House of Gold

by Natasha Solomons

  All the discussion about weddings was making Henri feel guilty. Claire had accepted with equanimity the disappointment about the journey to Russia. Henri understood that his name and its obligations liberated him from a decision, just as much as it trapped him. Claire never asked about marriage or requested any kind of commitment. She knew it was impossible. He was a Goldbaum. A prince and a Jew. But if he had been free to make his own decision, then he would have had to choose. To his immense shame, Henri knew that he was relieved to be released from such a quandary. Of course he told Claire how he would marry her, if he could. They consoled one another with this late at night as they lay in one another’s arms in Claire’s bed. But he knew it was an easy promise that he gave: it was one he would never be asked to fulfil. Disconcerted by such uncharacteristic introspection, he quickly thought of other things. Claire was a magnificent woman who deserved a magnificent gift. He would buy her a truly splendid bracelet. Diamonds perhaps. No, emeralds. The biggest and greenest that Cartier could find. He felt much better.

  Henri and Otto sat on the roof, waiting for Greta. Chairs had been carried up for them, along with a sofa, a low coffee table and a small sideboard laid with a drinks tray. They did not talk, each lost in uneasy thought that was not driven away by an excellent bottle of Bordeaux from the family vineyard.

  For once, Otto considered, it might be pleasant to drink something that was not stamped with the Goldbaum crest. They ate beef, duck, chicken or venison sent twice each day from their estate outside Paris; they peeled fruit nurtured in their own greenhouses, pollinated by their own bees; and they drank their own champagne, all because it was the very best. But perhaps it would be enjoyable to have something second-rate, just for a change.

  ‘If you’d married Greta, then at least she could have stayed in Paris,’ Otto said now, startling Henri from his reverie.

  ‘Are you scolding me?’ asked Henri, surprised.

  ‘Perhaps I am,’ answered Otto.

  Henri fell silent, considering.

  ‘I didn’t mean to fall in love with Claire,’ he said at last.

  ‘You make it sound like an unfortunate accident.’

  Henri shrugged. ‘Love isn’t something one does on purpose. One doesn’t choose.’

  ‘On the contrary. I think you can. I think if you’d been a little less selfish, you could have chosen to love Greta. She’s a good sort. She would have loved you back in the end, just to be decent. Everyone would have been much happier.’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Otto. What’s the point of this?’

  Otto sighed and then nodded. ‘You’re right, of course.’

  Henri reached inside his jacket and produced a letter from his pocket and handed it to Otto.

  ‘From our courier. The Russian Jews live in daily fear of a new wave of pogroms.’

  Otto read in unhappy silence. ‘What can be done?’

  Henri sighed. ‘Very little by us in Paris, I’m afraid. Our government is happily in bed with the Russians and the new entente cordiale. They will say nothing to disrupt the honeymoon. You must speak with Lord Goldbaum when you reach England. Perhaps he will have more luck with the British government.’

  ‘Is this new-found concern with Russian Jewry born out of sympathy for your co-religionists or a desire for retribution, after the Tsar agreed to entertain your mistress, but not you?’

  ‘Can’t it be both?’

  With a roll of his eyes, Otto placed the letter inside his pocket. ‘I’ll do my best with Lord Goldbaum.’ He reached for his glass. ‘Did your father speak to the British Ambassador?’

  ‘We spoke to him together,’ said Henri. ‘The Ambassador wants France to form an alliance with Vienna; to lend Vienna the money for a new army. The British government is all hot and bothered about German imperial ambitions. The Ambassador wants to insert a wedge between Vienna and Berlin. He’d like it if that wedge was France-shaped.’

  Otto huffed in irritation. ‘The only nation permitted to have an empire is the British themselves.’

  ‘Quite so. They have had a century or more to learn to tolerate French interests in Africa, but they are not willing to put up with German aspirations.’

  ‘And you are?’

  Henri winced. ‘I grant you, the German sabre-rattling is wearisome. But it is noise, nothing more.’

  ‘Well? Are you going to lend the Austrian government money for our army? Cement a Franco-Austrian bond.’

