The Rich Shall Inherit (14 page)

But after he met Francesco, Paolo forgot all about his work, all he could think about was her, and he stayed in Paris just to be near her. Francesca had assessed her position and decided that though he was not the international billionaire she’d hoped to catch, at least Paolo offered her comfortable family wealth and a noble name, and she would be the châtelaine of three great houses, and she’d agreed to marry him.

There was a sumptuous reception at the Palazzo Rinardi; the bride’s ivory satin dress was courtesy of Balmain, and her family were not invited.
But Anthony Carraldo was there.

Immediately after the honeymoon Paolo buried himself again in the library of the Villa d’Oro; all he wanted was a quiet life in the country with his new wife. Carraldo was the only person permitted to interrupt his thoughts.

He would drop by out of the blue, and after a dinner passed in chilly silence from Francesca, the two would retreat to the library and stay there until dawn. She would pace her bedroom floor furiously, wondering what they were talking about, and sometimes she’d creep downstairs and put her ear to the door, trying to catch what they were saying, but all she heard was the low murmur of voices. The next morning the bottle of brandy would be finished and she’d find pages of scribbed notes on Paolo’s desk.

“What were you two doing all night?” she’d demand icily.

“Carraldo’s come up with some great suggestions for my chapter on Verlaine,” he’d say enthusiastically. “I told him it’s he who should be writing this book! The man is so talented, Francesca, there’s
nothing
he doesn’t know.”

In Francesca’s opinion Antony Carraldo knew too much. He always looked as though his dark eyes could see right through
her. Besides, she thought, there was something strangely sinister about the man. Whenever his black Mercedes crunched up the driveway and she watched Paolo rush out to greet him, she would remember the gossip; and when he took her hand in his cold one and kissed it, a shudder would run down her spine.

It wasn’t long before she realized that the Rinardi family fortunes were on the wane. Paolo was totally impractical and he’d allowed the family money to languish in unprofitable investments. When she’d asked him about it, he’d shrugged and said the lawyers looked after all that, then he just buried his head in his book again while the villa and the palazzo gradually crumbled around them.

Francesca was wondering whether it would be easier to get an annulment or a divorce and how she might fare on the international marriage market as the beautiful Baronessa Rinardi, when she discovered that she was pregnant. She would have to wait.

Paolo chose the names for their daughter. Aria, because he thought his child was as beautiful as his favorite operatic songs; then he added Maria for his mother and his idol, Maria Callas, and Angelina, for his grandmother. To her fury, he also insisted on asking Carraldo to be godfather, but thankfully, Carraldo refused.

Francesca hated being saddled with the child. Leaving her in the care of Fiametta, the nurse who’d been with the Rinardis for two generations, and who had been Paolo’s own nanny, she shuttled between smart parties in Rome and Paris, and spent months away from home, staying with “friends” at summer villas on the French Riviera. Paolo understood, too late, that the classically beautiful facade he’d fallen in love with was all there was, and, disillusioned, he’d divided his time between his work and his little daughter, whom he adored.

Aria was six years old when Paolo contracted the rare virus that attacked his nervous system and killed him in just three months. For once Francesca was glad to see Carraldo, who, frozen-faced and showing no emotion, took care of the funeral arrangements and paid the bills. When the lawyers had explained how little money was left, she was stunned to discover that she couldn’t even sell the villa or its contents, let alone touch anything in the palazzo. It was all entailed in a family trust to be handed down to Paolo’s heir—Aria.

Francesca was furious. She was thirty-four years old, she was tied to a couple of expensive houses in places she didn’t even want
to live, and she was stuck with a small child. She’d quickly accepted Carraldo’s offer of help, but to her dismay all he allowed her was exactly enough money each month to pay their living expenses.

Leaving Aria in the care of Fiametta, she had flown off to Rome where she’d rented a tiny apartment and found herself a job as a vendeuse with one of the top designers. The pay wasn’t much, but she got wonderful clothes for next to nothing and the social contacts were terrific. She went to all the right parties and was busy from dusk till dawn, and her face soon became a familiar one in the international gossip columns and magazines.

