Authors: Sharyn McCrumb
“Well, I heard Captain Grandfather mention something about a ‘silly will’ being just what he had expected of his sister, so I assumed that it had something to do with Great-Aunt Augusta, but she’s been dead for ages. What about her?”
“Back in the twenties, her parents wanted her to go off to a finishing school, but she wanted to get married to a country singer. Of course, Great-Grandfather disowned her when she finally did elope with him. But it was
very
romantic,” sighed Eileen.
“Well, if she left you an inheritance, she must have been rich. Who did she marry? Hank Williams?”
“Oh, no. Nobody famous. He was killed in a bus accident a year after they were married.”
“Killed? Then where did the money come from?”
“Great-Aunt Augusta invested his insurance money in California real estate and made a fortune,” said Eileen.
“Why does the money come to you, Eileen?”
“Didn’t you know? Everyone else has been teasing me night and day. According to the terms of her will, the money comes to the first of her grandnieces or grandnephews to get married,” said Eileen. “And next Saturday, that will be me.”
“I wish someone had told me,” said Elizabeth. “I would have tried harder.”
Eileen giggled. “Oh, Elizabeth. You’re as bad as Geoffrey! Always joking! Anyway, it isn’t that much, really. Just about two hundred thousand after taxes.”
“Is that all?” murmured Elizabeth.
Eileen stood up. “Well, I’ve intruded on you long
enough. Let me go and see if Michael has finished in the library. Good night, Elizabeth.”
“What? Oh! Good night, Eileen.”
When Eileen opened the door, Geoffrey, who was coming up the stairs, called out, “Don’t shut it! I have a message for Elizabeth! Is she decent?”
Elizabeth peered out into the hall. “What is it?”
“Alban has gone home. It is my belief that he turns into a pumpkin on the stroke of midnight, but—”
“What is the message?” Elizabeth demanded.
“I am coming to that, my dear. It’s from Alban. He said to tell you that you are to go over at ten o’clock tomorrow to be shown around the Albantross. Not his exact words, of course. Got that? Good. Then I shall say good night ’til it be morrow.” He sauntered off toward his room.
“Thank you, Geoffrey!” called Elizabeth, closing the door rather more loudly than necessary.
Eileen Chandler did not go downstairs immediately. She flipped off the hall light and sat down on the top step. The drone of the television drifted up from the family room; she sighed and settled back into the companionable darkness. Behind her something moved, and she turned sharply to look. The pier mirror at the top of the stairs had caught her reflection as she moved. Nothing to be afraid of, she told herself; it was her own face she had seen. Eileen closed her eyes and thought back over her conversation with Elizabeth. Had she been convincing? Was that how a bride was supposed to talk? No one must suspect the fear that was growing inside her. She must sound normal. She must!
With a careful smile, Eileen stood up and started down the stairs.
T
HE
C
HANDLERS TOOK BREAKFAST
on a glass-topped table in the morning room adjoining the kitchen. When Elizabeth came downstairs at eight-thirty, only Charles and Captain Grandfather were present.
“Good morning,” murmured Elizabeth, taking a chair next to Charles. “Where is everybody?”
“All over the place,” said Charles between bites of toast. “Dad had an emergency case at the county hospital; Mother and Aunt Louisa left for town a few minutes ago; Eileen went out to paint, since she has that meeting later this morning; and What’s-His-Name’s asleep.”
Elizabeth looked at the two clean place settings in a shaft of sunlight across from her. “I don’t see Geoffrey.”
“Geoffrey says that breakfast before ten o’clock is uncivilized. He’s still asleep.”
Captain Grandfather looked up from his plate of eggs and bacon. “That boy is a perfect candidate for impressment,” he grunted.
“Well, I have an interesting morning ahead,” Elizabeth announced. “Alban is giving me a tour of his house.”
Charles yawned and stretched. “It’s too pretty to stay cooped up inside,” he remarked. “I’m going down to the orchard to get a little ultraviolet on my epidermis. I will see you later.”
He picked up a thick book on quantum physics that had been lying next to his plate, and ambled off in the direction of the back door. Elizabeth sighed and shook her head.
“What does he do?” she asked.
“Who, Charles?”
“Yes. If he’s so interested in physics, shouldn’t he be in grad school somewhere?”
