The Rich Shall Inherit (26 page)

“I had the devil’s own job finding you, me girl,” he said cheerfully as she clung to him, trembling.

It happened again in New York and again in Boston, and Poppy began to dread the moment Jeb walked out the door for fear he would never come back. She began to accept that every few weeks she would end up in a different children’s home, submitting to its disciplines and privations either in silence or with screaming rage, counting the days and nights until Papa found her again. But he never once offered an explanation as to why he hadn’t returned to the hotel, or told her where he’d been and what he’d been doing that was so important he couldn’t come and get “Papa’s girl.”

Things suddenly began to get better. It was summer and they were back in Philadephia, staying at a grand hotel. Jeb was wearing smart new clothes and he took Poppy to a store where she chose two new dresses and a bright blue overcoat and the prettiest little dark blue boots with scarlet laces. Later, she bathed luxuriously in the huge white cast-iron bathtub with the lion’s-paw feet, drying herself afterward on enormous soft white towels, and sitting happily while Papa brushed out her long red hair until it dried in fluffy waves and curls.

When Papa went to the hotel barbershop, she sat at his feet, wincing as she watched the barber apply steaming hot towels that surely must have hurt. She watched fascinated as the man drew his long, gleaming razor across Papa’s face leaving it smooth and pink, and she tried the aromatic gentlemen’s elixir on her own neck, patting it in the way the barber did and sniffing its bosky sandlewood smell delightedly.

Then Papa surprised her by telling her it was her seventh birthday and he planned to take her to dinner in a grand restaurant. Poppy felt very important and grown up and pretty in her new blue silk dress with the French
point d’alençon
lace collar. All the waiters made a fuss of her and Papa said she might choose whatever she wanted to eat. Then they brought out a little cake just for her with seven candles and her name—
POPPY
—written in
blue on the white frosting. She thought a little sadly that if all Papa’s friends had been here, it would have been almost like old times on Russian Hill.

She was very sleepy when Jeb tucked her in that night. “That’s my grown-up girl,” he said grinning jauntily as she sank back on her pillows, tired and happy. “Here you go,” he said, tucking her old rag doll inside the blanket and giving her a big hug and a kiss. Her eyes were already closing as he stole to the door.
“Be right back,”
he called, blowing her a kiss.

It was three days before the hotel staff realized that Poppy was alone. The manager was very kind to her; he put her in a small room of her own and saw that she was fed and looked after for another week before he understood that Jeb wasn’t coming back. And then he called the city welfare officer.

Poppy didn’t cry this time, she just huddled silently in the carriage waiting to be taken to her next place of incarceration. She wasn’t angry with Papa anymore, she was just bewildered and frightened, and very, very lonely.

At the home she did as she was told, submitting to their rules without question. She kept her eyes on the floor, never looking at the other children or the matron and her assistants. She just counted off the days in French, the only language she’d ever learned her numbers in, and waited for Jeb to come and get her.

The weeks dragged by until Poppy could count no higher and the days became a gray oblivion of institution smells and cold greasy food and numbing lessons in reading, writing, and arithmetic that just made her head ache. Then one morning she stared around the large cold classroom and realized that this time Papa was not going to come and get her, she was going to be here forever. Pushing back her chair, she sent it crashing violently to the floor as she ran screaming from the room.

Matron O’Dwyer was a kindhearted woman who had come into the business of looking after children with the knowledge that her own spinsterhood was permanent, and therefore she would never have little ones of her own. She was a dedicated woman who had fought long, hard battles with the authorities for more and better facilities for her young charges, and she cared deeply that they were ciphers in the institutional chain. When Poppy, red-faced and shaking, was hauled before her by an irate teacher, she told her to sit down and catch her breath and then tell her what was the matter.

“I don’t want to stay here!” blurted Poppy, eyeing her angrily.

“Poor child,” Matron said gently, “no one wants to stay here. But it is the only refuge orphans and abandoned children have. It’s a place for the homeless, my dear.”

“But I’m not
homeless!”
cried Poppy urgently. “I live in the Mallory House on my papa’s ranch in Santa Barbara. It’s called the Rancho Santa Vittoria. My papa is probably there now ….”

