Chapter 1 #3
The dangers of the pandemic had brought people back to basics, reminded them of the importance of family.
Some of her clients had gotten to know the children they barely knew before and had spent too little time with.
There was nothing to do at night in the first year.
People actually talked to each other, spent time together, helped their kids with online school and homework, went for walks.
They slowed down after having run a race for years, a race to be the biggest, fastest, richest. Now they were all at home on “pause” and they didn’t need an haute couture evening gown, or even a ready-to-wear one, for that.
All the men dressed like lumberjacks now in the winter and campers in the summer, and the women dressed like schoolgirls.
There were no fancy hairdos, and their jewels had been in the safe or at the bank for two years.
Eugenia had dressed them for the life they no longer had, not the one they were living now.
She was hoping that her upcoming runway show would change that.
She wanted to play too. She had no idea how the fashion critics would react to it, and she was afraid they would deal the final death blow to her business.
It wouldn’t take much. She had little money left of what had been a very sizable fortune she had made herself, having poured most of it back into her business and spent the rest on her kids.
Who else would she spend it on? And the divorce had hit her hard before Covid.
She had wanted to be fair to her husband, and he had kept pressing for more.
She didn’t want a big battle, all in the press.
She had paid a high price for discretion and fair play.
Her ex-husband was a taker, not a giver, and had cost her a fortune for years before the divorce.
He had taken full advantage of her success, and contributed nothing to it.
Sometimes she cried in her bed at night, terrified of the future.
She hadn’t been this frightened since she was a child, afraid that something bad might happen, or when her parents died within a year of each other when she was in her twenties with five young children, but she had her husband, Umberto, then, and the illusion that he would always be there for her.
She’d been frightened when they got divorced too, although she was the pillar that had held up their world.
Her parents and grandparents had left her a little money, but it had finally run out, just as her business took off.
The timing had been providential. She had never been as frightened as she was now, afraid her whole world was caving in.
She couldn’t see a light on the horizon.
She knew it was there, like the darkness before the dawn, but she couldn’t see it yet.
She had to find it soon, before the ship she had built with her own hands ran aground, and it would soon if she didn’t do something dramatic.
Of that she was certain. She just didn’t know what.
She had no one to talk to about it. Covid had separated her from her friends, with all the lockdowns and restrictions.
Most of the people she knew had left town and were isolated in their country homes.
She had never felt so alone in her life.
With no partner and her kids grown up, her business was failing and her money running out.
Everything she had ever done seemed fated, like part of a plan, with perfect timing.
As one thing ended, another started. Her first internship, her jobs, her business.
She had met her future husband when she did her internship at Valentino in Italy.
He was an Italian prince, a descendant of the royal house of Florence, which had existed when Italy had been divided into states and principalities for centuries, which it no longer was.
Umberto was the most elegant, charming, aristocratic man she had ever met, and the most beautiful.
He made her feel like Cinderella. Shy as a child, and in a foreign country, she had never met anyone like him, and innocently had had no sense of her own beauty and strength, only confidence in the designs she created.
She was certain of her designs and never doubted them.
She was na?ve, talented, and young, and he was so sophisticated.
Umberto was magical. She was twenty-one when they met at a ball in Venice.
Someone from Valentino had taken her to it.
It was the most extraordinary setting she had ever seen, a fifteenth-century palazzo, with candles everywhere.
Umberto caught her when she tripped on the dress she had made.
She hadn’t had time to finish the hem properly and had taped it, as they did with the models sometimes when a dress wasn’t finished right before a show.
Umberto had been struck by her innocence and vulnerability and natural beauty.
He was forty-five years old, one of the most desirable men in Italy.
He oozed aristocracy and charisma. Her discreet, conservative, respectable parents and their world were of an entirely different breed.
They seemed dull compared to Umberto. He was so glamorous.
She felt like a princess in a fairy tale when she was with him, and he wisely sensed that with her talent, passion, and energy, she would go far.
He had good instincts about people and how they could be of use to him.
Umberto was showy without appearing to be, and dazzling.
He lived in Rome, and took her under his wing, which was flattering and exciting.
He took her to parties all over Europe, and introduced her to people she had read about and never dreamed of meeting.
He had a reputation for dating models and movie stars, and rich and titled young women.
He had endless charm but not a penny. He told her she would be famous one day, he was certain of it, which seemed absurd to her.
She wanted to create gorgeous designs, she wasn’t seeking fame.
Fame was for other people. She didn’t care about fame, she just wanted to make beautiful clothes.
Her parents objected to Umberto when they met him, because he had never had a real job.
He “connected” people, brought them together in the most elegant, gracious way and helped them buy houses, meet jewelers, charter yachts or buy them, and he made a commission on every transaction, doing it so smoothly that no one objected to how much he charged them.
He was a very special European breed where a title became a job and was turned into a handsome profit, especially by a prince.
He had a talent for pulling money out of thin air and other people’s pockets painlessly.
Her parents thought none of what he did was respectable.
Her father called him an operator and a con man, which he wasn’t.
Umberto wasn’t dishonest, he was just clever, greedy, and charming.
He was like a magic trick that everyone loved and watched with admiration.
They got what they wanted, and so did he.
Despite her parents’ objections, Eugenia married him less than a year after they met.
He followed her to New York to close the deal.
They had a small wedding, commensurate with her parents’ displeasure, and she became a princess.
Afterward, she was never sure why he’d married her.
She only had a very small inheritance from her grandparents, and later a barely larger one from her parents, but he saw the potential she had and her money disappeared quickly in his hands.
She got the job with Dior in Paris after they married, and he didn’t object to her working.
Umberto was absolutely certain Eugenia would become a success, with her talent.
She was delighted because she loved her job and was learning everything she would apply later to her own designs, all the techniques of haute couture.
Everyone who worked with her saw her potential too.
Umberto di San Benedetto was a passionate man, and Eugenia was madly in love with him.
She got pregnant three months after they married, which dashed her parents’ hopes that she would come to her senses, see him for what he was, leave him, and have the marriage annulled.
He had her in his thrall. She was young and healthy, worked hard in the daytime, and went to parties and danced with him at night.
Their son, Stefano, was born on their first anniversary.
Eugenia was twenty-three, and Umberto was now forty-seven, wildly proud of his firstborn, his son and heir.
All his father had to give him was his title, which meant everything to Umberto, and little to her.
Much to Eugenia’s amazement, they lived in a very grand apartment in the 7th arrondissement, which a friend had loaned to Umberto in exchange for a favor.
It came with two servants who took care of the baby too.
Eugenia loved the glamorous life Umberto created for her, and she made enough to support them between his “commissions.” They never had a lot of money, but Umberto was always able, with his connections, to create a grand lifestyle out of thin air.
Her parents disapproved of everything he did.