A Rather Lovely Inheritance

by C. A. Belmond

  There he pulled me closer to him, slowly but inexorably, with a determination that told me, This time I won’t let you get away. The tug of his will gave me that thrill of inevitability, and when he put his head down to kiss me, I could finally let myself dare to really, completely feel that fierce hungry ache that I’d had all this time, ever since I first “clapped eyes” on Jeremy at the hotel, which I’d tried so hard to ignore during this whole trip to London, all through the reading of the will, and all the while we’d been chasing around the villa and up and down the whole ding-danged Riviera. Every step of the way I’d been pushing back the pleasure of being with him, and now suddenly, at last, I didn’t have to hide the simple fact that the sight of him, the scent of him, the warmth of him just filled me with utter joy. I could greet it all with open arms.

  And along with this ferocious hunger, I felt a new and sweetly secure sensation of coming home, where I belonged. We kept pushing closer and closer as if we couldn’t ever get close enough, and it seemed as if, after years of endlessly swimming around each other in the cool and salty sea, we’d at last emerged from the turbulent waves, stumbling onto a warm and sandy shore, collapsing into each other’s arms, where we lay happily gasping and giddy with the sun and the sky reeling overhead, exultant in our mingled delight.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  WHEN WE ARRIVED AT AUNT PENELOPE’S APARTMENT IN LONDON we didn’t talk much at all. We seemed to be moving in tandem, as if each of us knew what the other was thinking, feeling, wanting, in that blissful state of harmony. Such a natural thing, harmony is, that when it happens you wonder why on earth you’ve lived so stupidly that you actually forgot about how great it is to be in sync with another human being. As if once long ago, you knew.When you were pure and innocent and weren’t trying so hard to be something other than human.

  I put the key in the door and we were smiling at each other as we went in, until we heard a strange noise coming from the kitchen. Amid tremendous clattering of pots and pans, I could make out the deep hum of a man’s voice and the high sound of a woman’s laughter. They seemed to be calling out and shouting to each other over the clatter. I couldn’t hear the actual words, but I could comprehend the uproarious tone.

  Jeremy said, “Who the hell is that? It sounds like somebody’s crashed the apartment to throw a party!”

  “It’s my parents,” I said meekly. Jeremy paused.

  “What are they doing?” he asked in a hushed, fascinated tone.

  “They’re cooking,” I said.

  My parents didn’t even hear us come in, at first, so busy were they having a good time peeling, chopping, sautéing, teasing and joking with each other, already hilariously revisiting every funny or idiotic thing that had happened at the airports and on the trip over.

  My mother glanced up first, and well, you know how it is when you see from the expression on another person’s face that your own face has just given you away, and you realize that you’ve been walking around wearing your happiness all over you for all the world to see.

  When my mother observed me wearing this loud cloak of lucky twinkledust, she looked a bit startled, but then she quickly, in her inimitable English way, gave me a wry smile of comprehension that said to me, Well darling, it’s nice to see you happy for once.

  My father’s reaction was actually more like several looks passing over his face in rapid succession. He went from surprise, to amused comprehension, to a brief look of paternal sorrow. He recovered and smiled fondly, but then he gave Jeremy a look of mingled understanding and yet tiger-watchfulness, the way men do when they communicate, I know this is inevitable but if you don’t watch yourself you’ll have me to answer to.

  And Jeremy was looking back at him, respectfully but tigerish himself, the way a younger man communicates, You can’t keep her all to yourself any longer, Dad. I must say this primitive exchange was a bit shocking, and yet I felt as if nothing could surprise me today because everything was so wholesale astonishing.

  My mother took control of the situation and, with typical composure, broke the silence with words of assurance and civility, and said things like, “How was your trip? You must be hungry.” They were both wearing aprons on top of their shirts and slacks. My mother had a little flour on the tip of her nose, and my father’s hair was slightly askew in that way it gets when he’s been cooking in earnest.