“Oh, it’ll come to that, I expect. Right now, Charles and his friends are fed up with academia. They claim it’s too restrictive. You can’t do research without a lot of rigamarole, and they don’t want to be bothered with policy. Think they can do it on their own. Like Isaac Newton, Charles always says. Course, apples are cheaper than cyclotrons, as Geoffrey is fond of pointing out.”
“Apples? Oh! The law of gravity!”
“Right. They’ve started sending off grant applications trying to get funding to do their own work without having to hook up with some university or existing company. I don’t hold out much hope, though. Nobody’s going to give hundreds of thousands of dollars to that bunch. But you can’t tell Charles that. I give them six months.”
Elizabeth smiled, thinking how odd it was to find a Chandler with money problems.
Captain Grandfather began to chuckle. “I know what you’re thinking, young lady. You think they’ve all got their sea cocks open, don’t you?”
“If that means they’re strange, you’re absolutely right.”
“What they are is independent,” he said, pouring himself a cup of tea from the Victorian silver teapot.
“Independent and smart. So they find their interests in life and stick to them. They can afford to.”
“What about Charles?”
“Well, his income doesn’t run to nuclear reactors, but he won’t miss a meal. As I was saying, with the Chandler money, we don’t have to impress prospective employers or try to win friends with conformity. We do as we damn well please. You ought to try it sometime—not caring what anybody thinks. You’d find out who you are.”
“I wouldn’t be another Charles, that’s for sure.”
“I don’t know. Charles is very like your mother.”
Elizabeth stared. “My mother? Are you kidding? Suburbia’s macramé lady—like Charles?”
Captain Grandfather nodded. “Exactly. Margaret was the rebel of my three girls. I used to get letters from your grandmother in those days: ‘What are we going to do with Margaret?’ Your mother went off to Columbia with that friend of hers—Rhonda or Doris or some such name. They went to a dance at Fort Jackson, and Margaret met Lieutenant MacPherson. You know the rest.”
“Well, don’t make it sound like we live in the back of a station wagon!” laughed Elizabeth. “There were two cars in the driveway when I left home, and Dad’s business is doing pretty well.”
“I know,” said Captain Grandfather. “And your parents are very happy, which is all that matters. I was only trying to explain to you that your cousins are people who can do just as they please. Don’t set such a store by what you call normality. Sometimes I think the strain of trying to keep up that pose could make a person crazy. Better let them be themselves, so the pressure doesn’t build up.”
“Have it your way,” sighed Elizabeth, getting up from the table. “At least it’s never dull.”
The mellow tone of Amanda’s “cathedral-chimes” doorbell echoed down the hall.
“I expect that’s Alban now,” said Captain Grandfather. “Weren’t you supposed to meet him at ten?”
“I’m just going.”
“Don’t answer it, Mildred!” Captain Grandfather bellowed toward the kitchen. “Elizabeth will get it!”
“Do I look all right, Captain Grandfather? Should I have worn my bridesmaid’s dress?”
“No. But perhaps your dress tartan.” He chuckled and settled back into his newspaper. “Normal, indeed!”
Alban’s replica of the Bavarian castle had caused a substantial amount of comment during its construction. The general attitude of the town was one of pride overlaying the fact that no one had any idea of what it actually represented. Because it had been built by a member of the county gentry, and because it provided jobs for the local contractors, Chandler Grove was determined to take the castle seriously. Facetious titles like “Albania” or “The Disneyland Castle” were used only in private or by tourists, who often asked in town whether there were tours of the place. These queries were always answered politely in the negative, although in fact Alban did give one tour a year. Each spring the eleventh grade class of Chandler Grove High went out for a field trip, coinciding with their study of
Macbeth
. Alban had agreed to the tour after trying—and failing—to explain to Miss Laura Bruce Brunson that his Bavarian castle had nothing whatever to do with
Macbeth
.
The community considered Alban to be a nice enough fellow. He kept to himself, but that was what they expected of someone who lived in a castle. Mrs. Murphy, the cleaning woman, was able to report that there were no drugs, women, or wild goings-on at the castle, so the community “reckoned as how it was all right for the boy to build any kind of mansion he’d a mind to.” The novelty had long since worn off, and county and castle-dweller had settled back into peaceful coexistence.
