Keys to the Castle (5 page)

In an instant, with a strength of will that was classically Michele, she smoothed her expression into easy nonchalance, and uncurled herself from the chair with a long, lazy shrug.
“Eh bien.”
She smiled. “It was, as you say, worth the try. We shall live to fight another day,
alors
?”

Ash opened the door. “I look forward to it.”

She slung her bag—a bright yellow, crushable Prada—over her shoulder and sauntered past him. Just before exiting the door she paused, and turned a curious look on him. “This Mrs. Daniel, the American,” she said. “Do you intend to tell her about the brat?”

Ash's expression remained as pleasant as ever, but he could not disguise the wariness that crept into his eyes. “I can't imagine the subject would come up.”

She smiled, insincerely. “You are no doubt right.” Coming close to him, enveloping him in her scent, she placed a sharp-nailed hand alongside his face. She leaned in close, emerald eyes fixed on his, and brushed a quick, light kiss across his lips. “Au revoir,
mon cher
. Think of me.”

Ash waited until she had gone, then he removed a handkerchief from his pocket and blotted his lips. He walked into the outer office and stood thoughtfully beside Mrs. Harrison's desk for a moment. “Do you know what my father taught me?” he said, at length.

She did not look up from her monitor. “Everything you know, sir.”

“Quite. More to the point, he had a saying he was fond of repeating: An ember that's allowed to smolder overnight will oft be a blazing inferno by morning. You'd best cancel my date with the Swiss ambassador, and give my regrets to my mother. And clear my schedule for the week, will you? I'll be leaving for Rondelais on the evening train.”

“Very good, sir.” One hand continued to type as, with the other, she offered him a slip of paper. “The young lady is staying at the Rosalie in the village. Here's the telephone. She's expected to arrive by five.”

He took the paper, tapping it absently against his hand as he gazed out the window at the rain. “Sara,” he murmured. “Her name is Sara.”

“Yes, sir.”

He turned from the window to Mrs. Harrison with brisk resolve. “Let's see what we can do about upgrading our Sara's accommodations, shall we? Call in a staff, and get that chef— what's his name? The one who catered that affair for the museum we had there last spring.”

Mrs. Harrison raised an eyebrow but did not glance up as she jotted notes on her pad.

“Have them put her up in the Queen's Chamber,” he went on. “Yes, that will do nicely. And flowers, mountains of them. Make the place look like a bloody church. Candy, champagne, the full VIP treatment. And get Winkle up here. Tell him to bring the file on Rondelais. I think I'd best handle the matter personally after all.”

There was not one single thing that Sara could look back on and say,
Yes, that was it; that was what happened
; no precipitating event or specific moment. After the party in New York, she flew back to Chicago, approved the final revisions on the Super Bowl launch campaign for New Blue Microbrew, and three days later woke up in her plush lake-view apartment to the horrifying, paralyzing awareness that she couldn't do it another day.

She couldn't make herself get out of bed. She couldn't make herself get dressed. The telephone rang, and she didn't care. Her cell phone rang, and she didn't care. Her BlackBerry buzzed. She didn't answer the banging on the door. For forty-eight hours she lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and barely noticed the changing patterns of light and dark. She just didn't care.

Exhaustion, they called it. Stress and overwork. Take a vacation. She would be fine.

Sara nodded and smiled her wooden smile and pretended to listen to all the careful concern and well-meant advice. But even as she boarded the plane for the coast of North Carolina, Sara knew that the only way she would ever be fine was if she never came back.

And she didn't.

She moved into Dixie's basement guest room. She took long walks on the beach. She played endless games of Chutes and Ladders with the twins. She started to laugh again.

She accepted a generous settlement package from her employer, and transferred her two suitcases and a garment bag to a one-bedroom 1940s rental on Ocean Avenue with hideous linoleum and yellow clapboard siding. She helped Dixie with the bookstore in the height of tourist season.

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.

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.”