Keys to the Castle

by Donna Ball

  And then one day she noticed a publisher’s flier in the mail: Daniel Orsay presents Ribbons of Light, Sonnets for a Modern Age. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she had muttered out loud. “He is a poet after all.”

  On a whim, she had contacted the publisher to schedule a signing. And six weeks later, Daniel Orsay himself had stood backlit in the open door of Dixie’s Books and Nooks, looking for all the world like a knight in shining armor in his white jeans and open-throated shirt with his dark hair flowing over his shoulders, and he had said, softly, “Now, that is a beautiful smile.”

  It had been the most successful event Books and Nooks had ever hosted. The women attendees swooned over his French accent and his dark Gaelic good looks, and the store sold every copy. Sara, as hard as she tried to maintain a professional distance, was as caught up in his charm as any middle-aged tourist. And when he invited her—no, he insisted on taking her—to dinner to celebrate the evening’s success, she didn’t have a hope of resisting.

  Looking back, she saw she hadn’t had a chance since the moment he appeared in her doorway framed by the sun like some hero of yore, ready to sweep her away. She was forty-six years old, and falling for a fairy tale.

  He told her about his travels—to Nairobi, Bali, India, Hong Kong. He made her laugh until she was giddy with his tales of his multiple attempts to climb Everest, each one funnier—and more outrageous—than the last. His dark eyes softened and his fingertips touched her cheek as he told her that if he could paint her laughter, it would be musical notes bursting against a crystal sky. He took her breath away.

  They walked on the beach, they went sailing, they held hands at outdoor concerts. Neither Dixie nor her customers saw much of Sara that enchanted summer, and when Sara looked back on it now she realized that was exactly what it was—an enchantment. Daniel was a force of nature, a small sun that pulled everything into its gravitational path, and she had absolutely no desire to resist his magnetic power. She tumbled willingly, gladly, into the madness that was loving Daniel.

  She had lived half a lifetime without trust, without commitment, without love, and there was a part of her that knew this mad, wild adventure was completely reactionary, was totally insane . . . and that sanctioned it anyway. The little girl who had cowered in a closet, holding her sister tight in her arms, while her mother’s latest boyfriend shouted and broke things in the next room, disappeared when Daniel was with her. She did not have to prove anything. She did not have to be anything. She believed in fairy-tale endings.

  There was another part of her that knew, of course, that he was the type of man who would break her heart, and so he did. But first he married her.

  Because the real wonder of their entire, magical courtship was that this incredible man had, for some reason, fallen as much in love with her as she had with him.

  She didn’t know much more about him on the day she married him than on the day she had first read his publisher’s brochure. He told her that his parents had died, suddenly and tragically, in the 2002 bombings in Bali, where they had been on their first out-of-the Continent holiday in twenty years. There was a stricken look on Daniel’s face when he related this, as though he still could not quite accept the horror of it. He had no other family. The trip he had made to accompany his parents’ bodies back to France was the last one he had ever taken to Europe. He had stayed for nine months, and knew even then there was nothing left for him. He would never go back. In retrospect, Sara realized those were the only details of his personal life he had ever given her.

  Occasionally he referred to Rondelais, the town in France in which he had grown up, and now and then he talked about his college days at Oxford. He had come to the United States shortly after graduation, and had lived here, on and off, the past twenty years. He told her she was marrying a poor man and a dreamer. She told him she didn’t care.

  There was a part of her that knew this was not the way adults entered into marriage. And there was the bigger part of her that didn’t care.

  In the delirium of the passion they both shared, neither of them talked much about their pasts. Sara had assumed they would have a lifetime to discover all of those details about each other.

  But in fact, they had only three weeks before Daniel lost control of his new sports car—her wedding gift to him—during an ice storm, and plowed into a tree. Only after his death did Sara realize she had been married to a man she didn’t even know.

