Keys to the Castle

by Donna Ball

  He smiled at her, the kind of smile that caused deep crinkles to form at the corners of his eyes, and Sara began to suspect that being charming was, quite simply, what he did for a living.

  She said, “Why is it, again, that you are here rather than Mr. Winkle?”

  And even as she spoke, a waiter appeared—or perhaps the correct term was footman—in black jacket and white gloves, bearing a large silver tray with a selection of decanters and hors d’oeuvres. He set the tray on the shaded stone table near the fountain, and Ash said, “I wasn’t sure what you’d enjoy to drink; I should have asked. Will sherry do? I like a good Scotch before dinner, myself. Or I can send for something else.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, no, this is fine. Sherry is fine. Sherry is wonderful.”

  Ash spoke a few words of smooth, fluid French to the foot-man, who nodded a bow and departed.

  “I thought we’d enjoy our wine with dinner,” Ash said, pouring the drinks. “I’ve chosen a nice selection from some of the lesser-known vineyards that I thought you might appreciate while you’re here.”

  Suddenly Sara was reminded of her corporate days: the grand hotels, the expensive wines, the smell of chafing dishes and rich cigars. The sharp deals, the slick pitches, the clash of triumph and desperation. There was a hollowness in the pit of her stomach that was at odds with the grandeur of her surroundings.

  “You know,” Sara said carefully, “I really didn’t expect all of . . .” She made another vague gesture. “This. I’m starting to feel a little overwhelmed.”

  He handed her a glass of sherry. “I’m glad I didn’t order the caviar, then.” He indicated the tray, smiling. “The pâté is quite fine, though. The chef is one of the best in the valley, I’m told. We can look forward to a real feast tonight.”

  She repeated, “Chef?” And then she had to know. “Do you treat all your clients this . . .” She searched for the word. “Extravagantly?”

  He said, “Actually, I hardly ever bring clients here. It’s far too much bother, and the devil of an expense.”

  And that was enough. Her fingers tightened on her glass, and she said firmly, “Mr. Lindeman, why am I here? Why are you here?”

  His brows drew together, and he dropped his gaze to the glass of whiskey in his hand. “Sara,” he said, and then he glanced at her. “May I call you that?”

  She nodded, and something about the sober expression on his face made her attention sharpen. His frown deepened briefly, and he looked uncomfortable, as though searching for words. She remained silent, and waited for him to continue.

  He said, “I feel the perfect ass. I wanted to say something earlier.” Again he dropped his gaze, and small, hard lines appeared at the edges of his mouth. “I was in Australia when I got the word about Daniel,” he said. “I should have called. I know that. I’m no good at the bloody formalities. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to send a note. Started to write you more than once. But I couldn’t. I’m sorry.”

  She stared at him for the longest time, not understanding. Her memory, dulled by jet lag and the reluctance to revisit the horror of the winter, reluctantly began to shuffle through details. Finally she said, remembering, “But . . . there was a note. Besides the letter from your firm about—about the estate, there was a lovely handwritten note. I remember.”

  He gave a brief, sharp shake of his head, shifting his gaze away. Every word seemed clipped, and forced. “My secretary wrote it. I asked her to sign my name. I meant to do more. I have no excuse. Daniel was my best friend. I should have done more.” He forced out a breath, as though ridding himself of something unpleasant, and said shortly, “There. That’s said.”

  And suddenly she understood. “Oh my God,” she said softly. “Ash. You’re Ash. Daniel’s friend from school.”

  She turned away, her fingers coming to her lips, feeling a familiar surge of humiliation. She should have known that. That was something a wife should have known. How could she have been so oblivious?

  “I’m so sorry,” he said swiftly. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  She had to swallow before she could speak. “No,” she said. But she couldn’t turn around to face him. “I’m the one who should apologize. I’m just so embarrassed. I should have realized who you were sooner.”

  “My fault entirely,” he assured her. “I should have been more clear in my introduction.”

