The Jewels of Tessa Kent (48 page)

“Several times, Polly, trust me.”

“So now you’re punishing Liz and Hamilton and the entire house of S and S too, not just Tessa Kent? Can’t you let it go? Can’t you stop being so desperately something or other—immovable, proud, stiff-necked, hard, stubborn, impossible? That’s certainly not the Maggie Horvath I know and love.”

“When were you elected to become the voice of my conscience?”

“The day you moved in, a sad, lonely case, really
needing a place to live, and I fed you for months, or rather years to be exact, and let you rent my beautiful room, and became your best friend and still am.”

“
Low blow.
”

“Well?”

“I’ll think about it. Bitch!”

W
ant to eat here tonight, sweetheart, or go out for Chinese food?” Sam asked Tessa soon after he arrived back at the apartment, three days after she’d spoken to Liz Sinclair.

“How hungry are you?” Tessa asked, holding him as tightly as she could.

“I’m not, really. I had an enormous lunch with the head of my department, he’s a two-fisted eater and if you don’t match him bite for bite he broods and sulks. Rumor has it that a young professor was once fired for ordering nothing but a salad.”

“Could we just sit here for a while? I have something I have to tell you.”

“That sounds ominous. You haven’t stopped loving me? You don’t want me to pack my bag and go? Because, you’d have to physically remove me and you’re half my size.”

“Nothing like that. This is all about me.”

“Now that’ll be a treat—you talk about yourself less than any female I’ve ever known. If you weren’t so famous, you’d be my wonderful little secret, my very own private woman of mystery.”

Sam’s love for her showed so openly, so happily, and with such a lack of complication, that Tessa could scarcely endure it.

“Sam, sit down, drink your drink, and listen to me. Don’t interrupt. I have to get this out all at once.”

“Tessa, what the hell—”

“Just listen.
Please
. When I was fourteen I had a baby. Maggie. Mary Margaret Horvath. My parents brought her up as my sister, to hide the disgrace. By the time Maggie was three I’d already made
Little Women
. I’d become Tessa Kent. I neglected her shamefully, I was too wrapped up in my own future, too full of ambition, too high on my own totally wonderful self, to even
think
of getting to know her. I had plenty of opportunities because I lived at home for the next three years, but I allowed my mother to take over Maggie completely, I never even put up a fight. I was … grateful; it meant one less distraction in my exciting, brilliant, self-important life.”

“Oh, come on Tessa, that’s not you at all, that’s—”

“Then I met Luke and married him,” Tessa continued without giving Sam a chance to say more. “I was twenty, Maggie was five. I never told Luke about her, although now there’s no question in my mind that if I had, right at the start, he would have accepted the fact that Maggie existed. Hell, he was forty-five, a grown-up, a kind man, and I knew he was crazy about me. There was a window of opportunity, and I blew it. He wanted to think I was a virgin, right from our first date, and I let him believe I was. That was the worst of my lies. Afterward, I couldn’t admit I wasn’t—not that I was remotely tempted to—I lied and lied, even on our wedding night. I could never be honest—no, I
could
have been, Sam—I could have but I chose not to.”

“Tessa, you’re so hard on yourself, you were a kid—”

“You weren’t there, Sam, I was. I’m merely being accurate. The week Luke and I were married, my parents died in an accident and Maggie was left all alone. I
let her go, Sam
, I let her go to Luke’s stepbrother’s family,
the Websters, and grow up there. My daughter could have grown up with Luke and me, with a mother and a stepfather, instead of being stashed away with strangers, but I never had the courage to admit she wasn’t my sister. I was an utter coward, a shameful coward.”