  The nightmare of sorting out his affairs—such as they were—across two continents had been overwhelming, and without Dixie’s help Sara did not know how she would have navigated the mess. His publisher had put her in touch with a law firm in London that was apparently authorized to handle Daniel’s estate, however little of it there might be. Daniel was as free with his money as he was with his heart, and he had left very little behind. Nonetheless, the British lawyers kept writing, e-mailing, and telephoning to remind her that, according to French laws of succession, she was obligated to settle Daniel’s estate within a year. She managed to postpone the requests for a meeting until the most recent correspondence requested instructions as to how she wished to pay the taxes on Daniel’s property in Rondelais. She knew she couldn’t put it off any longer. She had to go to France, sign whatever papers the lawyers wanted her to sign, liquidate whatever small acquisitions Daniel had managed to hold on to, and hope that would be enough to pay the French taxes, which she had heard were outrageous.

  And once that was done, the brief, glorious madness that had been her marriage to Daniel would be over, erased from time almost as surely as though it had never been. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to go to France.

  It was that she didn’t want to say good-bye.

  In the Land of Make-Believe

  FOUR

  Sara arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport feeling rumpled and disoriented, which was not unusual for a trans-Atlantic flight, but not the way one wanted to face Paris for the first time, either. Dixie had tried to persuade her to at least stay a day or two in the city, to see the Eiffel Tower and sit in a sidewalk café, but Sara overruled her. She had booked a room at a B&B in Rondelais, which Dixie had looked up on the Internet and told her was adorable, and the law firm had offered to have a car meet her at the airport, which simplified her life greatly. Sara did not want to try to negotiate the rail system by herself in a country in which she did not speak the language.

  She had been married to a Frenchman and she didn’t speak enough French even to get herself on a train. She felt like more of an imposter than ever.

  Armed with her French phrase book, Sara had spent the half hour in which the plane circled the airport practicing one of the two French sentences she knew: Je voudrais aller a Rondelais, just in case she did have to do battle with a French ticket seller. The other sentence was Ou sont les toilettes? And she practiced that, too, just in case.

  She managed to make her way to baggage claim by scanning for the signs in English, and was just tugging her dark blue suitcase off the conveyor belt when a voice behind her said, “Pardonnez-moi, Madame Orsay?”

  Sara turned as a hand swung her suitcase onto the floor, and faced a man in a dark suit and chauffeur’s hat. He repeated, “Madame Orsay?”

  It took her a moment to understand. No one had ever called her by Daniel’s last name before, and it made her feel strange. “Um . . . Yes. I mean, oui.” She smiled at him gratefully, cleared her throat, and said with casual, deliberate enunciation, “Je voudrais aller a Rondelais, s’il vous plaît?”

  The driver relieved her of her carry-on bag, locked the extended handle of her rolling suitcase into place, and replied in impeccable English, “Of course, madame. If you’ll just follow me, we’ll be on our way.”

  “Right,” she murmured, trying to look nonchalant as she kept the pace beside him. “Thank you.”

  The uniformed driver led her to a long black car parked just outside the doors. He opened the back door of the car for her. “You’ll find the bar is nicely stocked
,” he said, “and I’ve opened a pleasant little Montrachet for you. There’s also cheese and fruit, if you like. We have a two-hour drive to Rondelais, so plenty of time to relax after your trip.”

  “Oh . . .” replied Sara, trying not to show her surprise as she climbed into the backseat and settled down into the cushiony folds of buff leather. “Yes, umm . . . Thank you.”

  “Well, well,” she murmured to herself when he closed the door. “This is what I call service.”

  She started to search her purse for her cell phone to call Dixie, but was distracted by what appeared to be a small refrigerator built into the seat in front of her. As promised, there was a china platter of cheese and fruit with flat crackers and squares of dark chocolate. There was a silver bucket padded with shredded raffia in which nestled a bottle of red wine and a crystal glass. She wondered how much the lawyers would pad her bill for these amenities, but then she tasted the Montrachet and she didn’t care.

