Keys to the Castle

by Donna Ball

  “It’s what I do,” he assured her, and he drew her again onto his shoulder, utterly convinced of his invincibility.

  An easy routine began to transform Ash’s London life. He discovered his refrigerator could actually hold food. His kitchen smelled of coffee. He went late to the office because he did not want to miss the sight of Sara sitting at his table wearing one of his robes, reading the morning papers and munching on her toast. He stayed at the office only a few hours because there was always something he would rather be doing: taking Sara to lunch, or strolling in the park, or helping her to rearrange the guest room for the anticipated arrival of Alyssa on the coming weekend.

  “I do believe the time off you’ve taken agrees with you, sir,” commented Mrs. Harrison. “You’re looking quite fit.”

  Ash declared expansively, “I’m in love, Mrs. Harrison. Best thing in the world for the constitution.”

  “Congratulations, sir. And just as a point of reference, you might note that during your absence the business has not suffered appreciably. In fact, one might even say it has thrived.”

  He gave her a suspicious look. “Are you implying my presence here is a hindrance to productivity?”

  “Certainly not, sir. Merely that should you wish to continue half days, I doubt anyone would object.”

  He muttered, “I’m certain there was an insult there somewhere.”

  “On the other hand,” she continued easily, “did you happen to see the Dejonge proposal that I left on your desk? Their attorneys have gone over it and returned it with comments.”

  Ash frowned in annoyance. “I still say we could work this all out in two hours if they’d agree to a meeting. Any progress on that?”

  “I’m afraid not, sir. They believe it’s still too early in the process.”

  “Very well. I’ll take the proposal home with me tonight. Sara’s stopping by to meet me for lunch. Let me know when she arrives, will you?”

  “Actually, sir, she arrived about half an hour ago. She’s with Mr. Winkle now.”

  Ash frowned at that. “She didn’t mention.”

  And Mrs. Harrison simply lifted her eyebrows. “Should she have?”

  Ash went into his office, closed the door, and picked up the telephone to buzz Winkle’s line. But in the end, he replaced the receiver, impatient with himself, and turned to his own work. Nothing would make Sara’s temper flare faster than to think he was interfering in her private business discussions, and she was more than capable of managing her own affairs.

  Besides, it wasn’t as though they had any secrets.

  Alyssa arrived the next week in a swirl of happy chatter and a mound of stuffed toys, in the hands of his mother, who happily turned her over. Katherine planned to stay in town for a few days to shop, then she would retire to the country to attend to her own affairs before returning to Rondelais in another few weeks to help Sara prepare for the party.

  She took herson’s newfound domestic tranquility instride—a town house that had never been more than a hotel room now transformed with fresh flowers and dishes on the drainboard and a guest room outfitted with a Little Mermaid comforter, and his arm, lightly draped around Sara’s shoulders—as though it were only natural, as though it had always been so, and that gave Ash an unaccountable pleasure. She stayed for tea and gave an easy, chatty report on matters at Rondelais, and he thought how odd it was, and yet how right, that the two parts of his life should be linked in this way.

  “I was right, by the way,” she informed Ash, “about the keys to the west wing. That dour Italian did have them after all. He came out and opened up the rooms, and checked around for damage. Do you know the Orsays left everything just as it was when they moved out? Rotting furniture, pictures on the walls . . .”

  “No hidden van Goghs, I trust,” suggested Ash, sipping his tea.

  “I’m afraid not. Just family photographs and bric-a-brac, nothing of import. Nonetheless, they might have sentimental value to . . .” She glanced at Alyssa, who was importantly serving tea and cake to her stuffed bear at the small designer cocktail table on the opposite side of the room—scattering crumbs all over the highly polished floors and table surface in the process. “Someone at some point, so I boxed them all up for you.”

  “Mother, you didn’t go wandering around in there.” Ash’s voice was alarmed.

  “Actually, the damage is not as severe as one might imagine. Mr. Contandino thinks the roof can be repaired. Of course it would cost a bloody fortune.”

  Sara sighed. “What else is new?”

