August 1997

Abigail Hardy bolted past the cameraman and spit into the sink. “The freaking coffee is cold again,” she barked to whomever was listening—which, under the circumstances, should have been everyone.

“Cut,” the director’s voice groaned across the vast room, the Victorian-appointed, copper-and-brass-shining room. “Let’s break for lunch.”

Slamming her mug against the stainless steel, Abigail snapped around the kitchen-turned-studio. “Kaminski!” she screeched. “Where the hell is Kaminski?”

It had not been a good morning. The script called for shooting the bakery segment of Christmas with Abigail before the afternoon sun scorched the kitchen and wilted the cranberry phyllo puffs. But wide-eyed Paula Padderson, baker extraordinaire who’d been imported from lower Manhattan to Abigail’s estate on the Hudson, had the unfortunate habit of looking better on camera than her pastries. And her hostess.

Standing beside chef Paula, Abigail appeared hausfrauish, old, and plain. Plain. Martha Stewart plain. Not every woman’s idol, Abigail Hardy, who dished up elegance with every easy-to-prepare, gourmet recipe and helped transform her middle-America audience into Park Avenue socialites. Anything but plain.

She pushed up the sleeves of her red-sequined silk tunic and envied Martha Stewart that she could wear jeans. There was something to be said for being comfortable.

Darting her eyes from the lace-trimmed velvet bows to the bundles of evergreens that swathed her kitchen, Abigail realized the absurdity of pretending it was Christmas when it was still August and eighty-nine steamy degrees outside, an hour north of the city, and how asinine it was that they’d had to camouflage the windows so that the viewers wouldn’t notice the explosion of color in the summer gardens beyond the French doors—the summer gardens that dotted the 1,500-acre estate and framed the forty-room sandstone Tudor mansion in a veritable rainbow of pollen.

Abigail lit a long, slim cigarette and wished her hand would stop trembling. She detested taping these holiday specials, detested the damn fuss, detested the damn smiling. Tightening all those facial muscles couldn’t be doing her plastic surgery any good.

Abigail much preferred her own weekly show … the half-hour syndicated show in which she called the shots, from choosing the featured guests (preferably male) to the meat of the content. Well, she decided now, pushing out an angry cloud of smoke, if they wanted her to continue these specials, she’d have to demand creative control from the network.

“Do you need me?” Larry Kaminski appeared beside her, clipboard in hand.

Abigail tucked her chin-length blonde hair behind her five-carat, diamond-studded ears. “The coffee is cold,” she said. “Again.”

He let out a sigh that sounded too deep for his short, frail frame. Except for the gray that shot through his dark hair and the lines that burrowed into his brow, Larry could have been mistaken for twenty, not thirty-seven. Right now, the burrow deepened. “They must have unplugged the pot to hook up the cables.”

She took another drag on her cigarette. “Our own crew knows better. These details should have been resolved before we began shooting.”

“I’ll check it out.” He made a quick note.

“Cranberries.” She scanned the set and shuddered. “How did we get roped into this?” Not that it mattered. If it wasn’t cranberries it would have been tofu or broccoli. Any food from any industry willing to pay big bucks to the network to have Abigail Hardy showcase their product and make it look delectable beyond the viewers’ most imaginative dreams. “I hope the supermarkets are prepared for the onslaught,” she said with a snort.

“And the bookstores,” Larry added. “By the way, the proofs came in today.”

“A hundred ways to cook with cranberries. How infinitely droll.”

“It’ll be a bestseller. Your picture’s on the cover.”

There was no need to doubt that Larry was right. There was also no need to admit that until the taping of this special, Abigail Hardy had never touched a cranberry in her life. But the audience would think otherwise, thanks to her well-spun aura, the illusion she’d spent a decade creating. Illusion, she thought now, inhaling again and wondering if any day of her life had been anything but illusion—if she ever, in fact, had spent just one day, one hour, one moment being the person she really was. Whoever that was.

“Anything else?”

She shook her head and stubbed out the cigarette. “Just get everyone out of my house before Edmund comes home. You know how he hates all these … union people crawling around the estate.”

Larry nodded as if he knew it was Abigail—not Edmund—who resented the intrusion of the blue-collar crew of network strangers. Ten years as her assistant apparently left very few secrets.

