The Painted Castle

by Kristy Cambron

  Amelia pressed her fingers to her lips, kissing a good-bye before she walked down a hall with photos of former brides and grooms—knowing a photo of Arthur and her would always hang among them. She’d walk down the aisle in a beloved liquid-satin gown, and terrible shoes, to stand beside a captain with a rare heart, with a full future ahead for them both.

  New York City, a family, and a fresh start.

  Just like authors H. A. and Margaret Rey, whose lives were saved by a story they carried with them, Wyatt and Amelia Stevens became the protectors of a beautiful story left behind.

  One day Victoria would be found and protected again. Until then, the cottage—their own painted castle—would sleep.

  Epilogue

  Spring, One Year Later

  Les Trois-Moutiers

  Loire Valley, France

  Titus Vivay may have lost his sight completely, but Keira doubted that hampered her grandfather’s eagerness to walk the road to the newly renovated Sleeping Beauty.

  From the moment he’d stepped through the scrolled-iron front gates, Quinn holding him at the elbow to brace his steps, their enigmatic patriarch appeared enraptured to imagine the awakening of the long-sleeping castle on such a perfect Loire Valley day.

  Sweet blossoms of wild plum trees and French violets perfumed the air. Birdsong twittered overhead. Scores of patrons had purchased tickets, their excited chatter lifting through the forest that shrouded the castle grounds from the outside world. The tourists stopped along the paths, snapped photos in the gardens, and brushed fingertips along the top edge of a rock wall that bordered the family’s vineyard rows.

  Cormac and Laine trekked along the castle road with their daughters, his arm draped over his wife’s shoulders as they paused a stroller at the hushed chapel in the woods—the little steepled sanctuary with stained glass windows that had been where their own story began. Ellie walked along with Quinn and Titus, a brilliant smile upon her lips as she described the fruits of their restoration labors in the last year. A breeze toyed with the tips of her favorite merlot pin-dot scarf, just covering a crown that was defying the memory of chemo and slowly—but beautifully—growing back her ebony hair. And Keira smiled to feel the warmth of the sun on her legs beneath a blush spring dress, and Emory’s fingers laced with hers as they lingered on the road behind everyone else.

  Before them was the lost castle’s moat and bridge and stone spires that kissed the sky.

  Open window frames no longer allowed little birds the freedom of flight from outside the castle to in. Instead, they were lined with glass and ivory brocade curtains. Scrub trees that had once sprung up in the cracks between ancient stone walls had been uprooted and cleared away, replaced by bright blooms in window boxes. The ivy they’d left to climb high as it wished, painting the burnished stone in a blanket of deep, abiding green. And the high-arched wooden doors, polished to a rich cognac, had been opened wide and were ready to greet guests to the restored château for the first time in over two hundred years.

  Keira paused with a squeeze to Emory’s hand. He slowed, turning back to her, and raised her knuckles to peck a kiss to the underside of her wrist. “You okay, Mrs. Scott?”

  “I’m brilliant,” she answered honestly, for the sight had fairly stolen her breath away.

  She twirled the wedding ring around her finger, reliving the memory of when he’d whispered, “Why don’t you marry me?” when they finished restoring the beekeeper’s cottage at Parham Hill. For Emory’s laid-back ways, Keira had thought he was just tossing a joke out between them and laughed it off as if he’d asked her if Victoria was hanging straight enough for her liking above the mantel. But then he’d climbed down from the stepladder and went down farther to one knee, asking her right then and there if she’d stay with him always. To marry and live in sleepy little Framlingham. Together, to make the country cottage their little piece of good in the world.

  “If you’re brilliant, as you Irish-Brits love to say, then why are you tearing up, sweetheart?” Emory brushed a fingertip against the apple of her cheek. “You thinking of your mother?”

