Mata Hari's Last Dance(32)

“Margaretha, you’ve come back!” He rushed over to embrace me but I backed away. I glanced at his wife as I said, “You were the one who left me. You left us all.”

“No.” He shook his head. “No, come into the parlor.”

I let myself be led into the parlor. I watched him. He was happy. No tears, no regret. He sat in a straight-backed chair, still the baron of Leeuwarden, now with a wife named Catherine. He sat forward in his chair. What had he been telling people all these years? That his children had abandoned him? That our mother had run off?

His wife sat next to him, pulling her chair close to his.

“I’m getting married,” I said, my voice flat. I couldn’t accept that he was married to another woman, letting her cook for him, sleep with him. Had she given him children?

I held my purse tighter, watching my knuckles turn white on the clasp. “Will you give me permission to marry?”

“Oh.” He sat back. “So is that what this is about? I thought you had come to visit.”

A wave of anger swept over me. I felt a new M’greet blooming in place of the old, something darker. I stood, enraged. “Are you not the least bit curious to know what happened after you abandoned my mother? Aren’t you interested to know why I was thrown out of Leyde’s school for teachers? I waited for you,” my voice was shrill. “In Leeuwarden, in Leyde, in The Hague. You never came! Where were you?”

Catherine pulled a handkerchief from her pocket, giving it to me. I hadn’t even realized that I was crying. “It’s all right.”

She patted my hand as if I were a child, making a fuss over nothing.

What had he told her? That I had left? “Where are my brothers?” I demanded.

My father hesitated. “In the factories. They’re doing well.”

No one did well in the factories. Grief overwhelmed me. This was not the man I remembered. My father really was dead. “Do you give me permission to marry?” I asked, moving toward the door. My body felt like lead.

My father hurried to his feet. “You’re not leaving?”

I didn’t answer him.

“Of course you can marry. As long as he comes to me to ask for your hand.”

I stopped. He hadn’t cared what happened to me for years, and now he wanted a formal visit?

“He must come to ask for your hand.” The idea was blossoming in his mind. He was thinking of all the fruit it could bear.

My cheeks flushed. “How dare you ask this.” He was living in his own world. I wasn’t his daughter. I considered telling him about fending off the Walrus. How would he react when I told him that I’d had half a dozen men at the Grand Hotel? I wanted him to see what he’d created, to feel the sharp edges of my pain.

“Margaretha,” Catherine interjected. “A formal proposal is only right.”

I turned around, prepared to give her a lesson on what was right. But I stopped myself. A woman can’t marry in Amsterdam until she’s thirty without her father’s permission. It was either comply with my father’s wishes or lose a husband, and I wanted Java too much to lose Rudolph.

I set my jaw, cursing him to hell. “Tomorrow, then.”





Chapter 11


A Girl's Private Laundry

I’m changing my clothes after an exceptional opening night when Edouard lets himself into my dressing room at the Odéon. “Did you see the prince of Schwarzburg?” I ask. “He was in the second row tonight. I have to hurry. He’s waiting for me in the lobby.”

I look up and notice Edouard’s face. It’s serious. He sits down across from my dressing table and I realize that he’s holding something. “M’greet, I want you to be calm.”

Immediately, all calmness drains away. “Has something happened to Non? Has something happened to my daughter?”

He holds up the book he’s carrying and I’m shocked. There’s a photo of me on the jacket. I am nine years old, dressed in a ridiculously expensive outfit my father had indulged me with. I remember the moment it was taken clearly: I was standing in front of Leeuwarden’s fountain, imagining I was a queen. It was summer and the air was heavy with jasmine blossoms.

“Who found that photo?” I reach for the book but he pulls it back.

“This book is going to make you very, very angry,” he warns me. “It’s a biography,” he says. “Of you. Written by your father.”

Rage, white-hot, burns through my body. “You aren’t serious!” But he hands me the book and as I begin flipping through the pages I know that he is. “And what does he write about?” I demand, scanning the pages. “Does he apologize for abandoning me? For leaving my mother to die in Leeuwarden?”

Edouard moves toward the door. “I’m sorry. I wanted you to hear about this from me, not read about it in the papers. I believe your friend ‘Bowtie’ is penning something about it.”

As soon as he closes the door I start reading. The Life of Mata Hari: A Biography of My Daughter and My Grievances Against Her Former Husband. Page after page details my father’s flair for business, his former collection of art, his overall greatness that inevitably produced a person like me. In every chapter my father is the hero. I am a caricature and Rudolph is unrecognizable. My brothers are barely mentioned. And in my father’s version of our life, my mother never existed.