The Eleventh Year

T
he Eleventh Year

Monique Raphel High

T
his edition published
by

Penner Publishing

Post Office Box 57914

Los Angeles, California 91413

www.pennerpublishing.com

C
opyright © 1982
, 2106 by Monique Raphel High

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

T
he Four Winds
of Heaven

Encore

The Keeper of the Walls

Thy Father's House

L
a Folie
, the house at the center of this story, does in fact exist. My family, the Gunzburgs, have owned it since 1861; it has been previously mentioned in
The Four Winds of Heaven
, the novel about my great-grandparents, my grandmother, and her three siblings. It was originally built by Napoleon III as the mess hall for his officers and has for some time already been an historic building. One eighth of it is mine; the rest belongs to various cousins. We know it as “the house in Saint-Germain,” and I felt that it deserved a more romantic name.

I first started visiting Saint-Germain as a small girl. My grandmother, Sonia, lived on the third floor, alongside her sister Anna and two of their cousins. Downstairs on the first floor was the splendid apartment of their cousin Robert. His daughter, Christine, four years older than I, was my favorite cousin and a girl I wanted to grow up to resemble. She is still that splendid girl, though she has long been married and has three grown children. After she left home, three more beloved cousins came to live there: Danny from Israel, Ruxandra from Rumania, and Kristen from the United States. I've dedicated this novel to Kristen, whom I have always called Cousinette—little cousin. We both adore this house and feel that it tugs us into a world gone by, a place of courtliness and splendor which we much prefer to our own. Sometimes we fantasize about retiring there and living like Sonia, Anna, Nadia and Mausi, having tea and chatting as we embroider. Except, of course, that my efforts at embroidery ended in disaster when I was eight.

The story of Charles, Anne, and Amelia is not about any of our real cousins. Ours were less romantic, and much less passionate. They also broke fewer rules and did nothing to betray their Jewish heritage. But we can never, as authors, watch lives enfold around us and not act as magpies, stealing bits of glitter from our cohorts. My grandmother's precious journals abound with tales of her thirty-seven first cousins. Charles, Anne, and Amelia may only be real inside this book, but I did pluck many tidbits from my grandmother's careful family portraits.

World War II continues to fascinate me. This time, however, my story spans fifty years, and though its climax takes place during the Great War, what led up to it interests me as well. I hope you too will be drawn in, and that you will come to love La Folie just as much as Kristen and I do.

This novel was the last one I worked on with the superlative editor Charles Spicer, who moved to St. Martin's Press shortly after the initial publication of
Thy Father's House
by Delacorte. He was ably assisted by Emily Reichert. I'm doubly thrilled that Penner Publishing has chosen to reissue it and give it new breath. Thank you, Jessica Gadsden, for liking this story, and my habitual gratitude to my literary managers, Renée C. Fountain and Italia Gandolfo, who handpicked Jessica for this project so close to my own heart.

T
he immense reception
rooms of the Varenne mansion glittered from the refractions of emeralds and diamonds, of the cut crystal of the antique chandeliers, and from the perfect Venetian
coupes
that guests balanced in their adept fingers while immaculate butlers in dress uniform filled and refilled them with vintage champagne.

Alexandre stood half listening to the words of congratulations that were being offered to him like so many trays of hors d'oeuvres, toast points laden with Beluga caviar, smoked salmon, truffled pâté from the province of the Perigord. It was an odd victory he was celebrating. Once again he would have his seat in the Chamber of Parliament, but by this time he had few illusions about being able to straighten out the politics of Europe. He smiled at the plump little banker next to him, wondering just how drunk he might be. How many times had the butler filled his
coupe
with Dom Perignon?

He touched the front of his frilled shirt, the fine oxford of his tuxedo. The soft hair at his temples was turning gray. He was thirty-eight, a mature man. His gray eyes scanned the room for Lesley, and when he saw her, he felt relieved. What was it she had said to him earlier that evening? That love, intimate love, was painfully wrought from the shared years of joy and pain, not just from those first sparks of electricity that gave off a sometimes artificial glow mistaken for fire. Did it mean that she loved him then? Or had those merely been a string of words as pretty as the costume beads that women sported in Paris these days, colored beads that, beneath their attractive veneer, were worth less than the string that bound them together? For a moment his oval face clouded, and then he saw her turn slowly to him and smile.

