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Joseph Amiel Author
Category:
Romance
Publisher: Lambent Publishing LLC
ISBN-10: 098531443
Type: Fiction
Pages: 474
Copyright: 2012
ISBN-13: 9780985314446
Price: $4.95 (eBook)
Beloved international best-seller! A brilliant, adopted daughter fights her treacherous father to regain the family's legendary bank, her birthright.
A novel of consummate dramatic sweep and emotional force, BIRTHRIGHT is the story of a father and daughter locked in a bitter contest for control of the world's most legendary banking house.
Reared in the splendid excess of her family's London home and country estate; blessed with beauty and a precocious intelligence that has already captured the eye of her empire-building grandfather, Deborah de Kronenegold has everything, or so it seems. But her childhood equilibrium is shattered when she discovers that she is adopted, and when she becomes the object of her father Leslie's malevolence. Upon the deaths of her her grandfather Samuel and her lovely and ill-fated mother Madeleine--and the mysterious disappearance of the will naming deborah Samuel's principal heir--Leslie sets in motion a series of shocking and irrevocable events. Deborah is turned out, and with nothing but her resolve to claim her birthright, she moves to New York, and starts to build a financial empire to rival her father's--and to bring him down.
BIRTHIGHT is also a constellation of passionate love stores: there is Bash, Deborah's first love, whose heritage forbids him what he most desires; and David, who offers Deborah wealth and security and adoration--but at a terrible price. Finally, there is the story of another love affair--set in distant war-torn Italy, which unlocks the secret of Deborah's birthright.
As played out against the glamorous world of international finance, and set in the boardrooms of London, Paris, and New York, in sumptuous townhouses, chateaus, and penthouses, and in Italy and in in modern Israel, BIRTHRIGHTcuts a grand and satisfying swath. It is a tirumph of the unexpected that will hold the reader captivated right up to its surprising
Excerpt
B I R T H R I G H T
by Joseph Amiel
Lambent Publishing LLC New York 2012
ISBN 978-0-9853144-4-6
Copyright © 2012, 1985 by Joseph Amiel
All rights reserved
PROLOGUE
One of the bankers strolling just before noon along Lombard Street in London's crowded financial district happened to catch a glimpse of the elegant woman inside the limousine. Stunned, he threw courtesy aside, grabbed his friend's arm, and pointed.
"It's Deborah de Kronengold!" he exclaimed. "Here."
Both men stood transfixed for a moment as the long black vehicle turned in front of them into Mercy Lane. Beyond, fronting on the narrow thoroughfare, they could see the open gates of the most famous merchant bank in London, doubtless of the world, the Kronengold bank. Like everyone in finance, they were aware of the warfare between the young woman in the limousine and her father, who controlled the financial institution that had made their family a legend for the better part of two hundred years. As if fearful for their own safety, the two onlookers scurried on, whispering, wondering.
The chauffeur started to turn the car into the gap where the tall iron gates were swung back. Deborah de Kronengold tapped on the glass partition and held up her hand, halting him. She wanted to observe the Kronengold bank for a moment.
She was a redhead and very beautiful, with a high, clear forehead and a long neck. Her mouth was firm, as was her chin, which bore just the suggestion of a cleft. Her nose, thin and straight, was made distinctive by nostrils lifted into delicate, nearly translucent wings. Her eyes, large and searingly blue, never wavered from the entrance to the granite building, sun glinting off its glass dome, that commanded the far side of the courtyard.
A doorman in black top hat, knee breeches, and long green velvet coat stood there at attention as the redoubtable Peckerill had once stood, the silver buckles on his patent leather shoes similarly gleaming. There was a time when waiting for the doorman to swing open the door before her and her grandfather's progress into the bank's marble rotunda had sent prickles down her back. That would not happen now, she knew. Leslie, her father, had expunged those feelings. He had lied and defrauded and stolen. His viciousness had gouged out of her the affection she had once held for him and for his bank. In the seventeen years since she had last seen him, when she had angrily charged from his presence at the bank and from England, he and the Kronengold bank had become synonymous; his deceit had corrupted it in her mind, and his ineptitude had undermined its reputation in the financial world. In a very short time she would leave him with no money and less honor. Her hatred would be satisfied, her vengeance achieved. Life really does make you pay for your deeds in the end, she thought.
Deborah nodded to her driver's eyes in the rearview mirror, directing him to head into the courtyard. Triumph began to curl into the shape of her smile. Now, at last, she was ready to seize her birthright.
Book One
THE FAMILY
ONE
IT HAS OFTEN BEEN WRITTEN that the Kronengolds are different from other people. On a spring afternoon in 1951, when Deborah de Kronengold was nearing her sixth birthday, she learned she was different from other Kronengolds.
She had always known she was different in one way, of course: her red hair. She yearned to have brown hair like her mother, whom she adored. Her mother appeared thoughtful when Deborah demeaned her own hair color, not happy or indulgent, as she usually seemed when they were alone together. At those moments she would hug Deborah or reach forward impulsively to take her daughter's hand and tell her how fortunate she was to have such beautiful hair. But in the very possessiveness of her grip, Deborah could sense her mother's worry.
A beautiful child with bright blue eyes from which a startling and precocious intelligence shone, Deborah was the only daughter of one of Britain's richest families. Despite such gifts, she had remained an affectionate little girl, sweet and considerate, but she possessed a prodigious store of energy.
From the very first, Nanny Duhamel, a young Frenchwoman hired to watch over Deborah and perfect her French, had found herself unable to cope with Deborah's high spirits and curiosity. "It is the red hair . . . that red hair," the harried nursemaid usually grumbled desperately as she raced after Deborah like a white kite the child suddenly yanked here to chase a squirrel or there onto some playground apparatus that brought her to the very rim of danger—and always when the inexperienced young woman least expected it.
