Brilliant (6 page)

T  E  N

I called the office to see what was going on.

“Tina has called a press conference for three o’clock,” our lawyer, David de Menuil, said.

“I’ll tell Owen when I see him, but I don’t think we’ll be back by then.”

“Don’t worry about it. If she says anything worth responding to, I’ll handle it.”

“Poor girl. I think she really does love him—she’s so dependent on him.”

“I think she’s got Owen confused with her father. She needs to grow up. I’ll let you know if anything develops.”

I placed a few more calls, covered all the bases, then fiddled around with Owen’s calendars for a few minutes. They were complicated. Every company had a different color ink: Panther Automobiles was burgundy, which came out of the printer looking more like dried blood. Ballantine’s was green, signaling hope, I hoped. The schedule was always so jammed with meetings it looked as though a child had scribbled all over the page with seven different colors of crayon.

Then, with a few quiet moments facing me, I decided to see what was what.

“Call me if you need me,” I told Michael, who was leaning against the car smoking and listening to music through his headset. “And do me a favor, pick up your cigarette butts. This is Carstairs—not Asbury—Park.”

The entrance of Carstairs Manor was laid out predictably, and smelled predictably old and damp. A small, severe foyer, almost like a church lobby, was followed by a slightly larger, equally severe room where a worn limestone staircase curved upward into the turret off to the left. Beyond lay a cavernous reception hall, which had an ancient and massive, smoke-marked, fireplace. The floor was stone blocks, worn smooth by centuries of use. This was the original great hall of the lodge, and it was easy to envision drunken lords with grease-stained leather jerkins, bad teeth (if they were lucky enough to have any teeth left at all), and dirty, food-packed beards, home from a day of stag or wild boar hunting, slouching around the fire and gnawing on bones while the womenfolk in their big aprons, wooden shoes, caps tied tightly beneath their sagging chins, silently refilled their tankards and tried not to arouse the dozing, ill-tempered dogs.

In spite of Lady Melody’s feminine touches, such as three golden harps on the hearth, chintz-covered furniture, and the world’s largest private collection of Rubens paintings, the room was too big, too cold, and too ill suited to life in the twenty-first century. Its only real function was as a conduit to the dining room, a cheerful eighteenth-century addition with mullioned windows and gleaming heaps of silver, and the library opposite, where the meeting was taking place behind closed doors. There was no noise, except for a phone ringing far away that was quickly answered.

I checked my watch and slipped into the shadows of the cavelike passageway beneath the stairs, confident what I was looking for lay behind one of the three heavy, oak doors, each a masterpiece of seventeenth-century hand carving. The first turned out to be a closet, jam-packed with coats and rubber boots.

The second, which I had to wrench open, hid a winding back staircase, probably one of six or seven in a house this old, intended for the servants. It smelled of mildew and damp plaster as though it hadn’t been used for centuries. I stepped in and closed the door behind me. It was pitch-black, not a hint of light anywhere. I always carry a tiny squeeze light in my pocket—you never know when you’ll need a little pinprick of light to help you get your key in the lock late at night. Or crack a recalcitrant safe. I began a careful ascent. The wall felt chilly and moist beneath my fingers, the silence as absolute as a tomb. Even with the little beam, I couldn’t see more than the next step, but finally, a small band of light from beneath a door illuminated a landing at the second floor. I leaned against the wall, gasping for breath. I was giddy with excitement, and my heart was pounding so hard it was all I could hear. I shouldn’t be doing this. I should have gone into the kitchen and asked where the powder room was, but the thought of seeing Lady Melody’s bedroom drew me like a magnet.

Thanks to fan magazines, I knew everything there was to know about her. She did all her writing in her bed, leaning against dozens of lace-trimmed bolsters and pillows. I’d seen hundreds of pictures of her in newspapers and magazines, and read how every morning of her life, before she went to work, she fixed her hair and her makeup and put on jewelry from her extensive collection. She chooses the jewelry based on the character she’s working on that day. She sits there in bed, fingers and wrists dripping with gems, bed jacket fluffed around her (according to an article in
Woman’s Review
, she has almost a thousand bed jackets) while she writes long-hand on a lap desk.

