The Ambassador's Daughter (34 page)

“What are you doing here?” I demand. I find myself staring at his mouth, flung back to our kiss by the pond in Versailles.

“Or, you could say thank you,” he replies pointedly, brushing off the sleeves of his uniform.

Annoyance rises up, eclipsing my desire. “For what? I didn’t need rescuing.” I point toward the crowd at the municipal building, larger than ever. “And now I’ve lost my place in the queue.”

“It was foolish to come,” he admonishes, sounding more like Uncle Walter than I would have thought possible.

“You still haven’t told me what you are doing here. Are you following me?”

“In a sense, yes.” A shiver runs up my spine. “Your father rang me from the hospital, with Celia’s help, of course. He knew you were coming to vote and he asked me to check on you.” So he had not chosen to come after me, after all, but had done so dutifully at my father’s behest. Had Papa softened toward Georg? More likely, he was just concerned about my well-being and saw Georg as being in the best position to help. Georg gazes over the crowd, which has descended into a widespread brawl. “This is madness.”

“I’m still going to vote.”

A faint smile plays around his lips. “I had no doubt. Come with me.” Without waiting, Georg takes my hand and tucks it beneath his arm and walks briskly toward the stairs of the municipal building. I start to protest that I do not need his help. Then, taking in the shoving, fighting men, I decide against it. Georg’s hand is warm around mine as he leads me through the crowd. I wait for my anxiety to rise again, but it does not. Here, in this most cramped of places, I feel comfortable and safe. I understand then that my claustrophobia has not really been about closed spaces at all, but about yearning to breathe freely—something I can do when I am with him.

Inside, Georg waves his government identification card to bypass the queue. At the front of the hall, he stops short of the registration table, gesturing for me to go ahead.

“You voted already?”

“Yes, by absentee ballot in Hamburg. I think that the National Socialists are most promising.” I stare at him in disbelief. Georg had always been a bit more conservative. I notice then that he wears a cornflower in his lapel, the bright blue signaling his shift to the right.

“But, Georg, they’re barbarians.” Suddenly we are back in the study at Versailles, quarreling over politics. “How can you possibly support their position?”

“Weimar is weak. The right are the ones who are willing to crush the opposition and make a strong stand for Germany’s
future.” He had been so burned by the treaty that he now sees militarism as the only way.

“Perhaps the Americans...” I begin.

“The Americans?” He cuts me off, his voice is harsher than I have ever heard him speak. I glance anxiously over my shoulder. It is not wise to discuss politics loudly in public these days. But he does not seem to care who hears him. “They came and created this mess and then didn’t even ratify the treaty.” He has an undeniable point—the Americans are an ocean away, unscathed by the disaster they left behind.

I struggle to find the words to make him understand reason, but find none. Once I’d been able to help him see the right way.
True north,
he’d called me. But Versailles had changed him. We are both less open now, calcified in our respective positions.

I present my identification and the woman escorts me to a booth where there are a dizzying array of choices. I punch the slots on the cards for the candidates.
This is for you, Papa,
I think as I finish.

When I emerge from the voting booth a few minutes later, the melee has mostly cleared, broken up by brown-shirted Freikorps, the burly police who are known to be quick with a billy club. Outside, Georg leads me away from the crowd to the corner where his car is waiting. I wait for him to suggest coffee, anything to give us more time together so that we do not have to say goodbye as swiftly as we did at the villa. “Shall we?” I offer when he does not, gesturing down the wide, tree-lined Unter den Linden. He hesitates and I brace myself for the rejection of his refusal. But then he nods in assent.

Neither of us speaks as we stroll beneath the bowed branches of the chestnut trees in the direction of the Tiergarten. I study him out of the corner of my eye, searching for some sign that he is glad to see me or eager to get away. But his face is impassive.

A few minutes later, I hear the carousel tinkling unseen behind high bushes. We turn into the park, which is speckled this midweek morning with crisp-skirted nannies pushing prams and children playing hoops in the grass. In the brush alongside the path, a man stoops to gather leaves for fuel. We cross the footbridge over the canal, a thin strip of brown water amid two steep dirt banks. Georg turns off onto a side path, shrouded high on both sides by birch trees and brush. Suddenly it is as if we are back in the Tuileries Gardens the night the treaty was announced, alone in a world made for just the two of us.