Nanny Duhamel breathed a sigh of relief at the end of this particular spring afternoon, when she could finally shepherd Deborah out of Hyde Park through the Park Lane exit in the direction of home. The Frenchwoman considered the day far more successful than most. Deborah had not added a new scrape to the small scabs that covered her knees and elbows like shifting squall clouds, and her hat and dress were still reasonably clean.
The woman and her charge were only a couple of blocks from the house when, without warning, Deborah's face suddenly lit with a smile and she sprinted off. She had caught sight of her older brother, Richard, who had spent the day with his school friends, all out on spring "hols." Following at his back like a square-sailed galleon was his elderly Nanny Stock, too old to take on an energetic new charge like Deborah, but kept on out of obligation by the family. She both protected Richard and propelled him with a subtle dominance the young Frenchwoman admired, but feared she would never master.
Richard was nine, three years older than Deborah. Like his parents, Richard had dark hair and eyes. His skin was pale and his physique very thin, conveying an impression of delicate health. As Deborah approached him, she could already sense that his attitude toward her now would be the sort of tolerant disdain he had increasingly adopted when they were in public, particularly when he was with his friends. "You're a child," he took pains to explain to her at such moments, "a tedious, silly child." The first time, she was too offended to react. The next time she had kicked him in the shins as hard as she could, and had been rewarded with a punch in the arm and then a slammed door between them. The exclusion had hurt far more than the blow.
Deborah fell into step beside Richard and tried to begin a conversation, but all his attention was focused on the yo-yo he snapped down and up ahead of him as he walked, and Deborah was forced to fall silent beside him and watch. He had promised to play with her the night before and refused when he became absorbed in his stamp collection. He had then told her they would play today, and Deborah was eager for his company. She glared at the yo-yo as if at a mortal enemy.
The Kronengold mansion rose like a gray fortress above one entire side of a park-like square in the Mayfair section of London. A black iron fence, like giant hair combs set on their spines, guarded the stone building's periphery. As they neared the front gate, Richard loosened the string around his middle finger, permitting Deborah her opportunity. She ripped the yo-yo out of his hand and raced ahead, the red hair whipping behind her like a cavalry flag. Richard gave chase, but she was too quick, bounding onto the stone pediment and statue at one side of the entrance and then scampering up the iron stanchion beside it to the top. Her hat had blown off, the white stockings had ripped, but Richard could not reach her. Balanced atop the narrow iron beam, feet planted between the pointed spikes, smiling at her advantage over him, she raised the yo-yo above her head.
"Richard, if you climb after me, I'll throw it into the traffic."
Nanny Stock had already gripped Richard's arm, her responsibility seen to.
"Viens ici! Viens ici, je t'en prie!" Nanny Duhamel's face tipped up to Deborah, white with fear. She wanted to run into the house to summon help from one of the male servants, but feared to leave Deborah for an instant.
"Please . . . please . . . come down," she begged helplessly, her arms bound to her sides, as if with ropes, by the possibility that an impulsive move on her part might cause the child to slip.
Deborah ignored her. "Richard, if I give it back, do you promise to play with me after supper until bedtime?"
"It's no concern of mine what you do with it," he answered. "I have another."
His indifference was infuriating to her after days of it. "You're a liar, Richard Edgar Henri de Kronengold! This one is your favorite."
She drew back her arm and studied his face. His mouth was quivering faintly.
"And we play Family," she pressed.
"Snakes and Ladders," he countered reluctantly.
"Young lady, you are coming down!"
Her father's voice. She looked toward the sound. He and her grandfather were striding toward her; she had not noticed the arrival of the black Rolls limousine that brought Father and Grandfather back from the bank. Grandfather's mansion spread over the next adjacent side of the square, so they occasionally rode home in one car. Her father was tall and strong, quite capable of reaching and lowering her.
"Snakes and Ladders," Deborah swiftly agreed, and bent toward her father. Looping her arms around his neck, she dropped into his arms. "Good afternoon, Father."
Leslie de Kronengold displayed a cold, imperious expression that came easily to him. His face was dominated by a high brow and a large, thin nose, and he customarily spoke in quiet, confident commands, as if all the thinking had already been done and others must unquestioningly obey. Deborah had perceived that his manner was different with her mother; she seemed to soften him—he listened when she spoke. At an early age the little girl had set her mind to win him over as her mother had done, and she soon found that if she was fearless in replying to his questions and could pierce his frequent boredom with humorous answers, he would be entertained and interested. This time he did not give her the chance.
"You could have been injured. Everyone on the street was watching."
"Especially Richard. He was much too frightened to come after me." She glanced slyly over her shoulder at her brother, his hand still shackled to Nanny Stock's. "Now he has to play Snakes and Ladders with me all evening."
"It will be quite a long while before you have permission to play games again. You are going to bed right after your supper." He put her down. "Go to your room."
Deborah was indignant. "I wish I had fallen and hurt myself, then you would have been too sorry to punish me."
"To your room!"
Reluctantly, she turned into the entrance, glancing at her grandfather's round face as she did so. His mouth was turned up into his mustache with amusement.
Deborah had spent very little time with her grandfather in her young life. He was a remote, Olympian figure who dominated the family—and much of the financial world as well, she was later to learn. She could hear the deference even in her father's voice.
The smile, a clear sign of Grandfather's approbation, so raised her spirits that she almost failed to hear her father mutter to him, "When I agreed to take her in, I didn't think we'd be getting an uncontrollable savage."
