Property of a Noblewoman by Danielle Steel Page A

but moved to Italy and married an Italian count? It would have been just like our parents to disapprove of it, and pretend she had died. Wouldn’t that be amazing?” Valerie said thoughtfully, turning the idea around in her mind, as her older sister looked at her, horrified by what she was saying.
    “Are you insane? Mother never got over her death. She mourned Marguerite, our Marguerite, our sister who died, for the rest of her life. She couldn’t even bear to see a photograph of her, she was so heartbroken, and Daddy forbade us to talk about her.” Valerie remembered it too.
    “She might have been just as heartbroken over her marrying an Italian count. Can you see our parents ever accepting that?” And Valerie had thought it odd that when their mother died, they had found not a single picture of their older sister among their mother’s things. Valerie had always assumed that photographs of her had been put away, but if they were, they had never found them. They had no photographs of their older sister, even as a child, although Winnie claimed she remembered what she looked like, which Valerie seriously doubted. And the idea she had just come up with was fascinating to her, but Winnie looked at her in strong disapproval.
    “Are you trying to convince me or yourself that you’re an heir to that jewelry worth millions that Christie’s is selling? Are you that desperate for money? I thought you still had most of Lawrence’s insurance,” although it certainly wasn’t worth as much as the jewelry that was going to be auctioned. Valerie looked at her as though that was ridiculous, and not simply rude.
    “Of course not. I’m not interested in the money. But the story is intriguing. What was Marguerite’s middle name?”
    “I’m not sure,” Winnie said fiercely, “Mother and Daddy never talked about it.”
    “Was it Wallace? I think that’s the name Phillip mentioned when he asked me.”
    “I’ve never heard that name, and I think you’re getting senile,” Winnie said angrily. She suddenly reminded Valerie more than ever of their mother. There had always been subjects they weren’t allowed to ask about or mention, and their older sister was one of them. They’d been told all the years that they were growing up that their older sister’s death at nineteen was a tragedy that their mother had never recovered from, and they weren’t allowed to bring it up, or anything relating to her. Eventually, it was as though she had never existed. And she’d been so much older than they were that they never knew her. It was as though Marguerite had been their real child, and Winnie and Valerie were the interlopers, unwelcome visitors in their parents’ house, and Valerie even more so than Winnie, since she had been so different from them all her life, just as she was from Winnie now. “How dare you come up with a theory like that, to besmirch our sister’s memory, and dishonor our parents? They were kind, good, loving people, no matter what you choose to say about them now.”
    “I don’t know who your parents were,” Valerie said coolly, looking straight at her. “My parents had ice in their veins, and stone hearts, Dad and particularly our mother, and you know it. She liked you better because you were more like her. You even look like her. But she couldn’t stand me, and you know that too. Dad even apologized to me for it before he died, and said she’d had a hard time ‘accepting’ me, because she was so much older when I was born, which is a poor excuse for the way she treated me. I was forty when Phillip was born, and it was the happiest day of my life, and still is.”
    “Mother was older, and she went through a difficult change of life. She was probably suffering from some form of depression,” Winnie said, always willing to make excuses for her, which Valerie had stopped doing years before. Their mother was a mean woman, and had been a terrible mother, to Valerie certainly, and she was only