  They explained that Rupert had let them in. He didn’t know what else to do with them when they phoned, and the poor kid didn’t stand a chance against their playful logic and the way they coordinate their persuasiveness by speaking back and forth more to each other than to anyone else, and sometimes both talking at the same time. My father told Rupert that he simply must get near a stove so that he could cook some food, which my jet-lagged mother had been craving since they left New York. Rupert surrendered and gave them the spare key.

  My mother took me by the arm and led me into the dining room, suggesting that we set the table together, which gave my father the cover he needed to have a few moments alone with Jeremy. I’m sure that nothing so gauche as direct questioning occurred, but when Jeremy returned to us, looking visibly relieved and a touch pleased with himself for surviving it, I couldn’t resist whispering to him as my mother discreetly went into the kitchen for more cutlery, “Well? Did he threaten you with a meat cleaver?”

  “Not exactly,” Jeremy said,“but I watched him mince an onion in seconds flat, dismember a chicken without a sound, and pound the hell out of a puff paste. I got the message. Now he wants to see you.” He paused. “He let me slice the bread. Is that a good sign?” he asked hopefully.

  “Very good,” I said.

  My mother returned and said, “Penny, dear, see if your father needs any help.” Then she took over Jeremy at that point, talking to him, smoothing the way for him, and the two of them with their nice English shorthand managed to make each other feel assured that neither would say or do anything to embarrass the other. Whereas I suddenly felt as if someone, possibly me, was going to shout from the rooftops with irrepressible joy. I tried to control this as I went into the kitchen to help my dad.

  “Everything all right?” he inquired in that low, easy French tone that I find so soothing.

  “Yes, of course, why?” I said, momentarily lapsing into my old schoolgirl-trying-to-pretend that I didn’t just sneak into the house at dawn after a school dance.

  “No reason,” he said in a rich Burgundian chuckle. “We only get our news these days in leetle bits and pieces.We hear you’ve been running around all of France in fancy cars, going to gambling casinos, chasing after a mysterious painting, and making everyone in three countries delirious with worry.”

  He said all this casually while placing chicken sections into individual-sized servings of pastry wreaths, then brushing them with sauce and popping them into the oven on a tray.Without pausing for breath he reached out and did some fast flipping of sizzling vegetables in a sauté pan on the stove, without a spatula, just with a few quick, astonishing jerks of the wrist that made the vegetables fly up in the air and dance before landing perfectly right back in the pan.Then he peered into a bubbling pot.

  “The soup is ready,” he announced. “Why don’t you pour it into the tureen?”

  “Gladly,” I said. “Does Aunt Penelope have a tureen?”

  He looked at me reproachfully. “After all the time you’ve been here, you didn’t acquaint yourself right away with the kitchen?” he asked.“You must be a foundling. No daughter of mine could possibly do such a thing.”

  “Wait, I remember,” I said. “Here it is.”

  “That’s better,” he said. “Let the soup wait. Come here and help me with the appetizers.” We worked side by side as we have before, and he asked me about everything that had happened in France, without once permitting me to forget the importance of the platter we were arranging to feed the people we loved. I told him about how dicey it had gotten with Rollo, and what happened with Jeremy and his mother and his Ita
lian grandfather.

  “And yet,” Dad drawled, “in spite of it all, here you are, safe and sound.” He reached out and gave my cheek a gentle pinch.

  “Hallo in there!” my mother called out. “We’re famished!” My father handed me a tray.

  “Here, carry this out and feed the boy,” he said.

  Part Twelve

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  WHILE WE WAITED FOR THE FRENCH COURT TO SCHEDULE THE DECISION on Aunt Penelope’s will, I was being advised about what to do with the painting if the judge decided that I possessed sole ownership.

  Personally I thought this was tempting fate, to start counting chickens and crossing bridges. But I really had no choice.Word got out that the painting existed, starting with whispers and murmurs, then small newspaper items, which people actually do read. So the world came knocking at my door, in some cases banging at it, and making the telephone shrill at all hours of the night with urgent messages from collectors, museum and auction house executives, all heedless of the time difference and eager to beat each other out, thinking that greed would make me amenable even when they’d just yanked me out of bed. I had to have all my phone calls forwarded to Jeremy’s law office, just to get some sleep at night.

