Property of a Noblewoman

by Danielle Steel

  A few minutes later, a middle-aged Filipina woman walked into the room in a white nurse’s uniform, and smiled as she looked at Jane. The patient coordinator introduced her as Alma, and said that she had been Marguerite’s main nurse for her last two years, and Alma mentioned as well what a lovely woman Marguerite had been.

  “She talked about her husband a lot at the end, and said she wanted to see him,” Alma said with a gentle smile. “And a few times, she said she had some things she wanted to give me. A ring, I think, or a bracelet, I can’t remember. A lot of our patients with dementia promise money or gifts that they don’t have to give. It’s their way of wanting to thank us.” The pretty Filipina woman didn’t seem surprised or disappointed by it, and Jane tried to imagine what it would have been like if Marguerite had given her the enormous diamond ring, the ruby one, or one of her brooches. There was no way to know what Alma would have done in that instance.

  Alma said that in her final days, in a rare moment of lucidity, Marguerite had wanted to go to the bank to get some things, and write a will. She was in no condition to go out by then, and they had offered to call a notary for her, but Marguerite had rapidly forgotten about it, and had died by the end of the week, without writing the will. The nurse explained to Jane that Marguerite had died of a brief bout with pneumonia when she was suffering from the flu. She was bedridden by then, and had been for two years, rarely coherent, and none of it was surprising for a woman of almost ninety-two. Jane couldn’t help wondering whom she would have left the jewelry to, had she been rational enough to write a will. To Alma at the nursing home? A distant relative she hadn’t seen in years? There was no way to know. Alma said she had mentioned no one by name.

  They seemed to be conscientious about their patients, although Jane found it grim with elderly people in wheelchairs sitting in the halls, looking vacant and not speaking. It seemed like such a sad way to end one’s days on earth, and she hoped that Marguerite’s dementia had made it easier for her, and prevented her from realizing where she was, with no one she loved to comfort her. And Marguerite’s ultimate fate and final years seemed even sadder to Jane.

  Jane felt melancholy thinking about it as she took the subway back to the city. And just for good measure, she stopped off at Marguerite’s previous address listed by the bank, a few blocks from the branch, and she asked for the building manager when she got there. She didn’t have to go to these lengths, but she wanted to. Something about the photographs she’d seen in the box, and the woman in them, had moved her deeply. And even the little she knew of her seemed very poignant. The manager remembered Marguerite clearly, and said that the workers in the building who had known her still missed her. He said she had been a very sweet woman, which was what they had said about her at the nursing home as well. He said that she had moved into a small one-bedroom apartment in the building in 1994, and had lived there for nearly twenty years, and had moved out roughly three and a half years before, when she moved into the nursing home, which corroborated what Jane already knew. She asked him if he recalled if she had children, family, or visitors, and he said that from what he knew from his own twenty years running the building, he had never seen anyone visit her, and he was sure she had no children. “She said her dogs were her children. She always had a little miniature poodle with her. I think her last one died a year or two before she moved out, and she said she was too old to get another dog. I think she missed it,” he said sadly, remembering back to the days when Marguerite lived in the building.

  The story seemed to be the same everywhere, she had no friends, no visitors, no relatives, no children. She lived alone, kept to herself, and seemed like the kind of person who led a quiet life, after an exciting one in the past, although at seventy when she moved into the building, by today’s standards she wasn’t ancient. But clearly her days of glory were already over, once she moved back to a small apartment in New York, twenty-nine years after her husband’s death. Once back in New York, her world was far from all the glamour Jane had seen in the photos.

  Jane thanked the building manager and left, and took the subway uptown to her own dingy apartment. She could hardly wait to move when they finished school and got decent jobs. She was tired of the grim building, and dark furnished apartment. The furniture was threadbare and ugly.

  Jane set down her bag, took off her coat, sat down on the sagging faux leather couch, and put her feet on the coffee table. It had been a long and interesting week, and her search for Marguerite’s heirs had been entirely fruitless so far. No one had responded to the ad. It really looked like there would be no one to claim her estate and her jewelry would be sold at Christie’s for the state’s benefit. It seemed such a shame and a waste, and she wondered what the man from Christie’s would say about the pieces when he saw them on Tuesday.

  She made herself a cup of tea, and was relaxing and reading a magazine, when John walked in an hour later. He looked in better spirits than he’d been in all week and announced that he’d finished one of his papers the night before, thanks to Cara, who had given him all the statistics and background research he needed.

  “She was a godsend,” he said, relieved, as Jane looked at him, always annoyed to hear about Cara, but she didn’t comment. Everything about her set Jane’s nerves on edge. “How was your day?”

  “Busy. Poignant. I’ve been chasing down the heirs and details on the estate of that woman I was telling you about. It turns out she really had no one. It’s so sad to think about someone’s life ending like that, with no one to care about them.”

  “She was ninety-one when she died, from what you said, so don’t get too worked up about it. It’s just about her estate now, and who’s going to get it. It’s not as if you knew her.” She could see that John thought her compassion for Marguerite was stupid.