Deborah squared her shoulders at the insult and kept walking, wondering what he meant.
The beginning of the nineteenth century was turbulent and unpredictable. Winds of democracy, unleashed by the French Revolution, were blowing across Europe, sucking war behind them like debris, until war in the person of Napoleon became the gale itself. In such times clever men could do well.
In Frankfurt there was such a man, Solomon ben Abraham, the only son of the goldsmith Abraham ben Itzakh. He had grown up with none of his father's superb skill at transforming cold, hard metal into gleaming beauty, and his father had feared for the boy's future: For generations beyond memory the family had produced renowned goldsmiths, so useful to the nobility that their house had been left relatively unscathed by the butchery that periodically assaulted the Jewish ghetto. Abraham soon realized, however, that his son had been born with a gift as rare as his own. He understood money in a way that amounted to a kind of genius. He could manipulate it with all the dazzling facility of an artist his paints or a composer his notes. By age ten Solomon could calculate exchange rates and all the coin values of Europe's profusion of duchies and principalities and nations at near instant speed. Before his bar mitzvah he had turned the front room of the family house into a store, from which he sold Abraham's work at prices the artisan had believed impossible and to which he soon added other goods imported from all over Europe.
As the years passed the store outgrew these quarters, and Solomon, now a young man, rented part of the house next door. He could have afforded to build his own by then, but there was no empty land left behind the heavy gates that, on Sundays and Christian holidays, locked Jews into the overcrowded Frankfurt ghetto. For the sign above his store he chose three golden crowns, the mark his father and those who came before him engraved on the bottom of their gold articles. Crowns had been chosen to denote family pride and derived in feeling from the five gold balls that were the insignia of their former patrons, the Medici, whose goldsmiths the family had been. The turmoil that followed Lorenzo's death drove Solomon's ancestors from Renaissance Florence, and they settled eventually in this bustling Teutonic city on the Main River. Beneath the three crowns—the insignia was reduced from five to three as a show of respect—Solomon directed the sign painter to write, not MERCHANT, but MONEY CHANGER, and he took the gold crowns for a surname: Kronengold. In money itself, he sensed—one of the few careers permitted a Jew—was his future and the future of the sons his shrewd, virtuous wife had started to bear him.
If one were then to have picked a family that would rise to dominate the finances of Europe, surely one would have skipped the little building with three crowns over its door on a street only twelve feet wide in a teeming ghetto of outcasts. But Solomon Kronengold understood money. And his wife bore clever sons. And that was the beginning.
Having failed to rein in Deborah's stubborn impetuosity in full view of her employer, Nanny Duhamel was grim-faced as she set out the child's supper in the day nursery. Deborah was too preoccupied with her own thoughts to notice. She had been pondering her father's remark since the moment she had heard it, but the possible meanings so threatened her that she pulled back time and again from the conclusion toward which her young, but highly logical, mind seemed to be pointing. She decided to wait for her mother. Other adults often rolled their eyes and put her off when she asked questions. Her mother always took as long as it required to answer them.
Her parents were going to a charity ball that night. Deborah never doubted that, despite the edict of punishment, her mother would come to her bedroom to kiss her good night. Deborah first floated on the expectation of how beautiful her mother would look when she appeared in the doorway, and then shrank in anticipation of the devastating information she might be concealing. Deborah felt small and frightened in the large bed at the center of the night nursery. In the darkness the pink canopy she always thought of as protecting her now seemed capable of hurtling down upon her with crushing weight.
She tried to evade her fears by imagining the gown her mother would be wearing. Although Madeleine de Kronengold spoke perfect English, she was actually a French Kronengold who had married a distant cousin; separated by many generations, they were joined by the common history and investment-banking interests that linked all the Kronengolds. Being French and fashionable, she favored Paris for her clothes, and among the Paris designers, she favored Dior, who had allowed women to be feminine again, in the longer skirts and rounded forms of his revolutionary New Look.
Deborah glanced up at the first sound of light footsteps approaching her room. Trailing red organdy, Madeleine de Kronengold glided through the doorway with confident grace, like a tropical bird zipping between crowds of umbrella-sized leaves without leaving the barest quiver behind. Below her neck was an exquisite ruby and diamond necklace. From her ears hung the matching ruby drop earrings; on her wrist was the bracelet, and on her finger, the ruby ring.
Deborah clapped her hands in admiration. Her mother would be the prettiest woman at the ball; she was ALWAYS the prettiest woman wherever she went.
Madeleine de Kronengold was as beautiful as her daughter believed her to be. A fawn's soft eyes peered out of an oval face. Small-boned, her slim tall body was characteristic of her branch of the Kronengolds. Her mouth revealed her personality best. Serene at rest, it illuminated her face with spontaneous smiles.
But tonight Madeleine's mouth was set in anticipation of the firm chastisement she would add to her husband's. "Your father and I are very annoyed at your behavior," she began sternly, seating herself on the edge of Deborah's bed.
Deborah listened dutifully to the recitation of her sins, her attention gripped by the spectacle of her mother's hair. Tiny spaces between the ends of the curly dark brown hairs had been set aglow by the hall light behind her, flaring the rim into an aura around her head. Deborah forced herself to concentrate on her mother's words as the lecture drew to a close.
"Dee, will you promise me never to take such a foolish risk again?"
Deborah nodded with contrition; smiling with relief at having got through this unpleasant task, Madeleine bent to kiss her daughter good night.
Now Deborah could express her own concern. "Mummy, I heard Father say he didn't know I'd be a savage when he agreed to take me in. What did he mean?" Deborah saw her mother's body stiffen, and she held her breath.