As he started toward the corner where two technicians stood, Abigail stared at his small butt squeezed into too-tight, black jeans. “Larry?” The small butt stopped moving, but the face did not turn around. “Tell Louisa to meet me in the master bath. I need my makeup redone. And make sure the coffee is hot when I return.”

There was a slight pause, then the head nodded. Abigail rubbed the back of her neck, silently grateful for Larry, the man-boy who kept her life together. She really must remember to send him something—perhaps a cypress tub filled with loofah sponges and musky oils and trinkets from Tiffany’s; it would please him to share it with his materialistic, young lover named Grady, and would be less committal than another raise.

The master bath was a sharp contrast from the original claw-footed tub and brass water closet, pinnacles of luxury in 1921 when the mansion was constructed. Today it was a five-room suite that would have curled a permanent smile on the handlebar mustache of Abigail’s great-grandfather: each of the two gold-fauceted baths—his and hers—had an eight-headed shower for total body cleansing, and the baths were connected by a glass-encased steam room.

Off the steam room a deep hot tub bubbled beneath a domed stained-glass ceiling. Beyond that was the vanity area, where a sweeping counter stretched along a bank of windows and was accented by a wide, magnifying mirror that Abigail had installed sometime around her fortieth birthday, when the closer she’d looked, the fuzzier everything had become.

It was practical in an opulent sort of way. She liked to think Great-Grandfather would have approved.

She flopped onto the white satin chaise beside the vanity now and wondered why she was so tired, why she was always so damn tired these days and so damn edgy. The monthly magazine Entertaining with Abigail practically produced itself without her. She had a staff of sixteen who sifted through recipes in search of those worthy of her seal of elegance. Plus, a half-dozen designers were responsible for her trademark fresh flower arrangements, custom created to complement the table and each food presentation.

No, the magazine wasn’t the problem. Neither was her syndicated TV show: the producers did all the work. All Abigail had to do was give final approval and endure a two-day-a-week upheaval of the kitchen and dining rooms in her home.

Now, of course, there was also the pending deal with Rupert’s Department Stores, the deal that would catapult her image into hundreds of retail outlets around the world. It was a huge deal, but just one more deal on the fast track to immense success. And Larry was taking care of it. It was one more duty to justify his 15 percent of her business.

She rubbed the back of her neck and thought about her accomplishment: her once-cottage industry that had erupted into a larger-than-life media hit with an even larger-than-life star—her. It was a dream come true. A life of her own, a name of her own, with millions of fans who tried to mimic her style, mimic her. Little did they know that to Abigail Hardy nothing seemed right anymore, nothing seemed worth it, as if somewhere along the way the star had been hopelessly derailed.

Closing her eyes, she decided that things might be tolerable if only she weren’t so damn hot all the time. If only she could get a decent night’s sleep.

“Menopause,” the doctor had warned. “Get ready. It’s coming.”

“Absurd,” she said now, swinging her legs over the chaise and standing up. “I’m only forty-eight. I’m not a freaking dinosaur.” She stalked to the vanity and sat on a stool, pushing from her mind the reality that in six weeks she would turn forty-nine.

Studying the mirror, Abigail confirmed that she looked as good as chef Paula Padderson. Not as young, of course, but surely as good. Better. More mature. Her eyes were naturally green—no false contacts for her—and the last little tucks at the corners had taken another decade off the calendar. Still, it was better to have a man standing beside her on camera. A good-looking, sexy man—any good-looking, sexy man—who would pump up the ratings by making her eyes sparkle if not her loins tingle. At her age, thank God, she was beyond that.

A soft rap sounded on the door.

“Hurry up, Louisa,” Abigail called. “And do something about the sweat all over my face.”

Silence was followed by a low, throaty voice. “It’s not Louisa. It’s Sondra.”

Abigail closed her eyes. The words “go away” formed on her lips but did not have the courage to come out.

Sondra Desauliers Boynton was the twenty-four-year-old thorn in Abigail’s sleep-deprived side. It was a position the young woman had assumed twenty-one years earlier when Abigail married Edmund, Sondra’s father; over the years the thorn had probed more deeply, and become more hurtful with each twist on the nerve. In the beginning, Abigail had thought she could handle it—a motherless child, so like she herself had been, desperately needing to be rescued, desperately needing attention. But Abigail soon found she didn’t know how.

