Europe and America, 1965 to 1998
Madeleine Cobham had married at the age of eighteen. Her father had been furious when she called from Rome to tell him that she was eloping with Stefano “Este” Antonelli, an Italian racecar driver with some small fame on the CART circuit. But Maddie finally admitted that she was pregnant, and that she loved Este passionately. The Italian knew that Maddie had been a virgin, was quite beautiful, and probably rich. She would make an appropriate wife for him. She converted to Catholicism and thought that life would be a glorious renaissance dream. Being a contessa in a crumbling Roman villa became extremely boring for a woman not yet twenty—especially when her husband was gone most of the time and his own mother finally admitted that she thought her son preferred men anyway.
She arrived back in Santa Barbara with a toddler named Alicia and some shattered illusions. She moved into her father’s home, recovered her spirits within three months, and enrolled in college. When she was in her junior year and still debating about what to do with her life, she happened to back into another car while pulling out of a grocery store parking lot in La Cumbre Plaza. The driver of the other car was a very dashing young officer from the Vandenberg Air Force Base to the north of Santa Barbara. Madeleine Cobham Antonelli was once more in love, and this time it was real.
Roger “Winger” Birch was a son-in-law of whom Robert Cobham approved very much. In fact, the entire family was fond of Winger, who proved to be as amiable and intelligent as he was handsome. He and Maddie were married for eight years and had two children before Winger’s experimental aircraft crashed in flames in the desert near Edwards Air Force Base.
Maddie returned again to Santa Barbara, and this time she herself was shattered. Her worried family insisted that she have therapy and diversion. After a few months of their fussing over her, she left for Europe and took both the teenage Alicia and the two young Birch children with her. She decided to try writing as they traveled about, and finally settled in the home of a Gowan aunt on the French Riviera. When her first book was published, Alicia was sent to school in Switzerland and both Henry and Stephanie Birch went home to America and a temporary residence with their Birch grandparents.
Maddie had been a widow for two years when she met Antonio Linares, a Spanish businessman who lived in New York and possessed devastating black eyes and a gift for laughing at life. She never quite loved Linares, but later recalled the passion between them with a sigh of delight. He also had a lot of money, and taught her how to enjoy the world again. He was a good stepfather, and all three of Maddie’s children came to live with them in New York.
Antonio’s lust for the sweet things in life unfortunately included a taste for other women. Their divorce was quite amiable. All of her children were in boarding schools, and she could not quite bring herself to go back to Santa Barbara. So she went to England with the intent to research a series of romance novels to be set in Tudor England. Instead, she met Sir Alistair Smythe.
She had laughed when she first heard his name. It seemed so quintessentially British, and she visualized him as a prim little man with a bowler and umbrella. Smythe turned out to be blonde, handsome, and dedicated to horses. He was a friend of the royal family and moved easily in their rather stuffy circles. Madeleine Cobham Antonelli Linares, with her American vitality, international polish, and glowing blonde beauty, proved irresistible to this twice-divorced and somewhat impoverished aristocrat. For her part, she liked Alistair immensely and found the lure of his inbred charm and intriguing social circles appealing.
Marriage was fun for about three years, boring for the next two, and finally a “civilized” arrangement in which both partners went about their own lives and hid from heavy involvements behind a martial shield. They had two children who lived in rotating fashion with their father in a very cold English townhouse, or the Smythe grandparents in an old and revered country abbey, or Maddie wherever she happened to be.
Diana and Winston Smythe were remarkably well-adjusted children despite their roving childhoods. They loved their parents, and they more or less liked America. Their mother dragged them to Santa Barbara for the old aunt’s funeral. It had been interesting to see these new kinfolks. Uncle James was rich and drank too much. His wife looked at them as if they were a new species of insect, and their Cobham cousins were totally boring. Aunt Kate was reasonably cool, and her son, Christopher, took them around the city to show them where to get good coffee, illegal substances, and some pretty good music. The only drawback was the fact that their mother seemed very upset by her aunt’s death. She and Aunt Kate sat around a lot talking about old stuff and dead people, and it all became very boring.
The Café, Santa Barbara, 1998
It was a dreary Sunday afternoon and rain was pouring. Kate and Maddie sat in the Café, picking at the remains of a late lunch with Diana and Winston Smythe and Christopher Benton. The teens were anxious to leave but were more or less marooned because Christopher’s car was in the body shop getting some dents repaired and his mother refused to let him drive her car until the insurance problems were settled. Christopher had called his father for assistance, but Jerome was home in bed with the flu and refused to drive into town to pick him up.
“I hope that the weather improves before you fly out tomorrow,” said Kate. “Make sure that you leave early to get down to the airport.”
Maddie shrugged. “It is supposed to clear up. I’d like to stay longer, but I’m sure that the kids will revolt if I do!” She smiled at her attractive blonde offspring.
“You got that,” said Winston, mopping up the last of his salad dressing with a french fry.
“Reverse revolution,” muttered Kate. “Hey, remember that we were British about three hundred years ago.”
“You were?” asked Winston.
“Yeah. Don’t you study history?” asked Christopher, bored to tears and anxious to argue about something. “We moved to America and whipped your ass in the American Revolution.”
Diana laughed. “We’ve seen all of the movies, Chris. We were the evil people in red coats.”
“Yeah. Our ancestors whipped your ancestors. Although maybe that’s not really true since you’re our cousin and you’ve got both sides!” Christopher frowned. The idea of being connected to the past seemed very strange to him—almost as strange as these cousins from England with their odd accents and slightly arrogant manner.
“Hey—we fought each other!” Winston seemed pleased with this idea. He fiddled with his video camera for a moment before his mother scowled and shook her head. “No, I thought that you promised not to drag that thing out in here.”
“This is California. Movie land,” whined Winston.
“You are soooo obviously an idiot,” snapped Diana. Her cell phone rang and she jumped up to move away from her family before answering it.
Kate and Maddie laughed. “She has secrets. Probably somebody bought new eyeliner. Gawd, don’t you love families …,” said Maddie.
Kate eyed her niece speculatively. “Maybe we’ve all gone soft.”
“Speak for yourself, Katie! Grandma Rebecca could never have dealt with cell phones, intercontinental airplane flights, and the problems of selecting just the right shade of eye shadow,” laughed Maddie. “She only had to deal with famine, disease, and war.”