Lesley, her red hair fringed and bobbed, wore a low-necked satin dress of the same brilliant green as her eyes. The three-quarter sleeves hugged her arms, and as a low-slung belt she had looped some beads around her waist. The dress hung loosely around her boyish hips and narrowed, so that her ankles showed in their dainty green pumps. Emeralds, always her stone, covered her hands and ears, and she wore one large, tear-shaped one between her breasts on a gold chain. The effect was of high, fashionable sophistication. She moved in a single sweep with her dress, a flapper of utmost taste, the most glamorous of the jazz-age girls. But you aren't a girl any longer, he thought, his throat tight. You are a woman of thirty, and I have known you for ten years....

“Excuse me, please,” he murmured to the little banker, aware that he was cutting him off in mid-phrase. He would have to make amends for this later; politicians always did. Especially politicians of the rightist minority, who needed bankers. Then he caught up to Lesley just as she was explaining something to the two butlers at her side, in the carved entryway that led to the hall.

She turned at his touch, smiled. “I had to send the valets down to the cellar,” she said to him ruefully. “We were running low on brut.”

“At this point, Madame la Marquise, you could bring out hock and they wouldn't notice. The guillotine will spare you, darling.”

It was a moment caught in space, and neither of them paid attention to the liveried help at their side. She rose on tiptoe to finger his cravat. From the silk, her hand moved to the tip of his chin. Such a small gesture, yet such a fragile one.

Then the moment dissolved and she was gone, between the two butlers. He stood alone for a few minutes, scanning the room. The Paris giants were there, Hélène Berthelot laughing with Cécile Sorel, the Quai d'Orsay meeting the theater with complete ease. And there was Gabrielle Chanel, spare, thin, dark, with her friend the voluptuous, overdone Misia Sert. He had never liked Misia and so he simply nodded in her direction. An egotist of the first order, he thought with some disdain.

He could hear laughter, he could hear French, he could hear English. Now and then there was a hard, raucous word of Russian, and he thought: What an odd mixture Paris has become…and how far we have traveled from the early postwar days of Clemenceau, our “Tiger,” our
Père la Victoire.…
Someone was touching his sleeve. A deep, throaty, well-known voice was saying: “You never did like strange women to approach you, did you, darling?”

He blinked. From head to toe, Elena Sergeievna Egorova was sheathed in black. Her tall, Minerva figure was encased in velvet, and diamonds and rubies adorned her magnificent white neck and shone again from the tiara set against the thick swirl of her long black hair. She is my age, he thought, yet still she manages to stun by her appearance. She so rarely did anything with that mane of hair except to let it hang, perfectly straight, down to the middle of her upright, majestic back. She said, to cover the uncomfortable silence: “Do you feel a winner yet?”

“And what, Elena, is a winner?”

“One who survives. Look around you at the sea of faces that have already drowned, and you'll understand exactly what I mean.”

He could not help but follow her gaze. His plump banker, red-faced, was trying to make a point with a sad-eyed man who looked amazingly like James Joyce. Lesley had read Joyce to him aloud, but one had to have been born to the English language to capture his bizarre imagery. There wasn't any life to it, he reflected, all at once aware of what Elena had been driving at. “I think I see,” he murmured.

“Proust saw it all so well. What a shame he died, isn't it?”

Alexandre smiled. “Yet he was unquestionably a survivor. He'll survive us all.”

“I have often wondered if he patterned Madame Verdurin after your mother.”

This made Alexandre laugh. “I hope so. She richly deserves it! And you? Were you a younger version of the Princess Yourbeletieff?”

She shrugged, and he was conscious of her white breasts rising and falling like twin Alps above the black décolletage. “I wasn't part of the
ne plus ultra
of Parisian society in those days. I had…barely made my appearance.”

“But an appearance nobody is likely to forget.”

