Property of a Noblewoman (17 page)

He took a cab back to Chelsea, and when he got back to his apartment, he thought about Jane. He still wanted to see her, but didn’t know when. He didn’t want to be a pest since she had a boyfriend. He had no way of knowing that at that exact moment she was sitting in her friend Alex’s apartment, telling her what had happened with John. The whole thing seemed sordid and humiliating and she wanted to put it behind her. She was surprised that she wasn’t sad, just angry and relieved for now. Maybe disappointment and loneliness would come later, but not yet.

“Now you can go out with the guy from Christie’s,” Alex said after they brushed their teeth and climbed into bed. Jane’s bags were standing in the hall, still packed.

“Not yet,” Jane said, thoughtfully. “I need some time to sort this out and get over it.”

“Don’t wait too long,” Alex cautioned her and Jane laughed. “Good guys don’t stay on the market. They get snatched up fast.”

“I’m fine without a man,” she said as much to herself as her friend. She could do anything she wanted now. And the best part of it was that she was free. And she knew she had done the right thing, leaving John. It was the best decision she’d made in years and long overdue.

WHEN JANE WENT
to work on Monday morning, she noticed that Harriet looked exhausted and had circles under her eyes. She looked as though she’d had a rough weekend, and Jane cautiously inquired about her mother later that morning, and Harriet looked touched. As much as she had resented Jane in the beginning, and assumed she was a spoiled rich girl, she had come to discover what a kind person and hard worker she was, and was growing increasingly fond of her. She had discovered that she could count on her to go the extra mile at work, and realized that she would miss her when she left. There was a freshness and energy to her that their regular employees just didn’t have. She looked up at Jane with a bleak smile.

“My mom had a setback this weekend, her MS seems to be getting worse at a rapid rate. I don’t know if I’ll be able to bring her home, and it’ll kill her if I have to put her in a nursing home.” Worse, Harriet had come to understand how dependent she was herself on having her mother there, and having someone to take care of. They had always been very close, and the prospect of coming home to an empty apartment, living alone, and visiting her in the nursing home in the coming years depressed Harriet profoundly, and Jane could see it in her eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” Jane said softly, and meant it. Her own troubles and upsets seemed insignificant compared to Harriet’s, and she felt foolish for being disappointed in John. A broken romance didn’t compare to a slowly deteriorating mother, whom Harriet obviously loved.

“You look a little rocky too,” Harriet commented, having noticed Jane looking less put together than usual. She hadn’t unpacked at Alex’s, and had come to work in jeans, which was rare for her.

“My boyfriend and I broke up this weekend, I moved out,” she admitted, feeling sheepish about it, as though somehow it were indicative of a failure on her part for not realizing what a loser he was while he cheated on her and set up his business plan with Cara, financed by her dad. It made her feel stupid as much as hurt. And she’d had the same feeling when she told her mother about it the night before, who had told her she should have figured it out sooner, and she had always known the relationship wouldn’t go anywhere. Jane’s mother thought all relationships should lead to marriage, and told Jane that this was what she could expect if she was avoiding long-term commitment, living with men, and focusing only on her career. So she wound up with John, who only cared about his career too. But despite what her mother said, Jane didn’t feel ready for marriage, and wasn’t going to be shamed or rushed into it. And Alex was right. He was the wrong guy for her. It had taken him three years to show his true colors, but now she knew.

“Are you heartbroken?” Harriet asked her gently, with a sympathetic expression Jane had never seen before, and she slowly shook her head.

“Not really. Disappointed. And I feel kind of stupid. Sometimes my mother is the master of ‘I told you so.’ I guess she was right.”

“Then he wasn’t the right guy.”

“No, he wasn’t,” Jane agreed, and it was hard to admit. It was a rare exchange between them, and she could see that Harriet felt sorry for her.