"'Agreed to take'—oh, Dee, you must have misunderstood," Madeleine said in an oddly strained tone.
"That's what he said."
Madeleine's shoulders sank. Her wide brown eyes stared into Deborah's without blinking, as if hypnotized by headlights on a dark road crossing.
"I had hoped . . . when you were older," she finally said. Her voice seemed to come from another part of the room. She glanced down and spent much too long straightening the blanket. "I'm so sorry it has come out this way. Perhaps it's for the best."
She brushed a stray lock off Deborah's forehead and took a deep breath. "Dee, six years ago, at the end of the war, I gave birth to a baby girl who died."
"Like Calico's kitten?"
"Yes, just like that."
Liquid was forming in the corners of Madeleine's eyes. "I had wanted a second baby very much. Just after the war ended, cousin Nathan called on the telephone to my brother, Pierre, who was in Italy, and told him what had happened. They both knew how much having a little girl meant to me." She gently touched Deborah's cheek. "Our family—your uncle Pierre's and mine—owned factories and a bank in Italy before the war, and Pierre had spent the war there, so he had many friends. One particular friend was a nun who was head of an orphanage where children were protected from the war and given a . . . home." The last word caught in her throat. She lifted her eyes to Deborah's. "Your uncle Pierre decided to bring me the most beautiful, most wonderful little girl he could find to be my very own."
Madeleine embraced her daughter, their cheeks close. She could feel Deborah's heart pounding.
"Dee, you were only a few weeks old," Madeleine whispered. "You were the most marvelous baby in the world. He chose you for us out of all the other babies. And we adopted you."
Deborah had no idea what that meant, but it frightened her. "What's adopted?"
"Do you remember when I told you how babies are born?"
Deborah stared at her mother, barely nodding; she had struggled to understand Madeleine's very simplified explanation.
"Well," Madeleine continued, "you had . . . you had a different mother you grew up inside of until you were ready to be born. Then I became your mother."
"Where is she?"
Madeleine could hardly hear her own answer. "She died too. You needed a new mother." Madeleine's heart cried out for all the distress battering her daughter at once. "My darling, I wanted so much to be your mother."
Deborah lurched apart from Madeleine. "You mean I'm . . . like the war orphans!"
"Yes," Madeleine murmured.
"Is Richard adopted?"
"No, but that doesn't mean we love him any more than you."
"He belongs to you, and I don't!" The inescapable knowledge raked her soul and racked her small body with sobs. Even as Madeleine seized her in a hug to smother physically the misery consuming this child she loved so deeply, a void engulfed Deborah, a black horror isolating her from every other living being, every familiar object in the universe. Someone went shopping and brought home a child, Deborah thought. Much as one chooses a puppy, she had been chosen as a gift for this woman and her husband in London.
"Will you keep me?"
"Oh, God, we love you. You're our daughter." She crushed Deborah in her embrace.
"Does Richard know?"
"Hardly anyone knows. I went to the hospital to have my baby and returned home with you."
"Promise me, promise me you'll never tell anyone else."
"If you don't want people to know, we'll never tell a soul."
"Father won't tell either?"
She nodded. "I'll speak to your father this very evening."
Then Deborah began to ask questions. She wanted every scrap of information associated with her birth and adoption and her natural mother; each bit was precious. Madeleine tried to remember—but knew too few of the facts to hold back the menace. Finally Deborah asked, "The other little girl—the one who died like the kitten—what was her name?"
"We never gave her a name. She died so quickly."
Deborah thought a while about the little girl who had no name. "If I had died, would I have a name?"
"You were born healthy and sound."
Deborah pulled away. "If she was born healthy and sound, would I have a mother?"
Madeleine was unable to answer.
"Would I still be your daughter?"
Desperate to offer consolation, Madeleine resorted to repeating, over and over, how much she loved her daughter and what Deborah meant to her.
But in the little girl's eyes, like blue mirrors, Madeleine could see, reflected back, that hers had become the face of a very kind stranger.
Gradually, when the tears would come no more, Madeleine's protestations of love and a child's need to be loved shrank the void around Deborah until it was only a tiny hole of black doubt that darted inside her. They hugged and talked and even laughed, but much later, when she lay in bed alone in the large, dark room, Deborah was left with the dreadful certainty she was far too young to be able to put into words, but which was no less real to her young mind, that she would forever bear within her that vacuum of imminent terror into which everything that was important to her would always threaten to collapse.
Deborah's behavior during the days that followed alternated between outbursts of rash recklessness and lows of lethargy and dependence. Both states were borne with equal fortitude by her mother, who spent many hours with her. Nanny Duhamel was kind, bringing chocolate at bedtime and playing with her when she might normally have left her alone, but it was Madeleine who held the small, shattered spirit together. What Deborah allowed no one, especially her brother, to see was the inner tempest driving such behavior before it: gusts of rage directed both at the biological parents who had deserted her and at the family who had adopted her. She stared for long stretches at the betraying, telltale differences in her looks, loathing them.
Deborah dimly understood that she must be grateful to the father and mother who had taken her in, that her food and shelter, her survival, were dependent on their goodwill. She could not risk incurring their displeasure; they had adopted her, so they could un-adopt her, couldn't they? What would become of her then? Perhaps her real parents weren't dead after all. Perhaps they were searching for her at this very moment, but did not know she had been snatched from their Italian homeland. How could she let them know? How could she find them? Were these new parents keeping her from them, like a prisoner? The gap between her terrors and the contentment she would have to dissimulate served to deepen her torment.
