The Jewels of Tessa Kent (30 page)

“I’m not as convinced as you are.”

“All I can hope to be, Aaron, for a long, long time, is a woman who is using her work to survive. No one can ‘be a comfort’ to me. The only sort of comfort I can imagine is in making movies back to back, using the one part of me that I know still exists, still functions. I’m going to be on the move, and your job is to make sure of that. Maggie’s place is in school. Do you seriously
imagine I could drag a seventeen-year-old girl around from one location shoot to another,
for companionship?
You know how unfair that would be to her. Aaron, I’m ashamed of you for not understanding that! She’s helped me beyond measure, she was there when I needed her, but now it’s time for her to go back to her own life.”

“No reason her life can’t be with you,” Aaron persisted. “No reason why she can’t take a year off. Tessa, she’s the only family you have.”

“Aaron, no, no, and no,” Tessa said, cutting short the conversation. Now that the first numbness had worn off, she saw clearly what was right for Maggie. She was free now to tell Maggie the truth, to claim her daughter, to claim the only child she’d ever have, but that revelation would bind Maggie more strongly to what she imagined, so wrongly, so sweetly, was her mission of comfort. She felt a strong urge, Tessa admitted to herself, to allow herself to take Maggie’s youth and courage and lean on it, to possess, at last, a child of her own, to hold her close, to let Maggie be strong for her. To
cling
. But it was wrong, clearly wrong. She must wait to tell Maggie until she felt less needy, less vulnerable. She must wait until she had done the long work of mourning that remained to her, until she stopped being this stranger, this wounded, grieving, empty shadow of herself, with only a craft left to keep her going.

“I’m sending Maggie back home tomorrow,” Tessa said, summoning up all the resolution at her command. “I’ll call Madison and arrange it. She’s been away too long as it is.”

“I’ll tell her,” Aaron said sadly. “She’s going to feel she’s abandoning you.”

Tessa continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “Now you, Aaron, you have no more than a week to get me that job, and if nobody has what you consider to be a decent location script ready to cast, don’t worry, take anything, anything at all. I don’t care about quality. One week, Aaron, and I’ll be packed and ready to go up the
Amazon or anywhere else that’s far enough away. You know you can do it. Don’t bother to argue with me again, because I don’t care what anyone thinks, not even you, Aaron. If I don’t get going, soon, I’ll never work again. Luke … Luke wouldn’t have wanted me to let go of life, no matter what happened to him. Remember Aaron, remember how proud he was of me …?”

S
he wouldn’t have to stand it much longer, Madison Webster told herself, sitting at the desk in her bedroom, as she listened to Maggie clatter down the stairs, off to one of the countless events that marked the end of her last year in high school. That—that
peasant
—would be out of the house soon, although it could never be soon enough as far as she was concerned. She didn’t need to provide a home for Maggie any longer, not for another second, yet for the sake of appearances she obviously couldn’t throw her out until her graduation, Madison thought, as she bent over her accounts.

Her own private investments in the past thirteen years, solid and substantial as they had become in the amazing market of the 80s, remained intact. She’d had the instinct to sell everything and cash in several months before the stock market crash of 1987. However, her own impressive funds, built up through thousands of domestic economies, seemed minor compared to the twenty million dollars Luke had left Tyler in his will. Although the settlement of Luke’s complicated estate was not yet final, there was no question
that they were far richer than she had ever dreamed they’d be, yet she still hadn’t changed any of her frugal ways.

Aside from what Luke had left them, he’d arranged the affairs of his company in exceptionally good order, leaving ten million dollars each to his six top men, dependent on their pledging to remain in the employ of the company for the next ten years, and he’d passed on his position as chief to Len Jones, who had been his second-in-command for so long. He’d left seventy million dollars to various charities, and everything else, the bulk of his estate, had been left to Tessa, except for another twenty million he’d left Maggie, to be kept in a trust until she was thirty-five, with Tessa named as one trustee and his tax attorney the other.

If Luke had enough to leave a hundred seventy million dollars to others, Madison wondered, biting the inside of her lips, what must Tessa be worth? She couldn’t begin to imagine. Certainly, if she were Tessa, she’d never be able to bring herself to spend it, she told herself comfortingly and honestly. How odd and yes, how pleasant, how deeply reassuring it was to know that she’d become so accustomed to a certain way of life that she’d never want to make drastic changes no matter how much money she might have.

In fact, for some reason she didn’t explore, Madison felt more devout about protecting her secret funds than ever. That was real money. It made her feel richer than the twenty-million-dollar bequest, which, after all, had been left to her husband, not to her.

Well, she thought, old money had always been conservative. Her family hadn’t had true old money for two generations, although they’d had the wit to make it look as if they had it but were too secure to spend it. A great deal of well-polished, ugly old silver, heavy in the hand; unfashionable, darkly varnished mahogany; her great-grandmother’s worn oriental rugs; lots of dogs—she’d grown up surrounded by all that, and as long as her horse was decent and her riding gear well cared for, the
money had been assumed to be there, by her friends, the only people who mattered.

Ah, but there was one thing she promised herself to spend money on openhandedly, her private celebration when Luke’s estate was settled. She was going to redecorate Maggie’s rooms, erase every trace of her. Once that big, gaudy girl with her vulgarly large breasts was out of the house, once she’d been shipped off to college, the guest suite would become her own office from which she’d manage the estate, since Tyler had neither the ability for nor the interest in such practical matters. He could be trusted to buy a few promising stallions if their manager approved the prices, but Madison had her own ideas about making the stud farm profitable, plans she’d never been able to put into action in the past.

