The report was light-years from the reality. The simple truth was that Elizabeth Roffe had no protective shield, no armor against the terrible loneliness that engulfed her. She was filled with such a deep sense of her own unworthiness that she was afraid to make friends, for fear they would discover that she was worthless, unlovable. She was not arrogant, she was almost pathologically shy. She felt that she did not belong in the same world that her father inhabited. She did not belong anywhere. She loathed being driven to school in the Rolls-Royce, because she knew she did not deserve it. In her classes she knew the answers to the questions the teachers asked, but she did not dare to speak out, to call attention to herself. She loved to read, and she would lie awake late at night in her bed, devouring books.
She daydreamed, and oh! what lovely fantasies. She was in Paris with her father, and they were driving through the Bois in a horse-drawn carriage, and he took her to his office, an enormous room something like Saint Patrick’s cathedral, and people kept walking in with papers for him to sign, and he would wave them away and say, “Can’t you see I’m busy now? I’m talking to my daughter, Elizabeth.”
She and her father were skiing in Switzerland, moving down a steep slope side by side, with an icy wind whipping past them, and he suddenly fell and cried out with pain, because his leg was broken, and she said, “Don’t worry, Papa! I’ll take care of you.” And she skied down to the hospital and said, “Quickly, my father’s hurt,” and a dozen men in white jackets brought him there in a shiny ambulance and she was at his bedside, feeding him (it was probably his arm that was broken, then, not his leg), and her mother walked into the room, alive somehow, and her father said, “I can’t see you now, Patricia. Elizabeth and I are talking.”
Or they would be in their beautiful villa in Sardinia, and the servants would be away, and Elizabeth would cook dinner for her father. He would eat two helpings of everything and say, “You’re a much better cook than your mother was, Elizabeth.”
The scenes with her father always ended in the same way. The doorbell would ring and a tall man, who towered over her father, would come in and beg Elizabeth to marry him, and her father would plead with her, “Please, Elizabeth, don’t leave me. I need you.”
And she would agree to stay.
Of all the homes in which Elizabeth grew up, the villa in Sardinia was her favorite. It was by no means the largest, but it was the most colorful, the friendliest. Sardinia itself delighted Elizabeth. It was a dramatic, rockbound island, some 160 miles southwest of the Italian coast, a stunning panorama of mountains, sea and green farmland. Its enormous volcanic cliffs had been thrown up thousands of years ago from the primal sea, and the shoreline swept in a vast crescent as far as the eye could follow, the Tyrrhenian Sea framing the island in a blue border.
For Elizabeth the island had its own special odors, the smell of sea breezes and forests, the white and yellow macchia, the fabled flower that Napoleon had loved. There were the corbeccola bushes that grew six feet high and had a red fruit that tasted like strawberries, and the guarcias, the giant stone oaks whose bark was exported to the mainland to be used for making cork for wine bottles.
She loved to listen to the singing rocks, the mysterious giant boulders with holes through them. When the winds blew through the holes, the rocks emitted an eerie keening sound, like a dirge of lost souls.
And the winds blew. Elizabeth grew to know them all. The mistrale and the ponente, the tramontana and the grecate and the levante. Soft winds and fierce winds. And then there was the dreaded scirocco, the warm wind that blew in from the Sahara.
The Roffe villa was on the Costa Smeralda, above Porto Cervo, set high atop a cliff overlooking the sea, secluded by juniper trees and the wild-growing Sardinian olive trees with their bitter fruit. There was a breathtaking view of the harbor far below, and around it, sprinkled over the green hills, a jumble of stucco and stone houses thrown together in a crazy hodgepodge of colors resembling a child’s crayon drawing.