  There was a privacy panel between the front seat and the back, soft classical music floating over hidden speakers, and her own temperature controls. The driver negotiated with expert skill the busy roads of the largest city in France, and the luxury car was so smooth and silent that Sara hardly noticed when they left the busy highways behind for the more leisurely pace of the secondary roads that led east, toward the valley of the Loire River.

  Sara sat back, sipped wine, nibbled on cheese, fruit, and exquisite morsels of chocolate, and actually started to enjoy the trip as the French countryside rolled by. The only traveling Sara had done in her life was circumscribed by hotel rooms and boardrooms; the concept of a vacation was alien to her. But for the first time it occurred to her that Dixie might be right . . . simply getting away could be good for her. There was something a little exotic about the smell and feel and look of a foreign country, and it made her feel exotic, too. She felt different in these surroundings, as though the pain and discontent that weighed her down throughout the winter was still trying to catch up with this time zone. It was an odd feeling, and not entirely unwelcome.

  The swatches of blue and green outside the window were like a gently undulating quilt whose symmetry was broken occasionally by the spire of a village church or the arches of a stone bridge. Rich, dark fields were turned in long, curving rows, and she turned to gaze wide-eyed at the almost military precision with which the carefully pruned and tied vines of the famous wine country were lined up along the hillside. It looked like a video from the Travel Channel.

  She was starting on her second glass of wine—and third or fourth square of chocolate—when the car turned gently off of the paved road and onto a narrow lane lined with those tall, cone-shaped trees she had seen in Renaissance paintings. In fact the entire vista looked a lot like a painting—the deep green trees silhouetted against a pale sky, the glint of a deep crystal blue lake in the distance that was spanned by a charming wide planked bridge, and beyond that bridge, half obscured by a dip in the road, she got a glimpse of the tall towers and chimneys of what looked very much like one of the oft-photographed châteaux of France. It was then that she remembered, with chagrin, the camera Dixie had stuffed into her purse at the last minute. She had promised the boys—well, mostly Dixie—a full photographic essay, and she hadn’t taken a picture of a single vineyard. Hopefully, a picture of a castle would make up for it.

  To Sara’s amazement and delight, the car crossed the bridge, and at the height of it the full château—or at least as much as the eye could see—came into view. The structure seemed to have been built around a pointed-roofed tower on the west side, so that it was as much round as square in appearance. It was constructed of a pale, rough gray stone, three stories high, with a darker stone accenting each of the multiple arched windows in an uneven, charmingly hand-hewn fan shape. There was a deep, shadowed entryway slightly asymmetrical to center with an arched portico that reached to the second story, and Sara counted six chimneys on the front side of the house alone. The sun, now long past its zenith, was aligned behind the ancient fortress in such a way that the entire structure seemed to glow with a silvery luminescence. It was everything she had ever expected from a fairy-tale castle, and more.

  She stretched from window to window to try to take it all in at once—the glittering water, the sweep of emerald lawn that surrounded the castle, the wavy leaded glass windows, the small dark rectangles in the tower that Sara believed had once been used as battle stations in the time of bows and arrows. She snapped a dozen pictures through the windows, and the driver, who must have noticed her efforts, was kind enough to pull the car around the circular drive and stop in front of the castle. He got out and came around to open her door.

  “Oh, thank you so much!” Sara exclaimed, climbing out. “Do you think it’s okay if I take pictures? I mean, will anyone mind?”

  “Certainly not, madame. As you wish.”

  “It’s gorgeous,” she said, backing up and checking her frame in the digital camera. “Just like Cinderella’s castle, only older. And real,” she added, snapping the shutter.

  The timeworn stones were mossy in places, and she could see white patches where the mortar had been repaired. She felt small, and overcome with awe, at the thought of the centuries this place had witnessed, the hands that had carved and stacked these stones so long ago, the feet that had trod its halls. Suddenly she was glad she had come to France. There was nothing like standing in the shadow of an edifice that had been erected by people who had lived and died centuries before you were born to put your own small life into perspective.

  Maybe she would make time to visit a few churches and museums after all.

  She had wandered a dozen or so steps from the car in her enthusiastic photo-taking, and now she turned back. “Thanks again for . . .”