Leslie de Kronengold rarely involved himself in his daughter's life. And during this period, for reasons of business, he was home even less than usual. Although Madeleine had alerted him that Deborah had become greatly disturbed upon learning of her adoption, he gave no indication of awareness on the few occasions his and his daughter's paths crossed. In typical British fashion, he believed that expressions of sentiment promoted weakness and lack of self-reliance in a child. Although she secretly longed for it, now that Deborah understood his remark nothing on earth would force her to seek some sign of concern from her father. The following week, realizing that time was only increasing Deborah's agitation about her birth, Madeleine asked her cousin Nathan de Kronengold to visit. They had been close since childhood. Nathan's father had been a premier banker in Berlin before the war. Nathan had fled Germany in the late thirties. By then his father was dead, and his mother doomed because she refused to leave ('The Jews are good Germans. The Nazis will soon realize that," she had told him). His bank and assets confiscated as the price of freedom, Nathan had temporarily taken a job operating the Swiss bank owned by the British Kronengolds. That had led him into military intelligence work for the British under his cover of Swiss banker. A bachelor, he now lived in England and was a partner in a small merchant bank started before the war by an émigré cousin, Hans Blaustein.
Deborah always enjoyed visits from cousin Nathan. Huge in stature but very gentle and jolly, he never spoke patronizingly to her; he patiently played endless games of rummy, and never failed to arrive without candies for her and Richard stuffing his high pockets. But on this visit, no amount of candy or joking in his sweetly comic German accent could lift her spirits. At Madeleine's urging, Nathan explained to Deborah that his only role in her adoption had been to tell Pierre on the telephone how despondent Madeleine was and to suggest that Pierre, so influential in Italy, might be able to find a healthy infant for her and her husband—the hostilities had orphaned so many. Perhaps Pierre could tell Deborah more about her background, he suggested.
The following day, Madeleine took Deborah on her first airplane ride, to Paris, aboard the family's DC-3. They could shop and spend some time with Grand'mère. Both knew, however, that the primary purpose of their trip was to see Pierre.
At the end of the Second World War, in every country where the Kronengolds survived, at least one of them was capable of preserving or even of restoring extravagant affluence for all the rest. In France the savior was Deborah's uncle Pierre, then still in his twenties; when he began, in part he had his wife's wealth to prop up his bank and for the rest he had only the legendary Kronengold name to borrow against, and that became his collateral. In Amsterdam it was the brothers Pieter and Carl. In Frankfurt, Vienna, and Milan, either nothing or no one was left to rebuild.
Pierre de Kronengold was Madeleine's older brother and the inheritor of the French barony upon the death of their father, Henri, during the war. The latter had taken refuge in England along with Pierre's wife and son and, of course, Henri's own wife, Deborah's grand'mère. Pierre had come alone tonight to the palais the Kronengolds had inhabited since the days of Louis XVIII and in which Grand'mère still lived.
Never allowed to dine with adults at home, Deborah sat stiffly and quietly at the long table. Frequently, her eyes strayed from Grand'mère—erect as bulrushes, gray hair swept atop her head into soft clouds—to the portrait of Grand-père, hung all alone on the yellow wall behind her. Deborah tried vainly to find Grand-père's sternness in Pierre's shy, considerate face, as he sat with an arm hooked casually over the back of his chair. Like Richard, her brother, he appeared fragile. His shoulders were slightly stooped and his voice and expression were soothing. The tassel of brown hair that fell across his forehead and the eyeglasses teetering atop the bridge of his nose added the final touches to an appearance that was more a bookkeeper's or a scholar's than the soldier her mother claimed he had been in the war. The only quality that seemed at all soldier-like to Deborah was the dash of persistence in his questions; he was always truly interested in knowing how Deborah was and what she had been doing.
After dinner Pierre, Madeleine, and Deborah retired to one of the salons. Like the dining room, it was large and decorated in an ornate French period style similar to most Kronengold houses: gilt rococo molding; a painted ceiling; fabric wall coverings obscured or punctuated by tapestry murals, fine paintings, and art objects; brocade-upholstered chairs and sofas; and cabinets inlaid with varying shades of wood. As she had at the great oaken front door, Deborah carefully averted her eyes from the Kronengold coat of arms carved into the mantel with its three crowns and its motto, Unity and Fidelity, that had been carefully explained to her. It seemed to rebuke her personally now for trespassing on the purity of the family's honor. Deborah flounced down on an oversized sofa, feeling very small and nervous. To ease her discomfort, Pierre chose a seat beside her on the sofa. He took her small hand in his as he began to tell Deborah how he had found her.
Near the end of the war, Pierre had learned from Nathan that his sister's baby had died in childbirth and that the doctors had told her she could have another child only by adopting one. Before leaving Italy for France to begin the task of rebuilding the shattered fortunes of the French Kronengolds, Pierre returned to Turin, the region where the family had purchased a factory complex a half century earlier, to pay a visit to the orphanage at the Convent of Santa Raffaella, which his family had long supported, to overcome potential anti-Jewish antagonism. Pierre's voice was soft as he spoke, and his eyes appeared to focus far away, as if viewing himself in the past.
"Whenever I visited the convent, I would walk through the orphanage with Sister Teresa and discuss its problems, as my grandfather and father before me had done with the abbesses before her. I told her how much my sister wanted a daughter. On the third floor was the nursery. It was a long, white room with cribs along the walls. Two nuns were sitting by a table in the center of the room, each feeding an infant. Sister Teresa and I walked from one crib to the next while she told me about the child in each.
"In the far corner something caught my eye. I saw a tiny hand playing with the white crib bars. I looked into the crib and was startled by the infant in it. Her coloring, for one thing: bright red hair and the largest blue eyes."
