The Rich Shall Inherit (78 page)

Helena strolled across the lawn swinging her tennis racquet lazily. She was wearing a short white dress and her bare legs were tanned by the summer sun. She was so graceful, Angel thought sadly, she walked like a dancer … and maybe she could have been one, if she hadn’t held her back because of her own stupid fears.

“Mama? Why don’t you come to the tennis court to watch me?
You
promised you would … I missed you, Mama,” she added, but her words were only a jumble of discordant sounds.

“Sorry, darling, I was just reading the newspaper and I completely forgot about the time. I’ll come right now.”

“It’s too late, Maria-Cristina got bored. She doesn’t want to play anymore.”

That was typical of her other daughter, Angel thought, she had the attention span of a butterfly—and a similar life-style, flitting from man to man the way a butterfly went from flower to flower.

Maria-Cristina had flirted her way through Santa Barbara’s small society and then moved on to San Francisco. She had been the most popular debutante of 1916, and at the end of the season she’d become engaged to the prize among the eligible young men. Three months later she had broken it off and started on a career of parties and engagements that lasted until she was twenty-five years old and everyone was saying Maria-Cristina Rinardi had left it too late to marry, she was over the hill.

She’d paused long enough in her headlong pursuit of enjoyment to realize that what they were saying was probably true. Within a month she was re-engaged to the devoted young man who had asked her to marry him when she was still only eighteen. They were married three months later with full pomp and ceremony and four hundred guests had danced at their wedding. But Maria-Cristina had seen no reason why a husband should interfere with her usual round of parties and flirtations, and the only difference marriage had seemed to make to her was that now she entertained in her own home. Her young husband’s devotion soon began to wear thin, but she scoffed at his requests that she settle down and behave like a responsible married woman. Their divorce three years later had caused a scandal that had necessitated a year abroad in order for things to calm down.

Maria-Cristina’s life had reverted to that of a carefree single woman; she’d acted as though she hadn’t a care in the world. But she’d also had no man who really cared about her. Until she met Bill Aston.

Bill was forty years old and a rich bachelor from the East Coast. He had a Manhattan apartment, a summer house in East Hampton, and a rambling old family place on the ocean at Palm Beach where he went to play polo. He was well educated and sophisticated and, for once, Maria-Cristina was overwhelmed. After they were married, Angel had thought with relief that at last her daughter had grown up.

For a while Maria-Cristina had played the fashionable East Coast wife; she’d seemed to enjoy giving the smart little cocktail parties in Manhattan, the charity luncheons in East Hampton,
and the chic black-tie dinners in Palm Beach, and she’d basked in her new social fame as “the beautiful, elegant Mrs. Bill Aston.” For a while it had seemed the perfect marriage—and then she’d had the baby: Paul.

Then just two months ago, she’d telephoned Angel to say that she was coming back to Italy—Bill was divorcing her. Hoping they could patch things up, Angel had asked her what the trouble was, but Maria-Cristina had just shrugged. “The same old thing, Mama,” she’d sighed restlessly, “boredom.”

When Aleksandr had refused the title after Felipe’s death, seven-year-old Paul was next in succession, and he had become Paolo, the Barone Rinardi. But the fact that she had a child to look after seemed to make very little difference to Maria-Cristina’s wild ways; as always, she’d just shrugged away her responsibilities. She never really looked after him; Fiametta did.

I’m as guilty as Poppy, Angel thought resignedly. I was unsuccessful as a wife and it seems I’m unsuccessful as a mother. All I ever gave my children was love, and it seems that wasn’t enough. She remembered Poppy as she’d last seen her—slender and still elegant even in a linen shirt and jodhpurs, and the black sombrero she had always worn when riding. She thought of the question Poppy had asked her, and that she’d refused to answer. Oh, Poppy, she thought, sorrowfully. Don’t you understand? That it really doesn’t matter which daughter was yours. They don’t belong to you or to me … they are themselves.

When she went to bed that night, she said her prayers, as she always did, for Aleksandr and Helena and Maria-Cristina, but this time she added a prayer for Poppy, too, asking for God’s guidance. Should she go to Poppy as her heart told her she must? Or was the first priority still the safety of her secret? But no answer came from heaven, and in the end the decision was hers to make alone. She knew she could not risk seeing Poppy again. It could only lead to disaster.