  But she stopped. The driver had removed her bags from the car and was standing beside them, waiting patiently for her. Sara hurried over to him.

  “Excuse me,” she said, gesturing to her suitcases. “Is something wrong? Aren’t you taking me to my hotel?”

  He nodded. “Oui, madame. This is Château Rondelais.”

  “But . . .” She scrambled in her purse for the folded paper on which she had printed all her travel instructions. “I’m staying at—at the Rosalie, in the village.”

  “No, madame,” he explained patiently. “There has been a change in your accommodations. Mr. Lindeman himself instructed that I am to make certain you are settled in the château.”

  “Oh,” she said, trying not to show her astonishment. Lindeman was definitely the name on the letterhead she had received from the British law firm. And this was definitely a castle.

  “But . . .” She looked around helplessly, but he gave her a reassuring nod and gestured her to precede him up the path.

  The flagstone walkway was cracked with age and showing a few weeds here and there, shadowed in places by the giant, rounded boxwoods that dotted the lawn. The château loomed huge and silent as she approached, with absolutely no sign of life within. She had heard, of course, that many of the châteaux in the Loire Valley had been transformed into B&Bs, but she had never expected to actually spend the night in one.

  The massive oak front door swung open just as they gained the top step, and a plump, uniformed maid receded into the shadows. Sara glanced uncertainly at the chauffeur, who smiled and nodded and, with his arms occupied with her luggage, gestured her to precede him. Sara stepped inside.

  There she was struck dumb and motionless. Why had she expected a cold, dark stone foyer lined with suits of chain mail and battle-axes? This was France, after all, the land of opulence and fairy tales. The enormous hall in which she was standing was clad in gleaming, pink-veined marble, floor to two-story ceiling. A banister curved upward alongside a marble staircase that was wide enough for a giant and a couple of his drinking buddies to climb side by side. Overhead was a chandelier that was as big as the bathroom in her Chicago apartment, and every prism of it sent shards of light cascading off the polished su
rfaces below.

  In the center of the room was a table with delicately curved legs, on which rested an enormous vase of flowers—nasturtiums, lilies, saucer-sized dahlias, stately yellow and pink gladiolus, and deep purple iris. There were mirrors in baroque frames, and a painting of a boy in knee pants with a greyhound that was taller than she was. Far beyond the crystal chandelier, the domed ceiling was painted a Renaissance blue, its panels edged in gold. The white marble floor beneath her feet shone like glass.

  Granted, the banister was dark with age and the steps were worn. The silver arms of the chandelier showed signs of tarnish and the blue ceiling was faded, the gold leaf blackened in places and flaking. But the sheer enormity of the room, the vast quantity of all that marble, the glitter and gleam of polished surfaces, swallowed up insignificant details.

  Sara was aware that she was gaping like Alice in Wonderland, but she couldn’t help it. The big oak door swung slowly shut on heavy hinges, and the driver began speaking in rapid French to a woman in a crisp gray maid’s uniform. In a moment he turned to her. “Madame, it has been a pleasure serving you. Madame Touron will show you to your room.”

  “Oh, uh, thank you.” Sara pulled herself out of the spell of wonder that had entrapped her the moment she entered the house, and fumbled in her purse for a tip. She had no idea how much would be appropriate. “You’ve been wonderful.”

  He ignored her futile search for euros and instead gave her a small bow. “Good day, madame. Enjoy your stay at Rondelais.”

  As he departed by the front door, the maid gestured toward the staircase in invitation. “Madame?”

  Sara felt like royalty as she followed the woman up the broad, sweeping stairs, her soft-soled shoes squeaking against the polished marble. The stairway was lined with portraits of people in costumes from various centuries, some in stiff Elizabethan collars, some in floaty empire gowns, some in Victorian ballroom attire. The only thing that prevented Sara from grabbing her camera and snapping photos at every step was that she didn’t want to seem like a typical American tourist to the maid. But she vowed to sneak down later and get some photographs—for Dixie, of course.