Matron peered skeptically from behind small gold-rimmed spectacles, but the child’s face shone with truth. “That must have been a long time ago, Poppy,” she decided, “and I’m afraid we are a long way from California.”

Poppy’s brow furrowed in despair as she thought about her papa, trying to place him in her mind at the Mallory House, but somehow the picture didn’t fit. Matron was right. She remembered wistfully the happy scene she had observed secretly that day so long ago and her meeting with Nik Konstant in the candy store, and her face lit with sudden hope. “Nik Konstant will know where Papa is,” she said eagerly, “he’s my friend.
He
will know I’m not a homeless child. Please, oh,
please
, can’t you just ask him? Can’t you tell him where I am?” She had no idea if Nik would help, but he was her only contact with reality and her father, and the image of his strength and stability shone like a beacon of hope in her mind.

“We’ll see, my dear,” Matron said gently, as she handed her back to the waiting teacher, “we’ll see.”

But Poppy had lived long enough with those words to know that they meant exactly nothing.

Matron O’Dwyer couldn’t sleep that night; somehow the image of the child’s white face and passionate, blazing blue eyes kept appearing in her mind and she could hear Poppy saying over and over again,
I’m not homeless, Nik Konstant is my friend.

The following morning she went to the rarely used telephone in her office and cranking it, asked them to put her through to the Santa Barbara exchange. After a long wait she was put through from there to the Konstant House and she found herself speaking to a charming woman who said she was Rosalia Konstant.

A week later Poppy was told to wash her hands and face and to brush and braid her hair neatly, and then to be downstairs at Matron’s room at twelve o’clock. Wondering what she had done
wrong this time, she knocked on Matron’s door precisely on the hour.

A look of wonder crossed her face and she stared at Nik and Rosalia as though they were gods who had come down from Mount Olympus to find her.

“It’s all right, Poppy,” said Nik quietly. “We’re taking you home with us. You’ll never come back here.”

Poppy’s face crumpled and she thrust her fists into her eyes fiercely, trying to stop the tears from coming. But her tears were not for relief at being saved from the children’s home, and not for joy that her dream was finally to come true and she was to live with the Konstants. She was crying because she was no longer
Papa’s girl.
Her childhood had been sacrificed to his whim and the turn of a card. And she never wanted to see him again.

1897, CALIFORNIA

Lying in bed on the morning of her seventeenth birthday, Poppy thought that the past ten years had been the most idyllic childhood anyone could ever have, and she was loath to leave it behind and grow up. Seventeen was awfully old! She glanced at Angel, still fast asleep in the other bed. The morning sun, beaming in through the open windows, caught her bright hair, turning it to pale spun gold. Her fair skin was flushed from sleep and Poppy thought with a sigh that she looked as though she’d just taken a long walk in the fresh air, whereas with her own pale skin she probably looked as though she’d slept under a stone like a frog! Of course, everyone acknowledged that Angel was a beauty, but even so, Poppy had never been jealous of her. They had been friends from the moment they met.

When she had left the children’s home with Nik and Rosalia, Poppy had made a decision: From now on there would be no more tears—ever. She was going to stand up for herself and fight! She’d glared belligerently at Angel, the girl whose place she had dreamed of taking for so long, daring her to hate her, and Angel had stared back at her with those wonderful clear, astonished eyes. Poppy had felt herself blush because even though Rosalia had bought her new clothes, she was painfully thin and still had that pinched, beaten look of an orphanage child.

“My goodness,” Angel had said, amazed, “you look exactly like a stick insect with red hair!” And she’d giggled, a low infectious chuckle that was impossible to resist, and Poppy had laughed too—for the first time in as long as she could remember. Then Angel had rushed forward and hugged her. “I’ve been
waiting and waiting all week for you to come,” she cried. “I just know we’re going to be best friends.”

Poppy had fallen in love with Angel right away. She’d wished her hair could be a smooth moonlit blond like Angel’s instead of her stupid fiery fizz of tangled curls; she’d wished her eyes could be the same confident pale blue like a crystalline pond whose depths held a magic secret; she’d wished her complexion was pink and white instead of pale and freckled; and she’d wished she could be petite and delicately boned like Angel, instead of tall and gangling.