  “No. Mum would have loved this—all of us together again.” She looked up the path. Jack—her da who’d never seen eye to eye with his only daughter—also walked the road with his family. With his former father-in-law at his side, when the last time they’d been together had been before divorce and death, before their story had taken painful turns. It wasn’t all ironed out, but he was trying. And that’s what mattered to her. “I was actually thinking of home. Of our little cottage along a country road in East Suffolk. It’s not grand as all this, but it’s . . . well, perfect, isn’t it?”

  “For me, it is. And you are.”

  The breeze rustled Emory’s hair and she smiled, the perfectly pomaded style from that first meeting in Dublin now long replaced by hair he allowed to fall naturally over his brow. Emory wasn’t the trust-fund kid or the high-end art world dealer buttoned up in a suit and tie. He’d slipped happily into farm life on the estate—worn tees, jeans, and all. Even trying his hand at beekeeping, of all things. Spending his days working at restoring Parham Hill while Carter wrangled his family’s legal troubles. And nights they spent by the fire in their cottage and woke up mornings in each other’s arms, watching every painted sunrise that bled over the top of the meadow.

  “I still defy anyone who says that life is without troubles or that all stories will end in walking a road to a fairy-tale castle. Along the way there’s bound to be brokenness. Laine lost her first marriage. Ellie and Quinn battled a cancer diagnosis that could have stolen everything. Even my grandfather has had to go on after losing two wives and a daughter to death.” She looked up at him, squinting a touch at the bright spring sunlight that shone behind him. “Should I also fear this moment won’t last?”

  “Don’t be afraid. It’s never about the end of a road, is it? It’s about living and loving in the journey we take to get where we are. Right now. Right to this very moment.” Emory stilled her fidgeting with her wedding ring by closing her fingertips in his palm. “Remember what I told you after Elise passed away, that I made a deal with God? I wouldn’t hate Him for taking her if He could show me something good in every day that came after that pain.”

  “I remember.”

  “You know that was wrong of me, right?”

  Keira couldn’t help smiling, not when her husband dared to admit he was wrong about something.

  “I know if you’re clever enough to realize I’m right most of the time, then we have quite a guarantee of a happy marriage.”

  He tipped his head a fraction, blocking the light just so she could meet his gaze. “No, I meant it was wrong to even ask that of Him. Because if I’d had my wish back then, I’d have missed out on this moment with you. And I wouldn’t dare jeopardize that. I have to believe there’s no guarantee of anything good in this life outside of the One who offers it to us. It’s like the castle stones over there. They’ve gone on for generations. What lasts isn’t what we build on our own, but the stories He builds within and around us.”

  “So you mean unraveling stories like Victoria’s, or the cottage’s, or even our own—that’s worth everything in this life?”

  “Yeah. It is, Mrs. Scott.” He smiled and dropped a kiss to her lips. “The question is, are you ready for whatever comes?” Emory glanced out to the end of the castle road and her brothers waving them on to join the family through the castle’s open doors.

  “Look at this beautiful castle. It’s not lost anymore, is it? That tells me every story can be redeemed.”

  “A castle or cottage . . . I don’t care. As long as this story has us together, I’m good.”

  “Then I’d like to think you can stop looking for those good things every day and rest in the knowledge that we’ve already got them. Right here. Right in this moment,” she whispered, falling in step alongside her husband as wind loosed blossoms to fall from the trees like pink snow. “I’m ready to keep walking this road with you, be
cause I know it will always lead us home.”

  Author’s Note

  The first time I saw Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole light up the silver screen in How to Steal a Million, I think I fell as much in love with them as their characters did with each other. Witty dialogue, a storied European cityscape, brilliant chemistry between the main characters, and fashion from famed icon Givenchy combined to create a pitch-perfect setting for a love story about the high-end world of fine art.

  Imagine a would-be art thief falling for a girl locked in a high-society world, only to find out they’re both keeping a secret, or twenty. What if the suave gentleman really was an art thief? And what if the fine art in question really was a forgery? That spark of tension between main characters became the inspiration behind Emory and Keira’s story, and the mystery behind a forgotten library and a lost portrait became the intrigue that brings them together.