She looked at him levelly from her kohl-ringed dark eyes that seemed somehow soulless in their abysmal depth. “Old age makes you gallant,” she commented, and then turned around to mingle once more, a tall black exclamation point among the shimmering soft colors of the other guests. He remained in place, still watching her. Old age! She's exactly as old as I, he thought with wry amusement.

Elena was linking arms with a tall, exquisitely tuxedoed man with brown hair that gleamed under the chandelier, a man with large brown eyes who was slipping his arm possessively around the black velvet shoulders. Alexandre winced. Damn Paul! He hadn't wanted him to be here, not on this night,
his
night. But to keep his brother away took more than the lack of a personal invitation. Damn, he thought again—and where is Jamie?

On the small love seat next to the bay window, he saw her. Soft brown hair swept into a knot, soft blue dress to match her eyes, those eyes that said—Forget me not—the eyes of the seeress, Cassandra. They had so teased her about that in the old days. Jamie Lynne Stewart, so earnest, so pure, so direct. He made his way toward her, and when he reached her, she rose, excited, pinpoints of red on her cheekbones. “Oh, Alex! It's such a wonderful evening!”

He took the proffered hands, kissed them gently. “Do you really think so?” He could not help but sneak a sideways glance toward the woman in black velvet and the man with the brown hair.

“It's all right, really,” Jamie said, oddly reassuring, making him sit down beside her. She had not touched her champagne.

“I didn't want—”

“I know. But the circles of our lives cannot help overlapping sometimes. He's your brother, Alex.”

“You
shouldn't be defending him.”

“I'm not.” There was a hard note to her voice. She cleared her throat. “But writers need to go out once in a while. Otherwise, where would we get our inspiration?”

He was thinking of Elena Egorova, talking of Proust, comparing his own mother to Madame Verdurin. But his mother had, in spite of everything, been an aristocrat. Did that matter? Did any of this matter in 1928? He was sitting next to Jamie Stewart, recalling that her beginnings had been very humble, that to many she had simply been a “nobody.” But she was no longer a nobody. She'd pulled herself out of anonymity, and not by selecting for herself the best stable of lovers Paris could provide. That had been his mother's particular achievement. He could feel the acidity in his stomach, the rancor. Jamie's eyes had filled with tears that she was fighting to hold back, and suddenly he kissed her cheek. “Don't cry,” he said.

“They aren't tears of pain. Only of regret. One has to cry at what might have been but never could be.”

He sat there with her hand in his, feeling warm, feeling at odds within himself. She wasn't speaking anymore. Then all at once he heard the commotion, and a footman was coming toward him across the reception hall. Alexandre rose instantly, drawing the liveried man off to one side, away from the sofa.

“Monsieur le Marquis!” the servant whispered urgently. “Madame Stewart's nurse—”

Although the two men had moved to whisper alone, they had not managed to avoid Jamie's sudden rising to join them. She had heard everything.

“My daughter's nurse? My God—” and Alexandre felt her body swaying, her knees starting to give way.

“Is the nurse
here?”
he asked.

The servant nodded. “Madame la Marquise has put her in the study. She came all the way from Louveciennes—”

In an oddly calm voice that chilled Alexandre, Jamie said: “Tell me at once what's happened to my daughter.”

Alexandre was conscious of voices stilling around them, of pairs of eyes riveted to Jamie's blue gown, to his reassuring hand on her arm. His own mouth was dry. Jamie insisted: “You must tell me.”

“Someone has kidnapped Mademoiselle,” the footman answered, and it seemed as if all ears in the large room were straining to hear his discreetly murmured message, as if every glass of champagne had remained poised in midair. Alexandre saw, out of the corner of his eye, the athletic figure of his brother rushing toward them, but at that moment Jamie collapsed, her face white, and he had barely enough time to catch her before she fell. His brother was tugging on his arm and asking urgently, over and over: “What's this all about? Why is Jamie ill? What is going on?”

Alexandre's gray eyes narrowed, and he glared at Paul's handsome face. Behind him stood the black velvet figure of Elena Egorova. Placing his fingers on Jamie's forehead, he whispered to Paul: “This isn't your business. I don't know what's happened—but whatever it is, it hasn't a god damn thing to do with you!”