As each week had come and gone, she’d vowed to try harder. But the days and weeks had passed into months, then years, and their relationship never quite gelled.

When Sondra had the measles, Abigail sat stiffly beside her reading from a book the child did not understand. When a fall from her pony left Sondra frightened and crying, Abigail clumsily tried to tuck the little girl into bed, but it was Edmund who wiped her tears. And when the first blush of puppy love left Sondra with a badly bruised heart, Abigail merely watched from a doorway as Edmund held her and rocked her as if she were a child, not fourteen, not nearly a woman.

The truth was, it was not Sondra so much that eluded Abigail but the girl’s show of feelings—tears, laughter, a hunger to simply be hugged. It was an open vulnerability that brought a lump to Abigail’s throat—a lump too stuck, too stoically rooted, to rise past her fear and allow her to … love.

Instead, Abigail did for Sondra what Grandfather had done for her: she bought her things, attempting to fill the child’s emotional needs with dolls and teddy bears and tea sets and clothes, and, later, with trips and cars and 10 percent of the Entertaining with Abigail empire.

She had not, however, bought (much less selected) her stepdaughter’s choice of a mate—the man for whom Sondra had abruptly halted her Radcliffe education and fled to Paris for two years until the money ran out.

“We’re taping today,” Abigail said now as Sondra entered the room. “This is not a good time.”

“I only stopped by to say hello.” The distorted image of Sondra’s tall, lanky body moved closer in the mirror, revealing a disturbing sparkle in her blue-gray eyes, eyes that Abigail had been told were identical to those of the young woman’s mother.

“Well,” Abigail replied, swiping a cotton ball across her chin with more vigor than necessary, “that’s nice. Is Craig with you?” She tried to say “Craig” as if she fully accepted Sondra’s husband, the struggling, practically penniless “artist.”

“No.” Her stepdaughter perched on the counter and crossed her long, Newport-tanned legs, a product of the forty-two-foot, wedding gift sailboat from Abigail.

“What happened to Newport?” She leaned into the mirror and carefully dabbed her eyelids, refusing to look at the chestnut-maned, motherless child or feel the never-ending guilt that she had not tried hard enough.

“Craig thinks we should go somewhere less pretentious, maybe somewhere tropical.”

“That hardly describes the breeze off the Hudson.”

“He’s thinking maybe the Caribbean.”

“How appropriate,” Abigail commented, “now that it’s hurricane season.” She sucked in her lip and wished she could bite off her tongue. Despite his economic failings, Craig was not a bad man, and he seemed to have accomplished what Abigail had not: he seemed to genuinely make Sondra happy.

Sondra slid off the counter and examined the bottles and jars that lined the top. She lifted the lid off a ceramic powder crock, sniffed the contents, then dabbed her neck with the puff. “The truth is,” she said, “I’ve been getting seasick.”

“You always loved the water. You always hounded your father to take you sailing.”

Placing the puff back in the crock, Sondra smiled. “I know. But that was before we were pregnant.”

Another hot flash crawled around the back of Abigail’s neck. She stopped short of fanning herself. “Pregnant?” she asked. “Who’s we?”

“We. Craig. And me.”

“That’s Craig and I. And I think you would be the one who is pregnant. Not your husband.”

Sondra laughed that deep, emotion-filled laugh that Abigail did not understand. “Oh, Abigail, you’re so provincial. But I think Daddy is going to be thrilled.”

“Daddy would be thrilled to hear Craig had a job.”

Sliding off the counter, Sondra knitted her fingers together. The sparkle in her eyes was quickly replaced by a thin veil of tears. “I know our timing may be off, Abigail, but can’t you try to be happy for us?”

“Sondra, please,” Abigail said quietly. “I was only being realistic …”

“Craig is a brilliant artist, Abigail. All he needs is a break. And until then, I’m going to support him. And we are going to have a family.” Her voice cracked. “And I don’t care what you say; Daddy is going to be thrilled. Because Daddy understands.”

She swept from the room as quickly as she’d swept in, leaving Abigail staring into the mirror, blood pumping into her face, heat surging through her.

Daddy understands. She dropped the cotton ball and gulped back the familiar sting of unshed tears. Because Daddy, Abigail knew, was the only one who mattered. No matter how hard she’d tried, no matter how much she gave, Sondra simply didn’t care.

No longer, she suspected, did Daddy.