  Henri took a sip of wine and shifted on his chair. ‘It’s not good business. Vienna wants the loan far too cheaply – I expect because the German government has offered them extremely favourable terms. We must speak to Cousin Edgar in Berlin. He will know.’ Henri smiled. ‘Whether the loan comes from Paris or Frankfurt or even London, it will be one of our Houses that floats the bonds to make it possible.’

  He stretched out, resting a foot on the low table.

  ‘All the same, I shall expect a disagreeable letter from Lord Goldbaum any day. He’s a stalwart champion of His Majesty’s Government and will doubtless urge us to reconsider.’

  ‘He is a British peer,’ said Otto. ‘You can hardly blame him.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t,’ replied Henri with a smile. ‘He presses for his nation’s interests, and I press for mine.’

  Yet family interests join us all, thought Otto, silently voicing the unofficial family motto. The balance between nation and family must always be minutely negotiated. The key to assimilation was to become a citizen of one’s nation, fully absorbed and committed to its affairs, and yet underneath it all one must never forget that one was also a Goldbaum. During the Franco-Prussian War, when diplomats withdrew from Paris and Berlin, couriers still travelled between the Houses, quietly sharing information with their respective governments. Politics and power irked Otto. The perpetual scuffles over empire and gilts. He knew it all fascinated Henri, who savoured a negotiation over interest rates with the same relish as he did a game of backgammon or an argument over the best vintage of Chateau Goldbaum. Otto looked up at the stars, pale pricks of white above the yellow lights of Paris. The heavens at least remained undisputed, belonging to no one.

  Greta was exhilarated by her mother’s wrath. The Baroness’s anger was so absolute that she felt liberated by it. She insisted that Greta had deliberately circumvented her authority with sly insolence, and she was ashamed of her. A Goldbaum daughter obeys her parents in all things. Greta protested; she had obeyed her mother. She’d followed her command to the letter, but with imagination and vim. The Baroness looked coldly on Greta’s humour. This was simply further proof of her daughter’s defiant nature. Thank God she was soon to be someone else’s concern. The Baroness withdrew from the Blue Salon after dinner, in ghastly silence, and would not look at her. Greta knew she ought to feel remorse for upsetting her mother, but after years of igniting either rage or irritable silence, she was inured to both. She wondered whether during her twenty years she had ever made her mother happy. It didn’t seem likely.

  Wearing the black-and-white dress, she hurried into the narrow passageway leading to the roof. Two servants stood silently at the top and bottom of the stairwell, holding lanterns. The lamplight illuminated her dress, making the white squares appear to glow, the long, loose sleeves fluttering like the wings of a moth.

  The parterre was stretched out below, its symmetry most remarkable when glimpsed from above in the moonlight. Grudgingly she admired the resolve and tenacity required to create such rigorous, defined beauty – the sharp triangles of box hedge, the rectangular flower beds. It was a garden for Pythagoras and for lovers of angles, she decided. Presumably Otto adored it.

  ‘Greta?’ called Henri. ‘Come here, so we can see you.’

  Shy and vexed to have been discovered before she was quite ready, Greta turned and walked towards the others. The wind caught and lifted the hem of her dress so that it tickled her calves.

  ‘I love it!’ cried Henri. ‘You look like you’re floating. Emilie Flöge is the Canaletto of clo
th, and you are her Venice.’

  Greta smiled.

  ‘It’s certainly different,’ said Otto, unconvinced and clearly trying to find words that were both tactful and true. ‘For goodness’ sake, Greta, your feet are black.’

  Once again she was not wearing shoes.

  ‘Nothing goes with the dress,’ she said with a shrug. ‘Only feet.’

  ‘It’s perfect,’ said Henri. ‘But you should paint each toe to match.’ He poured her a glass of champagne. ‘Let’s toast.’

  They raised their glasses.

  ‘To Greta and an unsuspecting London,’ declared Henri, and they all drank. ‘It’s a pity you’ve left Vienna,’ he added, setting down his glass. ‘Gustav Klimt ought to have painted you otherwise.’

  Otto continued to stare at her, half-fascinated, half-appalled.

  ‘I can see why Mother wasn’t quite convinced.’

  ‘Oh no, she was. She was convinced she didn’t like it.’

