The Ambassador's Daughter
Read The Ambassador's Daughter Online
Authors: Pam Jenoff
Paris, 1919.
The world’s leaders have gathered to rebuild from the ashes of the Great War. But for one woman, the City of Light harbors dark secrets and dangerous liaisons, for which many could pay dearly.
Brought to the peace conference by her father, a German diplomat, Margot Rosenthal initially resents being trapped in the congested French capital, where she is still looked upon as the enemy. But as she contemplates returning to Berlin and a life with Stefan, the wounded fiancé she hardly knows anymore, she decides that being in Paris is not so bad after all.
Bored and torn between duty and the desire to be free, Margot strikes up unlikely alliances: with Krysia, an accomplished musician with radical acquaintances and
a secret to protect; and with Georg, the handsome, damaged naval officer who gives Margot a job—and also a reason to question everything she thought she knew about where her true loyalties should lie.
Against the backdrop of one of the most significant events of the century, a delicate web of lies obscures the line between the casualties of war and of the heart, making trust a luxury that no one can afford.
Selected praise for Pam Jenoff
Quill Award Nominee
Nominated for the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal
“With luminous simplicity, Jenoff’s breathtaking debut chronicles the life of a young Jewish bride during the Nazi occupation of Krakow, Poland, in WWII… This is historical romance at its finest.”
—Publishers Weekly
starred review on
The Kommandant’s Girl
“In her moving first novel, Jenoff offers an insightful portrait of people forced into an untenable situation and succeeds in humanizing the unfathomable as well as the heroic.”
—Booklist
on
The Kommandant’s Girl
“Beautifully researched, with realistic dialogue,
The Kommandant’s Girl
is impossible to put down. Don’t miss this terrific novel!”
—Romance Reviews Today
“I have not been so moved by a book in quite some time as I was by
The Kommandant’s Girl…
The remarkably accurate account of a world at war, and the repercussions of that war, make this a brilliant debut novel… Historical fiction at its best. I could not put the book down, yet was sad to see it end.”
—Historical Romance Writers
“
[The Diplomat’s Wife],
Jenoff’s stirring sequel to her debut… Historical romance fans will be well rewarded.”
—Publishers Weekly
starred review
“In [her] successful and satisfying second novel… Jenoff explores the immediate aftermath of World War II with sensitivity and compassion, shedding light on an often overlooked era of European history. She expertly draws out the tension and illustrates the danger and poverty of Eastern Europe as it falls under communism. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.”
—Library Journal
on
The Diplomat’s Wife
Also by Pam Jenoff
THE DIPLOMAT’S WIFE
THE KOMMANDANT’S GIRL
In loving memory of Dad.
Contents
Prologue
The sun has dropped low beneath the crumbling arches of Lehrter Bahnhof as I make my way across the station. A sharp, late-autumn breeze sends the pigeons fluttering from the rafters and I draw my coat closer against the chill. The crowds are sparse this Tuesday evening, the platforms bereft of the usual commuter trains and their disembarking passengers. A lone carriage sits on the track farthest to the right, silent and dark.
I had been surprised by the telegram announcing Stefan’s return by rail. There were hardly any trains since the Allies had bombed the lines. At least that’s what the newspapers write—the defunct trains and the British naval blockade are the excuses given for everything, from the lack of new pipes to start the water running again—a problem that has forced us back outside as though it were a century ago—to the impossibility of getting fresh milk. Looking around the desolate station now, I almost believe the excuse.
Stefan’s face appears in my mind. It was more than four years ago on this very platform that we said goodbye, the garland of asters I’d picked hung freshly around his neck. “Don’t go,” I pleaded a final time. Stefan was not cut out to fight—he had a round, gentle face, wide brown eyes that said he could never hurt anybody. But it was too late—he had gone down to the enlistment center two weeks earlier, ahead of any conscription, and come home with papers ordering him to report. The war was going to be quick, everyone said. The horse-mounted Serbs, with their swords, were no match for the Kaiser’s tanks and planes. The fighting would be over in weeks, and all of the boys wanted a piece of the glory before it was gone.
