The Last Baron

by Saber Vale

  I couldn’t though.

  I needed to be able to think straight, which meant I needed distance from Cormac.

  Chapter 13

  Th next morning, Cormac had left a note on the dining room table that said he was going into town to get some stuff for the architect. I read the note twice, then made my way hazily into the original kitchen of the castle, hoping to find a tea kettle, where I ran right into a woman I’d never seen before.

  She was attractive and young, no older than thirty, in worn-in khakis tucked into cowboy boots and a button up flannel shirt and denim jacket, with black-framed glasses that she pushed up her nose with a nervous gesture when I saw her and startled. She had long, dirty-blond hair pulled up into a messy French twist at the base of her neck and a chunky silver necklace that looked liked it came from a flea market in New Mexico.

  “Sorry,” she said, “did Cormac not tell you I was going to be here?”

  She was making a pot of coffee in an ancient looking French press.

  “Uh, no,” I said hesitantly, “who are you?”

  “Oh, well, I’m sorry, he told me you knew,” she said, “he came and picked me up this morning from the bus station…”

  She was so… beautiful.

  My heart was sinking as I looked at her. She had the same easy confidence Cormac had, and a nice tan… maybe she was a surfer too.

  “It might not have been something he wanted to tell me. Are you like, his girlfriend or something?”

  “Oh, no, no, not at all. I’m Darleen Lawson, an architect,” she said reaching for my hand.

  “Oh, you’re the architect?” I said with obvious relief, looking again at her outfit and making note of her southern accent, “not what I expected I guess.”

  Why had I been so certain the architect would be a man?

  She laughed, sensing my mistake.

  “Yeah, my firm is in San Antonio, but we take jobs all over the world, my specialty is renovations like this one,” she said, waving her hand at the castle.

  “That’s cool,” I said, “it’s amazing to me that you don't feel the least bit bad about ruining historically important buildings for money-hungry clients like Cormac.”

  She looked, for a moment, taken aback, and then she smiled a broad, friendly smile.

  “No, actually I really don’t, most of the structures I work on would be destroyed if they weren't renovated,” she said.

  “Well, this is a nearly ancient castle, I don’t think it would be destroyed,” I sighed, “it was good to meet you.”

  I picked up the tea kettle I’d been looking for and went to leave.

  “Hey,” she said, stopping me, “I do this work because I love buildings like this, you have to get that, right? Like, you don’t become an architect because you hate beautiful buildings…”

  “I really don’t care,” I said, “did Cormac tell you I was fighting the development?

  “He did,” Darleen said with a warm smile that could have been mocking, but really wasn’t, “but he told me not to worry about it, that if you stop us you stop us, but not to slow down because of it.”

  I smiled an angry, tight, sarcastic smile.

  “Cool,” I said, imagining them laughing at me as he told her my pathetic story.

  “Let me… let me walk around with you, tell you about what I was thinking for the place…”

  “No, please,” I said, “I really couldn’t care less what you want to do…”

  “Astrid, that’s your name right?”

  “Mm-hmm,” I sighed.

  “Come on, I think you’ll find you and I have more in common than you think, I love history, Cormac said you’re writing about medieval history, I think, if nothing else, we could have a good conversation…”

  I set down the tea kettle and picked up her French press and a mug, poured a cup of coffee and tilted my head to the side. She’d appealed to my vanity, but it had worked.

  “Ok, show me how you want to desecrate my ancestral home, please.”

  We walked out to the front of the castle, where she took a long sip of her coffee before beginning to speak.

  “The facade of the castle would remain virtually identical to how it would have looked seven hundred years ago,” she said, “I’d do minimal re-structuring and repair of the stone work, reinforcing some of the infrastructure and repairing some of the more recent damage without totally refinishing it, which I don’t think is necessary… I would put a museum quality, non-reflective Plexiglas over the windows, inside and out, for better insulation, but it would be fitted to the outside of stone wall in such a way that it would be invisible to the naked eye, and could be slid around to give the castle the same open-air feel it has now during the spring and early autumn, when the temperature is perfect for leaving the windows open. In medieval times they would have just pulled a heavy tapestry over it, so it would be pitch dark and…”

  “Save the history lesson, I’m a medieval studies…”

  “Wait,” Darleen interrupted, “are you Astrid Griffen from Berkeley?”

  “Yes, I assumed you already knew that, Astrid, and this is my family’s castle, Griffenberg, Astrid Griffen…”

  “You wrote a paper about the way the medieval castle reflected a sort of domestic and moral hierarchy from top to bottom, with women’s chambers being at the top and the dungeon at the bottom, art, handicrafts and books at the top, violence and ugliness underground, and how that structure, planned or not, impacted the way that medieval people viewed women and their roles, sort of venerated women while also oppressing them…”

  “Uh,” I said, taken aback, “I did write that…”

  I’d forgotten that I’d gotten in published in an architectural history journal.