  Otto laughed, but his face suggested that, in this instance at least, he had some sympathy for the Baroness.

  ‘The question still to be answered is what poor Albert thinks,’ said Greta.

  ‘Ah yes, what indeed will poor Albert think?’ echoed Otto.

  ‘Think about what?’ asked a voice.

  A tall man lingered at the top of the stairs. He wore a top hat that made him look taller still. He held onto it with considerable resolve, clearly afraid that if he let go for a second, it would be snatched off by the wind. Greta wished he’d surrender. She thought one of the cherubs in the garden below would be much improved by the addition of an insouciant top hat.

  ‘Bonsoir,’ called Greta. ‘Or good evening, if you prefer. Who are you?’

  ‘Poor Albert, apparently,’ replied the man.

  They all sat in the Blue Salon, drinking an excellent vintage of champagne and desperately reaching for something to say. All Greta’s ebullience had burst along with the drawing of the champagne cork, and she perched on the edge of the sofa in her white-and-black creation, feeling as if she’d been caught playing make-believe in one of her mother’s evening gowns. She stared resolutely at her bare feet. The Baroness had been roused from her bedtime toilette and reappeared, fully dressed. Baron Peter smiled and nodded at his soon-to-be son-in-law, overwhelmed by the significance of the occasion.

  It fell to Otto and Henri to enquire after Albert’s journey: ‘Perfectly pleasant’; his cold, ‘Much improved’; and whether he was tired, ‘Not particularly.’

  Greta steeled herself to study him. His suit was beautifully cut and he wore it well. No tailor’s skill was needed to flatter him. He appeared pristine, spotless from his journey, as if he’d just been taken out of the wardrobe, pressed and aired. His hair was dark, nearly black, and his mouth was neither big nor small. He wasn’t unattractive, but he reminded her of the parterre, all hard lines and orderliness.

  ‘I hear you like butterflies,’ she said at last.

  He started, taken aback that these were her first words to him since the roof.

  ‘Yes. Moths and beetles, too. I’ve amassed nearly ten thousand specimens. Two thousand of which I’ve caught myself.’

  ‘Goodness, that’s quite a collection,’ said Greta, trying not to shudder.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Albert. ‘Perhaps one day I may have the privilege of showing you?’

  He met her eye, blinked and quickly looked away.

  Greta pictured a suite of rooms at Temple Court packed with display cases, each one brim-full of insects, all the cabinets dusted and polished, every insect meticulously identified. Labelling things was simply another form of tidiness, decided Greta. Somehow she couldn’t imagine him striding through the long grass with his net and jars; she could only see him sitting at his desk, writing out the labels in his precise hand for scores of unfortunate creatures in bottles.

  ‘I have a gift for you,’ said Albert, reaching into his jacket pocket and producing a large leather wallet. ‘I had them reset.’

  Greta watched as Albert unfastened the wallet and carefully withdrew a necklace. He placed it on her lap.

  ‘This is the yellow Goldbaum diamond. Mined in the Transvaal in 1852. It’s twenty-six carats. Flawless. My mother says that it now belongs to you.’

  Greta looked down at the necklace. A vast teardrop diamond, yellow as sunshine, formed a butterfly’s forewing, the hindwing fashioned from smaller yellow diamonds joined together by white-gold filigree, delicate as spider silk. The veins were similarly traced in white-gold, and the antennae and thorax were picked out in rubies. The jewel butterfly appeared as if it were mid-flight, about to settle on a leaf, wings folded. For a moment Greta felt it flutter in her lap.

  ‘It’s the perfect replica in diamonds of one I discovered in a wheat field on the Temple Court estate. It hadn’t been identified before. So I’ve named it Greta aurum. The jewels were yours anyway. The name is my wedding gift.’

  He reached out and, with cool fingers, fastened the necklace around Greta’s throat. It was too tight and for a moment she felt as if she could not breathe.

  She looked up at him. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  The butterfly pressed against the pulse in her neck. A tiny beat of blood like a wing. She wasn’t sure if she liked the necklace or not. It, like Albert, unsettled her.