She had begun to talk with Angel’s slight lisp, she’d tilted her chin in the same way when she laughed, and crinkled her nose when she didn’t like something. She’d even tried to curb her own long, eager stride to Angel’s graceful stroll, until finally Rosalia had taken her aside and explained that no two people were alike. She knew she admired Angel, but Angel was one person and Poppy was another. “And we love you because you are you,” she’d added, smiling.

Of course, Poppy had realized how foolish she’d been, but it hadn’t stopped her longing to be Angel Konstant instead of Poppy Mallory.

When they were eight years old, Nik had decided they were running too wild at the ranch and instead of their galloping off on their ponies to avoid the governess, they were sent to school in Santa Barbara, where the Konstants had built a lovely white clapboard house with bay windows and tall Victorian gables on De La Vina Street. There was a tennis lawn and a croquet lawn, and wonderful gardens with an orchard and trailing arbors of clematis and roses. There were stables for their new horses and a huge log store to fuel the enormous kitchen stoves and fireplaces; there was a white picket fence at the front; and there was school.

Angel thought it all great fun and slid into her new life with her usual ease, but Poppy loathed it. She hated having to be at school every morning when she would have much preferred to ride her horse, and she was suspicious of the camaraderie of the other girls. She found it easier to make friends with boys and soon learned from them to throw a mean punch, and then nobody teased about her red hair anymore because they knew her quick temper and the power of that small balled-up fist.

Angel was one of the most popular girls in Santa Barbara and even though everyone remembered that Poppy Mallory’s father
was “a bad lot” and knew the Konstants had taken her in, no one ever spoke of it.

The only time Poppy knew she was better than Angel was on a horse. Angel rode well for a girl, but Poppy rode like a man. She looked so lazily confident in the saddle that it wasn’t until you watched her helping Nik and Greg on the cattle roundup that you became aware of her superb horsemanship. Wearing an old white shirt of Greg’s and a black buckskin riding skirt with fringed chaps to protect her legs from the brush, she’d spur her bay mare up the steep sides of the mesa chasing after a steer, then plunge precipitously back down again to guide it into the herd of bellowing cattle already waiting below. With her black sombrero tilted insolently over her eyes, she’d sit quietly on her horse waiting with the vaqueros while the buyer pointed out his choice for the stockyards. Then, rearing her horse on its haunches, she’d be there as quick as any of the professional vaqueros, herding it through the sweating, angry animals to a holding point along the riverbank.

“You should have been a boy,” Greg Konstant used to tease her, “in fact you’d even look like one if we cut off all that awful curly red hair!” And he’d tug the ribbon that held it back, sending her hair tumbling around her shoulders so that the wind tangled it and sent it flying into her eyes.

Greg had square white teeth and brown eyes that crinkled at the corners as he smiled and he was one of the handsomest young men in Santa Barbara. Poppy felt very proud that he was her brother—or almost her brother.

Occasionally, the dark memories would come back to haunt her and she would wonder where her father was. She would dream that she was “Papa’s girl,” again, and she’d remember as clearly as if it were yesterday the look in the hotel manager’s eyes as he told her that her father wasn’t coming back and that he had sent for the city welfare officer … it had been a mixture of sympathy and contempt, and humiliation crept anew down Poppy’s spine. Waking cold and clammy from her nightmare, she’d rush down to the stables and saddle the beautiful Arabian mare she had been given for her fourteenth birthday. Then she’d gallop across the hill, trying to rid herself of the fear that one day Papa would come back and take her away again.

Ignoring the lane, she’d take a now familiar shortcut, slowing as she crested the hill that overlooked the Mallory House. Nik
had told her long ago the story of the visit by the boastful, swaggering cowboy from Montecito who had claimed to be his new partner. Jeb had gambled away everything—and he had also put Nik and the Rancho Santa Vittoria in jeoparady. Nik had been forced to mortgage everything he owned to buy back what her father had so casually thrown away. It was the land that should have been Poppy’s inheritance.