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Chapter One

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1929-1939

There had been bright sunshine when they left the English shore, but midway across the Channel, dark clouds swept overhead, and the wind had shifted from breezy to almost gale force. Now, as the ship headed for the Continent, they were suddenly caught in a late-winter storm. Cold rain whipped across the deck and stung their faces as the ferry rolled and pitched. Years later, the baroness could not recall feeling any anxiety during the crossing, and therefore she had not communicated any fear to her two small boys as they steadied themselves against her.

This squall was far less threatening than the typhoon she had once endured in the South China Sea; nor was it as threatening as the violent conditions that routinely battered the ships that had taken her from Asia to South America or from the Netherlands to the East Indies. Thanks to the composure of the Dutch baroness, her eight- and four-year-old sons could face the heavy weather cheerfully. But if she did not hold their hands tightly, the wind might easily sweep the children overboard. Better to take them inside for hot chocolate.

On her way to the ferry's café, the baroness passed her husband in the small, smoky lounge bar. Warming himself with Irish whiskey, he glanced toward her but did not interrupt his conversation with a fellow passenger. Her husband was not the boys' father-they were sons from her rst marriage. And from his dif dence, no one in the room would have guessed that he had any connection to this handsome, patrician woman and her two docile children. She heard him tell his drinking partner that he had left England to take up a new position in Belgium with great prospects. Indeed, she hoped for the best, for him as for herself and the boys: if at last he could hold a job longer than a month or two without succumbing to indolence-well, that might help secure the marriage, too. He was her second husband, and they had been married for three years; during that entire time, she reckoned that he had not worked a total of three months.

Her rst husband had jumped from the matrimonial ship ve years after their wedding, which was just four years ago, and she was left with two small boys when she was twenty-
ve; now, domestic storm clouds were once again on the horizon. And she was seven months pregnant.

She had some nancial resources and a share of ancestral property, for her family was of old European aristocracy. And she had a title: she was the Dutch Baroness Ella van Heemstra, now also Mrs. Ruston. Dutch baronesses were not a rare breed even in 1929; most democratic Netherlanders did not mind the last of the noble gentry using venerable titles-but only if their holders adopted no airs and graces and imitated the Dutch royal family, an amiably down-to-earth clan.

The four travelers reached Brussels safely and proceeded to a rented house. There, with the help of a relative who arrived from Holland, the baroness prepared for the child's birth while her husband went off to his job with a British insurance company as a minor clerk with no con dential duties. He was bored from the rst day.

On the morning of Saturday, May 4, the baroness went into labor, and by mid-afternoon she was nursing her newborn daughter. "Saturday's child works hard for a living," according to Mother Goose.

Ella, the Baroness van Heemstra, was born in the fashionable Dutch suburb of Velp, near Arnhem, on June 12, 1900. One of nine children, she was...