  “Yeah, I loved that idea, that the castle reflected social structures…” Darleen said, “I was going to… to use some of those ideas in my plans…”

  “Ok,” I said hesitantly, “how were you going to do that?”

  “Well, the West Wing would be the main hotel building, right? Cormac said you guys want to preserve parts of the East wing, so we’ll mostly leave that alone,” she said, “so I thought the rooms at the top would be light, airy, open, and the rooms near the bottom, the underground rooms especially, would reflect… I don’t know, the darkness of the history, more edgy... And then the old boathouse would be a separate part of the hotel with four units of more modern rooms, and the pool access.”

  “Oh my god, a pool? You’re going to ruin the boathouse with a pool?”

  “The boathouse was built in the thirties, Astrid, it’s not some kind of ancient architectural marvel…”

  “Fine,” I breathed, reminding myself that none of it was going to happen anyway.

  “The servants quarters and garage will be a permanent residence, Cormac wanted a place to stay here…”

  “Great,” I laughed.

  “And we’d put in a spa in the keep, underground hot tubs set in stone, fireplaces, I’m sure you can picture it…”

  “It’s vulgar, but yes I can,” I sighed.

  Darleen took a deep breath, like she was gathering the courage to say something to me.

  “Cormac is brilliant, you know,” she said, like she was revealing a secret, “this is the third time I’ve worked with him and the risks he takes really, I don’t know, he really amazes me. If there’s one person on earth you can trust to do this the right way, it’s Cormac Spalding and Opal Hotels.”

  I felt a twinge of something… jealousy? That couldn’t be it. She clearly admired Cormac, and I wondered if there was something more there.

  “Cool,” I said sipping my coffee.

  “Let’s walk to the East Wing,” she said, “is that ok? I haven’t seen it yet, I’d love to see it from your perspective.”

  “Why from my perspective?”

  “Didn’t you grow up coming here?” She asked, “I know you don’t want me here at all, but just as two women who like history, who care about it, I’d love to pick your
brain…”

  I couldn’t stop myself from wanting to talk about the castle, so I relented.

  “Ok,” I said, “but I didn’t grow up going to the East Wing very much at all…”

  We hiked up around the castle to the outside entrance, a heavy wooden door set into the stone wall. I pushed it open and we both stepped into the dark passageway that lead from the entrance to the bedrooms upstairs.

  We checked out the first bedroom, with its epic chandeliers.

  “Those are crystal,” she said, “this place is going to be stunning when it’s cleaned…”

  “Yeah, this isn’t even the cool bedroom,” I said, leading her onward.

  “So Cormac told me some things about this… love triangle? Would you call it that?” Darleen said as we opened the door to my great-grandfather’s chambers.

  “I don’t know what I would call it,” I said quietly, wondering, in spite of myself, how well Cormac and Darleen knew each other.

  It sounded like they’d talked a lot on the way up, and were more social than professional.

  “And there was a murder?” She asked, “or maybe something… accidental?”

  “Yeah, we’re trying to figure that out,” I said.

  “You and Cormac? You’re up here solving mysteries?” she said with a girlish giggle.

  “What else would we be doing? I think we’d kill each other if we didn’t have the distraction.”

  “If I was stuck in an isolated castle with a man who looked like Cormac I could think of things to do other than play detective,” she said with a laugh.

  I felt tense, but better. It didn’t sound like she and Cormac had ever been… intimate. Not that I’d care, right?

  I laughed, loosening up finally.

  “Anyway, these are my grandfather’s chambers,” I said, pointing to the bed, the bureau.

  “This is a great space,” she said, “the light is amazing.”

  “Yeah, you can see why he chose it, why he stayed even after they renovated the west wing.

  “I think it would be cool to have a bathtub out in the open in the room,” she said, suddenly seeing things with the eye of a designer, “right over there…”

  The thing was, I could see it too, the bathtub under the window, sexy and open and intimate, even in this huge space.

  “That would be interesting,” I agreed, “but not very authentic.”

  “No, but do you ever think that by updating things, making them livable again, you can bring them back to life?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “it’s hard for me to see this place as anything but… I don’t know, a container for my family’s history, I guess.”

  “I can see how you think a hotel would ruin that,” she said.

  “Yeah, I really don’t like the idea…”

  “But giving it to a historical society would be like saying the living part of the castle’s history is over. If you went into business with Cormac, wouldn’t you be letting history, your family’s history, keep flowing through here? I don’t think that dishonors the history, I think it give it a path to keep flowing through…”

  “I don’t really see it that way,” I said, “especially since I’m pretty sure Cormac is going to push me out at the first opportunity.”

