Power of a Woman (3 page)

Certainly it would never decrease in value; it could only increase, in fact; and she knew she would have no problem selling it whenever she 24 / Barbara Taylor Bradford

wished to do so. There were many rich men and women in the world who coveted the grand stones, some of whom were already her clients, and there would always be buyers for this most spectacular of diamonds. After all, in the business it was now considered to be a
historic
stone.

Owning the White Empress would be the crown-ing glory of Jardine’s. This thought pleased her. She had started the American company eight years earlier, and although she had done so with Bruce Jardine’s consent, his accord had been grudgingly given. Even today he barely acknowledged its existence.

The store on Fifth Avenue was an enormous success and had been from the very first day it opened.

And so Stevie always felt justified in pushing for it, vindicated, in a sense, because the annual earnings were enormous, the profits burgeoning on a yearly basis.

When she had told her father-in-law that she wanted to take Jardine’s, the Crown Jewellers of London, to New York’s Fifth Avenue, he had blanched, gaping at her in astonishment. Naturally, he had balked at the idea. Right from the beginning he had predicted nothing but failure. She had had to use a great deal of charm and persuasiveness to get him finally to agree.

Stevie had realized immediately that he fought the idea of her moving to New York because he wanted to keep her by his side at the London store. Later, he had admitted that this was

Power of a Woman / 25

indeed the case. Put simply, he could no longer do without her. As he grew older, he was becoming more and more dependent on her at work.

When he had stopped ranting at her and calmed down, Stevie had pointed out that he had a grandson who was almost twenty-two, and very capable of taking her place at his side. A young man who couldn’t wait to step into her shoes, in point of fact.

“Under your supervision, Nigel will do a fine job,”

she had reassured her father-in-law. Bruce knew as well as she that this was the truth, but he would not admit it, and once more he scotched the idea of opening a store in New York. Stevie had bided her time, worked on him in a gentle but persistent manner, and never lost a chance to point out to him how profitable the American branch could be.

“But I’ll miss you, Stephanie,” Bruce had murmured one afternoon, weeks after she had first presented her plans for Jardine’s of New York. Those few muttered words had told her that however reluctant he was to do it, he was, nonetheless, going to give her his support. This he did, although he never ceased to remind her that it was against his better judgment.

That had happened in 1987; one year later, in 1988, the Fifth Avenue store had opened its doors.

And for the first time in more than twenty years she had found herself living in the city where she had been born. She had moved to London at the 26 / Barbara Taylor Bradford

age of fourteen, after her mother had married Derek Rayner. Even though she had visited New York, it was a foreign city to her. Within the short space of a few weeks, Manhattan was under her skin, and she felt comfortable, at home.

Stevie rose and walked over to the hearth, where she threw another log onto the fire, and then sat in a chair, leaned back, and closed her eyes. It seemed to her that her mind was full of the past today, perhaps because it was November the twenty-seventh.

A very special date in her memory. Her wedding day. If Ralph Jardine had lived, this would have been their thirtieth anniversary.

She had never remarried. Some of her friends thought this was odd, but she didn’t, no, not at all.

It was really very simple. She had never met anyone she cared about enough to marry. No, that was not strictly true, she corrected herself. After Ralph’s death she
had
loved another man once, for a brief time, long ago. Marriage had never come into play, at least not from his standpoint, but it had from hers. She knew she would have married him in a flash if he had asked her. He never had. It wasn’t meant to be, she told herself, as she had done over and over again for years. Some things just weren’t meant to happen; and, anyway, you couldn’t have everything in life.

But we believe we can when we’re young, she suddenly thought. When we’re young we’re so certain of our invincibility, our immortality.

Power of a Woman / 27

We’re full of
ourselves
, blown up with ourselves, our power, our strength. We’re just so
sure
of it all, so
sure
we can mold life to our will, make it bend whichever way we want. But we can’t, that’s not the way it is. Life gets at us all in one way or another. It mangles us, brings us down, causes us so much pain. It’s the great leveler, the ultimate equalizer.