“I have a project for you.” Harriet changed the subject then, as a relief for both of them. “I thought about it this weekend, I just want to make sure we’ve been completely thorough in the Pignelli case. I know we didn’t find a will among her documents, but I was thinking about the letters. The ones in Italian appear to have been written by someone else, but the ones in English may have been written by her. I’d like you to copy them, and read through them, just to make sure we haven’t missed something, the name of a relative or an heir, a letter of intent to leave the jewelry to someone, even a friend. Sometimes things turn up in old correspondence like that. Will you give them a quick read just to be sure we checked everything?” Jane was surprised at the request and hadn’t thought of it herself. She nodded agreement, and Harriet gave her a permission slip to get the letters out of the vault where the documents were being kept.

“I think that’s a really good idea,” Jane said enthusiastically. For all of Harriet’s appearances of being bored by her job, she was good at what she did, and conscientious about it.

“There’s probably nothing in them, but you never know. Stranger things have happened.”

Jane went straight from Harriet’s office to the vault for documents being stored, handed the slip to the woman in charge, and was given the bundle of letters a few minutes later. She went to the copy machine, and made copies of all of them, and then returned the original letters to the vault. It was a thick stack of letters, written in a small, old-fashioned handwriting, and she took the copies back to her desk, poured herself a cup of coffee at the office machine, and settled down to begin reading. She flipped through them before she started, to see who they were addressed to, and saw that all of the salutations were similar and began with “My Beloved Angel,” “My Darling Girl,” or “My Darling Child.” There was no name at the beginning of any of the letters. And when she checked the signature at the end, in most cases they were signed with the initial “M,” and only a few were signed “your loving mother.” It was impossible to say, before she read them, if they were written by Marguerite, or to her by her mother. And they had few examples of Marguerite’s handwriting to compare them to. But instinctively Jane had the feeling that they were written by her. Not all of them had dates, but most did, and the first one was dated September 30, 1942, and beneath the date, the author of the letters had written “London.” The first letter was addressed to “My Beloved Angel.”

“I still can’t believe that I have left you. Unthinkable, unbearable, the most agonizing of all possible events. A tragedy for me. They took you from me, and now I am here, in London, living at a small hotel. I need to find an apartment. But where will I live? How will I live without you? How could this happen? How could they do it? I don’t know if I will send you these letters one day, but if so, I must let you know how much I love you and miss you, and tell you of the agonizing hole in my heart that happened the day I left you.

“I have met a very nice man, who has been so kind to me. He is here by special permission, on a diplomatic passport from Italy, and will only be here for a few weeks, and then he will return to Naples, where he lives. I met him the day after I arrived, when I tripped and fell in the street and he picked me up and dusted me off and then insisted on taking me to dinner at a very nice restaurant. He acted like a father to me, and I told him about you. I think only of you now, and wonder what you are doing, how you look, if you are healthy, and if they are being good to you. I know that Fiona will be loving to you, even if my parents are not. Please know that if they had let me stay with you, I would have. They gave me no choice.” The letter went on to describe what she had done with the Italian man – dinners, lunches, a drive to visit a friend at a manor house outside London. She wrote constantly about how kind he was to her. They had gone to the library, and in the next letter, he had found her a better place to stay and bought her a warm coat. There was something very young and innocent about the letters, as Jane read them, one after the other. Sometimes the dates were very close together, sometimes there was a gap of weeks or even a few months.

At the end of October, she said the kind man was going back to Italy and had invited her to go with him. She also said that he had asked for her hand in marriage, and she had accepted, and they were to be married shortly as soon as it was arranged. Jane couldn’t tell from what she’d written, somewhat demurely, if she was truly in love with him, or clinging to her only friend and protector in London. There was a war on, American and British soldiers were everywhere in London, and she was totally alone. She had mentioned in the first letter that her parents had given her money to live on, so she was not without means, at least for some time, but she had been set adrift in an unfamiliar world, with no contacts, friends, family, or protection at eighteen, and the Italian man she referred to was kind and loving, and she felt safe with him. She said that they would be married before they left for Italy, and he was taking care of everything. He was traveling on a diplomatic passport, and they would live in Naples when they went back to his home.