I peer back over my shoulder past the closing kiosk, which gives off the smell of stale ersatz coffee, at the station doors, creaking open and closed with the wind. Someone more important than me should have been here to meet Stefan. He is a soldier, wounded in battle. More to the point, he is the only young man from our Jewish enclave in Berlin who had gone off to fight and come back at all. I don’t know what I expected, not a marching band and reporters exactly, but perhaps a small delegation from the local war council. The once-proud veterans’ group had been disbanded, though. No one wanted to be identified as a soldier now, to face the glares of reproach and the questions about why they had not gotten the job done.
Fifteen minutes pass, then twenty. I clutch tighter the fine leather gloves that I’ve managed to twist into a damp, wrinkled ball. Fighting the urge to pace, I start toward the station office to inquire if there is news of the next arrival. I navigate around a luggage trolley, which has been upended and abandoned midstation. My skirt catches on something and I pause, turning to free the hem. It is not a nail or board, but a filthy, long-haired man sitting on the ground, a fetid mass of bandages where his right leg had once been.
“Bitte...”
a voice rasps as I jump backward. “I’m sorry to startle you.” He is a soldier, too, or was, his tattered uniform barely recognizable. I fish a coin from my purse, trying not to recoil from the hand that reaches out for it. But inwardly, I blanch. Will Stefan look like this sorry creature?
I lift my head as a horn sounds long and low from the darkness beyond the edge of the station. A moment later a train appears, threading its way onto one of the tracks. It moves so slowly that it seems to have no engine at all, nudged instead by some slight tilt of the earth. Great clouds of steam billow from its funnel, filling the station. As I walk toward the platform, straining to see through the mist, my heart begins to pound.
The train grinds to a halt. The doors open with painstaking slowness and a few men spill out, some in uniform and others street clothes. I search those walking toward me for Stefan, knowing that he will not be among them.
When the platform has nearly cleared, a nurse pushes a wheelchair from one of the train carriages. I step forward, and then stop again. The chair does not contain Stefan, but an elderly man, hunched over so only the top of his bald head shows. The nurse struggles with the chair and as its rear wheels catch on the door, I hasten to help her.
The man in the chair uncurls, straightening slightly as I near. It is Stefan, I realize, biting my lip so hard I taste blood. A giant slash across the right side of his face from temple to chin combines with the lack of hair to make him almost unrecognizable. But the worst part is his arms, skeletal and shaky. My mind races as I try to fathom the horrors that could age a man decades in a few years.
Stefan gazes up with vacant, watery eyes, not speaking. “Hello, darling,” I manage, bending to brush my lips against his papery cheek.
He reaches for me with a quivering hand. “Let’s go home,” he croaks, and as his fingers close around my wrist like cold death, I let out the cry I can hold back no longer.
My eyes fly open and I sit up in the darkness, still screaming.
Part One
Paris, December 1918
Chapter 1
I cycle through the Jardin des Tuileries, navigating carefully around the slippery spots on the damp gravel path. The December air is crisp with the promise of snow and the bare branches of the chestnut trees bow over me like a procession of sabers. I pedal faster past the park benches, savoring the wind against my face and opening my mouth to gulp the air. A startled squirrel darts behind the base of a marble statute. My hair loosens, a sail billowing behind me, pushing me
farther and faster, and for a moment it is almost possible to forget that I am in Paris.
The decision to come had not been mine. “I’ve been asked to go to the peace conference,” Papa informed me unexpectedly less than a month ago. He had previously professed no interest in taking part in “the dog and pony show at Versailles,” and had harrumphed frequently as he read the details of the preparations in the
Times
. “Uncle Walter thinks...” he added, as he so often did. I did not need to listen to the rest. My mother’s older brother, an industrialist who had taken over the electronics firm their father founded, could not attend the peace conference himself after contributing so much to the war machine. He considered it important, though, to somehow have a voice at the table, a presence before the Germans were formally summoned. So he had secured an invitation for Papa, an academic who had spent the war visiting at Oxford, to advise the conference. It was important to be there before Wilson’s ship arrived, Papa explained. We packed up our leased town house hurriedly and boarded a ferry at Dover.