  She could tell by his voice that his brief discomfiture was gone. He was back in his element now, saying the right thing, knowing what to do, putting people at their ease. As she turned, he came over to her and made a small movement with his hand, as though to touch her, and then seemed to change his mind. “I understand,” he said simply. “I do.”

  She had no doubt that he was sincere in his effort to make her feel better. And that was also exactly the right thing to say.

  Sara tried to think of something to say. “How long did you know Daniel?”

  He gestured her toward one of the teak chairs that was drawn up around a low table, and waited until she was seated to answer. “Since we were boys, off and on. His family did business with my father, and later, we were at Oxford together.” He smiled as he leaned back in the chair opposite her and sipped his drink. “He was the most impractical fellow I’ve ever known, and probably the most fun. Life was a circus to him. It was almost as though . . .”

  “As though he knew his time was short,” Sara finished for him softly, “and he was determined to make the most of it.”

  Ash said simply, “Yes.”

  “So,” she said, when she could speak again. “That explains why you took over from Mr. Winkle.”

  He looked a little uncomfortable. “Truth is, I should have done so from the beginning. Our firm has handled the Orsay affairs for generations, but estate law isn’t really my specialty, and I thought you’d be better served by Winkle. I meant no disrespect.”

  “What is your specialty, Mr. Lindeman?” Sara asked, with interest. “I have to be honest, I always assumed Daniel’s lawyers were, well, a small-time operation . . . you know, the type who do wills and trusts and not much else. I didn’t expect one of them to speak Japanese.”

  He said, “Lindeman and Lindeman specializes in international law. Truth be told, we do very little estate work these days, but the Orsays, as I mentioned, are old friends of the family. For myself, I’m what you call in America a closer, I believe. I put together the impossible deals. When Coca-Cola wants to bottle Perrier, or McDonald’s wants to franchise in China, my job is to make certain everything goes smoothly for everyone involved. And if Apple Computer wanted to buy Microsoft, for example, I would find a way to convince Mr. Gates that the deal is not only in his best interest, but that he simply cannot survive without it. I package proposals; I make them look irresistible; I make certain everyone comes away feeling he has won the game. It’s really quite exhilarating.”

  Sara blew out a soft breath. “Why do I feel I need to call my stockbroker?”

  Those lines about his eyes appeared again, and he tipped his glass to her. “The moment I hear from Apple, I’ll be certain to give you a call.”

  “So,” she said, “how did you end up with a castle in France?”

  “A portion of a castle,” he corrected her. And then he paused with his glass halfway to his lips, an odd expression coming over his face. “Don’t you know?”

  She shook her head, uncomfortable with the way he was looking at her. “Know what?”

  Still he fixed her with that penetrating gaze, his whiskey untasted, as though he were seeing her for the first time. “Impossible,” he muttered, almost to himself. And, aloud, “You do know who holds the controlling interest in Château Rondelais, don’t you? What I mean to say is, Daniel did tell you that at least?”

  She really didn’t like the way he was looking at her, and his tone, so crisp and British and lawyerlike, made her bristle. But he was her host, and he had sent her flowers and champagne, so she was determined to be polite. “Okay, I give u
p,” she said. “Who owns the other part of the castle?”

  He leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees, and fixed her with that watchful gaze. “As a matter of fact,” he answered her carefully, “you do.”

  SIX

  Sara simply stared at him, without speaking, without blinking, without, it seemed, even breathing, for an intolerable moment. Ash sat back heavily in his chair. “Good Christ,” he muttered. Then, lips tightening, “I’ll have Winkle’s scalp for this.”

  Sara set her glass very carefully on the small table beside her chair. She blotted her fingers on her skirt. She said, “Is this a joke?”

  Ash lifted his glass, and took a drink. He said, “It is not.”

  Her expression was immobile, her gazed fixed on him. Clearly she was waiting for an explanation, but he hardly knew where to begin. He decided, at length, on the beginning.