“What do you call this place?” asked Elizabeth, squinting up at four stories of white stone, capped by a pointed, gray-roofed tower.
“Home,” said Alban. “Shall we go in?”
The main building had a pointed roof, flanked by two small towers. Windows like archways, each with a column in mid-arch, studded the white stone front in symmetrical rows. Like a computer card, Elizabeth thought. A wide stone staircase led to the entrance: two elaborately carved wooden doors situated on the second story. The castle’s overall appearance was that of a large
?
without the middle stroke, an effect caused by a pair of two-story wings that met the main building at right angles. The wings were not symmetrical, however; the right wing, much larger than the left, ended in a square tower, capped by a white cupola with slit windows.
“And is there an attic where your insane first wife prowls at night?”
“No, Miss Eyre,” said Alban gravely. “But people have been known to knock on a Sunday morning, thinking I was a Baptist Church.”
“What do you do with all that space, Alban?”
“Well, the rooms are pretty big, and there are a number of hallways. But why don’t you see for yourself? Come on!”
“You don’t have a dungeon, do you?”
“If I did, would Geoffrey still be walking around?”
Elizabeth followed him up the steps to the golden oak doors. She leaned against one of the columns framing the doorway, trying unobtrusively to catch her breath as she watched Alban push down the brass latch. The door swung inward.
“After you, my dear,” he said, with a mock-gallant bow.
Elizabeth stepped into the well-lit foyer and looked about. “Just don’t tell me I’m here to do the floors,” she said at last.
The foyer, two stories high, was tiled in blue and white squares of marble; it stretched away to an archway at the far end of the room. Two staircases branched to the right and left. Above the staircases, gold-leaf columns separated murals of nymphs and shepherds from marble niches containing life-sized statues of the
Greek gods. Above it all sparkled a pair of crystal chandeliers.
“It’s my hobby,” Alban was saying. “I started out to be a medievalist and because I got so fascinated with Ludwig I ended up building this. Actually, it wasn’t as exorbitant as it looks. I was able to pick up a lot of this stuff in Greece and Italy for much less than it would cost to duplicate today. What do you think?”
Elizabeth nodded slowly.
“Well, the original was built in 1869 by King Ludwig II—”
“Who was crazy. Yes, I know. Geoffrey told me.”
“Who was
not
crazy!” snapped Alban. “Ludwig was a genius. I’d back him against your precious Bonnie Prince Charlie any day!”
“Then why do people say that?”
“Oh, because his people thought he spent too much money on castles. But I’ll tell you something about
that:
his personal debt for all three of his castles was less than eight million marks, and Bavaria paid four times that much to Prussia when they lost the Seven Weeks’ War—”
“They lost a war in seven
weeks?”
interrupted Elizabeth. “Bonnie Prince Charlie certainly lasted longer than that. In fact, his army got within 130 miles of London; if they had kept going—”
“Well, they didn’t. As I was saying, the people thought he was crazy then, but today Bavaria makes millions of marks a year using Ludwig’s castles as tourist attractions. Verlaine called Ludwig ‘the only king of the century.’ ”
“Well … maybe I’ll read up on him sometime,” said Elizabeth, who was still smarting from Alban’s remark about Charles Stuart.
“Yes, do. He was quite an idealist. Do you believe in reincarnation?”
Elizabeth stopped walking and stared up at him. “Now, Alban,” she said. “Don’t flip out on me. There are enough eccentrics around here!”
He laughed. “Aren’t you ever serious, Cousin Elizabeth?”
“Not to strangers,” said Elizabeth promptly. She blushed. “I mean … I know we’re first cousins, but … I didn’t really know you very well back then …”
“The age difference.” He nodded, considering this. “Children tend to regard anyone much older than themselves as part of the woodwork.” He looked thoughtful. “You’ve changed a lot in the last six years. You used to be almost as shy as Eileen. No more ponytails over the ears and Girl Scout tee shirts?”
“Only when I wash the car.”
“Am I the way you remember me?”
“No, Alban. Much less blurry.”
“Well, that eight-year age difference is a big gap when you’re kids.”
“Oh, sure. To us you were just another grown-up. And before that you were off at school so we didn’t hear much about you. I didn’t even know you had been engaged until Aunt Amanda mentioned it yesterday.”