  I had a long talk with my parents and Jeremy about it. We decided that, after the experience I’d had of someone breaking into the house in the dead of night to steal the painting, we didn’t want to keep it in an apartment, where it would have to be insured by people who might prefer to devalue it so that if it were stolen they wouldn’t have to fork over a lot of money. We didn’t like the idea of keeping it buried in a vault, where, as Aunt Penelope had pointed out, you’d never get to see what you had. So we agreed that I should sell it to a museum or gallery.

  First off, I wanted to split the money four ways—for me, for Jeremy, for my parents, and the final fourth divided between Aunt Sheila and Jeremy’s grandfather. My parents emphatically said they wouldn’t take a cent from me, and they couldn’t be budged.

  “Don’t be silly, darling,” my mother said. “We know you’ll look after us in our old age. What do we want with more bank accounts and investments to manage? And when we die—which I suppose we will, you know, someday, eventually—it would be a tax mess for you. No, dear, you keep it.”

  To which my father added, “Just make sure you keep me in good coffee and good wine and good fruit.The fruit will be the hardest for you to find. I don’t know what they’re doing to it these days,” and he was off and running, fuming about the poor state of produce.

  Aunt Sheila also said she was “fine as I am,” and Jeremy’s grandfather refused to take anything from me or relatives he’d never seen, but Jeremy said he thought the man would accept gifts from him, over time, whenever Jeremy visited him.

  “Then it’s you and me, kiddo,” I said.

  “Get hold of the money first, and then let us know what you want to do with it, you fool,” Jeremy said.

  So the painting had to be evaluated by the potential buyers’ experts, a process, we realized, that could go on forever. After more X-rays, and the scrutiny of specialists, most of the experts agreed on one thing, which was that the Madonna and Child came from a student of Leonardo. Many believed that the Master had not painted the whole thing himself, though there were a few stalwarts who thought it was entirely his work. But even “fractional participation” by Leonardo could make the numbers soar to dizzying heights.

  Dr. Mateo had written up his assessment for us—that the Master had made a stroke here and there on Fabrizi’s original painting. Most people believed that it was either a copy of a lost Leonardo sketch (which would still be quite valuable) or else the original work of Fabrizi, a “minor female artist” who had studied “briefly” under the Master and possibly been helped by him.

  I had Erik and Tim take a look at it when they stopped by in Italy; then they showed up in London on their way home. They arrived looking sated and suntanned from their travels. We had a swell time because I threw them a real English tea party and showed them all around the apartment, including Aunt Penelope’s vintage dresses, which made them moan with joy.

  “Will you marry me?”Timothy asked me. “Then I can be around this fabulous stuff for the rest of my life.”

  “Good.You marry her, and I’ll marry Jeremy,” Erik shot back. For to my chagrin, they spent more time discussing a photo I’d shown them of Jeremy than they did the painting. Jeremy was in Brussels when they visited, but I promised they’d meet him next time.

  When Erik and Tim finally settled down to tell me their opinion of the Madonna and Child, they grew very serious and professional, and they assessed it soberly and respectfully. They believed, as I did, that Fabrizi had sketched the underdrawings and was the creator of the piece.

  “Maybe Leonardo put a stroke here and there, that’s entirely possible, but this is so original,” Timothy declared excitedly. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “But leave it to the experts, honey,” Erik advised me, “and the experts are the ones who can get you the most cash. If they see a total Leonardo, then baby, let them.”

  But certain compulsive collectors with money to burn and time on their hands wanted only to beat each other to the punch, buy it and figure out who did it later. These people were the hardest to deal with, the kind who would think nothing of hopping on a jet to London and then stalking me.They were not accustomed to hearing “No” and didn’t handle it very well when I, a snip of a girl, said I’d have to think it over. They got ugly very fast, resorting to one basic tactic of negotiation—force—being positive that relentless bullying would make me bow to their wishes. I had to call the cops on more than one of them.This didn’t scare them as much as the fear that their competitors might get their mitts on a masterpiece that one day might be decreed an authentic, new Leonardo.

