The Rich Shall Inherit (66 page)

1907, ITALY

Poppy leaned back against the comfortable blue velvet cushions as the train rumbled onward from Genoa to Naples. She was staring out of the window at the passing scenery, but she was thinking of Franco. It was two months since their romantic idyll at Montespan. And she was two months pregnant.

All her telephone calls had been answered by a cold, efficient-sounding man who had told her that Franco was not there, but he would tell him she had called. Netta had come to her immediately she’d read the news in the papers, and she’d watched in despair as Poppy hovered near the telephone, waiting for the call that never came.
“You
don’t need a man like Franco Malvasi,” she’d cried angrily. “I warned you from the beginning, Poppy, but you were like the ostrich burying its head in the sand; you didn’t want to hear the truth.”

“Franco told me the truth!”
she’d retorted, her eyes flashing with anger. “It wasn’t
Franco
who did this. He warned me not to believe the reports; he asked for my trust.”

“And of course you gave it to him.
You
always do,” Netta said bitterly. “And where has all this
faith
got you? You’re pregnant and there’s no sign of Prince Charming.”

Poppy had slumped into a chair, sobbing. “I don’t know, Netta,” she’d wailed. “I don’t know where he is.”

When she could bear it no longer, Poppy told her she was going to Naples to see Franco. Netta stared at her, horrified, and then she ran to fetch Simone.

“It would be very foolish to go to Naples, Poppy,” Simone had said worriedly. “Forget about him; it’s better just to keep your illusions and stay here.”

“What do you mean, ‘keep my illusions’?” she’d demanded.
“You
all act as though he’s evil. And yet he’s never been anything but your friend.”

“You
don’t know anything about his world,” Simone told her. “You have no idea of what it’s like, Poppy. I’m
begging
you not to go.” But she’d known by the expression in Poppy’s eyes that her mind was made up.

It had been a long journey and even though she had stayed overnight in Nice, Poppy hadn’t slept. She stood amid the whirl of activity in the railway station at Naples, waiting for her baggage and letting the familiar sights and sounds of Italy rekindle her old memories. Even the raucous cries of the porters and the fruit peddlers, and the emotional chatter of farewells and reunions, couldn’t destroy the beauty of the Italian language. She stared at the black-shawled women clutching precious dark-eyed babies in their arms, and she wondered whether her child would have Franco’s dark eyes.

Telling the porter to get her a cab to take her to the Villa Carmela, she followed him through the milling throng. She waited while he told the driver the address, but the cabbie just threw his hands in the air, shouting in a torrent of Italian that she couldn’t understand. “What is he saying?” Poppy called, bewildered. “Doesn’t he know where it is?”

“Oh, he knows, Signora,” replied the porter, “but he says he is too busy.”

She watched, surprised, as the driver slammed the door of his cab and stalked off to the bar on the opposite side of the street. The next driver listened to the address, then simply shrugged his shoulders and went back to reading his newspaper. The third refused outright to go to the Villa Carmela, glaring at Poppy with a mixture of contempt and fear, and she shrank back against the wall as the porter went down the line of cabs, without any luck.

Tilting her chin angrily, Poppy climbed into a cab. “Take me to the best hotel in town,” she commanded haughtily.

Her suite was palatial in the usual red velvet, gilt, and mirrored provincial style, but all she saw was the black telephone waiting on a little inlaid table. At the other end of the phone would be Franco … he was here, maybe only five, ten minutes away … Her voice trembled as she asked to be put through to his number.

Franco glanced up from his desk as Alfredo, his secretary, answered the phone. “I’m sorry, Signora, he is not here,” he was
saying softly so as not to disturb him. “I will see that he gets your message. Yes, Signora. Here in Napoli.
Yes
, yes … Thank you, Signora.”

Franco leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He knew it was Poppy calling again, and he didn’t know what to do. He had thought not going back would be the kindest way of ending things. Easier on her, and easier on him. Because he loved her as much as any man had ever loved a woman.
To
see her sweet face again, to feel her kisses, to lie with her in their big loving bed in Montespan, would only weaken his resolve. It would only make him believe that he wasn’t the person he knew he was. And that belief had almost been his ruin. He couldn’t afford such a mistake again.