She wrote again after the fact, spoke in somewhat vague terms about the Germans in Italy, and that her new husband had been able, with high connections, to obtain an Italian passport for her, since they were married, which she had to use now, instead of her American one, since Italy and America were at war. She mentioned traveling through Switzerland on a diplomatic train to Rome, and then to Naples. “So now I am Italian and a countess,” she said almost playfully in another letter that had begun with “My Darling Angel.” She said that she was happy with her new husband, who was wonderful to her. She mentioned their supplies being rationed, how much she loved his home, and that the German
Oberführer
for the area came to visit them from time to time, and her husband felt it was wisest for them to be polite and entertain him, although they didn’t agree with his point of view or his politics.

In July of the following year, the Allies were bombing Rome, and she wrote how frightening that must have been for the residents of the city. And Umberto wouldn’t take her to Rome anymore. A week later, in the same letter, which she continued on a different day, she spoke of the Italian government falling, and of their surrender to the Allies in September, the Germans occupying Rome again three days later. And in October, the Allies entered Naples, and the Italians joined the Allied Forces. And they had entertained the American commanding officer in their home. She said that he had been surprised to discover that the countess was an American. She mentioned various events of the war, and bombings that continued into the following year, which was 1944. She had been in Europe and married for almost two years by then.

As she continued to read, it was clear to Jane that the letters had in fact been written by Marguerite. And through each letter was woven the thread of how much she loved her husband, and she spoke of how much she loved and missed her “darling angel.” The count had promised her that after the war, they would go to New York and reclaim her. She seemed to believe it was a certainty that that would happen, and she could not wait until that day.

There was a heartbreaking letter several years after that, written in 1949, which made it clear that they had gone to New York, consulted a lawyer, and attempted to reclaim the child – and had been fiercely rebuffed and attacked by Marguerite’s parents. The birth certificate they had manipulated falsely for her child in 1942 when she was born would have proved difficult to discredit. They had threatened to claim that Marguerite and Umberto were Nazi sympathizers, which would not have gone well in court. And in another heart-wrenching letter, Marguerite lamented not even being able to see her when they were in New York. The lawyer they had consulted had advised them that they had no hope of reclaiming the child, or even seeing her, and suggested they contact her directly when she reached eighteen. There was nothing more he or anyone could do. Marguerite’s parents had blocked them at every turn. They had told her that everyone thought she was dead and they wanted it to stay that way. They had buried her alive and kept her child from her.

And a letter farther down the stack, written in the summer of 1960, indicated that Marguerite had tried to follow the attorney’s advice, or intended to. She had gone to New York to see her daughter and tell her the real story of her birth, and who her mother really was. Marguerite had followed her on the street unseen, for several days, bowled over by how beautiful she was, and how happy she looked. And she realized with an aching, broken heart that to tell her the truth would rob her of the only identity she knew, and the legitimacy she believed was hers, and would have replaced it with scandal, shame, and confusion. All Marguerite had to offer her was illegitimacy and disgrace. And in the end, Marguerite had gone back to Italy without contacting her, or making herself known to her daughter. It felt wrong to her to shatter the peaceful, secure world she lived in, the respectable identity she believed was hers, and force herself on her, a mother she never knew was her own. The letters Marguerite had written after that were deeply depressed, for a long time. She had lived for the opportunity to see her daughter, and make contact with her, waiting patiently to do so for many years, when she turned eighteen, only to realize that what would have been a joy for her might be a shocking tragedy to her daughter.

Five years later she wrote of her husband’s sudden death of a heart attack while he played racquetball, which left Marguerite alone in the world again, without the pillar of comfort and protection she had relied on for twenty-three years since she was a young girl herself. She had explained again and again over the years that having another child would have seemed like a betrayal to her, having been forced to relinquish her first one. She always said that Umberto wanted children, and had none of his own, but Marguerite felt she couldn’t do it. It was unthinkable to have another child while she still mourned her firstborn. And at forty-one, she found herself without child or husband.