  “Château Rondelais has been in the Orsay family since 1715,” he said, “when it was awarded to the marquis of the day for some service to the crown, or perhaps to pay off a gambling debt; no one has ever been clear on that part of the story. Family fortunes declined over the generations, as they’ve a tendency to do, and châteaux are expensive to maintain. Daniel’s parents practically bankrupted themselves trying to put the place into the shape it is now, and sold most everything that was disposable to keep it up and pay the taxes. Unfortunately, a condition of Daniel’s inheritance was that the property itself could not be sold, so when he needed money a few years back I managed to get around that encumbrance by offering to purchase an investment share. Which is how I came to own part of a castle and how you . . .” He took another drink. “Came to inherit one.”

  Sara stood up and walked across the terrace. He watched as she reached the stone wall and paused there for a moment, her hands resting lightly on it, gazing out over the valley. She stood stone still, her face in profile, the curve of her shoulder and the fall of her skirt in perfect alignment, and in the pinkish twilight she almost could have been a sculpture: a piece of modern art designed to complete the terrace, a part of it. Woman Surveys the Future, it would be called.

  Ash took another drink to clear his head, and was surprised to find his glass almost empty.

  She turned after a moment and walked back toward him. She was wearing sandals with a low heel, and her footsteps made almost no sound on the stone. She sat down again and picked up her glass, looked at it for a moment, then returned it to the table with very great care. He could see that her hand was unsteady.

  “I see,” was all she said.

  “There’s no excuse for your not having been told all of this from the start,” Ash said, his voice harsh. “It was our job, as executors of the estate, to make certain that all the paperwork detailing your inheritance was clear and in order. Unpardonable that we shouldn’t have done so. I assure you that there will be an accounting—”

  She held up a hand to stop him. “No, don’t. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. I’m sure it was all explained perfectly . . . I just wasn’t paying attention. I hardly read the letters your office sent. And all Daniel ever told me about his family home was that it was old and falling apart. I . . .” She stopped on a sharp inhalation of breath, pressing her fingers to eyes. “We were married for three weeks!” she cried. “Damn it!”

  And suddenly she started to laugh, softly. She leaned back against her chair, shaking her head. “It is a joke,” she said. “It’s a great big twisted cosmic joke and I’m the punch line. I’m Cinderella trapped in a freakin’ fairy tale that just doesn’t know when to end. And what the hell am I supposed to do with a castle in France?” she demanded, turning on him. Her eyes glittered and her voice was beginning to take on a shrill edge. “Could you just tell me that, please?”

  “I thought we could discuss your options after dinner,” he said, watching her carefully. “I had hoped to get a couple of drinks into you first. Or perhaps a Valium?”

  Sara looked down at the sherry glass on the table as though suddenly remembering it, then picked it up and downed the contents in a single swallow. When she spoke again her voice was matter-of-fact, almost flippant. “You must think I’m a complete idiot. That’s okay. Because that’s exactly what I feel like.” She held up her empty glass. “Maybe I’ll have another.”

  Ash did nothing but lift a glance toward a shadow somewhere beyond her shoulder, and a waiter appeared to refill her glass. This time she sipped more slowly.

  “My father walked out on us when I was six,” she said. “My mother—wasn’t the kind of person who could recover from something like that. She was broken, I think, from the inside out. She started to drink, couldn’t hold a job . . . I kind of took over for her, fixed the meals, made sure my little sister got to school on time and that we had clean clothes to wear . . . I lied about my age so I could get an after-school job at fourteen, and I kept telling myself if I worked really, really hard, I could get Dixie and myself out of there. And eventually I did. I got a scholarship, a degree, and a great job. It was all I wanted, all I’d ever wanted. Of course . . .”

  She shrugged, and sipped her sherry. “All those years I threw myself into my work like that I really was still just a little girl trying to get out of that trailer park, but by the time I realized that, half my life had gone by. And when Daniel showed up—the most impossible, exotic, romantic fantasy any woman could ever imagine—I tried to make up for every dream I’d never let myself have all at once. I was ready to be swept away. I wanted the insanity. I’d lived the buttoned-down life for almost twenty years and I was ready to throw caution to the wind. It’s not that I didn’t know better. It’s that I wanted to believe in the fairy-tale ending. My sister had it all, why couldn’t I?” A small smile. “And of course, who could resist Daniel? I sometimes wonder whether he wasn’t as caught up in my fantasy as I was.”