  Though Franz Xaver Winterhalter was a much-sought-after portrait artist in the throne rooms of nineteenth-century Europe, little is known about his private life. While this story takes artistic liberties to imagine his character with jovial eccentricity, history does confirm Queen Victoria entrusted Winterhalter with the commission of her “secret picture” in 1843 (as she would refer to it in her journal on July 13 of that year). With the queen’s hair unbound, wearing a plain pendant containing a lock of Albert’s hair instead of stately jewels, and with an unceremonious posture and intense longing in her features, the portrait was considered an intimate look at the behind-the-scenes lives of the royal couple. Though a common practice was for copies to be made of Winterhalter’s royal paintings (especially later in his career, when apprentices worked in studio to mass-produce copies of paintings for a larger public audience), the portrait in question had but a select few miniatures made, and no formal copy is known to exist.

  The gift was presented to Prince Albert on 18 August 1843, for his twenty-fourth birthday. We’ve fictionalized parts of the queen’s journal entry to add Franz’s “little bee” into the storyline, but the queen did refer to the portrait as “my darling Albert’s favourite picture” and wrote of the secret picture: “he thought it so like, & so beautifully painted. I felt so happy and proud to have found something that gave him so much pleasure.” The prince is said to have indeed dubbed it his favorite portrait of his bride, but found the image too private for public display and instead hung the portrait in his personal study at Windsor Castle. While not shown publicly until 1977, the secret picture was more recently included in a royal exhibition at Buckingham Palace in 2010, in conjunction with preservation by the Royal Collection Trust, United Kingdom.

  Like Victoria and Albert, history is still painted over by the stories—in portraits, photographs, and letters—that connect our own yesterdays to the present.

  My grandfather served as a B-17 copilot in the 390th Bombardment Group, his 571st Squadron having been stationed in Framlingham during WWII. While I wish he were still here to share his firsthand accounts of those years, one poignant line in this book is directly from him. He once told me what he remembered most about the war—a sobering reality of the WWII generation: “You don’t make friends, because the moment you do, the next day they’re gone.”

  While D-day had darkened the skies over Framlingham with planes headed to the Normandy coast in June 1944, the 390th embarked on more than three hundred combat missions of its own between 1943 and 1945. Most were supply drops over a war-weary France and bombing raids on strategic targets in the lifeblood of Nazi industrial resources, such as marshaling yards, train depots, railroad bridges, ports, aircraft factories, and oil refineries across Germany, Belgium, Holland, and Czechoslovakia. While fictional for Wyatt’s crew, mission #243 was a real combat mission to bomb oil storage units at Derben, Germany, on 14 January 1945. Flying Fortresses saw an attack from some one hundred single-engine fighters that tore through the skies over Berlin, becoming one of the group’s greatest battles of the war.

  The mission would cost the 390th nine planes.

  Though the bombing of St. Michaels Church was also fictionalized for our story, a Pathfinder wreck did occur in February 1944. A German Ju 88 combat plane managed to evade detection and sneak into the airfield on its tail, resulting in a crash landing into the brick wall surrounding Glenham Church. Despite carrying a heavy bomb load, members of the 390th flocked to the crash site in an attempt to save those on board—rolling live bombs away from the wreckage and pulling both the pilot and copilot to safety.

  Of the thirteen crew members, all but three were saved.

  The Battle of the Bulge was hitting a fever pitch in December 1944. The Eighth Air Force had sent a dispatch for two thousand bombers to respond, but on the return, thick fog along the coast prevented many from landing safely at their own airfields, leaving hundreds of servicemen stranded with no place to stay on Christmas Eve. It was noted that someone had seen the 1944 film The Canterville Ghost—about a group of servicemen who were bivouacked at a country manor during a similar situation. Owners of a nearby manor house—aptly named Parham Hall—were contacted in the middle of the night and opened their doors to some two hundred displaced servicemen from the Allied armed forces, hosting them for an impromptu Christmas holiday.