Why? she cried into the glass. Why didn’t anyone ever try to understand her?

Her hand moved to the bracelet on her wrist, and Abigail wondered—for the ten thousandth time—how different life would have been if her parents had not died when she was eight, if they’d not left her alone to fight for her life.

Then she looked back to the mirror, stared at the forty-eight, almost forty-nine-year-old face, and wondered if it was too late to get out.

Suddenly Louisa appeared at the door. Abigail straightened, cleared her throat, and turned sharply. “Get Kaminski up here,” she demanded, a tremor in her voice. Network or no network, baby or no baby, there were some things Abigail Hardy could still control. Getting rid of the beauty-queen pastry chef was a place to begin.

• • •

“So you won’t be going to Brussels with me.” Edmund’s tone was businesslike, as though Abigail were just another art dealer, another negotiation.

She stood at the carved rosewood mantle in the library, holding a snifter of Courvoisier and gazing across the book-lined room, out the tall windows. In the distance a long, lazy barge carved a path up the Hudson. She turned to her husband, who sat on one of the two sofas and was dressed in the same type of casual-elegant clothes he’d worn twenty-two years ago when Grandfather told her they’d make a perfect match. “The network has to find a replacement for Paula.”

Edmund shook his head. The lines on his face told Abigail he was tired: tired from jet lag, tired of arguing, and, most probably, as tired of her as she was of him. Despite his still-handsome face and sleek silver hair, at fifty-two it was difficult, even for Edmund, to look dashing when he was tired. She flicked her eyes back to the cold fireplace and wondered what had happened to the magic, when the fire of romance had dwindled to a flicker, then an occasional spark, then had been snuffed out altogether. She wondered if that early magic had only been part of the illusion of her life, the illusion created to please Grandfather Hardy.

“The holiday special is important, Edmund. It coincides with the release of the cranberry book.”

His nod was one of resignation. He sipped his coffee from a nineteenth-century cup with practiced, proper respect for the fine china. “I talked with Sondra this afternoon.”

Swirling the brandy in her glass, Abigail replied “Yes.” She took a small taste. “So did I.”

“She doesn’t think you’re pleased.”

Abigail did not answer.

“You’re her stepmother, Abigail. She wants you to be excited for her.”

“I’ll have some Belgium lace sent for the nursery,” she bristled. “Unless you’d prefer to pick it up while you’re there.”

Edmund rose. “I’m going to my study.”

Abigail laughed. “Of course! Run away! Don’t bother to ask why I’m not thrilled at the prospect of becoming a grandmother to a child of two immature parents.”

He stopped. “Maybe this is the responsibility they both need. And maybe it will keep their marriage together.” His tone was flat.

Abigail sensed he had stopped short of saying that if she had relented years ago, maybe they could have had a child together, maybe they could have kept their marriage “together.”

She masked her guilt by glaring at him.

“Honey,” he said, moving toward her. “I know this upsets you. But once the baby arrives …”

“Once the baby arrives there will be one more mouth for me to feed.”

“That’s not fair. I earn a decent living.”

Abigail closed her eyes. “I know you do, Edmund. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that you do not want my money.” Once, she’d been flattered by his macho need to pay his own way. Today, his disinterest in her growing millions made her feel not independent but distant. As though she had sculpted a world he neither needed nor wished to enter. It almost made her wonder why she had bothered.

He rested his hands on her waist. “You also need to know that Sondra and Craig will be fine.”

She did not ask how much he intended to increase their allowance.

Stepping away from his hands, she took another swig from the snifter and walked to the French doors. The sun rested on the horizon, casting a warm glow over the rose trellises in Edmund’s garden, Edmund’s passion. For years he had insisted on designing and tending the multitiered grounds with little help—creating rolling, flower-scaped beauty befitting the National Gardens. She wondered what her viewers would think if they knew that the blossoms in her magnificent floral arrangements were not the product of her own soil-free hands but had been cultivated by her sensitive, caring husband, the one whose heart did not freeze when his daughter cried. She raised the glass again, the brandy hot on her lips, stinging with the realization that small talk was safer with Edmund lately, more comfortable than discussing Sondra. Or feelings.

“How long will you be gone this time?”

“A couple of weeks. Later in September there’s an auction in Rome.”

He did not ask if she’d like to go with him; she did not ask if he’d be home in time for her birthday.