1933, ITALY

The farm looked overgrown and neglected when the workmen came to Montespan and packed all the things. They ignored Luchay, crouching worriedly on his stand, as they crated the paintings and the clocks and the vases, the silver and the books, and the baskets of dried flowers. His sharp round eyes blinked nervously as they carried out the trunks with Poppy’s vast collection of clothes and personal belongings, and they laughed when the parrot squawked in rage as they thrust him into his golden cage, throwing a hood over it, shutting out the light.

The truck rumbled through France and into Italy. Every now and then it stopped, and they thrust a bowl and some seeds into his cage, but they never took off his hood, and the parrot simply crouched on his perch, fluffing his feathers and hiding his head under his wing in fear. At last the truck stopped and the big doors were thrown open.

“Allons-y,”
the burly French driver shouted, swinging the parrot’s cage clumsily from the van.

As the man carried the cage, swinging violently, up the curving staircase, the parrot lifted his head tentatively, as though listening for Poppy’s familiar voice, but there was only the sound of great activity: the whoosh of a broom on the ground and the slap of a wet mop on a marble floor, the squeak of chamois leather on a windowpane, and the tread of heavy feet. There was the smell of fresh paint and of soap … and the sweet familiar scent of gardenias.

“And what have we here?” a woman’s voice demanded. The linen hood was whisked off and the parrot blinked its eyes in the bright sunlight, fluttering its wings fearfully.

“Ah, the poor little creature, he is so frightened!” the woman exclaimed, opening the door and holding out her hand to him, but Luchay shied away, edging back along his perch to the farthest corner of the cage.

“Leave him,” Franco said quietly, “he only likes Poppy. For now, just see that he has food and water and is kept quiet.”

They placed Luchay’s cage and his beautiful bejeweled stand near an open window in a large sunny bedroom. Men toiled in the garden below, cutting back the overgrown shrubs and creepers, pulling up weeds and recreating lawns. The scents of the garden mingled with the gardenias and the bird peered around inquisitively, tilting his head from side to side, listening to the bird noises and the yapping somewhere of a little dog. A long white ambulance with a red cross on its side rolled smoothly to a stop by the steps and Franco hurried forward to help as they carried Poppy on a stretcher into the house.

“Are we home, then?” she asked in a clear voice as they brought her into the bedroom.

Luchay ruffled his feathers. “Poppy
cara
, Poppy
chérie
, Poppy darling!” he squawked, fluttering his wings excitedly.

“Luchay? Is that you, at last?” she called. “Ah, come here, my sweet, come to me …” Franco carried his cage across to the bed where they’d propped her against a mound of fresh white linen pillows, and the parrot fluttered unsteadily onto her outstretched hand. “Poppy, Poppy … Poppy …” he muttered.

“I missed you, too, Luchay,” she said softly. “I need you, my friend.”

Poppy’s voice sounded tired, her shaven head was covered with the fluffy copper-amber sheen of new hair, and an angry red scar ran from her right temple across her skull. Her cheekbones jutted sharply and her blue eyes were sunken and tired; even her freckles seemed to have faded into the translucent whiteness of her skin. And the bony fingers that stroked the parrot’s wing were trembling as though they’d never stop.

A woman in a rustling starched white uniform came to stand by the bed and Franco said, “Poppy, the nurse is here to take care of you. She will see that you have everything you need.”

“I’d rather be alone,” Poppy said wearily. “Too many nurses, too many doctors … ask her to go away.”

“Not yet, Poppy, you still need help.”

Taking her hand in his, Franco gazed at her with a look of
mingled tenderness and sadness and then he said, “I’ll let you rest now. I’ll be back to see you when you’re feeling stronger.”

“Am I home then, Franco?” she asked, her eyes closing wearily.

He nodded. “You’re home now, Poppy,” he said, bending to kiss her cheek.

For the first few weeks Poppy was quiet and listless, but with the arrival of spring she seemed to get stronger and she finally ventured outdoors. Luchay crouched on her shoulder as she wandered hesitantly through the newly immaculate gardens, with tears coursing down her cheeks. “This isn’t ‘home,’ Luchay,” she cried, “the garden there was all tangled and green and mysterious … it was a special place. Why are we here? This isn’t the place.”