All right, Kick, I told myself, if you’re going to do it, do it. My pulse had returned to normal. I took a breath and put my hand on the cold brass doorknob and turned. It made only the quietest, well-oiled click. I pushed the door open an imperceptible fraction and checked my watch—I’d been gone for less than two minutes. There was no noise in the hallway. No sound of cleaning or dusting. I opened the door farther and poked my head out and looked around. Because of an article in the Sunday
London Times Magazine
, I knew Lady Melody’s bedroom was the one with the open double doors at the top of the stairs. It would be a good-sized room with a rounded wall of windows that opened onto the park. Sunlight streamed out invitingly.

I listened again, more acutely this time, still no sounds. I stepped into the hallway, leaving the door slightly ajar, and dashed across to the inner sanctum.

Her bed, a golden boat with a pink satin canopy, was unmade. It was said to have been Marie Antoinette’s, but if you’d been in the auction business as long as I have, you’d soon discover that if everything that people claimed had been Marie Antoinette’s had been, she would have needed ten palaces the size of Versailles to house it all. The delicate antique coverlet and down puff were tossed aside, half-on and half-off the bed. All those famous pillows? Nowhere to be seen. In the middle of the bed, on top of the morning papers, next to an open laptop computer that appeared to be on-line to CNN-FN, sat a breakfast tray with dried-out scrambled eggs and toast crumbs, which were being consumed by a fat gray cat who scarcely gave me a look before he continued his leisurely breakfast. A dinner tray stuck out from under the bed. The tail of another cat twitched the bed-skirt. The room had an uncomfortable, cat-urine-tinged, peach-air-freshener smell. One of the mullioned windows in that big bowed nook needed opening.

Books and magazines littered the floor. Mail-order catalogues with folded-down pages were all over the place. Along one wall, twenty or thirty postal service boxes overflowed with unopened fan mail, and I felt a sting of humiliation for those whose gushing missives had been treated so contemptuously. There were sterling silver champagne buckets on almost every table, maybe eight or ten of them, each with a bottle of Dom Pérignon floating in melted ice. Most of the bottles had been opened and used flutes sat here and there. But the real corker, the pièce de résistance, was above the fireplace: an enormous (and very famous) Gainesborough portrait of a young woman in a pink dress smiled placidly over the mess. Incredibly, someone, maybe it was Lady Melody herself after a few belts of champagne, had painted a huge black mustache on the girl. I almost gasped out loud. It was one of the most insolent things I’d ever seen. Someone had been having one hell of a party.

E  L  E  V  E  N

I moved quickly into her dressing room. It was dirty and smelled of stale perfume. I wasn’t a bit surprised to find the real-life Lady Melody bore little resemblance to the public one. She’d done a bad thing, disavowing her daughter all those years ago, and the guilt had rotted her from the inside out. If my long-abandoned son or daughter walked into my life today, a herd of wild horses couldn’t trample my joy at meeting and showing off him or her. But then, who am I to throw stones or cast aspersions? Me, the Queen of the Double Life.

Dozens of scarves—everything from large silk Hermès squares to cotton pocket handkerchiefs to fringed shawls—lay piled and draped about. Atomizers, powder puffs, hair ornaments, tons of makeup, piles of jewelry, coins, and stacks of pound notes in every denomination covered the surface of the dressing table. I would have liked to have had that table in my dressing room—it had a pink tulle skirt covered with sparkles and faced an antique gilt-framed mirror bolted to the wall by little flower-shaped mirrors. Yellow sticky notes were pasted everywhere. I went over and looked more closely.

Although I’m a jewelry expert, it wouldn’t take one to see that some of Lady Carstairs’s pieces were much better than others. I glanced at my watch: four minutes gone. I sifted rapidly through the assortment, then spotted a diamond bracelet, approximately one and a half inches wide, set with maybe sixty stones. I dug my jeweler’s glass out of my pocket. On cursory study, the diamonds looked to be of stunning color and quality, possibly D but most probably E or F, there were so many of them, approximately two carats each.