  “The state is going to get it,” Jane said, looking down about it. “I’m meeting with a representative from Christie’s next week to appraise it.” She realized then that she hadn’t seen John since she had done the inventory herself. “She had some amazing stuff, very important jewelry, like giant diamonds, bracelets, and brooches, even a tiara.” Jane’s eyes shone brightly, remembering the beauty of it.

  “Was she some kind of royalty?” he asked, as he helped himself to a beer from the fridge in the small kitchen.

  “She was American, but she married an Italian count at eighteen and lived pretty grandly in Italy, judging from the pictures. It looked like a very fancy life,” she said, thinking of the race cars and château. “And it all ended in a nursing home in Queens, alone.” With a safe deposit box full of fabulous jewelry, and no one to give it to. It all seemed so strange to Jane, and so incongruous. To John, it was just another story that didn’t appear to move him, but he hadn’t seen the photographs of her or gotten a sense of Marguerite as a person. Jane thought he was being insensitive about it, but the only thing that interested him lately were his own concerns. “Do you have time for dinner and a movie this weekend?” she asked hopefully. He shook his head ruefully in answer.

  “I have to finish my second paper, and I just got assigned a new one. I think it’s going to be pretty rough till May. I’ve got to stay focused.”

  “Let me guess, you’re working with Cara again.” She tried to keep the edge out of her voice as she said it, and didn’t succeed. It was hard seeing so little of him, and knowing that she was always with him, whatever the reason.

  “Get off my back. It’s not going to change anything and just pisses me off.” There was a strong warning in his eyes. Their last months before they graduated were turning out to be a real test of the relationship, and he wasn’t getting high marks at it so far, and in his eyes neither was she. And her jealousy of Cara seemed unreasonable to him.

  “Okay. Sorry,” she said with a sigh. “I’ve got some reading to do this weekend anyway.” She tried to sound easy about it and she wanted to see a friend for lunch, and needed to work on her own paper. She could tell that she was about to spend another week
end on her own. And she knew he was right, her getting wound up about Cara wouldn’t do them any good.

  John went to the gym to work out that night, before he went back to the research for his paper, and Jane did laundry and paid bills. It felt good to catch up, although they barely exchanged five words with each other, and by the time John went to bed, she was asleep, and he was already gone the next morning when she woke up. He had left her a note on the kitchen table that he would be at the library all day. But at least he wasn’t at Cara’s, she thought to herself. There was just something about her that always made Jane jealous, probably how sexy she looked, and she was smart too, a winning combination. She was the kind of woman men flocked to. And Cara took full advantage of it. All her friends were men. Women never liked her.

  Jane called her friend Alex, and they agreed to meet at the Museum of Modern Art for lunch. Alex had graduated from law school the year before, and had landed a job in a Wall Street firm. She said they were working her like a slave, but she was making decent money and she liked it. Her specialty was intellectual property law, which was interesting and fun. Alex was hoping for an eventual junior partnership in the firm, in a few years.

  “So how’s Prince Charming?” Alex asked with a broad smile. She was small with dark hair and green eyes, and appeared younger than her thirty-two years. In jeans, a fisherman’s sweater, and ballet flats with her hair in a braid down her back, she looked like a kid. The two women were an interesting contrast, with Jane’s long, lean blond good looks, and Alex’s dark pixie quality, which was her personality too. They had shared some good laughs and lively times together.

  “Not so charming these days,” Jane said about John with a sigh, as they finished lunch in the museum cafeteria. They both wanted to see a Calder exhibit that had just opened. He was a favorite of Jane’s. “He’s in such a shit mood, finishing up his papers and final projects. That’s all he thinks about now. I haven’t had dinner with him in a month.”

  “I don’t know what it is about guys, they can never multitask. It’s all one thing or another, with no room for anything else.” Alex had broken up with her last boyfriend a year before, and had just started dating a junior partner in the firm. And her parents had been nagging her about getting married for the past two years, since she turned thirty. Jane’s parents were more relaxed about it, for now. Her mother had started making comments about John, and questioning their plans for the future but marriage just wasn’t on her radar screen for now. Alex was a little more concerned in recent months, and had started talking about wanting kids. “Is the old magic still there?” she asked Jane, who thought about it for a moment before she answered.

  “To be honest, I don’t know. I’m not sure we ever had ‘magic.’ We like each other a lot, we like doing the same things. It was easy, and we get along, or at least we used to. I guess if you put a gun to our heads, we’d say we love each other, but I don’t think either of us are passionate people. Maybe we’re too interested in our careers.” Jane thought about it at times, but she had no real complaints about John either, except lately, with his intense study habits and no time for her, and her mild concerns about Cara, and women who looked like her. Jane was wholesome and natural, she wasn’t a sexy type or a femme fatale like Cara. John liked to talk about “hot women.” Cara definitely was one. And their sex life had fallen off too, which also put distance between them. He was never in the mood now, he was too tired, or not at home when Jane was.

  “Maybe he’s not the right guy,” Alex threw out as a possibility. She had never been crazy about him, and thought he had a big ego, which didn’t seem to bother Jane, but it annoyed Alex. “Maybe you’d feel more passionate about a different guy,” she said cautiously, not wanting to offend Jane.