The nurse came running; she looked anxious and later she telephoned Franco. The next day he came to see her. He’d noticed that sometimes she would welcome him with a look of joy, and at others she would just stare at him, puzzled, as though he were a stranger, disturbing her chosen solitude.

Today Poppy was haughty and autocratic. “I’ve dismissed the gardeners,” she told him abruptly. “I don’t want manicured lawns and flower beds. I want weeds and green-growing creepers that hide things.” Her eyes grew puzzled again. “Isn’t this the place, Franco?” she asked. “Isn’t this ‘home?’ I thought it was …”

“Don’t worry,” he soothed her, “it will be exactly as you wish. Whatever makes you happy, Poppy.”

The next person she fired was the nurse. “I don’t need a nurse anymore,” she told Franco when he came hurrying back to the villa. “Besides,” she added with that sly, knowing look in her eyes, “she’s not my nurse. She’s my
keeper.”

He nodded. “You’re right,” he said, “it’s time she went.” The following week a new “housekeeper” appeared, but she, too, didn’t last long.

“We don’t need all these people around us,” Poppy whispered to Luchay as they watched her march down the drive, suitcase in hand. “We shall be alone together, Luchay, just you and me. Until Rogan comes home.”

Summer slipped into autumn, and autumn into winter. Franco came to see her at Christmas, his big car loaded with gaily wrapped parcels that she never even opened. She refused to talk
to him and just sat by the fire all day, staring into its flames. But despite everything, he still came once a month to see her.

In the evenings Poppy would eat a simple meal prepared for her by the woman who came in from the village, and she’d drink a glass of wine. Then she’d walk slowly upstairs to her room and sit at her desk and begin to write. “Sometimes I know it all, Luchay,” she’d say, looking at her scribbled words sorrowfully, “and sometimes nothing. I thought if I wrote it all down I could capture my memories, and when I forget, they’ll be here to remind me.”

The next time she was told Franco was coming, she went to a great deal of trouble to look nice. Her beautiful, rich red hair, streaked at the temples with white, had grown back again, and she washed it and brushed it until it shone, pinning it up with the diamond stars. She rummaged in the vast armoires that held a quarter of a century’s worth of her clothes, until she found the ice-gray satin gown with the wide pink sash that she’d worn in her portrait. As always, she wore her pearls and she plucked a gardenia from the dozens of growing plants that Franco kept her supplied with, winter and summer.

When he arrived, she was standing by the window of the ornate salon, waiting for him, her head tilted to one side, a smile on her lips and the gardenia clutched in her hand.

“Franco,” she said clearly, “I want you to see something. Come closer, darling. Look at me.”

Luchay skittered agitatedly along his stand as Franco walked slowly toward her, his face as gray as the ice-satin gown.

“What is it, Poppy?” he asked. “Why are you dressed like this …?”

“Don’t I look like my portrait, Franco?” she asked softly. “Once I was that woman, painted by Sargent. But now look … see the scar on my skull, and here, this puckered red flesh on my neck, and here on my shoulders, and along my arm …. There are other scars, Franco, but you can’t see them; nobody can, only me. But you see, I’m not that woman in the portrait anymore; she’s gone, Franco, gone forever. For you, the reality is not this aging shell of a half-mad woman … she’s the woman in the painting on your bedroom wall. That memory is
real
, Franco. Keep it. But the other one has gone forever. She has set you free.”

“Poppy,” he cried brokenly, “you don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Oh, yes, Franco, darling, today I do know. I don’t want you
to come back here again. Please, Franco. Say good-bye to me now, while the memory of what we were still lingers. And then leave me to my solitude and my jumbled half-world. You see, I don’t need anyone anymore.”

Franco bent to kiss her hand, and then with a choked cry he turned and walked rapidly from the room. The gardenia she was holding, with its creamy petals that withered the moment it was plucked from the tree, fell unnoticed to the ground.

After a while, Poppy walked slowly through the ornate red and gold salon, across the empty marble hallway, and lifting her long skirts gracefully, she mounted the grand curving staircase under the painted cupola of nymphs and cupids, and walked back to her room.

“It’s just you and me now, Luchay,” she said wearily, “and the past, for that will never leave us alone.” A puzzled frown crossed her face. “There’s just one more thing to be done—if only I can remember what it is….”