  “Never mind, my love,” Ash said, smiling at her. “It would just be another twenty rooms for you to keep clean. Let the roof fall in, I say.”

  Sara looked worried, and Katherine said, “It wouldn’t hurt to talk to someone about some kind of emergency measures to control the water damage when you return. I’m sure that would be a manageable expense.”

  She moved on to talk about her plans for the party, and to arrange to go shopping with Sara the next day for the necessities, and Ash fell into a reverie whose most remarkable component was simple contentment.

  They made frozen waffles for breakfast, and Sara decorated them with funny faces made out of fruit, the way she had seen Dixie do for the twins. They fed the ducks in the park. They had dinner at five. And there was that inevitable moment when Alyssa burst into Ash’s bedroom early one morning while they were still asleep and declared scoldingly, “Petit-papa , Tante Sara, where are your clothes?” Sara was mortified, but Ash laughed about it the rest of the day.

  On Sunday they took Alyssa to the zoo and ate cherry popsicles, most of which ended up on Ash’s shirt as he was lifting Alyssa to his shoulder to view the elephants. Sara, laughing, was trying to brush the stain away with a paper napkin when she noticed a woman across the path from them, wearing big sunglasses, chic, formfitting cropped jeans, and high-heeled sandals, watching them. As soon as she noticed Sara’s gaze, she turned and walked the other way.

  “Tante Sara, Tante Sara, tigers!” Alyssa tugged excitedly at her hand, and Sara quickly hid the faint shadow of puzzlement that had crept into her eyes as she turned her smile back to Alyssa.

  “By all means,” declared Ash, swinging Alyssa up into his arms, “we mustn’t keep the tigers waiting. Which way, Magellan?”

  And so they were off, with Ash and Alyssa trying to outdo each other with their tiger growls, and with Sara laughing so hard that her heart barely speeded at all when she spotted the woman again as they were leaving the tiger exhibit.

  Alyssa, skipping along between them, a hand held in each of theirs, suddenly stopped and gasped, her eyes big as they followed a red balloon floating free against the sky. “Petit-papa , look!”

  He dropped to one knee beside her to better share her view. “It’s a balloon,” he told her. “Shall we go and see if we can find another? Perhaps one just for you?”

  Those beautiful big eyes widened even further in delight. “Rouge?”

  “Red,” corrected Sara. This time the woman did not try to avoid her eyes. She waited patiently in the shade of a sycamore a few dozen feet away, absently twirling her sunglasses between two fingers, her expression cool and unashamed.

  “I think I know just the place to look,” Ash said, catching Alyssa’s hand in his as he stood. “Shall we, my love?” His eyes, crinkled in the sun, looked happy and relaxed as he turned to Sara. “I saw a vendor just around the corner, there.”

  “You go ahead,” Sara said, smiling quickly. “I need to find a ladies’ room. Alyssa, do you need to go to the toilet?”

  Alyssa shook her head, tugging at Ash’s hand. “A red one!”

  Ash laughed and let himself be pulled away, and Sara called after him, “I’ll meet you there!”

  She waited until the two of them had disappeared into the crowd before she turned and walked over to Michele. There was a wooden bench underneath the tree, and Michele had made herself comfortable there, her shapely jeaned legs crossed, a cigarette in her hand. She
gestured for Sara to join her. Sara remained standing.

  “Are you following us?” she demanded without preamble.

  Michele looked amused as she pushed the sunglasses into her sleek red hair. “And so it is true. You have domesticated him. This I could not believe until I saw it for myself. Congratulations.” She drew on the cigarette and blew out the smoke in an elaborate sigh. “And what a very great pity.”

  “What do you want?” Sara said.

  Michele glanced up at her. She seemed completely unintimidated by the fact that Sara was standing over her. If anything, in fact, it was Sara who felt ill at ease in her cotton capris and sneakers, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, her nose pink with the sun. But women like Michele had always been able to do that to her. She started to cross her arms over her chest, realized that looked defensive, and stopped herself. Michele smiled, unruffled.

