Meanwhile Simon was being shown a side of Gregory that he had never seen before, the face of the obsequious servant. “Secondly, sir, I’m here tonight as an agent.” A gentle imitation of a laugh. “No, I’m not volunteering to be your booking agent, or whatever the right term is. I’m representing my own employer. He would like to hire you for a private performance.”
Simon thought he knew who that employer was, and curt refusal was on the tip of his tongue. Yet he couldn’t quite come out with it. The germ of a daring idea, very intriguing even if still very hazy, had been born. He had to find out more. It was completely obvious by now that Gregory had not the faintest idea of who Simon really was.
“You come quite highly recommended, Mr. Hill.” Gregory managed to sound smug, servile, and snobbish at the same time. “Miss Vivian Littlewood, ah, my employer’s sister, saw one of your performances not long ago.”
So, now he works for Saul. That was a minor surprise. “And who is Miss Vivian Littlewood?” Simon enjoyed the chance to make his own tone condescending.
Gregory almost flushed. He drew his short frame perceptibly more erect, and looked up at Simon frostily. “My employer is Saul Littlewood. You’ll recognize the family name if you’re at all familiar with Chicago.”
“Oh, you mean the old meatpacking family.” It was fun to be knowledgeable but not impressed.
The little man had regained his smoothness. “Mr. Littlewood is planning a rather lavish weekend in his suburban home, starting one week from tonight. I realize that this is quite short notice and that you may well have some previous engagement. But I am authorized to say that Mr. Littlewood will make it quite worth your while.” Gregory smiled rather vacantly and nodded in Margie’s direction, as if assuring her that the guarantee applied to her as well. “The theme of the party will have to do with the medieval, you see.”
“Evidently a popular theme these days.”
“And in this case, as you’ll see, very appropriate indeed for a housewarming.” Gregory displayed the faint smile of superior knowledge. “Mr. Littlewood has authorized me to offer you one thousand dollars for one evening’s performance, on Friday. Then you and your assistant will be welcome to remain as guests for the remainder of the weekend if you wish. That would of course be an all-inclusive fee for both of you, meant to cover expenses—”
“A thousand dollars?” Simon couldn’t help showing surprise. “I’m hardly one of the big names of show business. What do I have to do? I mean, I don’t have any big production numbers, or…”
“The only requirements are, first, that you provide yourself with some medieval costume, authentic in appearance. Secondly of course you are to give the best performance of which you both are capable, a point I am sure I need not emphasize. You are of course free to choose your own tricks, effects.” Gregory paused meaningfully. “You will of course cooperate in so far as you feel able, with any special requests that members of your small audience may have.”
Simon shrugged. “Insofar as we feel able.”
“Yes. And there is a fringe benefit that you may consider of some importance.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Among the guests will be a few who are quite influential, I understand, in the world of entertainment. You say you are not now one of the big names of show business, but… I of course know nothing of magic myself. Would there be any special equipment, or prearrangements that you require?”
Margie was about to speak, probably with questions to ask, but Simon had taken her hand and now squeezed it gently, signalling for silence. He said: “We can provide all the special equipment we’ll need. Where’s this house?”
“In the far suburbs—rather far out even to be called suburbs, I’m afraid; about two hours’ drive. You’ll need rather detailed instructions on how to get there.” Again, the small superior smile. “When you see the house, you’ll understand what I mean about the medieval theme being fitting.”
THREE
Mrs. Hildegard Littlewood, nee Hildy Nordberg, was dressed for tennis, having just recently ascended from practice on her court. She was standing on the roof of her castle, leaning her forearms and elbows on what her bridegroom had recently told her ought to be called a merlon. It was the portion of a battlement that stuck up like a giant squared tooth. With fingers hooked over the rising edge of stone, Hildy could feel how her thick new golden wedding ring caught and grated on the edge. With her eyes closed in summer sunshine, she was trying to fight back a threatened bout of near-hysterical giggles. She had the feeling that if she once let the laughter get started it was going to get out of hand at once. Sometimes lately it had seemed to Hildy that if she could allow herself one good bout of hysteria she would get it out of her system and would then be able to settle down. But she wasn’t familiar enough with hysteria to know if it might be managed that way. In fact she had never had trouble with it before. And she wasn’t sure, either, how long she was going to be alone on the roof before someone came up looking for her.
She told herself now for the thousandth time that she had no realistic cause for unhappiness. Quite the contrary. Absolutely the contrary. And in fact she wasn’t really unhappy. It was just that two months ago she had been a part-time student and part-time waitress, supporting herself after a fashion by dishing out pizza in a roadside place just outside Los Angeles. And today here she was just finished with a workout on her own tennis court in Illinois, with more money in more bank accounts than she knew what to do with, and standing on top of her own imported, reconstructed… no, it was just too ridiculous.
Hildy pulled hard on the mortared stones. A sound between a laugh and a faint shriek escaped her lips. But then nothing more came. A genuinely relieving outburst was evidently not as near the surface as she had thought.