“I’m going to do some work,” he commented.

She nodded and watched him retreat to his study, wondering if either of them would ever admit to the other that they were miserable.

When he was gone, Abigail settled into a deep-cushioned chair with the bottle of brandy and a new pack of cigarettes. She suspected it would be another long night.

She smoked and drank and gazed around as if it were her first time here. Within the huge, high-ceilinged room thousands of books were encased in mahogany cabinets; muted, fifteenth-century Flemish tapestries hung between the silk-draped windows.

As a child she had played the sleek grand piano that was tucked at one end of the room. She had played because Grandfather insisted she take lessons. “Culture,” he’d said, “is a crucial part of being a Hardy.” It had been years now since the keyboard was opened.

Slowly Abigail’s eyes drifted to the dark portraits that hung over the mantle: Grandfather William, Great-Grandfather Robert—both white-haired and stern-looking, both exuding power and wealth, both decidedly dead. Yet their presence, their power, still lingered.

Abigail ran her palm along the deep green, damask-covered arm of the chair and wondered why her father—and mother—had had to die in that avalanche in St. Moritz.

Quietly she reached down. Slowly she unsnapped the locket that hung from her bracelet. Inside, framed by a rim of heart-shaped gold, was a faded photo of Jonathan Hardy, heir to it all, the sandy-haired, wide-smiling Hardy who had never reached thirty-five. Beside him was his beautiful, raven-haired, equally smiling young wife—that “damn Leslie-woman” as Grandfather had called Abigail’s mother—without whom Jonathan would not have been skiing like a jet-setting gypsy.

But they had married. They’d had to, of course, because that damn Leslie-woman was—they were—pregnant.

Abigail closed the locket and thought again about their deaths. It was the reason, of course, that she’d not wanted children. There would no orphaned eight-year-old child of hers to be fussed over—or not fussed over—by strangers. Strangers who knew that if she had not been conceived there would have been no dead heir; strangers who always looked sad when they saw her, who took her to Radio City once a year, who brought Christmas and birthday gifts as if stage shows and presents could re-glue her heart.

Birthdays, she thought, then sipped her brandy and remembered that the calendar was quickly moving toward her forty-ninth.

The grandfather clock at the far end of the room began to strike midnight, as if to mock her. She closed her eyes and tried to shut out the sound, and the inevitable reality that next year … next year she would be fifty. Fifty years old. With nothing to show but material things and the fulfillment of dreams that had once seemed so important.

“Would you like anything before I retire?” Louisa’s voice interrupted Abigail’s thoughts.

She looked up at the elderly woman but did not respond that the one thing Abigail wanted, Louisa surely could not provide. “No, Louisa. Good night.”

The housekeeper departed.

Abigail toyed with her bracelet, her thoughts shifting to Louisa. The woman had worked at Windsor-on-Hudson ever since Abigail—the scared, abandoned child—was left on Grandfather’s reluctant doorstep. It was Louisa, olive-skinned and portly, efficient and kind, who had become her parent. Louisa who had ridden each day in the Rolls Royce that transported Abigail to school at Arbor Brook; Louisa who had allowed Abigail and her friends to bake cookies, have parties, and stay up late. Louisa was there, but she wasn’t her mother. Not like the mothers of her friends.

Her friends. Maddie. Kris. Betty Ann. A small ache gnawed at her heart as she thought of them now.

Like Abigail, Maddie and Kris would turn forty-nine this fall.

Next year, they too would be fifty. She wondered if they were feeling the pull of time, dreading the other side of middle age.

She hadn’t seen Maddie in years. She wondered if Maddie was still as eccentric as the photographs she created, or if the divorce had tempered her spirit.

The last she’d heard from Kris was a brief note many winters ago, commenting that wasn’t it providence that they each had a book on the bestseller list and what must the literary world be coming to.

As the grandfather clock stopped bonging, a small smile crept across Abigail’s face. They had been friends, so long ago. Friends who grew up together, laughing and crying and sharing their awkward young lives. Friends who stuck by one another, connected with a bond she’d since been unable to duplicate in her crazy, artificial world.

She sucked on her cigarette and wondered if she should get in touch with them again. Maybe together the old friends could face fifty; maybe together they could fight back.

And maybe, just maybe, Abigail would get the one thing she wanted … with the help of her friends.