  At the writing of this novel, the restoration of the lost castle that inspired the series—Château de la Mothe-Chandeniers—is now becoming reality. Just as our Foley family walks the road to their castle restoration, you and I can now do the same at the castle that sparked this series years ago. The concept of history as a witness to the stories of people living in vastly different times, places, and cultures became the heartbeat of this series. To end it in any setting but the fairy tale–inspired “Sleeping Beauty” castle from The Lost Castle wouldn’t have felt right. Weaving the Foley family’s story through castle stones spread across France, Ireland, and now England added the perfect punctuation to the legacy of stories and how we live them. From Victorian England to Churchill’s war-torn world, and from those years until the modern day, the absolute, constant, ever-flowing current to the human experience is that our Creator is the same yesterday, today . . . and for all eternity.

  Like weathered castle stones, His story—God’s story for each one of us—lives on in the journeys we tread with Him.

  Discussion Questions

  At its core The Painted Castle is a story of redemption for three women in very different life circumstances. All are navigating loss, battling to heal, and learning to love again. What are the common threads of Elizabeth Meade, Amelia Woods, and Keira Foley’s stories? How do their healing journeys differ?

  For more than a decade Elizabeth Meade believes seeking justice for her father’s murder will bring her peace. What happens when the man she’s held responsible for her father’s death begins to unravel what she’s always thought to be true? How does Keaton contradict the image she’d built of him in her mind?

  Through the generations we see a shift in the roles of women in society. Elizabeth’s expectations in a Victorian era are different from Amelia’s during WWII and from Keira’s in our modern day. How have the roles of women changed from the nineteenth century to now? How did each character navigate the social construct of her surroundings in order to use her gifts and talents to benefit both herself and those around her?

  Amelia and Wyatt find themselves thrown together at Parham Hill during the last years of WWII, but it was books that really began their journey to one another. How did their mutual love of books affect their ability to heal from past brokenness? What books have impacted your own story?

  By accepting the commission to authenticate the painting of Victoria, Keira Foley hoped to find a quick fix to repair her career and hide from a romantic life that had completely fallen apart. Instead, she finds herself thrown into the middle of a situation that tests her in both areas. How does Keira begin to heal from both the pain of her childhood and her broken engagement? Does learning of Emory’s past brokenness soften her heart toward him? W
hat wisdom have you gained from being tested romantically? Professionally?

  The Painted Castle turns a spotlight not just on main characters but on many beloved secondary characters—the most famous being real-life master artist Franz Xaver Winterhalter and Queen Victoria herself. How important is weaving in secondary characters to the fabric of a story? Whose stories affected the main characters the most and why?

  Each book in the Lost Castles series includes a castle or manor house—or beekeeper’s cottage—largely forgotten by time. Can a character with no voice still affect the characters’ lives? How do the legacy and longevity of castles mirror God’s ever-present involvement in our own stories?

  A constant theme in this novel is the beauty of creation: art is shown as paintings, books, or even a carefully preserved library. How did each character view the art placed before him or her? Can artistic expression be used to glorify God—whether it’s from the past, present, or future?

  Acknowledgments

  For the last many years, I’ve kept a stack of WWII-era photos and postcards on my desk while I write. I flip through them from time to time, thinking about the fighting men and women of the “greatest generation,” feeling those pinpricks of pride in my heart that my grandfather, Edward “Big Ed” W. Wedge, was counted among the brave in what is penciled on the back of one photo of smiling young flyboys from the 390th: “A swell crew.”

  I have vague memories of attending the annual reunions of the 390th Bombardment Group during the formative years of my youth. I have boxes of WWII-era memorabilia that tracks his time in Framlingham—a book issued by the United States Army that includes airfield maps and Framlingham town photos, and chronicles the firsthand accounts of the 390th missions and general life both on and off base as servicemen invaded this country hamlet. Also helpful were an original newspaper from his Michigan town dated December 7, 1941 (Pearl Harbor Day), medical records, B-17 flight logs, crew yearbooks, dress uniforms, and a postcard of a young lieutenant smiling in a photo sent to his parents (my great-grandparents) before he shipped off to war.