She released her grip on the edge of the parapet and turned, opening her eyes to summer sunshine that warmed the stone-paved castle roof and the nearby treetops that screened away most of the outside world. If you could see me now… but what made her overload of success all the more traumatic was that there was practically no one to whom she could say that, even on the phone or in a letter.
Hildy had moved around a lot in her young life. What little had been left of her family when she was growing up had been second and third generation Californians, with Okie restlessness intact. Continual moving continually made the latest crop of new friends drop away, and old friends were nonexistent. And then her mother, the remaining family remnant, died. And there Hildy had been, waiting on tables, that day two months ago when Saul Littlewood had just happened to come in looking for some lunch.
One of the less visible changes in her life since that day was that now her trains of thought tended to become easily derailed. Another recurrent thought came interrupting now: some of these treetops really ought to be trimmed, at least a little. And then, every night, one light ought to be left on in one window of the upper castle, probably right in that narrow window of the single tower that rose above the roof and battlements. That way they could have the place photographed for a paperback book cover… Hildy had tried this joke a couple of times on Saul, who each time had looked at her indulgently, smiled a little helplessly in his serious way, and hadn’t appeared to really get the joke at all…
Whenever Hildy tried to tell someone, calmly and factually, what had happened between the two of them on that first day in the pizza parlor, she wound up having to say that she had simply let him pick her up. Which was undeniably true as far as it went. But putting it that way didn’t begin to tell the truth of what had happened between the two of them at first sight.
All right, she advised herself now, run through it once more in your mind, and then stop dwelling on it, and then let’s concentrate on where life ought to go from here.
Once more, now, she told herself that at the time she first met Saul, she hadn’t really been Cinderella. Neither dirt-poor nor uneducated. Anyway, poverty, Hildy had decided, was far more a state of mind, or perhaps a statement of soci
al position, than it was a measure of actual money available. It was just that when she first met Saul she had been only nineteen years old and her own sole support, and the degree in computer science that was going to make her independent and successful was a number of years that seemed like a good part of a lifetime in the future. And Saul was still far from being used to the possession of wealth himself, though wealth had been in his family for generations. He was still walking on air with the reality of the whole vast inheritance, that day when he just strolled into the pizza place, and looked at Hildy and said—
Hildy’s rather feverish reverie was broken at this point by the sound of a door opening. In contrast to the stones surrounding it, it was an ordinary-looking twentieth century door, only a few decades old. Sturdy, weatherproofed wood with a no-nonsense modern lock, it was set in the side of the round watchtower that extended up ten feet or so above the roof. Old Grandfather Littlewood, as Saul and Vivian kept saying, might have been eccentric to import and rebuild himself a French castle, but he had not been daft enough to want to live in an unmodernized one.
As the door swung outward across stone flags, a young woman’s face wreathed in black curls came into view around its edge. The face lit with a friendly smile at the sight of Hildy.
“There you are.” This was Vivian, Saul’s sister. At the twenty-eight she claimed, she was a couple of years younger than Saul, and looked considerably younger still. Her basically pale skin, like her brother’s, seemed to resist tan and sunburn alike; but recent weeks in Hawaii and California had managed to impart a light bronze tint to both of them. Vivian was not as tall as her brother, but even more innately elegant. Hildy, in contrast, had white-blond hair and Scandinavian blue eyes. Her short frame was shapely enough, and not at all fat, but she was definitely on the sturdy side. With slightly improved reflexes she might have made a tennis champion; she could never have become a fashion model.
Vivian, wearing jeans and a trim shirt that displayed her own thin figure to good advantage, came forward smiling. “If you’re in the midst of some serious meditation I don’t have to interrupt it.”
Hildy, who had found herself getting on much better than she had expected with Vivian, was determined to be cheerful. “Oh, I can meditate any time. What’s up?”
Her sister-in-law put on a look of mild concern. “It’s just that the great housewarming weekend starts in a very few days now, and we were insisting that all the guests and all the help have medieval dress of some sort. And I’m afraid that so far I have done zilch about what I’m going to wear, and—”
“Oh, the weekend. Oh my God yes, a costume. There’s been so much else to do I’ve just completely—”
“I know, dear. Me too. Anyway, Saul and I have just decided to dash into the city. He with more business to be done, as usual. Me to track down this place I’ve heard about where they make you costumes that are really clothes, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh. Oh yes. I’d better come along. How are you going?”
“Your husband wants to fly, he’s really happy with his new license. We can land at Meigs, that’s right on the lakefront you know, and be in and out of the city in no time, comparatively speaking.”
“Great idea.” Hildy looked at her new wristwatch. “Give me ten minutes to get changed?”
“Sure. I doubt we’re going to leave inside of half an hour anyway. The great tycoon’s still on the phone.”
“Good,” said Hildy, wondering not for the first time if it was this casual put-down attitude of Vivian’s that kept her from getting married. And Hildy started for the door in the tower and the stair inside it. But then she found herself delaying involuntarily for one more look around.
“There are moments,” said Vivian, watching her now with quiet amusement, “when I envy you.”
“Why?” Hildy asked in wonder.