On her fleeting visits home, to host a reception at the palazzo or a house party at her country villa, then, of course, she would see her daughter, but Aria was an annoyingly tomboyish child, more interested in climbing trees and playing with her pet rabbits and the dogs than taking tea in the salon with her mother’s friends, and somehow she’d always managed to spill lemonade down the pretty smocked dress Francesca had bought specially to show her off.

Carraldo rarely called at the Palazzo Rinardi anymore, though he was meticulous about paying Aria’s school fees and expenses. As a christening gift, he’d given her a priceless antique silver goblet fashioned by the famous eighteenth-century silversmith Paul de Lamerie, and Francesca often eyed it longingly, wishing she could sell it, but the thought of Carraldo’s cold dark eyes if he ever heard it was back on the market had stopped her head.

On her daughter’s seventeenth birthday, Francesca had been forced to reassess her own position. Younger women were running off with the marriageable prizes now, not poor widows. She was “on the shelf”! It was then she’d thought of Aria.

Her tomboy child had emerged into a dazzlingly attractive young woman, and surely seventeen was quite old enough to find a rich husband. Picking up Aria’s silver-framed photograph from her dressing table, she had decided, critically, that her daughter wasn’t as beautiful as she was. Aria’s was a strong face with enormous dark blue eyes set challengingly beneath winged brows, a straight nose, a wide mouth, and the sort of bones that gave it character. But there was something about the way she held her tall, slender body, her confident long-legged walk and the engaging way she faced the world, straight on, her chin held high, that turned heads along any street. Francesca knew that
with grooming and the right clothes Aria could be the sort of unusual beauty who lasted in a man’s memory.

But Aria was also stubborn and willful—she had never done as Francesca had wanted. She’d remembered with a sigh all those sabotaged tea parties with spilled lemonade, and realized this wasn’t going to be an easy task. Aria was a typical teenager; she had a host of friends and boyfriends, yet she often liked to spend time alone at the villa, riding her horse or painting and playing music too loud on her record player.

Of course these days young people expected “love.” But what Aria needed was an older, more experienced man; a man who knew what he wanted—and what he was paying for. Francesca sighed again; Aria didn’t seem to give a damn if her friends were rich or poor—and she certainly wasn’t going to marry a man her mother had chosen just because she said so … she was going to have to be much more clever about this …. It was then she’d summoned Antony Carraldo. What he had said had surprised her, but after thinking it over quickly, she had been thrilled. Still, it had taken a great deal of thought to plan how to get Aria to agree.

“Darling,” Francesca had said the next morning. “I think it’s time you knew something important … something …” Her voice had broken with a sob, and Aria had glanced up from her breakfast, her eyes wide with alarm.

“What is it, Mama? Are you ill?”

“No … well, not really, though the doctors have warned me …” Francesca’s hand had trembled a little as she’d brushed it wearily across her eyes. “The fact is, Aria, we Rinardis have no money left. Of course, after working so hard all these years, I’m completely exhausted, but I explained to the doctors that I must carry on with my work, otherwise who would look after you? It’s so hard for a woman of my age to commute between her work in Rome and a young daughter who needs her here in Venice, but I know it’s my duty. Oh, Aria, if only you knew the
truth!
How much I’ve sacrificed in the name of ‘duty’! How I’ve devoted myself to work in order to bring you up; why, I even had to sacrifice being here—with my own child—because your father left us penniless….”

“No, he didn’t,” Aria had retorted defensively. “How can you say we were
penniless
, Mama? As though Papa left us out on the
street, begging for a living? You worked because you enjoyed it and it meant you got a lot of pretty clothes.”

“Aria! Did you want me to suffer in some job I hated? Make no mistake about it, I worked in order to bring much needed extra money into the house. I tried to keep it from you, to protect you while you were still so young, but the truth is that the money from the Rinardi trust wouldn’t have kept your dreadful parrot Luchay in sunflower seeds! I’m afraid it’s only because I’ve struggled to keep things together that you are dressed decently and went to good schools.
And now I’m exhausted.”
Pressing a fragile white hand tiredly to her brow, Francesca had sunk gracefully onto a frayed brocade chaise longue.