As for Maggie, clearly it was Luke’s intention that she now be in Tessa’s charge. Obviously he’d intended that Maggie make her home with Tessa, once she was of an age to go to college and no longer needed the steadiness of living in a family. Let Tessa cope with her sister for a change! Let Tessa try to get her to wear a bra!

Anyway, chances were Maggie would spend most of her holidays with classmates just as she’d encouraged Barney to do. That boy hadn’t been home for almost a year, what with a summer at a friend’s ranch in Nevada and Christmas and Thanksgiving in Boston and Philadelphia. He was such a popular boy that his disappointing marks didn’t matter. The main thing was that he was making exactly the kind of friends she’d hoped he’d make when they’d decided to send him to Andover, when he was twelve, more than five years earlier.

Tyler thought that the reason for Luke’s bequest was gratitude for their sacrifice in taking Maggie into their own family. He was probably right but, the good Lord knows, she’d more than earned it. In all justice, he should have left them more than he’d left Maggie. Tyler
was his stepbrother, Maggie merely his wife’s sister. But justice wasn’t Luke’s strong point, as it was hers. Wasn’t she planning to give that girl a combination eighteenth birthday and graduation party, which, considering that Luke would never know about her generosity, she could perfectly well have skipped?

Even though it was soon
going
to be too dark to ride, Maggie wandered down to the stables and perched on the post-and-rail fence surrounding the empty practice ring. It was almost twilight on this soft spring Friday evening, a week before graduation. All the horses had been turned out to the fields, the six stable hands had gone home to their own lives, and she had the place to herself. She was surprised to feel a piercing nostalgia as she gazed at the scene of so many childhood hours of fear and humiliation. Yet heaven knew, she didn’t feel anything but anticipation at the prospect of going away to college, leaving a home that had never been a true home under the cold care of shit-for-brains Tyler and snake-blood Madison, who had never once greeted her with a trace of warmth or even cared enough about her to criticize, so she’d know what she was doing wrong.

There was no question in her mind now that Madison truly disliked her and always had, for all these years. She had grown used to the hurt of it, grown to accept it. Only the physical buffers of Candice and Allison, both now married, had kept Madison from openly revealing her unexpressed, but unrelenting and most mysteriously unexplained, hostility, which seemed to have grown more open since Luke died.

No, her nostalgia was certainly not for her years in this house where she was, at best, tolerated, though unwanted; where Elizabeth, the cook, was the closest thing she had to a mother figure; where, after thirteen years, she still felt like an intrusive, unattractive, inferior
stranger, as if she were some kind of charity case they’d been forced to take in, although that didn’t make sense no matter how she tried to figure it out.

Her sense of loss was centered entirely on the time she’d spent with Barney, her faithful old protector, Barney who had forgotten her, disappearing into a world of grand new buddies and frantically social preppy vacations. She’d never had a chance to surprise him with how well she could ride. They hadn’t even had a chance for one of their private talks in years, because when Barney did come home, just long enough to get his shirts washed and pressed, he’d been too occupied with his parents and the impressively connected friends he brought with him, to do more than say a quick hello to her.

Damn Barney to hell, anyway! He was only seventeen and a half and she was about to be eighteen in a week, a grown woman feeling sorry for herself because she’d been ignored by a boy, a mere adolescent, who, unlike a female, wouldn’t really mature for years.

She was at the top of her class academically, Maggie told herself fiercely, she was popular with all the other girls, she was editor of the school paper and president of the debating team, she was highly computer literate, she’d been accepted by Smith and Vassar and the University of Michigan—and you’d better bet she was going to Michigan, where there were guaranteed to be men, genuine grown-up men, thick on the ground. Elm Country Day hadn’t any male presence except on the faculty. Once Maggie had made it clear that she wasn’t going to have a coming-out party, Madison hadn’t introduced her to any of her friends’ sons, not that she wanted to meet them, so her feeble experience of guys was limited to the geeky brothers of her classmates, not one of whom turned her on as much as her favorite horse.

Once she got to Michigan, after a decent week’s wait, she was going to head straight to the student health department and ask to be fitted for a diaphragm, so that
she’d be ready for whatever happened, Maggie promised herself. She didn’t want to go on the Pill, she’d read too many articles about contraception to start the Pill at eighteen, with at least thirty fertile years ahead of her, but a diaphragm was safe.

She knew she’d meet the right guy during freshman year. It was impossible for anyone as ripe, as eager for experience as she was, not to find a guy, and it didn’t matter if the guy was a mistake, as he was almost certain to be. She wanted to fall in and out of love as many times as was possible for a sane person. Four years of serial love affairs, Maggie promised herself with a wide smile, wasn’t that the underlying purpose of higher education? She’d have to keep her grades up enough to stay in college, but fundamentally she was going to major in passion.

And when she graduated she was going to go to New York City and get some kind of wonderful job and have another five years of love affairs before she even thought of getting married. Almost more than anything else, she wanted, needed, a family of her own, because it had been so hard to grow up without one, but when she did marry, Maggie thought ferociously, she wanted to stay home and really be with her kids, the way she could still remember her mother being with her, although the memories were dim and fragmented. She was almost sick with a wild ambition to do and feel everything! She wanted it all, everything!

She’d been stuck in boring, limited horse country for most of her life. If ever a woman needed to be liberated it was she. There was a vast, marvelous world out there that she was going to bite into and chew up, piece by delicious piece, Maggie promised herself. She was going to be a raving success, she knew it in her bones. She felt as determined, as sharp, as purposeful and powerful as a shining sword. She took a deep breath, reveling in her sense of all the exciting, unknown adventures that were going to happen to her. She was ready for the world and all its surprises, oh, more than ready!