Property of a Noblewoman (4 page)

“Fine, I think,” Jane said, worrying that she might have forgotten to do something official. “She had some beautiful things,” she said softly, thinking of the contents of the jewelry boxes.

“Any sign of a will?”

“No, just photographs and letters, some newspaper clippings of parties and her husband’s obituary, old passports from a long time ago, some irrelevant bank forms, and the jewelry.”

“Anything we can sell?” Harriet asked, sounding official and matter-of-fact. She hadn’t seen the photographs of the beautiful young woman with the dazzling smile and sad eyes.

“I think so.” Jane pressed a button on her phone, and showed her the photographs of Marguerite di San Pignelli’s jewelry, without comment. Harriet was silent for a minute after she finished looking at them, and then stared up at Jane in obvious amazement with wide-open eyes.

“You saw all this stuff today?” Harriet asked her in disbelief, and Jane nodded. “We need to call Christie’s right away to get it into an auction.” She jotted down a note to call Christie’s on a scrap of paper and handed it to Jane, who took it from her, looking worried.

“Am I supposed to call them?”

Harriet nodded, with slight exasperation. “I don’t have time.” Their understaffing problem seemed to have gotten worse lately. “Just call Christie’s and ask them to have someone from the jewelry department meet you at the bank, to have a look. We need an appraisal if any of the heirs shows up. And we’ll need it for the court too.” Jane confirmed to her then, in answer to Harriet’s questions, that the contents of the box were mostly jewelry. There had been no cash, no stock certificates or bonds, and Hal had told her that the funds in her checking account had dwindled to under two thousand dollars at the time of her death. She hadn’t written a check in years. The only money drawn out of her account was the automatic transfers to her nursing home in Queens every month, which she had set up when she moved there. But her jewelry was clearly worth a fortune.

Jane went back to her desk, took off the coat she had worn for Valentine’s Day, and looked up the phone number for Christie’s. When the number came up on her computer, she saw that their offices were at Rockefeller Center. Although by then it was nearly lunchtime, she called the number and asked for the jewelry department when they answered. The phone rang for a long time, and she was about to hang up, when a female voice finally picked up, and Jane asked to speak to someone about an appraisal to submit jewelry items for an upcoming sale, and they put her on hold, while she listened to an endless piece of music. It appeared that there was no one in the department, when a male voice said simply “Lawton” in a flat tone.

Jane explained that she was calling from the surrogate’s court and needed an appraisal for a number of abandoned jewelry items they would be putting up for sale if no heirs showed up. There was a momentary silence, as Phillip Lawton sat staring out the window. He had been assigned to the jewelry department at the venerable auction house for the last two years, and felt like he was trapped. He had a master’s in museum curating, with a specialty in Egyptian art and Impressionist paintings, and had waited forever for a job at the Metropolitan Museum. He had finally given up and taken a job at Christie’s in the art department, and he had found it interesting for the three years he had worked there, until three vacancies came up in jewelry, when the head of the department moved to their London office, and the two people directly under him had quit. Phillip had then been transferred from art to jewelry, in which he had absolutely no interest. They had promised to move him back to the art department eventually, but it hadn’t happened yet. And all his background and training was in art. His father had been a professor of art history at NYU until his death a few years before, and his mother was an artist. He had done an internship at the Uffizi in Florence after college, and had thought about moving to Paris or Rome, but came back to get a master’s in the States instead. He had worked at an important gallery in New York for a while, and went to work at Christie’s at twenty-nine, where he had been now for five years, the last two of them as a hostage in the jewelry department. He had recently promised himself that if they didn’t move him back to the art department in the next six months, he’d quit.

Phillip Lawton objected to jewelry on principle. He thought the people who wore it were frivolous and vain, and he failed to see the beauty of it. Paintings and art in any form touched his soul and filled him with joy. Jewelry never had. To Phillip, only art was beauty – jewelry left him cold.

He sounded bored when he responded to Jane. He expected her call to be another request for a routine appraisal for the court. “Can you bring the pieces in?” he asked, in a disinterested tone. He had done appraisals for the surrogate’s court before, and none of the items had been worthy of auctioning off at Christie’s, with the exception of a minor recent piece that had qualified for their “fine jewels” auction, which hadn’t been an important sale. And he thought it highly unlikely that these would be any different, or even as good. Most of what wound up in surrogate’s court was of no interest to them.

“I’d rather not bring them in,” Jane said honestly, thinking that he sounded as though he thought she was wasting his time, which annoyed her. She was calling him in an official capacity, not asking him for a favor. And she was trying to do her job. “There are twenty-two pieces, and I think they’re too valuable for me to take them around the city.”

“Where are they now?” he asked, still staring out his office window at the skyscrapers across the street. His office felt like prison to him, and his job a life sentence that would never end. He hated coming to work now.

“It’s all in a safe deposit box at the Metropolitan Bank in Murray Hill. Would it be possible for you to meet me there to see the pieces?” Possible, he acknowledged silently, but not very appealing. But it was part of his job to do appraisals, mostly of estates for heirs who didn’t want the old-fashioned jewelry they’d inherited, or greedy women who wanted to cash in on what they’d been given, after a divorce. Among their clients were often jewelers seeking to get rid of unsold pieces, since auction prices were usually somewhere between retail and wholesale, which was appealing to both sellers and buyers. “We need an appraisal,” Jane explained, forcing herself to sound pleasant, “and unless an heir turns up soon, we’ll be putting the items up for auction.”

“I know how it works,” he said brusquely, as Jane silently wished that someone else had taken her call. He didn’t sound agreeable to deal with, or even interested in seeing the pieces. She smiled to herself, thinking that he was in for a surprise.