“What did she say this time, Alfredo?” he asked wearily.

“The Signora is here in Naples. She is at the Grand Hotel. No cabdriver would bring her here.”

Franco’s face was impassive; he couldn’t afford to betray his emotions again in front of any man, but the frown between his brows deepened and a small pulse ticked nervously in his cheek.

“Thank you, Alfredo,” he replied, turning his attention back to the papers on his desk. But his mind was full of Poppy … she was here … he could go and fetch her right now. In fifteen minutes she could be in his arms. He would bring her to the villa, beg her to stay, ask her to marry him. They could live here, surely they needed no one else, no friends, no dinner parties, no visits to the opera. All they needed was each other.

Pushing back his chair, he paced to the window. Already his firm resolutions were dissolving. He had no right to act like a lovesick fool; she didn’t belong in his world and he must set her free. He knew of only one way to do it.

“Alfredo, you will call every florist in Naples, even in Rome … wherever you have to … and order them to send every available gardenia to the Signora’s suite at the Grand. Then you will telephone and tell her that a car will call for her at nine this evening. I want you to send three bodyguards with the chauffeur.” He thought for a moment. “Ruggiere, Fabiano, and the Dottore.” He had deliberately chosen the Dottore because he was the most frightening man he knew—a failed surgeon whose specialty was the knife, and whose only desire was to use it.

Poppy shrank against the chill black leather upholstery of the Mercedes limousine as it moved through the outer suburbs of Naples and climbed upward into the hills. The chauffeur knew the road well
and blared his horn warningly at the peasants in their haycarts. They turned to stare, crossing themselves as the big car went past. She had no idea where she was going and she stole a look at the men on either side of her. They had the low foreheads and brutish, bovine eyes that came from generations of peasant inbreeding, and they were crouched forward in their seats, staring intently at the road ahead, with small machine guns clutched in their hands.

The third bodyguard, sitting next to the chauffeur, had been waiting for her in the foyer of the Grand. He was tall and well dressed, and his skeletal head was almost bald. His eyes were an indeterminate color behind thin, gold-rimmed glasses, and a fine scar ran from his right eye to the corner of his thin-lipped mouth, puckering it into a permanent sinister smile. “I am Emilio Sartori,” he’d told her, “usually known as the Dottore—because of my medical training. I had plans to be a surgeon, you see, before my interests became … diverted.”

The big car slowed down, stopping in front of tall iron gates set in a massive stone wall. Moonlight glinted on the shards of glass and the iron spikes, and on the guns pointing at her as half a dozen men surrounded the car.

“It’s all right,” the Dottore called to them, “it’s the lady he’s expecting.”

They peered warily into the car and Poppy closed her eyes, wondering if she had been captured by Franco’s enemies, waiting for the bullet that she felt sure was coming. But the big gates swung open and the car moved forward again, crunching up the winding gravel drive and stopping finally in front of an impressive Palladian portico. Four more men with machine guns watched her as she walked up the steps beside the Dottore, and Poppy stumbled in panic. Averting her eyes from their curious stares, she told herself none of this mattered, not their guns, nor their cruel faces and their frightening, implacable stares … nothing mattered except that in a few moments she would be with Franco.

“Wait in here please, Signora,” the Dottore told her. “The Signore will be with you as soon as possible. He is in a meeting.”

The lofty, pillared room into which he showed her was formal and classical, and in perfect taste. The walls were painted a cool almond-green and the elaborate cornices picked out in white and palest terra-cotta. The beautiful marble columns by the double doors were from ancient Rome and no attempt had been made to restore their crumbled beauty. Poppy wandered nervously around, admiring the important pictures, touching the little silver boxes inscribed
with the crest of Charles I, the exquisite Paul Storr candelabra, the Fabergé eggs, the Caffieri clock. She hadn’t realized before how very rich Franco must be; his home was like a beautiful museum stocked with priceless objects. She thought of their little farm at Montespan, and its simple country furniture, its stone-flagged hallways and tilting beams and the great bunches of flowers picked from the meadow and stuffed into a copper milk churn. The houses belonged to two different people. Suddenly she was afraid. It wasn’t the same kind of physical fear she had felt in the limousine when she had thought for a moment she might die; it was less simple.

“I didn’t expect to see you here, Poppy. In my home.”