“Because. To you all this is so very new. This was more or less our family home, Saul and I spent a fair amount of time here, visiting Grandfather, when we were kids. There was wealth around, even if we didn’t have much.” Vivian waved her hand. No need to go into all that again now; Hildy had heard often enough already the tangled tale of family politics, quarrels, disinheritance, legal maneuverings. But now the older generation were all gone and the courts’ final ruling had come down. The castle and its grounds were only a small part of Saul’s and Vivian’s inheritance.
“I envy you most of the time, I think.” Hildy murmured now. “That you can take to all this naturally.” She looked around again; “I think I’m falling in love with the place.”
The roof where they stood was perhaps two hundred feet above the broad, brown surface of the Sauk, which flowed at the foot of the high bluffs on which the castle perched. The river, slow now with summer, was visible only in dots and patches hazed by the green of the nearby crowns. In fact, when you looked out in any direction from the roof, what you could see was mainly the tops of nearby trees. The grounds of the castle, small airstrip included, covered about ten or twelve acres, most of it right atop the riverside bluffs and down their slope. The bluffs, heavily wooded, were much too steep ever to have been cultivated, or even put to pasture. The river and its shorelines along here, Hidly had thought, probably looked much the same now as they had during Indian times.
The rich countryside that surrounded the river on both sides could be seen from the castle roof only in leaf-clouded patches, through and over the uppermost branches of trees that must have been little more than saplings, if indeed they had existed at all, when Grandfather Littlewood bought the land. If Hildy let her imagination try, it could build on the hints of things seen tantalizingly through the summer trees, working to convince her that she was now in fact the mistress of some huge feudal domain. If the land in feudal times had not really looked like this round the castle’s original site, it should have.
There were vast fields of summer corn out there, along with square miles of other crops that she could not so easily identify. There were sprawling, sloping creekbed pasturelands, supporting tidy herds of dairy cows, with here and there some sheep. Most of the fields were bordered by thick hedgerows that Saul said sheltered small game in plenty. Orchards and pastures provided patches of woods, besides the wooded land of the river bluffs and islands. Saul had told her that there had been wild deer here in the valley when he was growing up, and he thought there probably still were, at least a few. He could remember Grandfather Littlewood telling stories of wild wolves, running right here along the Sauk… the more Hildy heard of Grandfather Littlewood, the more she wished that she could have met him.
The trees around the castle prevented a rooftop observer from being able to see any of the prosperous modern farmhouses and barns very plainly; with very little effort a feudal illusion could be sustained. What buildings were visible through clear gaps in greenery were miles away, too distant for detail to be seen. In winter, Hildy supposed, with the leaves gone, the view of the countryside around must be considerably plainer—and of course it must then be easier for the outside world to see the castle, too. To see it, for example, from the narrow highway that threaded along the river’s farther shore, and maybe even from Frenchman’s Bend, the little town on the far shore half a mile upstream. She could see nothing of the town now, and very little of the highway even when the breeze stirred branches. The breeze was picking up a little now, she noticed, and there were gray clouds in the southwest.
“I suppose we’d better get moving,” Vivian commented, looking in that direction, shading her eyes against the sun. “We can spend the night in town if we decide to, but the ace will want to get there before the thundershowers do.”
The two women entered the tower; Hildy closed the door firmly behind them, and they started down the winding stone stair. The narrow stair curved counterclockwise as you descended, Saul said to give a defending right-handed swordsman the advantage as he retreated upward. As she passed one of the narrow decorative windows Hildy looked down into the courtyard some sixty fe
et below, and saw that the workmen were giving the swimming pool a trial filling. It certainly ought to be ready for use by Friday afternoon. Now, in a matter of minutes, she was going to get into a machine with her lover Saul at the controls, and fly. She felt dreamy, drifty, ready to let go and enjoy the ride.
She asked Vivian: “What were medieval swimsuits like, I wonder?”
Vivian’s laugh was quietly musical. “They looked very much like medieval pajamas, I’m afraid.”
“Not a stitch in sight?”
“Exactly. Saul and I got away with skinny-dipping in the river a few times when we were little. One of our cousins from across the river put us up to it… he was quite a nasty little boy. But we’d better not encourage the weekend guests to carry this medieval thing too far.”
The stairway brought them into a hallway that had not existed in the original structure, on the third level of the castle above the ground. Again the walls were stone, and ancient sconces held unlighted torches against the walls. But there were electric lights as well, recessed and inconspicuous; there were bedrooms, bathrooms, closets, designed in at the time of reconstruction in the early twentieth century. The old place was really in remarkably good shape, thought Hildy, considering how many decades it had been standing almost empty and almost unoccupied since it was rebuilt. She had to admit that old Gregory, though she didn’t like him, had certainly done a good job as caretaker.
Saul, still in tennis clothes as was his bride, was standing halfway down the long hall, telling some more workmen in which room to put an antique bed. The process of refurnishing was coming along faster than Hildy had thought it would.
Hildy hurried to embrace her tall husband, bury her face for a moment against his chest, smelling of sweat and exercise and sunlight. Saul, murmuring something, returned the hug; he seemed half-distracted, as he usually was these days, thinking about business.
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