"Like a clown!" Deborah blurted out.
"Like cabochon sapphires." Pierre smiled. "Do you know what they are? Round sapphires. The best of them have stars shining within them, like your eyes do. Sister Teresa explained to me that a doctor from a nearby town had brought the child there when it was born . . . just after its mother died."
Madeleine reached protectively for Deborah's free hand. But Deborah drew both hands into her lap.
"Who was . . . my mother?"
Pierre shook his head. "The doctor knew only that the woman had no family. The child's father had been killed in the war."
Deborah's eyes had turned to glass. "That's all you know about them?" she finally asked.
Pierre thought a moment. "I remember Sister Teresa saying that the doctor told her the mother had the same coloring you do and was also very beautiful." He smiled again at the recollection. "I had never seen such a beautiful baby. Suddenly the child reached out—"
" But it was me. Why do you keep saying 'the child'?"
He bent his head apologetically. "You. You reached out and began playing with your toes, gurgling like babies do—you seemed so pleased with such a wonderful trick. Around your neck I noticed a gold chain with a small gold cross."
Deborah's anguish deepened. Nanny Duhamel wore a cross and had explained what it signified.
"I'm not even Jewish."
"The doctor thought your mother was Jewish and was wearing the cross to hide her religion from the authorities. They tried to capture Jews in those days, you know. Wearing a cross was a good way to disguise oneself. The doctor said that she herself named you before she died."
"Is Deborah a Jewish name?"
"It comes from the Bible. In Hebrew it's Dvora. She was a wise judge who rallied the Israelites to defeat their enemies thousands of years ago."
"But why did you keep the name Deborah?"
"We Jews had all gone through so much. The fight for Israel was about to begin. Besides, you seemed like a very clever baby."
"You don't have to be very clever to find your toes," Deborah said grumpily.
"Not one of those other babies your age could have done it."
She fought back the accommodation of a smile. "I wish you had named me Mary."
Deborah didn't speak again for a long time, allowing the whole story to replay through her mind like a film. Finally, she sought Uncle Pierre's eyes again.
"Am I really special?"
"Very special," Madeleine replied just an instant before he did.
Deborah could feel the tears beginning to come again. "I come from nowhere."
Madeleine opened her purse and lifted out a tiny gold cross on a chain. The child stared at it, trying to see in the cross's shape or color where it had come from, who had made it, and, most of all, the woman who had worn it and had named her Deborah. Madeleine lowered the cross into Deborah's open palm. The small fingers closed on it, seeming to clutch without conscious command. The sharp metal points cut into Deborah's skin, but the pain increased the reality of her scant birthright. She squeezed harder, staring at her fist until the white-hot pain drove every thought but itself from her mind and she became lost in it, coming back to awareness only when she noticed her tear had fallen on the heel of her hand. Her mother was speaking again.
"When Uncle Pierre brought you to us, it was a miracle. I can't imagine life without you. I love you more than you can ever know."
Deborah flung herself at her. "Oh, Mummy, I love you too."
She snuggled her cheek into the cool blue silk dress and gazed at the familiar rope of pearls as large as ripe grapes around her mother's neck. She could feel security flowing back into her muscles and bones. Whoever her shadow parents might be, obscured in the dimness at the edge of the room, she knew that the flesh-and-blood mother she held loved her. And although the tiny demon of doubt about who she really was still nestled inside her, she no longer doubted her mother's love.
A flash of childish fear or intuition at that moment made her whisper, "Don't ever leave me, Mummy."
"I could leave everything in this world before I left you, Dee."
Content, Deborah hugged Madeleine without thinking for a long while. Then she sat up. She wanted Pierre to retell the story, not because she didn't remember every word, but because it was all she had. That, a tiny cross, and a first name. Everything else, she felt, was an act of charity.
Soon afterward Madeleine decided to invite as many of the British Kronengold family as could come to their London house for the Passover seder, a ceremony erected on family and religion—elements now dangling dangerously from her daughter's sense of belonging.
Eating matzos rather than leavened bread during the eight days of Passover was a detail of religious observance that had long since slipped from the family's small inventory. As religion had gradually lost its appeal to upper-class Christians during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so had it done to the Kronengolds. But they always dutifully appeared at synagogue during the High Holy Days. Not only would the Kronengolds' absence be considered letting down the side, but it would also violate the family's superstitious, unspoken understanding of a covenant by which God had agreed to allow the family to flourish while so many other Jews suffered so dreadfully.
For generations Kronengold dinner parties had been traditional gathering places for the mighty and the gifted. Several times in Deborah's short life she had been presented to Winston Churchill. She had curtsied obediently, but nearly erupted with giggles at the sight of the long cigar protruding from the aged infant face into hers. Once Matisse, who had been commissioned to do a portrait for one of the drawing rooms, had dashed off a pencil portrait when she was introduced to him. But before this night she had always been swiftly herded out by Nanny or one of the other servants after her ritual moment of courteous prettiness, bearing with her the recollection of smart clothing and magnificent jewelry, which she would later do her best to re-create using crayons, scissors and paste so she could play dress up.
Tonight was an awesome occasion for Deborah: She was to dine at a large gathering with adults for the first time. Male servants in black livery swung back the great doors to the dining room. Deborah gasped. The chandeliers and sconces glittered like clutches of huge diamonds against the soft glow of red velvet walls.
Grandfather sat at the head of the table. Samuel de Kronengold was of medium height, but to her child's eye he always appeared to be a giant—larger than her much taller father. He had a ferocious countenance: great scowling eyebrows that sat above his eyes like bushy black sentinels and, guarding his mouth in a similar manner, an old-fashioned mustache that had not changed its shape through decades of family photo albums. A vest covered the dome of his large stomach. Like the rest of his suit it was, as usual, black.