“Tessa—”

“Don’t, Sam, let me finish. I visited Maggie from time to time, and she visited me, not nearly as often as it should have been. I never truly knew if she was happy or not. I could have found out, so quickly, if I’d only had the guts to ask her the right questions, but I kept our relationship bright and easy and utterly superficial. The truth must be that I didn’t really
want
to know, not in my heart of hearts. That was easier for me. So much less complicated. My life with Luke came first. Before my own daughter, Sam. I wasn’t even a good sister to her. All the real family Maggie ever had was this remote movie-star creature who threw glamour dust at her every once in a while instead of steady, daily love and caring. Barney, the Websters’ son, adored her. That’s all the real love she got, Sam, from the time she was five until she was eighteen. That was most of tier life—she’s twenty-three now. Even after Luke died I didn’t tell her.”

“Then why now—?”

“Wait! Maggie found out I was her mother when she was eighteen, five years ago. I’d finally decided the time had come to tell her, but she found out first. She’s never spoken to me since, or opened a single letter I’ve sent her. There’s one chance left, but I’m afraid Maggie won’t let it happen.”

“One chance for what?”

“To somehow get closer to Maggie.”

“Are you looking for forgiveness?”

“I guess … oh, shit, of course I am!”

“I don’t blame you.”

“If there’s the slightest chance, it’s worth trying. Maggie works in publicity for S and S, the auction house. I called a friend there, one of the owners, and told her I’d sell all my jewels at auction, but only on the
condition that Maggie would work on the sale. That way we’d be thrown together all the time and she’ll have to talk to me, and maybe … but I don’t know yet if she will or won’t.”

“Do you have a lot of jewels?” he asked, in surprise. “All I’ve ever noticed is this unbelievable green rock and some pearls. Oh, and those cameos you were wearing the day we met.”

“Oh, Sam, darling Sam, Cleopatra had more jewels than I do, I’m sure, but yes, I have jewels. I just don’t wear them with you or your friends. They’re a … distraction.”

“You mean something like a million bucks’ worth of jewelry?” he asked incredulously.

“Tens of millions.”

“That just might have made the wrong impression at faculty parties.” Sam gave a snort of laughter. “When will you know?”

“When Liz Sinclair calls me. I have very little hope.”

“If there is an auction, when will it be?”

“I told them it had to be held within six months, I don’t want this situation to drag on and on. ”

“Will it take up a lot of your time?”

“Almost all, and I’ll have to travel a lot to publicize it.”

“Tessa, we’ve been together for a year and you’ve never said a thing about Maggie. You never so much as told me that you had a sister. Is it because of the auction that you told me the whole story tonight?”

“No, Sam, no! There probably won’t be an auction and I certainly could have waited to find out if it was going to happen. But I couldn’t stand lying to you anymore, lying by not saying anything, even though chances are you would never have known.” She couldn’t tell him everything at once, Tessa thought with a twinge of guilt.

“And even though you thought I might stop loving you. Admit it, you did think that. I know you so well now, I could tell.”

“But how
can
you keep loving me, Sam?”

“You made one hell of a lot of mistakes, rotten judgment calls, you were a thoroughly lousy mother and not even a decent sister. But that was then and this is now, and there’s hope for you, Tessa Kent. So you thought I would change, you actually believed that was possible?”

“Yes.”

“I guess you don’t really know me yet,” Sam said, grabbing her and pulling her tight. Tessa sobbed into his shirt for long, unutterably relieved minutes while he kissed her hair and patted her back as if she were a baby. Finally, she looked up at him, her mascara running down her cheeks, and said, “You haven’t even asked what this will do to the movie schedule, how long we’ll have to postpone starting production.”

“What movie?”

The next day Maggie, grim-faced but bowing to the arguments of wily, irrefutable Polly Guildenstern and to her own intensely rooted loyalty to S & S, agreed to handle the publicity for the auction of the jewels of Tessa Kent.

A preliminary meeting was immediately scheduled for the following morning, a meeting that would include only Liz and Hamilton; Tessa; Maggie; Monty Foy, the director of S & S’s jewelry department; and Juliet Tree, the director of marketing. As within every auction house, the big sale, or the prospect of one, was a tightly held secret known only to the few top people who would work on it from the very beginning.

