more confusing, her own brother-in-law’s sister-in-law. But she wasn’t Maggie’s aunt, damn it, and Tyler wasn’t her uncle. They weren’t the slightest relation to Maggie. Maggie didn’t come from their kind of background, she didn’t come from a family heritage you could respect, and nothing could change that. Under normal circumstances she would never have taken Maggie into her home to live, and she knew her neighbors had raised many an eyebrow when she’d tried to explain the tragic circumstances that had, so suddenly, made Maggie a part of their family.

She’d put the best possible face on it, but she knew that many members of the bridge club, the hunt club, and the tennis club wondered why Maggie occupied the guest suite, when her own daughters shared a room. What would they say if they knew that she’d never dared to severely reprove Maggie, although the girl
drove her crazy with her inability to keep her blouse tucked into her skirt or her pants, to say nothing of the way she managed to get spots on clean clothes within minutes of putting them on. She was such an unfeminine thing, always dashing around with Barney as if she were another little boy, her unruly hair looking as if it had never been brushed, her face as if it had never been washed. None of the exquisite, and totally inappropriate, party dresses or fine sweater sets that she brought back from her visits to her sister had ever survived more than a few weeks of Maggie’s treatment, but then they were entirely unsuitable for a child in any case, and infuriating when she had to imagine what they’d cost. The money that was lavished on that child! It was unseemly, in her opinion, utterly unseemly.

You could always tell when Maggie was in the house: the sound of her bold laugh, entirely too loud and too frequent, the sound of her feet—couldn’t that child ever walk instead of running up and down stairs?—and then her boisterous entrance into any room, with the expectation of a hungry puppy, bursting with observations and questions. She seemed to need attention and, worse, long for affection that Madison didn’t, couldn’t possibly be expected to feel and would have to be a skillful actress to produce. Really, it was too much! Affection on demand! Maggie took up more air than any nine-year-old should be allowed to do. Didn’t she have any decent sense of self-consciousness? Couldn’t she learn to be less visible? Maggie acted as if she owned the place, Madison thought bitterly, and although the child couldn’t possibly realize it, in an indirect way, she did, for every acre of their handsome property belonged to Luke, and Luke and Tessa had no heirs other than Maggie.

Madison sighed, thinking of her own daughters: Candice, the exceptionally pretty one, who was now fourteen, and Allison, who might or might not become the extraordinarily beautiful one, but was now, at twelve, merely promising. What satisfactory children
they were! Neat, polite, modest, ladylike girls with perfect manners, who hung up their clothes, polished their riding boots, kept their bedroom and bathroom tidy, and got their homework in on time without her prompting. If only some of their breeding had rubbed off on Maggie!

But, one had to admit, breeding didn’t “rub off,” it was innate. Tyler came, as she did, from a long line of what she could only term “American aristocrats,” every last one of them Protestant, every last one of them proper, every last one of them quietly, admirably at ease in his social environment. Well, all she could say was that whatever momentarily fortunate mix of Irish and Hungarian genes had produced the ravishing Tessa hadn’t been in operation when Maggie was conceived. Everything about her high coloring, with skin so white, and cheeks so red, with her thick thatch of black curls and the fierce blueness of her eyes, screamed “Black Irish.”

Not that she had anything against the Irish, goodness knows, she wasn’t a snob, Madison assured herself, but there simply didn’t happen to be any living in the neighborhood. Nor enrolled at Elm Country Day, where Maggie was the only child who had to be driven to confession every Thursday and catechism class every Saturday—a thirty-mile trip each way, with nothing for her to do but sit in the station wagon and read while she waited for the damn things to be over. And yet somehow she didn’t dare direct any of the staff to take over those trips. It was much … safer … for Maggie to report to Tessa that Aunt Madison took her. Thank the good, reasonable Episcopalian Lord that she had the excuse of going to her own church on Sunday, so that she could send Maggie off to mass with the cook.

And what an unsuitable to-do last year, when Maggie made her First Holy Communion! First she’d been endlessly involved in finding a perfect dress. They’d actually had to go all the way into Manhattan to find a decent selection. The only saving grace was that the church was so far away that her friends hadn’t been aware of the
ceremony. They all knew Maggie was Catholic, of course, but some details were best left to the imagination, such as, good grief, a child of eight outlandishly decked out in a long white dress, a miniature bride drinking the blood and eating the body of Christ.