He stops then and turns to me. “I was sorry to hear about your father. You must have been terribly frightened.”

“He’s recuperating slowly but surely. He’s a fighter, stronger than he looks.”

He smiles. “It runs in the family, no doubt.” Then his expression grows serious. “I wanted to come to see you, I mean him, but I feared it would only complicate matters for you.” It would have. I had not told Stefan about my encounter with Georg at the villa or the fact that he was in Berlin. A run-in between the two men would have been an unbearable reprise of that night in Versailles. But in my anguish, his comfort was the one for which I had yearned.

“I’m sorry we didn’t have more time to talk at the house the other day,” I offer. “I was surprised to see you.”

“No matter.” His lips twist. “You must be quite busy with preparations for the wedding.” The last word is clearly distasteful, almost spat. He is angrier than I realized when we last met. Had seeing me again dredged up his feelings of betrayal and hurt, or had I simply been too caught off guard at our encounter the other day to notice?

I reach out and touch his forearm. “Georg, about that...” I debate telling him the truth: that I was about to cancel my wedding to Stefan and come back to him when Papa collapsed. But knowing how close we had come would only make the fact that we cannot be together harder to bear. I swallow, pull my hand back. “The wedding is tomorrow.”

“I know.” His words are neutral, but there is a pain to his voice he cannot mask. The notion of me marrying Stefan was hard enough when it was in the future. But faced with the immediacy of it, his veneer begins to crumble. Seeing him now, I understand that he had not fled the villa the other day because he was angry about Paris. Rather, being that close to me and unable to be together was simply unbearable.

I swallow, fighting back the urge to throw my arms around him. “Georg, I know how difficult this is...” Then I stop—my words sound condescending and I will not add to his injury. “I will hate your fiancée someday, I am sure,” I joke feebly.

But he shakes his head, unwilling to see the humor. “I’ve no intention of meeting anyone. I’m quite fine alone.” He has withdrawn again to the solitary man he was before he met me. His isolation and retreat to a place I cannot reach is almost worse than any jealousy I might feel over another woman. “Anyway...” He clears his throat and turns away and I can see the faintest glisten of wetness at the corner of his right eye. “I’m leaving Berlin,” he announces.

“But you can’t! What about your position with the new government?” He does not respond. I’m driving him away. Seeing me once or by happenstance was unbearable enough. But we travel in concentric circles, and though the city is large, we are inevitably bound to run into or hear news of one another. Knowing that I am so close, but that I am married and can never be his, is more than he can stand.

“It was too good to be true.” He smiles ruefully. “It had to be, didn’t it? Congratulations on your marriage,” he manages, his voice gruff. “Don’t be nervous about the wedding. I’m told that it is just a big party—and a bit about lifetime commitment.” He turns away.

“Georg,” I cry out, a note of desperation creeping into my voice. I cannot bear to have him walk away and, having felt the fire again, to now have it go cold. He looks back and vulnerability and rage break his face into a thousand pieces. “Goodbye.” He kisses me on the cheek, his lips pressing hard against my skin, as if he is trying to give me in that moment all that cannot be. I reach out and cup my hand around the back of his neck, holding him. Everything I have ever wanted is both inches and lifetimes away.

Then I release him and he straightens. “Godspeed, Margot.” As he walks away, shoulders low, the air grows empty and cold around me.

Georg disappears, enveloped by the trees. I watch sadly, fighting the urge to go after him. What did I expect? It isn’t fair to ask him to stand by and watch as I start my life with someone else. I retrace our route from the Tiergarten, feeling the emptiness of the space beside me where Georg walked. Laughter drifts from an unseen woman on the far side of the trees, her happiness somehow an affront.

As I reach the corner by the municipal building, Uncle Walter’s Model T appears and he steps out from the backseat. His face is thunderous and I wait for him to rebuke me for going to vote. “Margot.” There is a note of urgency to his voice I’ve not before heard. “Celia rang. She said it’s about your father, and she needs you at once.”