She swung around to face him, her hand on the pearls at her throat. Franco was standing by the door, unsmiling. He looked thinner, gaunter, and the lines on his face were etched even deeper—but it was Franco at last. She felt weak with love for him. “I … I was just admiring your collection,” she stammered, resting her hand on the porcelain statuette of a little dog.

“The statue is of Marie Antoinette’s chihuahua dog, Papillon,” he said, walking toward her. “She ordered it from Sevres in 1790. It was found in her dressing room at Versailles … afterward.”

Poppy shivered as she remembered Simone’s prophetic words when she had first told her about their life at the farm at Montespan.
Marie Antoinette played milkmaid too
, she’d said.
And look what happened to her.
Poppy wondered wildly if the little dog had had its head cut off too.

She waited for Franco to put his arms around her, to kiss her, to tell her he was happy to see her at last. “I never intended you to come here, Poppy,” he said, pouring champagne into two brittle and beautiful Lalique glasses. “But since you are here, we must celebrate.”

“Franco, I had to see you. I needed you!”
she cried desperately.

“I’m afraid I cannot always be available when you
need
me,” he said, offering her the glass.

Their hands touched and a flicker of longing sparked in his eyes.
“You
heard what happened?”

She nodded. “I read it, and there was talk …”

“Well?” he asked harshly. “And what do you think?”

“You
asked me to trust you,” she said simply.

He nodded, looking at her. “Faith is such a rare commodity,” he said sardonically.

There was a knock at the door and the Dottore entered. “Dinner
is served, Signore,” he said in the smooth, high-pitched silken voice that sent chills down Poppy’s spine.

The dining room was as big as the salon, maybe forty feet long by thirty wide, with a narrow oaken refectory table running down the center. “The table came from a thirteenth-century monastery,” Franco told her, as though he were a museum curator. “It pleases me to think of those old monks sipping their simple broth where we now dine so sumptuously. Every piece in the house has a story; the library table over there belonged to Cardinal Richelieu, the vases were a Chinese emperor’s of the Third Dynasty, this very silverware once graced the table of Queen Anne of England. I suppose I have this passion for pieces of other people’s lives because I have no real life of my own. The four walls, you see, are my boundaries. The gardens—a mere ten acres—are my country. I am ‘king’ of this small empire, Poppy, though now it spreads across continents. But what you are seeing is my entire personal world. One third of this prison I inherited, and one third I created, but the bars of the final third have been placed around it by men who betrayed me.”

A white-gloved footman placed small crystal dishes of caviar in front of them and the tiny silver spoons tinkled against the glass.

“I’m glad you came here,” Franco said, spooning the glistening black grains onto a small triangle of toast, “because now you can see for yourself what it is like. Do try the caviar; it’s beluga, my favorite.”

“I never knew you even liked it,” Poppy blurted.

He smiled, nodding his head. “The man who fished for trout in the Montespan brook and enjoyed drinking milk warm from the cow no longer exists, Poppy. But there are compensations; a man in prison is allowed the best food that he can afford. So tonight we are having the best—the champagne, the caviar, the veal with white truffles, the wines from the beat chateaux. What more can a man ask?”

Anger flared in Poppy’s eyes as she swept the crystal dish, the Lalique glasses, and the Queen Anne silver to the floor. “What game are you playing, Franco?” she hissed. “What is going on? I’m here because you didn’t come to me. I waited. I was frightened for you, I cared about you. I
love you, Franco!”

Her face was pale and her blue eyes glittered in the candlelight as she reached up, tearing the combs and pins from her hair. “Look at me,” she commanded as it tumbled around her shoulders in a glossy rippling mass. She ripped the earrings from her ears, the pearls from her throat, the rings from her fingers. Tearing open her red chiffon
dress, she let it slide to her feet. She had deliberately worn nothing underneath because she had known he would take her straight in his arms and make love to her, and now she stood naked in front of him.
“This is who I am!”
she cried.
“This
is how I was for you at Montespan.
This
was the woman in your arms, the woman you said you loved.
You
are talking to me about caviar and Cardinal Richelieu’s tables, when all I want you to say is that you love me, that you are glad to see me.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I want you to tell me that nothing matters in the whole world … except us.”