I recognized the piece instantly as the one the beautiful spy, Lucinda, had worn to the ball to identify herself in
Kiss the Stranger
, five or six novels ago. It was modeled on the bracelet Queen Victoria had made by Garrard Crown Jewelers in 1850 to wear with the King George III Fringe Tiara. More recently, both the bracelet and tiara had been owned by the Queen Mother, who had loaned them out to family princesses to wear at their weddings. The pieces are well-known and easily recognizable to people who pay attention to such things. Such as I. This bracelet seemed to be a fairly good copy.

The tiara and the bracelet were first seen together in 1851 in Winterhalter’s painting,
The First of May
, in which a dewy Queen Victoria has her arm around her seventh child (out of a total of nine), baby Prince Arthur, later the duke of Connaught, while his godfather, the duke of Wellington, who has his white hair brushed forward to cover his balding head, presents him with a gold box studded with dime-sized emeralds and rubies. Victoria, who was thirty-two at the time of the painting, has on a pink-and-silver skirt I’d kill for. Baby Prince Arthur is balanced on the green velvet arm of a sofa, a spray of lilies of the valley clutched in his little fist, while his father, the long-suffering Prince Albert, stands behind them. He seems preoccupied, or to be talking to someone offstage. He looks like he’s late for a meeting.

Depending on the stones in Lady Melody’s replica, the breakdown value of the piece could be around 3 million dollars.

I slipped it into my bra.

A cushion-cut diamond engagement-type ring—the model for all the engagement rings in all Lady Melody’s books—sat in a little bone china dish, among various and sundry other junk. It was maybe seven carats and on quick examination appeared to be a D Colorless Flawless stone. Remarkable fire. It looked alive. Just the way she’d described it.

It joined the bracelet in my mighty bosom.

Was that a noise? I froze and stood still as a statue to listen. No. It was nothing. Six minutes gone. I’d better get going.

But an art deco diamond-and-sapphire Cartier watch caught my eye. I picked it up and was trying to untangle a cheap, clip earring from its thin platinum chain, when voices entered the bedroom. I laid the piece back on the dressing table, exactly where it had been, just in case anyone was keeping track, which I seriously doubted, and stepped into the darkness of the sour closet.

Through a crack in the door, I watched two maids, one young, one old, both dressed in old-fashioned gray cotton uniforms with white aprons and caps, bustle into Lady Melody’s bedroom.

“I don’t see how she can live like this,” the girl said. She placed the computer gently on the bed table and gathered up the newspapers, while the other woman lifted the cat off the pillows and set him on the floor, stacked up the breakfast and dinner trays and put them in the hall, then returned to help make the bed.

“It’s what makes her happy. It’s not our place to judge.”

“Do you think she’d mind if I just arranged a couple of those stacks?”

“I’m not going to tell you again, Jane. Don’t touch them,” the woman snapped. “She knows exactly where everything is. Now go replace the towels and bring her laundry hamper while I refill the ice buckets and we’re done.”

“How much of that bubbly do you think she drinks a day?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

“Well, I think she drinks three or four whole bottles. Sometimes five. Don’t you think that’s a little strange?” The girl pressed. “Drinking by yourself all day?”

“Jane.”

The warning tone certainly was clear enough to me. Come on, Jane, I thought, get with the program here. Get your stuff done and get out.

“Yes, ma’am.”

The girl passed within two inches of me—close enough for me to smell her Jean Naté splash, which I’m allergic to. I squeezed my eyes closed and held my nose, praying I wouldn’t sneeze. She took her time picking the wet towels up off the floor and stuffing them in the hamper. She took fresh ones from the shelf, hung them over the gold-plated racks. She draped one of the scarves around her shoulders and pirouetted to admire herself in the mirror, and then sorted through the heaps on the dressing table, inches from where I hid, until she found a pair of matching fake diamond drop earrings that she held up to her ears and admired, giving herself a coy smile in the mirror. My sneeze was building steam. Damn her and her Jean Naté. I pinched my nostrils closed as tightly as I could.

“What are you doing in there?” the older maid called. “Come on. We have work to do.”

“Coming, ma’am.” The girl put the earrings back quickly, picked up her hamper, and was gone.

“What do you think you’re doing in that scarf?”

“Oh, sorry, ma’am.” She darted in and threw it on the stool just as the sneeze erupted behind my flat hand and pinched nose and almost exploded my eardrums. The diamond ring and bracelet were burning holes in my skin.