Bloodline. Сидни Шелдон

soon got into the habit of ignoring her. They discussed Elizabeth among themselves and unanimously agreed that she was the most spoiled child they had ever seen. In a confidential year-end report to the headmistress, Elizabeth’s teacher wrote:

      We have been able to make no progress with Elizabeth Roffe. She is aloof from her classmates and refuses to participate in any of the group activities, but it is difficult to tell if this is because she makes no effort, or because she is unable to handle the assignments. She is arrogant and egotistical. Were it not for the fact that her father is a major benefactor of this school, I would strongly recommend expelling her.

      The report was light-years from the reality. The simple truth was that Elizabeth Roffe had no protective shield, no armour against the terrible loneliness that engulfed her. She was filled with such a deep sense of her own unworthiness that she was afraid to make friends, for fear they would discover that she was worthless, unlovable. She was not arrogant, she was almost pathologically shy. She felt that she did not belong in the same world that her father inhabited. She did not belong anywhere. She loathed being driven to school in the Rolls-Royce, because she knew she did not deserve it. In her classes she knew the answers to the questions the teachers asked, but she did not dare to speak out, to call attention to herself. She loved to read, and she would lie awake late at night in her bed, devouring books.

      She day-dreamed, and oh! what lovely fantasies. She was in Paris with her father, and they were driving through the Bois in a horse-drawn carriage, and he took her to his office, an enormous room something like Saint Patrick’s cathedral, and people kept walking in with papers for him to sign, and he would wave them away and say, ‘Can’t you see I’m busy now? I’m talking to my daughter, Elizabeth.’

      She and her father were skiing in Switzerland, moving down a steep slope side by side, with an icy wind whipping past them, and he suddenly fell and cried out with pain, because his leg was broken, and she said, ‘Don’t worry, Papa! I’ll take care of you.’ And she skied down to the hospital and said, ‘Quickly, my father’s hurt,’ and a dozen men in white jackets brought him there in a shiny ambulance and she was at his bedside, feeding him (it was probably his arm that was broken, then, not his leg), and her mother walked into the room, alive somehow, and her father said, ‘I can’t see you now, Patricia. Elizabeth and I are talking.’

      Or they would be in their beautiful villa in Sardinia, and the servants would be away, and Elizabeth would cook dinner for her father. He would eat two helpings of everything and say, ‘You’re a much better cook than your mother was, Elizabeth.’

      The scenes with her father always ended in the same way. The doorbell would ring and a tall man, who towered over her father, would come in and beg Elizabeth to marry him, and her father would plead with her, ‘Please, Elizabeth, don’t leave me. I need you.’

      And she would agree to stay.

      Of all the homes in which Elizabeth grew up, the villa in Sardinia was her favourite. It was by no means the largest, but it was the most colourful, the friendliest. Sardinia itself delighted Elizabeth. It was a dramatic, rock-bound island, some 160 miles south-west of the Italian coast, a stunning panorama of mountains, sea and green farmland. Its enormous volcanic cliffs had been thrown up thousands of years ago from the primal sea, and the shoreline swept in a vast crescent as far as the eye could follow, the Tyrrhenian Sea framing the island in a blue border.

      For Elizabeth the island had its own special odours, the smell of sea breezes and forests, the white and yellow macchia, the fabled flower that Napoleon had loved. There were the corbeccola bushes that grew six feet high and had a red fruit that tasted like strawberries, and the guarcias, the giant stone oaks whose bark was exported to the mainland to be used for making corks for wine bottles.

      She loved to listen to the singing rocks, the mysterious giant boulders with holes through them. When the winds blew through the holes, the rocks emitted an eerie keening sound, like a dirge of lost souls.

      And the winds blew. Elizabeth grew to know them all. The mistral and the ponente, the tramontana and the grecate and the levanter. Soft winds and fierce winds. And then there was the dreaded sirocco, the warm wind that blew in from the Sahara.

      The Roffe villa was on the Costa Smeralda, above Porto Cervo, set high atop a cliff overlooking the sea, secluded by juniper trees and the wild-growing Sardinian olive trees with their bitter fruit. There was a breathtaking view of the harbour far below, and around it, sprinkled over the green hills, a jumble of stucco and stone houses thrown together in a crazy hodgepodge of colours resembling a child’s crayon drawing.

      The villa was stone, with huge juniper beams inside. It was built on several levels, with large, comfortable rooms, each with its own fireplace and balcony. The living-room and dining-room had picture windows that gave a panoramic view of the island. A free-form staircase led to four bedrooms upstairs. The furniture blended perfectly with the surroundings. There were rustic refectory tables and benches, and soft easy chairs. Across the windows were fringed white wool curtains that had been hand-woven on the island, and the floors were laid with colourful cerasarda tiles from Sardinia and other tiles from Tuscany. In the bathrooms and bedrooms were native wool carpets, coloured with vegetable dyes in the traditional way. The house was ablaze with paintings, a mixture of French Impressionists, Italian masters and Sardo primitives. In the hallway hung portraits of Samuel Roffe and Terenia Roffe, Elizabeth’s great-great-grandfather and grandmother.

      The feature of the house that Elizabeth loved most was the tower room, under the sloping tile roof. It was reached by a narrow staircase from the second floor, and Sam Roffe used it as his study. It contained a large work desk and a comfortable, padded swivel chair. The walls were lined with bookcases and maps, most of them pertaining to the Roffe empire. French windows led to a small balcony built over a sheer cliff, and the view from there was heart-stopping.

      It was in this house, when she was thirteen years old, that Elizabeth discovered the origins of her family, and for the first time in her life felt that she belonged, that she was part of something.

      It began the day she found the Book. Elizabeth’s father had driven to Olbia, and Elizabeth had wandered upstairs to the tower room. She was not interested in the books on the shelves, for she had long since learned that they were technical volumes on pharmacology and pharmacognosy, and on multinational corporations and international law. Dull and boring. Some of the manuscripts were rare, and these were kept in glass cases. There was a medical volume in Latin called Circa Instans, written in the Middle Ages, and another called De Materia Medica. It was because Elizabeth was studying Latin and was curious to see one of the old volumes that she opened the glass case to take it out. Behind it, tucked away out of sight, she saw another volume. Elizabeth picked it up. It was thick, bound in leather, and had no title.

      Intrigued, Elizabeth opened it. It was like opening the door to another world. It was a biography of her great-great-grandfather, Samuel Roffe, in English, privately printed on vellum. There was no author given, and no date, but Elizabeth was sure that it was more than one hundred years old, for most of the pages were faded, and others were yellowed and flaking with age. But none of this was important. It was the story that mattered, a story that brought life to the portraits hanging on the wall downstairs. Elizabeth had seen the pictures of her great-great-grandparents a hundred times: paintings of an old-fashioned man and woman, dressed in unfamiliar clothes. The man was not handsome, but there was great strength and intelligence in his face. He had fair hair, high Slavic cheekbones and keen, bright blue eyes. The woman was a beauty. Dark hair, a flawless complexion and eyes as black as coal. She wore a white silk dress with a tabard over the top, and a bodice made of brocade. Two strangers who meant nothing to Elizabeth.