Chapter 20

The ground shifts sideways beneath me. Uncle Walter steps forward and helps me into the rear of the car. Inside, Krysia sits by the far window, brow knotted. “What happened?” I move closer and she squeezes my hand tight. The car turns not in the direction of the hospital, but winds out of the city on the motorway toward Grunewald. “It has to be all right, doesn’t it, if they’ve sent him home?” There is no response.

Thirty minutes later, we reach the villa and I leap from the car, scarcely waiting for it to come to a stop. As I race down the hallway to our suite, I brace myself for the worst. But when we reach his room, Papa is sitting up in bed, showing no signs of distress. “Papa, what is it? Are you feeling unwell?”

He shakes his head. “Quite the opposite. I feel better just being home. I was worried about you, though. I heard something on the radio about a skirmish at the polling place.”

“I’m fine,” I say. He should know, having sent Georg after me. “There was a bit of a fight, but then Georg...”

“There’s to be another wedding,” Tante Celia announces, cutting me off. She sits by Papa’s bed, clasping his hand, assuming her rightful place. I cock my head, confused by her outburst. Celia holds up her hand. “We’re engaged!”

So that was the emergency. For the first time since Celia’s call, I breathe normally. I gesture to Krysia, who has appeared but hangs back near the door. “You remember Krysia?”

Papa smiles. “Lovely to see you again. It is a great comfort to my daughter to have you here.” Then he turns back to me. “I’m sorry to have worried you. We wanted you to be the first to know—and to tell you in person.”

“Engaged,” Celia repeats, waving her hand like a flag.

I cringe, not wanting to look. Had Papa really given her my mother’s ring, the one she had left behind when she fled? No, he would not have been so cruel. The band around Celia’s fourth finger is a more modern design, just her sort of thing, with lots of stones and detail. I turn to Papa. “How did you...?” He must have bought it in Paris and saved it, waiting for the right time to propose. I remember then how he’d tried to get the three of us to dinner. But then I had learned the truth about my mother and forestalled things once more.

“We’re going to get married in the spring,” Celia says, giddy as a girl.

I feel Papa watching my face, searching for signs of disapproval. “After all that has happened,” Papa adds, “we don’t want to wait any longer.” It is more than that—all of these years, while my mother was out there still alive, he was still technically married. Finally, he is free. My thoughts turn improbably to Uncle Walter, who has disappeared from the room, and I recall his angry expression when he met me at the polls. What did he think of the relationship, now too public for him to ignore? Would he be furious that Papa had “ruined” one of his sisters before moving on to the next—or relieved to have the long-unwed Celia cared for?

I hesitate. Should I tell them that it is too soon after mother’s death? Papa would listen, perhaps persuade Celia to delay. They have waited years, though, caught in a limbo not of their own making. Part of me wants to keep Papa all for myself. But I cannot deny them this chance for happiness that might not come again. I force a smile. “Mazel tov.” Their faces break with relief in unison.

A footman enters the room then and sets down a tray of sandwiches. “I’d love for you to stand up with me,” Celia says. Not waiting for an answer, she lifts the plate of sandwiches from the tray and offers them to us as though we are at a picnic. “I’m thinking about the spa at Baden for the honeymoon. The waters would be good for your father’s health.” She
really does, in her own strange way, care for him a great deal.

“Celia, would you mind looking over the flower deliveries that arrived this morning?” Krysia asks when we have finished eating. She is pulling Celia away, trying to give me a moment alone with Papa.

I take his hand, staring out the window, not speaking. “You seem troubled, my dear. Is it our engagement? I didn’t want to announce it on the eve of your wedding, but Celia...”

“No, it’s fine,” I reply quickly. I am a bit jealous—Papa and Celia are able to be with the person they genuinely love. But it is more than that: seeing their happiness reminds me of how I should feel about my marriage, and how I do not. “I don’t mind. And I’m so glad you’re home.”

“Then what?” His brow wrinkles.

I look down, running my hand along the edge of his bedsheet to smooth it. I should not be worrying him in his condition. Tears fill my eyes. “It’s nothing.” But avoiding the truth is what brought us to this place in the first place. I cannot keep it from him any longer. “What if I’m not ready to marry Stefan?”