Still, my life’s not been so bad, she reminded herself, looking at the positives, as she always did.

Her children had turned out relatively well; at least, none of them was drug addicted or soaked in alco-hol. And she had built herself a career out of nothing. After all, she had not been gifted with some sort of creative talent to use as a springboard into success. All she had was a practical nature, a steady, levelheaded temperament, and a good head for figures and business, as it had turned out.

She had once said this to André. “But you also know the diamonds,
chérie
. Ralph taught you almost everything he knew about the stones,” the French jeweler had exclaimed, looking at her in surprise.

Vaguely, she heard André’s voice coming to her from a long distance, from the past. “You have a good idea, Stephanie. Go to Bruce. You will see; he will listen to you. The argument you have is a strong one.
Valid
. Indeed, it is a necessity.”

Her thoughts leapt backward in time, back to the year 1976, and in her mind’s eye she could see Bruce Jardine as he had been then. Tall, dark, 28 / Barbara Taylor Bradford

good-looking in a saturnine way. But as stubborn and rigid as always. An unbending man.

How well she remembered his scornful expression, his mirthless laugh when she had told him she wanted to work. And at Jardine’s, at that.

Before he could answer her, she added in a quiet voice that she wanted him to train her to run the company.

He had stared at her speechlessly, disbelievingly, all those years ago, and then he had asked her if she had taken leave of her senses.

Twenty years ago
. Yet sometimes it seemed like only yesterday. She had been a young widow of twenty-six that summer; it was exactly three years after Ralph’s bungled operation for an appendicitis.

Her rage about this shocking tragedy had dissipated with the passing of time, and yet, when she least expected it, she would feel a spurt of anger and dismay about her husband’s unnecessary death.

As it turned out, Ralph had not had appendicitis at all, but a perforated peptic ulcer. The surgeon had not recognized the trouble on the operating table. He had performed the appendectomy, but had not made a second incision to reach and repair the perforation. Peritonitis had advanced to cause the sepsis that had killed Ralph. Everyone knew it was a death that should never have happened.

With his son Ralph gone so unexpectedly, Bruce was now the only Jardine in the family busi-Power of a Woman / 29

ness. His older brother, Malcolm, had retired several years earlier because of ill health, and Bruce was suddenly carrying the burden of Jardine’s entirely alone.

And then, without any warning, he was struck down with a heart attack in February 1976; when he finally recovered, he was debilitated, and pan-icked.

Stevie had instantly recognized the latter, and had understood the reason for his nervousness. Young though she was at the time, she had a great deal of insight into people, knew what made them tick, what motivated them to do the things they did. In a sudden flash, and with genuine clarity of vision, she realized what she must do, what the solution to Bruce’s problem was.

She was the solution
.

And so she had taken André’s advice and gone to see her father-in-law on a warm Thursday afternoon in July, arriving at his office in the Bond Street store unannounced. He had been startled and put out by her unprecedented visit, but being a gentleman of the old school, and courteous, he had invited her into his inner sanctum.

“Teach me the business, train me,” she had said earnestly. “I’m the only Jardine you have right now.

Nigel and the twins are still little boys. What will happen to the company if you have another heart attack? Or get sick? Or die?”

Startled by the bluntness of her words, he had looked affronted. And he had stared at her 30 / Barbara Taylor Bradford

askance, for a moment at a loss for words in the face of her breathtaking directness.

Swiftly she had gone on to explain. “Look, nobody wants to think of his own mortality, or think about dying, I know that. But
you
have to, you
must
. Ralph always said you were the most intelligent man he knew. He told me you were extremely clever, a genius really, and clearheaded. So think clearly now.

Think
unemotionally
. You need someone you can trust, a person who could run the company if ever you were incapacitated. And it must be someone who has your grandsons’ interests at heart. Since I’m their mother, that’s me. Obviously. You need
me
. Anyway, face up to it, I’m the only Jardine available.”

