Property of a Noblewoman Read Online Free PDF

there was no one in the department, when a male voice said simply “Lawton” in a flat tone.
    Jane explained that she was calling from the surrogate’s court and needed an appraisal for a number of abandoned jewelry items they would be putting up for sale if no heirs showed up. There was a momentary silence, as Phillip Lawton sat staring out the window. He had been assigned to the jewelry department at the venerable auction house for the last two years, and felt like he was trapped. He had a master’s in museum curating, with a specialty in Egyptian art and Impressionist paintings, and had waited forever for a job at the Metropolitan Museum. He had finally given up and taken a job at Christie’s in the art department, and he had found it interesting for the three years he had worked there, until three vacancies came up in jewelry, when the head of the department moved to their London office, and the two people directly under him had quit. Phillip had then been transferred from art to jewelry, in which he had absolutely no interest. They had promised to move him back to the art department eventually, but it hadn’t happened yet. And all his background and training was in art. His father had been a professor of art history at NYU until his death a few years before, and his mother was an artist. He had done an internship at the Uffizi in Florence after college, and had thought about moving to Paris or Rome, but came back to get a master’s in the States instead. He had worked at an important gallery in New York for a while, and went to work at Christie’s at twenty-nine, where he had been now for five years, the last two of them as a hostage in the jewelry department. He had recently promised himself that if they didn’t move him back to the art department in the next six months, he’d quit.
    Phillip Lawton objected to jewelry on principle. He thought the people who wore it were frivolous and vain, and he failed to see the beauty of it. Paintings and art in any form touched his soul and filled him with joy. Jewelry never had. To Phillip, only art was beauty – jewelry left him cold.
    He sounded bored when he responded to Jane. He expected her call to be another request for a routine appraisal for the court. “Can you bring the pieces in?” he asked, in a disinterested tone. He had done appraisals for the surrogate’s court before, and none of the items had been worthy of auctioning off at Christie’s, with the exception of a minor recent piece that had qualified for their “fine jewels” auction, which hadn’t been an important sale. And he thought it highly unlikely that these would be any different, or even as good. Most of what wound up in surrogate’s court was of no interest to them.
    “I’d rather not bring them in,” Jane said honestly, thinking that he sounded as though he thought she was wasting his time, which annoyed her. She was calling him in an official capacity, not asking him for a favor. And she was trying to do her job. “There are twenty-two pieces, and I think they’re too valuable for me to take them around the city.”
    “Where are they now?” he asked, still staring out his office window at the skyscrapers across the street. His office felt like prison to him, and his job a life sentence that would never end. He hated coming to work now.
    “It’s all in a safe deposit box at the Metropolitan Bank in Murray Hill. Would it be possible for you to meet me there to see the pieces?” Possible, he acknowledged silently, but not very appealing. But it was part of his job to do appraisals, mostly of estates for heirs who didn’t want the old-fashioned jewelry they’d inherited, or greedy women who wanted to cash in on what they’d been given, after a divorce. Among their clients were often jewelers seeking to get rid of unsold pieces, since auction prices were usually somewhere between retail and wholesale, which was appealing to both sellers and buyers. “We need an appraisal,”