As the man who owned the bulk of the British Kronengold assets and controlled I. Kronengold & Sons, the family's legendary merchant bank, he would normally have been looked up to by the others. But he had long ago proved himself to be one of those rare sons of genius the family uncannily produced just in time to lead it through critical years. His time had come just after the Second World War, when the bank's assets had been slashed by war losses and much of the ancient building on Mercy Lane that had housed generations of Kronengold bankers had been razed by bombing. Samuel de Kronengold and the bank's employees worked endless hours in the half of the bank that remained. He brilliantly leveraged investments in businesses that would thrive in the postwar boom he foresaw. In addition he was the major force resuscitating and uniting London's banking capability and, through that, much of the nation's industry.
The Kronengold interests and the rest of the City had soon risen like phoenixes from the rubble of Hitler's bombardment and, like phoenixes, the new appeared to be very much like the old. The men who then came each day to the City as their fathers and grandfathers had—in striped trousers, morning coat, and top hat; or in black suit, bowler hat, and carrying a brollie—determined that they had good reason for optimism, even for complacence. Once more it was good to be an Englishman and, as always, if the example of Lord Kronengold was any criterion, blessed to be a Kronengold.
Samuel was no observer of Jewish ritual. He considered much of it nonsense, but he had a strong sense of family and had rich recollections of Passover seders as a boy. Although still vigorous, he was now in his mid-sixties and becoming increasingly concerned about the accelerating entropy and the loss of entrepreneurial spirit among the Kronengolds. He began the evening by recalling the words of Solomon Kronengold to his sons: "It is hard to be a Jew. But it is harder to be nothing." Then he nodded to Nathan, the most religiously observant of those present, who explained that the Passover dinner, the seder, is a reminder of the Jews' deliverance from Egyptian slavery thousands of years ago—and that such redemption is still spiritually possible for everyone.
Raising his glass, Nathan intoned the prayer for the wine, and the age-old ritual-dinner began.
Among the many relatives along the sides of the long dining table were Deborah's parents, her father's shy brother and sister-in-law, Charles and Cora, Grandfather's gregarious nephew Malcolm and Malcolm's ex-actress wife, Lavinia. Malcolm was on the board of the family holding company, but was perfectly content to allow Samuel to run things while he tended his art collection. Other Kronengold adults and their children made up the rest of the party.
Deborah was the youngest child present. She had been carefully schooled for several years in the table manners expected of an upper-class young lady, but she was nonetheless bewildered by the number of forks, knives, spoons, and glasses set out before her. When in doubt, she had been told, use the outside utensil, but no meal could possibly have so many courses. There was so much an adult had to know, she decided. No wonder it took so long to become one.
For children the high point of a seder is the hunt for the afikomen, a piece of matzo wrapped in a napkin that is hidden when none of them is looking. Deborah was all concentration, never taking her eyes off of the square of napkin-covered matzo beside her grandfather's plate. She was determined that the prize—traditionally money, she was told—would be hers.
But she had anticipated too soon. When dinner was finally brought in by a file of servants bearing gleaming silver trays, her attention was captured by the display. The butler led, his white collar high and starched, his black bow tie alert, like rabbit ears. Behind him were the liveried footmen. The young ladies who worked for the family followed, their backs straight, their cheeks slightly flushed at the notice their entrance was receiving.
"At last!" Malcolm cried out. "Another minute, and I'd have converted out of pure hunger."
Everyone laughed. Deborah's gaze shifted back to the napkin. It was gone! In that short moment of letting down her guard, someone had whisked it away. Halfway down the table, Malcolm was standing behind one of the relatives. Grandfather's eyes seemed to be laughing at her. All her advantage lost. Deborah folded her arms and glared at him.
When the children were finally unleashed, yapping and scuffling, she bounded to the head of the table. The others searched chuckling dinner guests or opened the doors of cabinets along the walls or peeked behind pictures, but she was convinced it had to be near Grandfather; her surveillance had been broken for only that single instant. Malcolm, empty-handed, had been too far down the table; he had been a decoy. Deborah studied Grandfather's face. He stared as intently at hers, his eyes once again seeming to laugh at her predicament.
"Deborah, you'd better hurry—someone else will find it," Malcolm's wife, Lavinia, prodded.
The heavy older man and the little girl continued to study each other.
She could see clearly it was not in his lap or under his chair. Hands locked across his stomach, he sat unmoving in the tall chair. He seemed much stiffer than earlier in the evening. Of course! She plunged into the space separating his back from the upholstery. Having observed her sudden movement, the other children were rushing toward them. She groped around frantically. The bottom of his jacket felt hard and flat; her hands scrabbled underneath it—and the prize was hers. Triumphantly, she held up the glorious square white parcel. The adults applauded and cheered. Richard was fuming. The ignominy of being bested by someone as young, as insignificant, and as female as she was almost too crushing an embarrassment to bear. It would be days before he spoke to her again. She resolved not to care.
"My prize!" she demanded.
"What do you want?" Samuel asked.
"Money. That's the prize . . . isn't it?"
"Perhaps some candy." His tone was teasing.
"But it's supposed to be money!"
"Deborah, speak to your grandfather with more respect," her mother interjected sharply.
But she was not to be diverted. She continued to stare him down.
Samuel broke into a wide smile. "I honestly believe this monkey would go so far as to destroy my reputation in the City if I failed to pay what I owe her."
He lifted her onto his knee. "You sit here with me, little Deborah. Tomorrow morning I will withdraw one entire gold guinea from the bank just for you."
