Property of a Noblewoman (22 page)

She could hardly find words to answer him for a minute, and then instinctively switched into legal gear. There was no doubt in her mind what he had to do. “You need to call a lawyer, and fast. You can’t sort this out on your own. You need to advise the surrogate’s court that an heir has been located, your mother needs to come forward officially, and then you’ll need to provide proof. How long that will take, what the steps are in the process, or what proof they will require, I don’t know. But a lawyer will. This isn’t my area of expertise. How is your mother taking this, by the way? It must be a terrible shock to discover that the people she thought of as her parents cheated her out of her real mother, and kept them separated from each other all her life. It’s really heartbreaking to hear stories like that. I know it happens, but it must be an awful feeling for her,” Jane said with compassion in her eyes. Marguerite’s poignant story, and his mother’s, had reality for her now and touched her deeply.

“She’s very upset, and I can’t blame her. She really isn’t thinking about the jewelry at this point, just about the mother she lost, and I gather that her grandmother was never nice to her. She was a very cold woman, and I guess she always held against my mother the circumstances of her birth, unfair as that is. But in spite of all that, we have to deal with the jewelry too. It can’t be sold now that there is a rightful heir, without that heir’s permission, and my mother will have to be legally acknowledged as the heir first. And I have no idea if that will take days or months.” He looked worried about it, and so did Jane.

“I don’t know either,” she admitted. “The timing of that could be anything, and courts never move quickly, particularly when they’re handling the estates of deceased people who can’t complain about how long it’s taking.” They both smiled at that.

“I also don’t know if my aunt Edwina is going to make a claim on the estate. Marguerite was her sister, and she may want a part of it too.”

“You need to call an attorney immediately,” Jane reiterated. “I can get a recommendation if you like,” she offered helpfully.

“I have someone in mind,” he said quietly.

“Call them today,” she urged him, as he nodded and paid the check, and then thanked her for listening, and for her good advice. It helped being able to talk to her, and he appreciated it. She was still awestruck that destiny had led her to call Phillip, and that his mother was the child whom Marguerite wrote about in her letters, and had grieved for most of her life. The force of it was overwhelming. “When Harriet had me read the letters in the safe deposit box, I was still hoping to find a will. I didn’t, they were only letters, but the whole story is there. Everything you just told me, from her mother’s side. Leaving the baby she called her ‘darling angel’ in New York, being forced to disappear, arriving in London during the war, meeting the count, marrying and living with him, and attempting to get her child back when she was seven. They did what they could, and were stymied by her parents at every turn. She went back to see her when the child was eighteen, to tell her the whole story, and once she saw her from a distance, she was afraid to disrupt her life and ruin it, and trade her daughter’s respectable life for a scandalous one, and she went back to Italy without seeing her, and eventually just gave up.

“She wrote letters to her lost daughter for more than seventy years. They were love letters to her child. She never named her, and she always said that she was going to leave the jewelry to her. She was going to write a will, but she obviously never got around to it. And you can tell from her letters that her mind was no longer clear in the end. She was lost in the past. There is nothing in the letters that would provide adequate legal proof, except if your mother can prove that Marguerite is her mother. But it’s all there, the whole sad story from beginning to end, and some sweet times too. She was happy with the count, but the most powerful force in her life was her missing child. I still have the copies of the letters in the file. I’ll scan them for you. It’s a sad story, but it will tell your mother how much her mother loved her during all those years they lost and never had as mother and child.” She could only guess at how much the letters would mean to Phillip’s mother. They were her mother’s voice speaking to her.

Phillip looked overwhelmed by what she had just said. And it would be an important testimony to give his mother, to know how her mother had felt.

“I’d be very grateful to you if you sent me the copies of the letters. They might be tough for my mother to read, but maybe healing in a way too. All she knows now is from other people. Hearing it in her mother’s letters would be an incredible gift.”

“I’m so happy I read them,” Jane said quietly, even if they hadn’t yielded a will, which would have been more useful to him.

They went out to the street then, both of them a little dazed by what they’d shared. And to distract them both from the heavy emotions of their discovery, he decided to inquire how things were going with her boyfriend, not expecting anything to have changed.

