have any of the details yet. He was climbing Mont Blanc. A rope broke. He fell into a crevasse.’
‘Did they find –’
She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them.
‘A bottomless crevasse.’
Her face had turned white. Rhys felt a quick sense of alarm. ‘Are you all right?’
She smiled brightly, and said, ‘Of course. I’m fine, thank you. Would you like some tea or something to eat?’
He looked at her in surprise and started to speak, and then he understood. She was in shock. She was rattling on, making no sense, her eyes unnaturally bright, her smile fixed.
‘Sam was such a great athlete,’ Elizabeth was saying. ‘You’ve seen his trophies. He always won, didn’t he? Did you know he climbed Mont Blanc before?’
‘Liz –’
‘Of course you did. You went with him once, didn’t you, Rhys?’
Rhys let her talk, anaesthetizing herself against the pain, trying to build an armour of words to ward off the moment when she would have to face her own anguish. For an instant, as he listened to her, he was reminded of the vulnerable little girl he had first known, too sensitive and shy to have any protection against brutal reality. She was dangerously wound up now, tense and brittle, and there was a fragility about her that worried Rhys.
‘Let me call a doctor,’ he said. ‘He can give you something to –’
‘Oh, no. I’m really quite all right. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll lie down for a while. I’m feeling a bit tired.’
‘Would you like me to stay?’
‘Thank you. That won’t be necessary.’
She walked him to the door, and as he started to get into the car Elizabeth called, ‘Rhys!’
He turned.
‘Thank you for coming.’
Jesus Christ.
Long hours after Rhys Williams had gone, Elizabeth Roffe lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling, watching the shifting patterns painted by the pale September sun.
And the pain came. She had not taken a sedative, because she wanted the pain. She owed that to Sam. She would be able to bear it, because she was his daughter. And so she lay there, all day and all night, thinking of nothing, thinking of everything, remembering, feeling. She laughed, and she cried, and she supposed that she was in a state of hysteria. It did not matter. There was no one to hear her. In the middle of the night, she suddenly became ravenously hungry and went down into the kitchen and devoured a large sandwich and then threw it up. She felt no better. Nothing could ease the pain that filled her. Her mind kept going back, back over the years with her father. Through her bedroom window she watched the sun rise. Some time later, one of the servants knocked at the door, and Elizabeth sent her away. Once the phone rang, and her heart leaped and she reached for it, thinking, It’s Sam! Then she remembered, and snatched her hand away.
He would never call her again. She would never hear his voice again. She would never see him again.
A bottomless crevasse.
Bottomless.
Elizabeth lay there, letting the past wash over her, remembering, remembering it all.
The birth of Elizabeth Rowane Roffe was a double tragedy. The minor tragedy was that Elizabeth’s mother died on the delivery table. The major tragedy was that Elizabeth was born a girl.
For nine months, until she emerged from the darkness of her mother’s womb, she was the most eagerly awaited child in the world, heir to a colossal empire, the multi-billion-dollar giant, Roffe and Sons.
Sam Roffe’s wife, Patricia, was a dark-haired woman of surpassing beauty. Many women had tried to marry Sam Roffe, for his position, his prestige, his wealth. Patricia had married him because she had fallen in love with him. It had proved to be the worst of reasons. Sam Roffe had been looking for a business arrangement, and Patricia had suited his requirements ideally. Sam had neither the time nor the temperament to be a family man. There was no room in his life for anything but Roffe and Sons. He was fanatically dedicated to the company, and he expected no less from those around him. Patricia’s importance to him lay solely in the contribution she could make to the image of the company. By the time Patricia came to a realization of what kind of marriage she had made, it was too late. Sam gave her a role to play, and she played it beautifully. She was the perfect hostess, the perfect Mrs Sam Roffe. She received no love from her husband and in time Patricia learned to give none. She served Sam, and was as much an employee of Roffe and Sons as the lowliest secretary. She was on call twenty-four hours a day, ready to fly wherever Sam needed her, capable of entertaining a small company of world leaders or serving a gourmet dinner to a hundred guests at a day’s notice, with crisp, heavily embroidered table cloths, gleaming Baccarat crystal, heavy Georgian silverware. Patricia was one of Roffe and Sons’ unlisted assets. She worked at keeping herself beautiful, and exercised and dieted like a Spartan. Her figure was perfect, and her clothes were designed for her by Norell in New York, Chanel in Paris, Hartnell in London, and young Sybil Connolly in Dublin. The jewellery Patricia wore was created for her by Jean Schlumberger and Bulgari. Her life was busy and full and joyless and empty. Becoming pregnant had changed all that.
Sam Roffe was the last male heir of the Roffe dynasty, and Patricia knew how desperately he wanted a son. He was depending on her. And now she was the queen mother, busy with the baby within her, the young prince, who would one day inherit the kingdom. When they wheeled Patricia into the delivery room, Sam clasped her hand and said, ‘Thank you’.
She was dead of an embolism thirty minutes later, and the only blessing about Patricia’s death was that she died without knowing that she had failed her husband.
Sam Roffe took time off from his gruelling schedule to bury his wife, and then turned his attention to the problem of what he should do with his infant daughter.
One week after Elizabeth was born, she was taken home and turned over to a nanny, the beginning of a long series of nannies. During the first five years of her life, Elizabeth saw very little of her father. He was barely more than a blur, a stranger who was always arriving or leaving. He travelled constantly and Elizabeth was a nuisance who had to be carted along, like a piece of extra luggage. One month Elizabeth would find herself living at their Long Island estate, with its bowling alley, tennis court, swimming pool and squash court. A few weeks later, her nanny would pack Elizabeth’s clothes and she would be flown to their villa in Biarritz. It had fifty rooms and thirty acres of grounds and Elizabeth kept getting lost.
In addition, Sam Roffe owned a large duplex penthouse apartment on Beekman Place, and a villa on the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia. Elizabeth travelled to all these places, shunted from house to apartment to villa, and grew up amid all the lavish elegance. But always she felt like an outsider who had wandered by mistake into a beautiful birthday party given by unloving strangers.
As Elizabeth grew older, she came to know what it meant to be the daughter of Sam Roffe. Just as her mother had been an emotional