Aria had stared at her doubtfully. After all these years she still couldn’t tell when her mother was telling the truth or when she was acting. Yet if what she said about the Rinardi trust was true, then where had the money for her schooling come from? And how had they managed to keep up the palazzo and the villa? Recalling the vast undulating roofs of the Villa d’Oro, she shuddered at the thought of what they must cost to repair.

She had thought wistfully of her father. To her, the Villa d’Oro was still the special place she had shared with him; she’d never felt as happy anywhere, anytime in her life, as in the times spent with Paolo. Their love had been so uncomplicated, so natural and easy, quite different from the complex range of emotions she felt toward her mother. Sometimes Aria wondered how she could dislike so many things about Francesca, and yet still love her. And how she could despise Francesca for her shallow, social-butterly existence and yet still find herself anxious for her approval.

Her mother had dropped her hand from her brow and was gazing listlessly into space. She
did
look exhausted, Aria had thought, suddenly worried. What if she was
really
ill? She must do something to help. She would get a job. She’d thought longingly of her art studies at the college in Florence; painting was her passion and she’d intended it to become her life, but now it would have to wait. “Listen to me, Mama,” she’d said, “you must go to Villa d’Oro, it’s peaceful there and quiet, you can rest until you feel stronger. I shall leave college and get a job and look after you.” She’d stroked Francesca’s blond hair tenderly.

“Don’t do that, Aria,” her mother had complained, smoothing back her hair, “I’m just on my way out for lunch.” Then she’d
stared at her astonished. “A job? And what would you do? Sell carnival masks and Murano glass to the tourists? Work in a hotel as a waitress, or a chambermaid perhaps? You don’t seem to understand, Aria. The Rinardi trust is virtually at an end. All it consists of is right here, around you … these crumbling walls and these faded antiques that we can’t even sell because they belong to the same damned trust that has no money! I
tell you, Aria, I cannot go on!”

Shrugging her jacket over her shoulders, Francesca had picked up her purse and headed for the door. As she flung it open she’d turned, staring back at her daughter still sitting at the foot of the chaise longue. “I want you to know, Aria, I’m at my wits’ end. If this cannot be resolved properly, then …” She’d paused dramatically.
“Then I simply don’t know what I might do!”
And turning abruptly, she’d stalked from the room.

Aria had clutched her arms across her stomach as fear gripped her. What had her mother meant,
she didn’t know what she might do
…? She couldn’t possibly mean that because they had no money …
she would kill herself?
Tears had spilled down her cheeks as she’d considered the possibility that to her mother, a world without the luxuries she considered to be the necessities of life was a world that simply was not worth living in. But there had been a new, desperate look in Francesca’s eyes and a shrill nervous edge to her voice that had a terrible ring of truth. Springing from the couch, Aria had run terrified from the salon in search of Fiametta.

No one knew exactly how old Fiametta was—not even Fiametta herself remembered, and with her wrinkled walnut face and her swollen arthritic hands, she might have been anywhere from seventy to a hundred and seventy! By title and employment—though it was many years since Francesca had actually paid her any wages—she was Aria’s nanny; but to the Rinardi family she had always been much more than that; Fiametta was more like a beloved grandmother, as well as being Aria’s friend and confidante. Aria told Fiametta all the things she could never tell her mother, and she loved her dearly.

The old woman was sitting at the scrubbed pine table in the center of the lofty, antiquated kitchen that had once required a staff of fifteen to run. Her coarse gray hair was scraped back into a knot at her neck, and she had the comfortable full-bosomed matronly body of the eternal grandmother. She wore a starched white apron over her black dress and was chopping herbs for a
lunchtime risotto, her swollen arthritic hands making painfully slow work of the job.

Her bright, birdlike glance changed to a frown of concern as she saw Aria’s tears. “Whatever’s the matter,
carina?”
she’d asked, lumbering to her feet as Aria hurled herself into her arms. “Now child, tell old Fiametta all about it,” and she’d patted Aria’s back gently, the way she might a tired infant’s.

She’d frowned ominously as Aria had poured out her story. She had known Francesca for more than twenty years and there was something about this that didn’t ring true. Francesca wasn’t the sort to kill herself, she was far too cold and calculating.