  “I don’t think so. I had a hot romance like that in college. It was awful. I cried all the time, and lost fifteen pounds.”

  “That’s not all bad,” Alex grinned. “Except the crying part. Sometimes John reminds me of the guy I used to go out with before law school. I liked him and we got along, but it was never really right. And once we started arguing about everything, it was all wrong. I think we just ran out of gas, and then it went sour. If I’d stayed with him, we would have wound up hating each other. We broke up before that happened. Some relationships aren’t meant to last forever. Maybe this is one of those.” Jane didn’t want to admit it to her, but she had wondered about that too. And their constant arguments now depressed her. She didn’t want to fight with him. But she was still hoping it would get better again. They were at each other’s throats whenever they were together.

  “I don’t think we can figure anything out or make any decisions until after we graduate in June,” Jane said calmly. “We’ve never had any major problems until now. He’s just in a shit mood and at maximum stress levels all the time trying to finish everything before graduation. It’s not a lot of fun for either of us, and I snap at him too.” About Cara.

  “Doesn’t sound like fun to me,” Alex agreed. They walked in the museum garden then, and Jane told her about Marguerite, and her search for heirs to the estate. She told her about the jewelry and trying on the enormous diamond ring. “Wow! It’s hard to imagine romances and people like that. They’re part of another century. Can you imagine any guy we know giving someone that kind of jewelry, riding around in a race car, or living in a château? Sounds like a fairy tale, or an old movie.”

  “It is,” Jane agreed with her. “And it’s sad to think how the story ends up. Alone, with dementia, in a nursing home in Queens. That sounds like a nightmare to me.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Alex said as they walked into the Calder show and spent a pleasant afternoon, talking about nothing in particular and enjoying each other’s company. At four o’clock, they said their good-byes and Jane took the subway back uptown, and Alex went to the West Village, where she lived in the meat-packing district. She had rented an apartment in a good building in a trendy neighborhood as soon as she got her new job, and she was loving it. And she had a date that night with her new guy to go to the theater.

  Jane found herself envying her when she went back to the empty apartment, and worked on her paper that night. John called her around nine o’clock and had been at the library all day. They were on separate paths for now. And she tried not to think about what Alex had said at lunch, that John might be the wrong guy. She wasn’t ready to believe that yet. And she thought about what she’d said, that some relationships just played themselves out and ended. She hoped that hadn’t happened. But the stress on both of them had clearly taken a toll.

  On Sunday morning, Jane woke up to find John in bed with her, which was beginning to seem like a miracle, and they made love for the first time in a month. She felt better about them after that, and they managed to have brunch at a nearby deli before he went back to the library for the rest of the day and night, but at least the morning had gotten off to a good start, and she felt connected to him again.

  She went to a movie alone on Sunday night, a French art film she’d been wanting to see, which wasn’t as interesting as she hoped, and that night she went to sleep and dreamed of Marguerite. She was trying to say something to Jane, and explain something to her, but through the entire troubled night, Jane never figured out what it was. John didn’t come home again on Sunday night and had texted her he’d slept on someone’s couch. She got up Monday morning, feeling drained and frustrated, and got ready for another week in surrogate’s court. At least she had the Christie’s appraisal to look forward to the next day. It was a welcome change. And with all that spectacular jewelry, Marguerite’s estate was anything but boring. It was the only excitement and bright spot in her life for now.

  Chapter 4

  PHILLIP LAWTON LEFT his apartment in Chelsea at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning, as he did every week, to rendezvous with the love of his life. Her name was Sweet Sallie, she was an old wooden sailboat he had owned for eight years, and he kept her in a small harbor on Long Island. He spent
every weekend on her, no matter what the weather, and when it was decent, he spent all his time sanding, cleaning, painting. She was immaculate, and no woman had ever given him as much joy. He was fiercely proud of her, and he usually spent Saturday night on her, and Friday night too whenever possible. It was a prerequisite that the women he went out with also loved Sweet Sallie. Some did more than others. Most women got tired of the boat after a while, and Phillip’s passion for her. She was the possession he was most proud of. He had loved sailing since he was a boy, even more than he loved art. He was a good sailor, and would often take her out in rough seas or summer storms. But at those times, he went alone and didn’t expect anyone to go with him.

  At thirty-four, he had been involved in numerous relationships over the past years, but none either serious or long-term. A few had lasted a year, but most of them ran their course in a few months, and by then he or the woman or both had figured out that it was going nowhere and never would. Phillip had high ideals about what he wanted in a long-term relationship, and particularly a wife, and his role model was his parents’ marriage, which had seemed perfect to him. He compared all relationships to theirs and wanted nothing less for the long haul. His parents had been crazy about each other, until his father’s death three years before. They had been the ideal complement to each other, and fit together seamlessly. The whole relationship had always been characterized by humor, kindness, compassion, tenderness, a profound love for each other, and deep mutual respect. Phillip had no sense of how rare that was in today’s world and thought it was normal. His father was ten years his mother’s senior. They had met when she took one of his art history classes at NYU. His mother was a serious artist, for whose work his father had the greatest admiration.