“Actually,” she said, smiling up at him once they were on the sidewalk outside, “some things happened that changed the situation for me. I moved out. I just moved into my own place in the meat-packing district, and I love it.”

“Are you still seeing him?” Phillip asked, hoping she wasn’t.

“No, I’m not,” she said quietly. “He was cheating on me, and I just found out. I should have given up six months ago, when the relationship went sour, but I thought it would work out. It didn’t. And he’s moving back to L.A. with her.” It had been a total bust, as Phillip could deduce, and he hoped it hadn’t been too painful for her. She seemed calm and philosophical about it, and even relieved.

“Could I invite you for dinner sometime?” he asked her, just as he had before, and this time she nodded and looked pleased.

“I’d like that a lot,” she said with a warm smile, and he promised to keep her informed about his mother’s situation, and what they would be doing to confirm her as Marguerite’s heir. He had a feeling it would be complicated, and maybe a lengthy process. And she promised to send him the copies of Marguerite’s letters that afternoon. He wanted to copy them, and read them himself. He felt enormous compassion for his mother over what she’d just learned.

“I’ll call you,” he promised, and after kissing her on the cheek, she wished him luck. He hurried back to his office then to contact his cousin Penny. She was the attorney he had in mind. She worked for a great firm, was a partner herself, and always gave him good advice. He called her as soon as he sat down at his desk, and she walked out of a meeting to talk to him. As cousins and only children, they had always been extremely close. Penny was forty-five years old, and had three teenage children, a thirteen-year-old son, a fifteen-year-old daughter who drove her crazy, and an eighteen-year-old son who was in his last year of high school. They were the grandchildren Winnie complained about constantly to her sister.

“What’s up? Did you get arrested?” she asked hopefully, and he laughed.

“Not yet. I’m still working on it. Listen, something has happened, this is a biggie. Can I come down to your office and see you?” She worked on Wall Street, and her specialty was tax and estate law, so this was right up her alley.

“When were you thinking?”

“Now? Later? In ten minutes?”

“Shit, I’m in meetings till six o’clock. If it’s important, I’ll ask my housekeeper to stay late and feed the monsters.”

“It would be great if you could do that,” he said honestly.

“See you at six then. You’re not in trouble are you? Tax fraud? Embezzlement?”

“Thank you for your faith in me,” he said, smiling ruefully.

“You never know. Crazier things have happened.”

“Not crazier than what did happen. See you later. And Penny, thank you.”

“No problem. See you at six.”

He had three hours to wait until he saw her, and half an hour later Jane scanned Marguerite’s letters to him, and he sat at his desk all afternoon, reading them, as tears streamed down his cheeks. Knowing all he did now, it seemed a tragedy to him that Marguerite had been robbed of her child. Even more so for her than for his mother, who had no idea what she’d missed. Marguerite knew exactly what she’d lost and mourned it all her life.

The firm Penny worked at had an impressive name and a big reputation, and she had a handsome office. She had been a full partner for several years, and when Phillip walked into her office, she got up to hug him. She was a good-looking redhead, with a great figure, and a husband who was crazy about her.

She sat back at her desk after hugging him, and he took a seat across from her and told her the whole story. His mother’s secret illegitimate birth, her grandparents claiming her as their own, with a birth certificate that had been doctored and paid for, and falsified at birth that her grandmother was her mother, their “disappearing” their oldest daughter and keeping Valerie from her, and then the coincidence of his doing the appraisal on Marguerite’s intestate estate, his mother’s guesswork, and the information the old nanny had provided her, which appeared to be accurate but was unofficial. He told her about Marguerite’s letters too, which confirmed it all in depth and her own words.

“So what do we do now, to establish my mother as her mother’s rightful heir?” Penny thought about it for a moment, and jotted some notes on a pad, as she had done during his whole astonishing recital. But as an attorney, nothing surprised her anymore. She had heard far stranger stories, although Phillip’s was remarkable.

“First, we send someone to get a statement from the nanny. At ninety-four, we don’t want to dilly-dally. If she dies in her sleep tonight, the story, and the corroboration, dies with her. I’ll try to get someone up there tomorrow. Do you think she’d be willing?”