  “You are correct,” she said easily. “I have followed you since I heard Ashton tell the doorman where you were going. I always like to give my regards whenever I am in the city, but your happy little family was already leaving as I arrived. Perhaps I should have made my presence known.” She shrugged. “But one learns so many more interesting things when one watches unseen, n’est-ce pas?”

  Sara closed her fingers, and opened them again. “What did you learn?”

  Michele smoked in silence for a while, her eyes wandering in a leisurely, disinterested fashion over the families and couples that passed by. “You will be surprised perhaps to learn I came to see you. I wanted to tell you about Ashton’s last visit to me in Paris.” She slid a glance upward toward Sara, and her smile was slow and sly. “Ah, I see our darling boy did not bother to mention this to you, eh? And it was only a few weeks ago. One wonders what other secrets he has kept.”

  Sara knew she should turn on her heel and walk away. She did not.

  Michele shrugged and drew again on the cigarette. “I was going to tell you of how he took me in his arms and made such love to me that I wept, how we lay naked and exhausted on the floor of my little apartment when the sun came up, how I took his hand and led him to the bath . . .”

  Sara felt a chill go down her spine—not because of the words, but because of the desperation that must have prompted them. Until now she had thought of Michele as a shallow, bitter, and selfish woman whose only pleasure came from hurting others. But Sara realized she was just a sad woman, hurting inside herself.

  Sara said simply, and as kindly as she could, “I don’t believe you.”

  Michele smiled, curling her tongue upward as she blew out smoke. “Then you are clever. Because it is untrue. Ashton is disgustingly loyal. It is all very boring, really. A woman, she likes a little adventure in her life now and again, don’t you agree?”

  Sara said nothing, and Michele took another draw on the cigarette.

  “Ash did come to see me in Paris,” she said with a shrug. “The encounter, it was not so pleasant as I would have liked. He—how is this said?—used his threats against me, to protect you, and the child. My Ashton, he has been very angry with me in the past, but never has he been so forceful. And so I determined to discover for myself what manner of woman you are, to inspire such passion in him.”

  Michele tossed away the cigarette and stood. This time when she tried to smile, the expression did not quite reach the corners of her lips. “He is a fool for the child,” she said. “This I knew.” She shrugged. “But when I watch him, and he does not know I’m there, and he smiles at you . . .” She glanced briefly away, and an expression crossed her face that Sara could not entirely read. It might have been a flash of pain. “Never has he looked at me in that manner. Never. And that is what I wanted to know. So you have won. Congratulations.”

  And then she smiled, a stiff, brittle expression that did not come close to her eyes. “But,” she said, “still he has the secrets, no?”

  Sara said softly, “You still love him.”

  She laughed. “Chérie, don’t be absurd! Of course I love him. I have loved him when I hated him. I have loved him through three other husbands. I even loved him when I was married to him.” She shrugged again, her lips forming a brief, elaborate pout. “Alas, he loves another. This I know now. C’est la vie.”

  Sara felt compelled to say, “I’m sorry.”

  The flash of surprise in Michele’s eyes was covered quickly by another light laugh. “Chérie, do not waste your tears. I know very well the cure for a broken heart. I am off to Spain, and my new lover—who is very rich, and very old. And I will advise you”—she tilted her head speculatively, her smile cool—“to enjoy your good fortune while you may. These things rarely endure.”

  Sara watched Michele walk away, and then moved quickly through the crowd, almost running at the end, until she spotted a blond man in a cherry-stained shirt at the balloon stand. She surprised him by flinging herself on him and kissing him hard on the face, and she whispered in his ear, “I have something to tell you when we get home.” He gave her a puzzled smile, and bought her a yellow balloon to complement Alyssa’s red one. They walked home swinging Alyssa’s hands between them, and she told him about the encounter with Michele while they chopped apples and carrots for a salad, because she did not want there to be any secrets between them.