  As she spoke, twilight was deepening, bathing the terrace in rich blue shadows that seemed to encourage intimacy. In the background, silent figures moved, dropping a white linen cloth over the stone table, bringing out trays, lighting candles. With a gentle whoosh, a torchiere flared to light a half dozen feet away, smelling of butane and citrus, and in soft sequence—whoosh, whoosh, whoosh—more of them followed, encircling the terrace with a golden glow and casting dancing shadows across the stone. Ash watched her silently, and listened.

  Sara took another sip of her drink. “I knew it wasn’t real,” she said. “I knew it couldn’t last. I just didn’t care. I guess, if I thought about it at all, I expected to just wake up one morning to find him gone, like my dad . . . but no, I didn’t think about it. I just wanted to live the dream for as long as I could, because I had gone so many years without any dreams at all. I didn’t expect him to die. I didn’t expect him to die without telling me who his next of kin was or where his insurance papers were or if he even had a will . . .” Her voice tightened here, and she stared into her almost empty glass. “When the coroner released his body they wanted to know how I wished to dispose of the remains, and I didn’t know. I was so angry at Daniel for that, for dying, for all the things he didn’t tell me and all the things he left me to take care of. But mostly for just making it all so real, and messy and ugly.”

  She looked at Ash. “But eventually I got over that. I got over the anger, I got over the disappointment, I was even starting to get over the pain. Now I find out my handsome prince has left me a four-hundred-year-old castle to remember him by, and how am I supposed to deal with that? What am I supposed to do now?”

  Ash put his drink aside and stood, extending his hand to her. “Come to dinner,” he said. Sara hesitated, then put her hand in his and allowed him to draw her to her feet. He placed his hand lightly on the back of her arm as they crossed toward the table, guiding her across the uneven flagstones. She said tiredly, by way of apology, “Too much information, huh?”

  “Daniel,” he said, “had an uncanny knack for complicating the lives of those who cared for him. Still, it’s rather int
eresting, don’t you think, that of all the things he could have left to a woman who never before had dreams of her own, a castle is the most fitting?”

  She glanced at him, and smiled a little, though it was fleeting. “That was a nice thing to say,” she said. “And I apologize for making you listen to all that. Are you married, Mr. Lindeman?”

  He pulled out her chair and waited until she was seated to respond. “I was, briefly.” He went around the table and took the chair opposite her. “To Daniel’s cousin, actually. She is a viper.” He compressed his lips in a brief gesture of distaste as he shook out his napkin. “I make it a point never to speak of her during meals.”

  Sara’s tone was both surprised and dismayed. “I didn’t know Daniel had any living relatives.”

  “The relationship is distant, to say the least,” Ash assured her. “There was a breach between the two family branches in the 1800s, and they’ve barely been civil to each other since.”

  The table was beautifully set with fresh yellow flowers and candles flickering in a silver candelabra. She could smell the aroma of something cooked in wine and garlic, and warm fresh bread. A waiter poured wine, and Ash told her it was from a vineyard only a few kilometers away that was known for its aromatic wild clover hues and chocolate bottom notes, and she tried to look interested as she tasted it. It was good, but she did not taste any chocolate.

  “I don’t know much about wine,” she admitted.

  “You will, if your visit lasts more than a few days,” he assured her. “You should try to get down to the village on market day. Many of the local wineries bring samples, and in November there’s a delightful Beaujolais Neauvoux festival.”

  Sara said she might like to ship a case of wine home to her sister, and he said that would be easy to arrange, and they talked like that for a time, about unimportant things. Sara knew that he was doing what he did best—directing the conversation, putting her at ease, carefully choreographing the flow of the evening away from such disturbing topics as widowhood, legacies, and castles.