“As I remember her, she’s pretty chatty. Also, she wanted my mother to know the story. I don’t know why she didn’t tell her sooner. But at least she did now. If I hadn’t done that appraisal, my mother would never have seen those photographs, and would probably never have found out who her mother was, or that our grandmother wasn’t really her mother.” The story was so amazing, it shocked them both.

“Fate moves in strange ways,” Penny said, and firmly believed it. “My next suggestion may not be something your mother wants to do, but it will simplify the whole story. I want her to get a DNA test. We’ll need an order to exhume her mother’s body, my aunt and your grandmother, I guess,” she said, considering it. “We have to get the court’s approval for that. And I don’t see why they would balk at it, as long as we’re willing to pay costs, which I assume we are.” He nodded confirmation. “And if it’s a match, it’s pretty straightforward. The court would then confirm your mother as the rightful heir, and what she does with the property after that is up to her. It takes six weeks to get the results of the DNA, and if it’s a positive match, it’s a done deal.”

“What about your mother? Would she be a direct heir too, as Marguerite’s sister?” Penny thought about it for a moment, and knew how unpredictable people were when estates were involved, but she thought she knew her mother better than that, and her financial circumstances. Penny’s father had left her a very substantial fortune, and his parents had established a sizable trust for Penny. There was no need for the two women to fight over the money.

“She could certainly make a claim on the estate,” Penny admitted, “but I think we should leave that up to the sisters. Let them work it out and come to an agreement. My guess is my mom won’t want it, and will be happy for your mother, and figure she deserves it, particularly after they cheated her out of her rightful mother. Let’s see what our moms work out between them over that. Is the jewelry worth a great deal?”

“According to our estimate, twenty to thirty million, before estate taxes of course, which will cut that amount in half.” But it was still an impressive amount. Penny whistled.

“That’s a nice chunk of change.” It could leave Valerie with ten to fifteen million dollars after taxes. She’d be set for life, even more so than with her late husband’s insurance. “This really is an amazing story. It feels like the hand of destiny is on this one. One forgets that good things do happen to good people, not just bad ones. This would be nice for your mom.”

“Yes, it would,” Phillip agreed, and for him one day, but he wasn’t thinking about that.

“Well, let’s get started. I’ll send someone up to see the old nanny tomorrow. Shoot me an email with her details. You ask your mom about the DNA test, and have her call me, and I’ll prepare an order to exhume Marguerite’s body. It’s all less complicated than it sounds. And if there’s no opposition to her being the rightful heir, there’s no problem.” At least the end of the story would be simpler and happier than the beginning, and hopefully with a good result for his mother, which was some consolation, although the jewelry, and proceeds from it, were no substitute for a mother.

It was seven-thirty when Phillip left his cousin’s office, and he called his mother as soon as he got home. She was painting. He told her what Penny had said, and she rapidly agreed to the DNA test, and gave him Fiona’s address at the nursing home in New Hampshire, and said she’d call and warn her that someone would be coming to take a statement from her. When Valerie called Fiona, she said she would be happy to tell the story to the investigator when he arrived.

Valerie was excited now to get the result of the DNA test. She was planning to call her doctor about it the next day. She seemed to have a deep visceral need now to prove that Marguerite had been her mother, which no one was denying. At least not now, not anymore. But she wanted to confirm it officially, as though to prove to herself that she’d had a mother who loved her after all.

Finally, Valerie called Winnie. She just wanted to let her know what she was doing. Winnie listened carefully to what Valerie told her, and sounded somewhat jangled when she responded.

“It’s all so messy,” she said, sounding unhappy. “Exhuming bodies, DNA tests. I wish we could just let it lie.” But then Marguerite’s estate would go to the state, which seemed wrong to her too. But she hated all the mess, and facing the reality that her parents had been liars. She wasn’t angry at Valerie anymore, she just wished that none of it had ever happened, or they hadn’t found out. She was a little annoyed at Fiona for telling Valerie the story. Winnie had preferred to be an ostrich all her life. And so had her parents. And it was painful for Winnie to admit they were liars.