  The museums by and large used the “dangling carrot” approach, calculating that fear would motivate me if they feigned only mild interest at first, then casually made an offer of a comparatively more modest sum than the private collectors proposed. Still, even from them I got some pretty strange phone calls in the night, offering me, sotto voce, tens of thousands of pounds if I’d sell it to them right now, tonight, before it went to auction.

  Big money is tempting, but oddly enough, when it gets that big it becomes unreal and a little frightening.You get the feeling that bad luck will come with it, because nobody forks over that much without expecting to extract some of your flesh and blood if it turns out that they miscalculated and the painting was later, somehow, proved to be what they would consider a fake. I had nightmares that such a buyer would tell himself that I’d somehow swindled him on purpose, and he’d come looking to get his money back or dump me in the Thames, or both. Of course, with all that money I supposed I could hire thugs of my own, and become like Rollo or worse; but even people with thugs and bodyguards, I’ve noticed, are not immune from fear and paranoia, and they still do a lot of looking over their shoulders. No, thanks. I’d seen enough of this shadowy underworld, and I didn’t want to cut any deals like Persephone.

  Besides, I was concerned about how and where the painting would be kept. In the end, the offer that I liked best was from one little museum on the Italian Riviera suggesting that they would put it in a special glassed-in gallery where visitors could view it from either inside the gallery or from an adjacent tearoom, where they could rest and revive and feed their kids while gazing at art through the glass walls. If they wanted to view it up close inside the gallery, they were restricted from bringing things like phones and food and noise with them. Being Italian, the curators said certo, they understood my concerns about a proper and protective environment for the painting, but, they reminded me with an amused tone, one couldn’t always control the behavior of tourists. Best of all, though, it would stay in a place that I would be glad to come and visit and say hello to the Madonna and Child whenever I wanted.

  Jeremy liked this gallery, too, once he h
eard the offer that this surprising little museum came up with.“Twenty million pounds,” he said in a tone of satisfaction, as if he’d finally gotten me what he’d wanted to all along. “Now all we have to do is convince the judge that Aunt Pen was sane and not unduly influenced by me when she wrote her will.”

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  AUNT PENELOPE’S WILL WAS JUDGED IN NICE. ALL OF US WERE there—my parents, Harold, Rupert, Severine, Louis, Jeremy and me . . . and Rollo and his lawyers. Only Great-Aunt Dorothy was AWOL; she had a headache or heart palpitations or something, they said, while the fact was, she just couldn’t stand to see all that lovely money go to somebody else.

  Because a deal had finally been struck. All family members agreed to it, and it was this: Rollo wouldn’t contest the will, and we wouldn’t press charges for theft and send him to a French prison, thanks to his thuggy friend who “sang,” as Jeremy told me.

  “Now who’s talking like a cop?” I asked him as we took our seats in the courtroom.

  “Behave,” he hissed. “The French don’t like cutups in the court.”

  I saw my parents glance inquiringly in our direction, and I sobered up, feeling as if I were a kid again who didn’t want the grown-ups to know how much I liked Jeremy.

  The judge, a serious-looking but dapper man in his mid-sixties, eyed us all with the bright, alert eyes of a bird of prey while hearing the case presented to him. It was all spoken in French and then repeated in English, even when he rendered his decision with great formality.

  The gist of it was that Aunt Penelope’s will would stand as written. It helped to have her handwritten note, dated, signed, and witnessed, indicating that she knew who Jeremy was, regarded him as a special member of the family, and had reasons to bequeath what she did to him—and me. So Jeremy got the villa; Rollo got the furnishings, which must be removed under supervision by such-and-such date, no going back later, etc.; and I got the Dragonetta, the garage, and its contents.Which included the painting.When it was over and the judge retired, even cool old Harold let out a sigh of relief and mopped his brow with his handkerchief.