  EIGHTEEN

  Overnight, it seemed, Ash’s bachelor life was turned upside down. His flat was reduced to chaos in very short order. The housekeeper who usually came once a week was engaged daily and could barely keep the disorder under control. There were jam smears on his chrome cabinets and orange juice circles on his countertops and fingerprints on his glass tables. And he barely noticed because in the evenings Alyssa would crawl into his lap and he would read her some ridiculous story about talking puppies or flying cats or moons, and he could feel Sara watching him and smiling and he could almost convince himself, just for a moment, that the life he was living was his own.

  And then there were other times.

  Sara had gotten into the habit of lying down with Alyssa, just until she fell asleep, and sometimes Ash would use that quiet time to go over paperwork or return phone calls or send e-mails. But other times, when the house rang with a silence now unfamiliar to him, he would feel compelled to go upstairs, and step quietly into the child’s room, and stand over them, cuddled together as they were, and his chest would fill with a longing so intense it actually hurt. Because he knew by whose graces these two had entered his life. And sometimes, late at night when he awoke only to make sure Sara still slept beside him, or sometimes at moments like these, when he watched the two of them together, he became desperately convinced that if he were not very, very careful, Daniel would take them back.

  It was their last night in London. Alyssa was growing cranky; she missed her nanny and her cat and her fairy princess nursery, and five days of overstimulation in the city had exhausted all of them. They decided to travel back to Rondelais on the afternoon train the next day. Ash would stay the weekend; beyond that they had made no plans.

  He came out of the shower to find Sara sitting cross-legged on his bed wearing the nightie he liked so much, the one with the ribbons, and his reading glasses. Papers were spread out around her, and she was scowling over some of them. He said, “Darling, you’re taking on some dreadful habits from me.” But he loved seeing her there. He loved the fact that she could read with his glasses. He finished drying his hair with the towel and tossed it aside. “What are you doing?”

  She said unhappily, “I’m running out of money.”

  “Do you need cash, love?” He turned to the mirror and began combing back his hair. “There’s some in the drawer there.”

  She shook her head impatiently. “I don’t mean cash. I mean money. The Contandinos charged a fortune to repair the plumbing—not that it wasn’t worth every penny—and I spent a lot more on restoring the apartment than I meant to. And your mother’s right—something has got to be done with the roof, even if I can’t afford to have it completely repaired. The electricity and
the oil and the occupancy tax—whoever heard of charging a tax to live in your own house, anyway?—it’s all more than I thought it would be.”

  “Is this an accounting?” He came and sat beside her, reaching for the paper in her hand. “How much do you need?”

  She snatched the paper back from him. “I don’t need your money, Ash.”

  “Don’t be absurd. I told you from the beginning, Alyssa’s trust is set up to provide for her, so whatever you’ve spent on her—”

  “You’re already paying for the nanny and the housekeeper—”

  “Aside from which, any repairs you make to the property are an improvement on my investment so—”

  Her jaw was set and her eyes took on that stubborn glaze that he had almost forgotten. “I don’t need your money,” she told him again, very distinctly. “I need a plan.”

  He smiled and plucked the glasses from her face. “Oh my. Are we about to have one of those dreary domestic squabbles over finances I hear so much about? I understand the make-up sex is simply spectacular.”

  He leaned forward to kiss her neck, but she snatched the glasses back from him and returned them to her face. “I need a long-term sustainable plan for the château to pay for itself. I asked Mr. Winkle to run some figures for me. I haven’t gone over all the paperwork yet, but from what I’m seeing here so far I think I can put together a viable business plan—at least enough for the initial financing.”

  He frowned, taking up one of the papers. “For what?”

  “For restoring the château and turning it into a B&B,” she said simply. “If your hotel company thought they could make money doing that, why shouldn’t I?”

  He simply stared at her. “For one thing, why should you?”

  “Because it’s Alyssa’s heritage,” she replied simply, “and it needs to be there for her when she grows up. By that time,” she added, retrieving the paper from his hand, “the winery should be a growing concern as well. I can start out by leasing the land for vines,” she explained, “and gradually buy back the business with the proceeds from the château. It’s been done before. I have several business models to back that up.”