“Well, can you do it?” She felt as though she’d need an armed guard if she brought Mrs. di San Pignelli’s jewelry to him, and the court would certainly not let her hire one. And she didn’t want the responsibility of transporting all those jewels. So he would have to come to see them at the bank, or she’d call someone else, like Sotheby’s, who were just as good, in spite of Harriet’s preference.

“Yes, I’ll do it,” he said in a bored voice. “How about next Tuesday? Ten
A.M.
? I have to be back at noon for a sale.” He had been trained as an auctioneer by then, and sometimes handled the bidding in minor sales. But he couldn’t imagine that the jewelry the court wanted him to appraise would take that long, if they were small pieces, which he assumed. They always had been in the case of abandoned safe deposit boxes that he’d handled before.

“That will be fine,” Jane said politely, after they agreed to meet at the bank the following week. She thanked him before hanging up, and was relieved he’d been willing to meet her. And then as an afterthought a moment later, she called him back.

“Sorry to bother you again,” she apologized when he sounded busy when he answered. “I took some photographs of the pieces with my phone. Would you want to see them before we meet?” It might give him an idea of what was there, and spark his interest.

“Good idea,” he said, sounding instantly more cheerful. If the pieces were as insignificant as he suspected they would be, he could refer her to a less important auction house, and spare himself the trouble of an appraisal. “Just send them to me.” He gave her his email address. She sent the photos as soon as they hung up again, and pulled out one of the other files Harriet had assigned her to work on. The case was far less interesting and mysterious than Marguerite’s. And Jane was surprised when her phone rang ten minutes later and it was Phillip Lawton at Christie’s. The tone of his voice had completely changed from the first two calls, and he sounded excited, as he questioned Jane intently.

“What was the woman’s name again? Was she well known?”

“I don’t think so. Countess Marguerite di San Pignelli. She was a young American woman who moved to Italy at eighteen, during the war, from what I can deduce from her passports. She married an Italian count and lived there until the nineties. He must have had money, given what’s in the safe deposit box in terms of jewelry. It’s all she had, as far as we know. She was down to her last two thousand dollars when she died. She was ninety-one.” They were all the relevant details.

“If what she had is real, that’s an extraordinary collection of jewelry.” He sounded impressed finally, although the only pieces that had caught his interest in the past two years were jades he had seen at their sales in Hong Kong, which he thought had great romance and mystery to them, and required an expert’s eye, which he was not, to understand them. The standard Western pieces never appealed to him, but even he had to admit that Marguerite di San Pignelli’s jewelry was amazing.

“I have no reason to believe it’s not real, and it’s all in the original boxes,” Jane said simply.

“I can’t wait to see it,” he said, with a tone of awe. Their appointment was five days away, and he was now planning to bring a camera to take better photographs than she had gotten with her cell phone.

“See you on Tuesday,” he said, friendlier than he’d been before, and Jane smiled as she hung up. And as she sat at her desk afterward, she thought wistfully of the beautiful young woman who had moved to Italy and married a count, as in a fairy tale, and all the secrets of her life that had died with her.

When Jane got home that night, John was out, as he had told her he would be. She thought about him with Cara, and his study group, and felt the same unease she always did when he was with her. But there was nothing she could do about it, and he had told her they would work straight through the night on their collective projects. She would have liked to tell him about the jewelry she had seen that day, and her conversation about it with Christie’s. But it would have to wait until he had time and was less distracted. She took a bath and went to bed, still haunted by Marguerite di San Pignelli, the photographs of her and the count, and the jewelry he had given her. Without knowing the details, Jane sensed that it had been a great love story, despite the young woman’s occasionally sad expression in the photographs. It was impossible not to think about who she had been, how the count had come into her life, and the exciting life they must have shared in a more glamorous era. It was hard to imagine a girl of eighteen receiving gifts like the ones Jane had seen. And Jane couldn’t help wondering if the beautiful young woman had been truly happy.

THE NEXT MORNING
John still hadn’t come home when Jane left for work, and since he had warned her, it didn’t surprise her. She knew she’d see him that night when she got home, and hopefully they’d spend some time together over the weekend, just to talk and relax and catch up on what they were doing. She missed their previously easygoing relationship, but felt sure it would return to normal after graduation, although he’d been particularly hard on her in the last few months. She was trying to be patient about it, and not make it worse by complaining.

And once at work, Jane decided to finish her due diligence in the pursuit of Marguerite di San Pignelli’s lawful heirs. In an estate this size, now that the jewelry had surfaced, she wanted to leave no stone unturned, and she decided to go to Marguerite’s last known address to see if someone knew something more about her there, if she had relatives or children. She might have had family who visited her but were unaware of the jewelry.

She consulted a map of Queens, and took the subway there later that morning. She discovered that the address that had appeared on her death certificate was a small nursing home, which was clean but depressing. When she checked with accounting, they confirmed that Mrs. Pignelli’s monthly charges had been paid by automatic transfer from her bank account every month. They were unaware of how little she had left and that she would have run out of money shortly. They referred Jane to patient services, where their records showed that she had had no visitors in the three years she’d been there until her death, seven months before.

“She was a very sweet, kind woman,” the patient services coordinator told Jane. “Her records show that she had dementia when she was admitted. Would you like to speak to one of her nurses?”

“Yes, I’d like that,” Jane said quietly, after confirming again that there was no next of kin listed anywhere on her records. She appeared to have been entirely alone in the world, with no relatives or friends, which they said wasn’t surprising. Many of their patients had no visitors, and no relatives listed, particularly if they were very old and had no children.

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.