Everyone but Maggie had arrived and taken their places around a table by the appointed time. Earlier that morning Liz had gathered Monty Foy and Juliet Tree together and told them that the only reason S & S had the prospect of Tessa Kent’s auction was that Maggie Horvath was Tessa’s younger sister. Unless Maggie ran the press, there would be no sale, but they must not make any reference to that fact during the meeting.
They had to be informed, she realized, so that they wouldn’t make a gaffe about the absence of Lee Maine, who normally would have been there.

Tessa had refused to sign the Master Consignment Agreement even after she’d telephoned her with the news that Maggie would participate, Liz thought, tapping her foot. Tessa was waiting to see if Maggie was actually going to show up, in spite of Liz’s assurances, and by now, Maggie, who was usually so punctual, was ten minutes late.

“Who’ll have more tea or coffee?” Liz asked, presiding as she always did at staff meetings, behind a Georgian silver service.

“I’d love another cup of coffee, Liz,” the normally collected Monty Foy said nervously, rubbing his bald head in an automatic gesture.

If that man has more coffee he’ll explode from nerves, Liz thought, glad that she’d substituted decaf without telling anyone. She knew she couldn’t take another drop of caffeine herself, without risk, to say nothing of Hamilton, who looked as taut as she’d ever seen him.

The presence of Tessa Kent certainly did nothing to lower the level of tension in the room, Liz noted, trying not to look at her watch. In most cases, the owner of a collection is dead. Everyone in the room was accustomed to dealing with heirs, using tact, discretion, and tacit sympathy. The auction business, Liz reflected, is a profoundly people business, a service business that has to please everyone, sellers and buyers, yet an infernally delicate business because you can never forget that you’re coping with people who are in varying degrees of pain about selling their personal property, so often things they care about but can’t afford to keep.

However, the presence of one of the most radiant film stars in history sitting at their conference table changed everything. To all of them, even to her, Liz realized, Tessa Kent was the sum of many things, the unforgettable roles she’d played, the Oscars she’d won, the
sheer mythology of her Hollywood glamour, the cloak of inaccessibility she’d drawn around herself for twenty years, her position as Luke Blake’s widow, and, of course, her jewels, that incredible collection of jewels that was not, until the contract had been signed, theirs to sell. And it was impossible to keep your eyes off her beauty, which made them all look as if they belonged to another species.

“Miss Kent,” asked Juliet Tree, breaking the silence, “have you seen the Sotheby’s catalog of the Thurn und Taxis Collection belonging to Princess Gloria that’s being sold in Geneva in November?”

“I glanced at it the other day,” Tessa replied.

Just what had given the otherwise clever Juliet the idea of mentioning Sotheby’s at this particular moment? She must stop grinding her teeth, Liz told herself. The dentist had warned her about that. Let him go into the auction business, that fussy little man, he wouldn’t last a week.

“I guessed it would interest you,” Juliet continued, “since it’s a single-owner catalog, and those, you know, are exceedingly rare. Did you happen to notice the three-page genealogy of the House of Thurn und Taxis in the front?”

“How could I miss it?” Tessa answered. “All those princes and princesses, with an archduke or an infanta or a king thrown in now and then, related to half the aristocracy of Europe, and the whole thing based on running a better postal service. Just imagine what I might have accumulated if, like Princess Gloria, I’d married a man whose family had started transporting mail for the Holy Roman Empire five hundred years ago? But alas, my genealogy is shorter, simpler, and vastly more humble. There seemed to be an abundance of tiaras in the sale. I wonder how many people are in the market for tiaras? Of all the jewelry, I preferred the green beryl and diamond brooch in the form of the neck badge of the Order of the Golden Fleece … it was fantastic enough to have been designed by Verdura.”

Why was she chatting on and on like this? Tessa wondered, feeling her hands cold with sweat. She’d never been one to chat, especially with perfect strangers.