She hadn't the slightest idea what the value was of the coin Grandfather had named, having never possessed, nor needed to, even so much as a tuppence in her life. "Is that a lot of money?"
"A fortune," he assured her. "And afterward we shall go to a grand restaurant, you and I, to discuss important financial matters."
Deborah had never been to a restaurant, but had often stood yearning to join her mother as she pulled on her gloves and adjusted her hat in the mirror.
"Do you promise?"
He solemnly extended his hand. "Is my credit good until tomorrow?"
They shook hands, and she collapsed happily against his chest. Then, as he remembered his own grandfather doing every Passover, he began to tell Deborah and the other children the history of the family.
As the nineteenth century was beginning, Solomon Kronengold sent his eldest son, Isaac, to England as his agent.
In 1642 Jews had been permitted by Oliver Cromwell to return to England after four centuries of exclusion. The years since then had witnessed a steady increase in their number. A short, almond-eyed young man with pronounced Semitic features, Isaac spoke only German when he arrived in the City of London.
When Londoners speak of the "City," they mean the heart of Britain's financial establishment, the banks, insurance companies, commodity and stock exchanges, and many other firms and institutions packed into the single square mile in which the municipality originated. To this day it has its own Lord Mayor, Common Council, police, and courts; and the Queen still needs permission to enter. Two thousand years ago, it was merely a ford on the Thames River. Ships were sailing from it well before the Romans expanded the little village into a city and built a wall around it and roads outward from it. Traders and travelers by foot, horse, and ox had to move through the hub city. Cargo ships picked up and dispatched goods there. The pattern was set from that time forward: the City traded.
The buying and selling, the bargaining, the lending, the very closeness of people in the City when Isaac Kronengold arrived among the tangled skein of narrow streets—today still bearing names like Threadneedle, Old Jewry, Poultry, Bishopsgate, and Cheapside—were native territory to him. He began by exporting goods to Germany, but soon surmised that the real growth industry was not textiles or ceramics, but the credit he extended on them. By the second year he had bought a building between King William and Lombard streets, on Mercy Lane. Over the door he placed a sign displaying three crowns, as his own father had once done, and the words "I. Kronengold & Co," the "Co." later to be replaced by "Sons."
Solomon sent his second son to Paris before he was twenty, and others, in turn, to Amsterdam, Vienna, and Milan. The youngest remained with their father in the narrow house in the Frankfurt ghetto.
All six of the Kronengold brothers, but the eldest most of all, had inherited their father's genius for finance. And in their footsteps, for generation after generation, would march half a dozen branches of the dynasty.
Inflation, scarcity, and the need to transport money beyond guarded, war-ravaged borders brought desperation to some in Europe. To the Kronengolds they brought the opportunity to rise from squalid oppression to security, to dignity. In his own city each son built a branch bank that prospered beyond the avarice of potentates; they became the richest, most powerful bankers in the world, financing nations and early ventures of the Industrial Revolution: railroads, Bessemer steel plants, steam-driven ships. Their partnership was linked by more than codes, couriers, boats, and messenger pigeons; they thought as one, united by the creed old Solomon had laid down: Unity and Fidelity.
Initially, Kronengolds tended to marry other Kronengolds, first because they genuinely liked and, more importantly, trusted each other; second, because few brides' fathers could provide the heavy dowry befitting marriage to a Kronengold except another Kronengold; and third, because the family capital was thereby kept intact. When they did marry outside the family, the alliance was always an advantageous one for the firm, originally involving other Jewish bankers—Rothschilds, Warburgs, Blausteins, and the like—and, later, the most elevated of titled gentility.
By tradition, only the sons could own shares in the banks; the daughters formed blood links among the sons and the influential aristocratic husbands they married outside the family.
Soon the Kronengolds were too rich and too powerful—and had too many friends in high places dependent on them—to be denied aristocratic titles; each country where one lived produced its own hereditary Baron de Kronengold. At the pinnacle of society in their countries—usually grudgingly because of their Jewish roots—they became the intimates of royalty, resided in vast palaces, were waited on by regiments of servants, and amassed superb art collections and racing stables. Yet the various branches of the family still comprised a loosely bound unit.
Even when the Kronengold banks in different countries under different cousins were split into separate firms, the cousins still relied on each other across borders and visited with each other for holidays.
Always, they still felt themselves planets in a single solar system that revolved about the singularity of their heritage. Always, they still felt themselves held in orbit by the creed that had impelled the family's success: Unity and Fidelity.
Samuel sought every child's eye and, finally, Deborah's. "Without the family, we are just like any other people with money who come and go. But together, as one, we are invulnerable." Recognizing that she did not understand, he added, "Making sure the family prospers—does well—and our name goes on, that is our purpose in life, little one. Nothing is more important."
After the seder, Madeleine accompanied Deborah upstairs to tuck her into bed.
"Mummy, does Grandfather know I'm adopted?"
"Yes, Dee, he does."
"I think he likes me all the same."
Madeleine kissed her daughter's forehead tenderly. "I think he does—very much. You like him, don't you?"
"Yes. Because he's fair. A lot of adults aren't to children, you know."
"What was the best part of the whole evening, Dee—finding the matzo?"
Deborah thought a minute, then shook her head. "Being allowed to stay up with the family. Mummy, is that what it was like before the war? The whole family together like that?"
"A little bit. We were younger, of course. And there were many more of us, from all over Europe." Her eyes grew unfocused as she thought about it. "I seem to remember us all being so foolishly full of hope."
And then a shiver rasped along Madeleine's spine. She had remembered that day in Valtary when hope and youth had died.
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