As the wheel of the century turned, the boys married and had children and gave Samuel grandchildren. Abraham had gone to America on his twenty-first birthday, in the year 1891. He had married an American girl seven years later and in 1905 she gave birth to Samuel’s first grandchild, Woodrow, who sired a son named Sam. Joseph had married a German girl, who bore him a son and a daughter. The son in his turn married a girl, who bore a daughter, Anna. Anna married a German, Walther Gassner. In France, Anton had married a French girl, by whom he had two sons. One son committed suicide. The other married and had one daughter, Hélène. She married several times but had no children. Jan, in London, had married an English girl. Their only daughter had married a baronet named Nichols and had a son whom they christened Alec. In Rome, Pitor had married an Italian girl. They had a son and a daughter. When the son, in his turn, married, his wife gave him a daughter, Simonetta, who fell in love with and married a young architect, Ivo Palazzi.
These then were the descendants of Samuel and Terenia Roffe.
Samuel lived long enough to see the winds of change that swept across the world. Marconi created wireless telegraphy and the Wright brothers launched the first aeroplane at Kitty Hawk. The Dreyfus affair captured the headlines and Admiral Peary reached the North Pole. Ford’s Model Ts were in mass production; there were electric lights and telephones. In medicine, the germs that caused tuberculosis and typhoid and malaria were isolated and tamed.
Roffe and Sons, a little less than half a century after it had been founded, was a multinational behemoth that circled the globe.
Samuel and his broken-down horse, Lottie, had created a dynasty.
When Elizabeth had finished reading the Book for perhaps the fifth time, she quietly returned it to its place in the glass case. She no longer needed it. She was a part of it, just as it was a part of her.
For the first time in her life, Elizabeth knew who she was, and where she had come from.
CHAPTER 12
It was on her fifteenth birthday in the second term of her first year at school that Elizabeth first met Rhys Williams. He had dropped in at the school to bring Elizabeth a birthday present from her father.
“He wanted to come himself,” Rhys explained, “but he couldn’t get away.” Elizabeth tried to conceal her disappointment but Rhys was quick to see it. There was something forlorn about the young girl, a naked vulnerability, that touched him. On an impulse he said, “Why don’t you and I have dinner together?”
It was a terrible idea, Elizabeth thought. She could visualize the two of them walking into a restaurant together: him, incredibly good-looking and suave, and her, all braces and pudge. “Thank you, no,” Elizabeth said stiffly. “I—I have some studying to do.”
But Rhys Williams refused to accept no for an answer. He thought of the lonely birthdays he had spent by himself. He got permission from the headmistress to take Elizabeth out for dinner. They got into Rhys’s car and started heading toward the airport.
“Neuchâtel is the other way,” Elizabeth said.
Rhys looked at her and asked innocently, “Who said we were going to Neuchâtel?”
“Where are we going?”
“Maxim’s. It’s the only place to celebrate a fifteenth birthday.”
They flew to Paris in a private jet, and had a superb dinner. It began with pâté de foie gras with truffles, lobster bisque, crisp luck à l’orange and Maxim’s special salad, and ended with champagne and a birthday cake. Rhys drove Elizabeth down the Champs-Élysées afterward, and they returned to Switzerland late that night.
It was the loveliest evening of Elizabeth’s life. Somehow Rhys managed to make her feel interesting, and beautiful, and it was a heady experience. When Rhys dropped Elizabeth off at school, she said, “I don’t know how to thank you. I—it’s the nicest time I’ve ever had.”
“Thank your father.” Rhys grinned. “It was all his idea.”
But Elizabeth knew that that was not true.