  LONDON, JUNE

  Albert did not approve of the dresses. He did not say so. In fact he pressed both Otto and Henri to permit him to repay Greta’s debt – she was to be his wife, her bill by rights belonged to him – but they demurred, insisting that it was not a loan, but a gift. Albert was too polite to press the issue. Greta knew that he did not like them when she appeared at breakfast in a fashionable narrow-waisted blue skirt and one of the new Parisian blouses that the Baroness had selected. His compliments on the pinstripe were elegant and protracted. Greta thanked him, feeling a ball of disappointment burn in her chest like indigestion. She wanted him to be the kind of man who smiled at his wife’s daring.

  Albert was as solicitous as he was neat. He enquired as to which brand of paint she preferred for making watercolours, and whether she liked to embroider with silk or lamb’s wool. He wished everything to be shaped to her comfort on her arrival at Temple Court. Greta did not paint and she had not made a sampler since her last governess had given in her notice more than five years earlier; and the Baroness, tired of recruiting capable women who were, it seemed, incapable of managing her daughter, decided that Greta’s education – while inadequate – was complete.

  She feigned seasickness during the journey on the packet from Ostend to Kent and, declining Albert’s offer of a doctor, requested only privacy and fresh air. His presence oppressed her like a swaddle of blankets on a too-hot night. He withdrew, leaving her in a deckchair to the tactful ministrations of Anna.

  To her profound relief, they did not stay at the house at Number One, Park Lane with Albert and Lord and Lady Goldbaum. Baroness Emmeline insisted that, until after the wedding, the two branches of Goldbaums ought to remain divided. Greta was both thankful and bewildered, since the house was large enough to lose the entire family tree, and not merely a branch or two. In the end she concluded that the Baroness wished to have the pleasure of complaining about the hotel. They had taken a floor of the Savoy but, to her gloomy triumph, the Baroness discovered that the shortcomings in English plumbing extended even to the finest of establishments. On showing them the royal suite, the unfeeling concierge had even briefly implied that the Baron and Baroness might share a bathroom.

  Greta, on the other hand, liked the hotel immensely. There was a bar and restaurant downstairs that were filled with people she did not know. The relief of anonymity was even more refreshing than the cool, cucumber-scented Martinis that they shook at the bar. She had only visited London once before and had found it grimy and damp. This time it was grimy and hot. The pavements softened like caramel and stuck to her shoes when she ventured outside; the milk soured before it was delivered, and coffee was serve
d black. The leaves on the trees in the Royal Parks curled and shrivelled. Yet, to her surprise, Greta found that she liked the city. Everyone constantly marvelled at the heat – and she discovered that she could initiate an enthusiastic conversation with anyone at all simply by saying, ‘Goodness me, what weather!’

  The afternoon of their arrival they were invited to the house on Park Lane for tea. Albert and Lady Goldbaum and two ranks of servants received them in the great hall with military decorum. Ten thousand blue cornflowers and golden marigolds had been woven into a vast living tapestry displaying the family crest, the bright hue of the cornflowers bringing out the Canaletto blue on the series of vast paintings of the Grand Canal hanging along the staircase. The family’s private orchestra had been sent up from Hampshire and played a dutiful arrangement of Viennese waltzes alternating with English chamber music. A photographer snapped uneasy portraits of Greta and Albert who, as they posed hand-in-hand on the foot of the stairs, contrived to look like strangers appalled at one another’s proximity. Toasts were issued and congratulations proclaimed. Yet, to Otto’s astonishment, Lord Goldbaum was absent: he sent his profound apologies, but he was much taken up with matters in the House of Lords.

  The Goldbaums were famous for their scrupulous civility, and not greeting one’s future daughter-in-law and her parents was perilously close to a slight. Otto knew that the London Goldbaums quietly understood the Baroness’s anxiety over the smaller fortune held by the Vienna House, and were usually fastidious in paying them every possible respect to allay any hint of condescension. The unity between the Houses was tantamount in family lore. What on earth was so important as to keep him away? Otto felt uneasy. The moment he was able, he quietly drew Albert aside.

  ‘Where is your father? I had hoped to speak with him about Russia. See if the British government can’t exert pressure on the Duma to stop the pogroms.’

  ‘My father will raise the matter with the Foreign Secretary, but I don’t have high hopes. He’s battling against the government himself at present.’