Bruce Jardine had seen the rightness of her words.

She
was
the only adult Jardine he could turn to, and therefore she was the only solution to his very real dilemma. Also, her sincerity, eagerness, and enthusiasm had convinced him that she really did want to work for him and learn the business. And so he had taken her on as his junior assistant, hoping she would not disappoint him.

“You’ve got to love this business if you’re going to be a success at it,” he would tell her repeatedly during the first years she worked at Jardine’s, and Stevie quickly discovered she did love it, every facet of it.

She loved the diamonds particularly, and the other gems and the creative side of the jewelry business. Yet it was the intricacies of the financial Power of a Woman / 31

and corporate side that fascinated her. Within the first six months of working at Jardine’s, she displayed a talent for figures plus business acumen as well. Bruce had been pleasantly surprised.

It was only natural that she became indispensable to her father-in-law. Bruce Jardine, once her deadly enemy, eventually came around to making his peace with her. He recognized her considerable attributes, her talent, her genuine ability, and her willingness to work hard for long hours. As the months passed, he came to respect her. And he depended on her more and more.

One day, after she had been at Jardine’s for five years, the animosity and contentiousness she had come to expect simply ceased to exist.

Alfreda never became one of her admirers. On the other hand, Bruce’s wife had apparently realized the validity of her husband’s moves; she well understood that Stevie was the one person they could trust as the mother of their grandchildren, their heirs.

And so she had kept a civil tongue in her head and stayed out of her daughter-in-law’s way. Alfreda had died in 1982, almost fifteen years ago, but right up to the day of her death she had disliked Stevie, had never shown her any affection or made even the smallest friendly gesture.

Rising, walking back to the desk, Stevie bent forward, picked up her wedding photograph, and peered at it intently for a moment or two. How young she and Ralph had looked. But then, they 32 / Barbara Taylor Bradford

had been young, she most especially. I was just a little girl, only sixteen, she thought. A child. Why, I was younger than Chloe is now.

Oh, Ralph, who would have believed it? Believed that your father would take me into the business?

Or that one day I would be head of Jardine’s on both sides of the Atlantic? She could not help thinking that life, the great leveler, was also so very unpredictable. I couldn’t have accomplished all that I have without friends, good friends, and most especially André Birron. She knew that André had taught her as much as Bruce ever had about the jewelry business. He had been her mentor in certain ways, and a genuine friend, almost like a father.

André had always given her the best advice, the soundest. When she was twenty-seven, she fell in love again, after four years of widowhood. She discovered she was pregnant a year later, and it was to André she had turned. She had flown to Paris to see him, to confide in him, although, being wary by nature, she had done so only to a degree. She had merely alluded to the identity of her lover, the father of her unborn child. Even before she had finished her sentence, André had held up his hand as if in warning.

“Do not tell me who he is. I do not want to know.

Remember this, my Stephanie. Confide a secret to one person and it is a secret no longer,” the sage old Frenchman had cautioned.

And so she had kept her own counsel always, Power of a Woman / 33

for this was her natural inclination. No one had ever known who her lover had been, or even tried to guess the man’s real identity. Not even Chloe knew who her father was.

Chloe
. Stevie’s expression changed, became softer as she thought of her eighteen-year-old daughter.

Now
she
was a D-flawless diamond. Quite perfect.

Stevie suddenly broke into a chuckle. Well, not really. Her daughter was only almost perfect, thank goodness. No one wanted a paragon of virtue. They were no fun, and usually too good to be true.

Chloe would be arriving later that afternoon, hopefully in time for dinner, and they would enjoy a cozy evening together. Tomorrow her mother and stepfather would be driving up from Manhattan to spend Thanksgiving Day with them, and the rest of the holiday weekend. She was looking forward to it, just as she knew Chloe was.

Derek Rayner had been knighted by the queen some years before, and he and her mother were now Sir Derek and Lady Rayner. As had been predicted long ago, he was now the greatest classical actor on the English stage, and at sixty-eight a living legend.