She wondered what had happened to the little girl, who, judging by the dates on the back of the pictures, would be an old woman now as well. It was all a piece of history from the distant past, and it was unlikely that any of the people in the images were still alive.
Jane gently closed the folder with the photographs, as Hal handed her the next one, with assorted documents in it. There were several expired passports, which showed that Marguerite was a U.S. citizen, born in New York in 1924, and the stamps in her passport indicated that she had left the States, and entered Portugal, arriving by ship in Lisbon in 1942, at eighteen. Portugal was a neutral country, and the subsequent stamps in her passport showed that she traveled to England the day after she arrived in Portugal. And she had only returned to the States for a few weeks in 1949, seven years later. Further stamps in her passport showed that six weeks after she arrived in England in 1942, she had gone to Rome, with a “special visa.” Jane couldn’t help thinking that the count must have pulled some very high-up strings, or paid someone handsomely, to get his bride into Italy with the war on. There were Italian passports in the folder as well, and the first one was dated December 1942, and showed her name as di San Pignelli, so they were married by then, three months after she’d arrived in Europe, and she had acquired Italian citizenship with the marriage.
She came back into the States in 1960 on a U.S. passport that had been renewed at the American embassy in Rome. It was her first visit back to the States since her three-week trip in 1949 – and in 1960, she only stayed for days, not weeks. The passport showed no trips to the U.S. after that, until she moved to New York in 1994, when she was seventy years old. All her American passports had been renewed at the U.S. embassy in Rome. And she seemed to use her Italian one when traveling around Europe. She clearly had dual citizenship, and perhaps maintained her American one out of sentiment, since she had lived in Italy in the end for fifty-two years, the greater part of her lifetime, and all of her adult life till then. And she had not been to the States at all for thirty-four years, when she moved back for good in 1994.
Jane observed bank statements in the folder too, a record of her Social Security number, the rental papers for the safe deposit box, and a receipt for two rings she had sold in 1995 for four hundred thousand dollars. But nowhere among her papers could Jane find a will. There was nothing that referred to any heirs or next of kin, or anyone in fact. They found very little information in the folder. And other than that, there were only the two thick bundles of letters, written in fading ink, tied with a pale blue ribbon on one, and a pink one on the other. In one neatly tied stack, the letters were written in Italian, on heavy yellowed stationery, in brown ink, in an elegant handwriting that looked like a man’s, and were written by her husband, Jane assumed. The second set of letters seemed to be written by a woman and were in English. Jane glanced at a few of them without untying the ribbon and saw that many of them began with “My Darling Angel.” They seemed to be simple and direct outpourings of love, and were signed with the initial M. There was no will there. And the notary duly noted the two bundles of letters on her own inventory, as did Jane.
And then Jane carefully took out the twenty-two leather boxes, all of which looked like jeweler’s boxes, and one by one, she opened them, and her eyes grew wide as she saw their contents.
In the first box, she found a large rectangular emerald ring in an emerald cut. Jane didn’t know enough about jewelry to guess at its carat weight, but it was large, and the red leather box was marked “Cartier” in gold on the inside. She would have been tempted to try it on, but didn’t want Hal to think her unprofessional. So she wrote down the description, closed the box, and moved it to the other side of the desk, so as not to confuse it with the others.
The next box yielded a large oval ruby ring with a triangular white diamond on either side, again from Cartier. And the ruby was a deep, almost bloodlike color. It was a magnificent piece. And in the third box was an enormous diamond ring, again with a rectangular emerald-cut stone, like the emerald. It was absolutely dazzling and this time Jane gasped. She had never seen a diamond so large, and she looked up at Hal Baker in astonishment.
“I didn’t know diamonds came that size,” she said in awe, and he smiled.
“Neither did I, until I saw that one.” He hesitated and then smiled more broadly. “I won’t tell if you try it on. You might never get the chance again.” Feeling like a naughty child, she did as he suggested and slipped it on. It covered her finger to the joint and was absolutely spectacular. Jane was mesmerized by it, and could hardly bring herself to take it off.
“Wow,” she said unceremoniously, and all three of them laughed to relieve the tension in the room. It was a strange and slightly eerie experience going through this woman’s things, and it seemed so unusual that a woman with such valuable possessions had no one to leave them to, or had failed to do so, and never reclaimed them herself, to keep, wear, or sell. Jane couldn’t bear the thought of things as beautiful as this being sold for the benefit of the state, and not going to someone who would appreciate them, or had cared about her. This was just too sad.
The next box yielded an emerald and diamond brooch in a handsome design by an Italian jeweler. There was an invisibly set sapphire necklace from Van Cleef and Arpels, with matching earrings in a separate box, and an incredibly beautiful diamond bracelet that looked like lace. As she opened box after box, Jane found herself staring at one piece of jewelry more beautiful than another, and some of it, particularly the rings, set with very large stones. And there was a large round yellow diamond set in a ring by Cartier in the last box. It looked like a headlight, as Jane sat staring at the dazzling array in the now-open boxes. Hal Baker had said that Marguerite had some nice jewelry that might be of considerable value, but Jane had expected nothing like this. She hadn’t seen anything of its kind since she’d gone to London with her parents at sixteen, and went to the Tower of London to see an exhibit of the queen’s jewels. And some of these were prettier and more impressive than the queen’s. Countess Marguerite di San Pignelli had owned some truly spectacular jewelry, and Jane could easily guess that what she had before her, in the elegant leather boxes from some of the finest jewelers in Europe, was worth a fortune. She wasn’t quite sure what to do next.