  “If that’s what you think then you don’t know Cormac very well,” Darleen said, “he’s… loyal. He brought friends up with him from college as he rose in his company. He hired me when my firm was brand new and struggling and he’s hired me for everything since, and now I’m one of the most sought after restoration architects in the world…”

  “Hmm,” I said shortly, suspicious of her motives.

  We walked through Caroline’s chambers, then the library upstairs, and finally the hardly-seen lady’s chambers that we’d only opened recently. Darleen seemed impressed, and filled with ideas.

  “Those tapestries, they’re going to cost thousands of dollars to clean and restore,” she said, “and the paintings…”

  “Yeah, that’s why I was going to donate them…”

  “Cormac said he wants the castle to stay as intact as possible,” Darleen said, “wouldn’t you prefer that?”

  “Well, if I need to sell some stuff in order to save it…”

  “It sounds like he’s more interested in preserving it than you are,” Darleen said, looking out of the window down at the lake.

  “That’s not true,” I said tightly, offended.

  Darleen laughed.

  “No offense, really, I’ve seen it before,” she said, “you think by keeping it from changing in one particular way, like making it a hotel, you’re saving it, when really it just means making small compromises until the whole thing is half of what it was before… Cormac is giving you an opportunity whether you realize it or not.”

  “Well it doesn’t feel like that,” I said, wondering if she’d been instructed by Cormac to convince me.

  “Can we have lunch and then go look at the boat house?”

  “Sure,” I breathed, glad to leave the stuffy chamber.

  After some sandwiches and unnecessary glasses of wine to calm the tension between us, walked along the beach together, the wind from the lake whipping at our clothes and hair.

  “It’s cold today, I thought it was almost summer,” Darleen said, pulling her denim jacket tight around shoulders.

  “Summer gets here late and leaves early,” I said, “but when it’s beautiful it’s really, really beautiful…”

  We walked up to the boathouse, a pale, decrepit looking building looming on the shore.

  “Can we go inside?” Darleen asked.

  “Oh, it’s probably locked,” I said, “but we can go look.”

  We circled the building, looking for a way in, until Darleen, on a hunch, pried away a piece of plywood over a door with her bare hands, the rotted wood cracking and popping starkly as she did it.

  She had a sort of fearless straightforwardness about her that I couldn’t help but appreciate.

  “I haven’t been in here in a long time,” I breathed, as we ducked through a screen door into the dank, closed space. Old glass skylights barely let in light, just enough to see the outlines of the canvas-covered furniture in the tired room. Particles of dust hung suspended in the air, catching the golden, faded light.

  “I played here as a child,” I said, “when rain interrupted out beach days.”

  “I can see that,” she said, then, as though imagining it she went on, “a light, airy space, all the windows open to let in the sound of the downpour, unwinding after swimming, sailing…”

  I smiled, remembering it. My mom and whoever she was dating would drink gin and tonics, my grandpa playing the radio, my uncle, who died a bachelor in a boating accident, dancing with me on the bleach-white wooden floors.

  “We could make it like that again,” Darleen said, “if you wanted. You could bring your kids here.”

  “I’m never going to have kids,” I said, “I don’t want to… to end up like my mom.”

  “How would you do that?”

  “Oh, she was just selfish,” I said, “she hung on to glory instead of being a good mother, she was a baroness before she was a mom and she was hardly any kind of baroness, if you get my drift…”

  “That must have been hard,” Darleen said, “my mom was a Texas socialite, so I think I get it. When I became an architect instead of getting married it kind of blew her mind.”

  I laughed. My mother had never understood my career, or even the idea of having a career, when you were pretty enough just to marry rich.

  “Do you mind it I take some pictures?” Darleen asked, slipping a Leica digital camera out of her jacket pocket.

  “Go ahead,” I said, feeling acquiescent and passive.

  Go ahead, I thought, do whatever you want…

  I thought of how easy it would be to just let Cormac have what he wanted, even if it meant letting the very last of what it meant to be a part of my family slip away, the title of baroness a
piece of worthless ephemera, lost to history, my whole mother’s life a ridiculous charade…

  Maybe, I thought, it was a charade.

  “These floors are amazing,” Darleen said, “they’re in great shape, too, they just need a quick clean and re-finish.”

  “Yeah, here, let me pull up this rug, I bet it’s pristine,” I said, indicating a shaggy old wool rug from the sixties, probably, laying across the empty space behind the couch.

  I rolled up the rug to show Darleen the gorgeous white-washed pine wood floor, and she stepped forward.

  “What’s that,” Darleen said, walking over to a tiny brass ring bolted into the wooden floor beneath the rug.

  “Huh, I don’t know,” I said, kneeling down to take a look. I slipped a finger through the ring and easily lifted the wood plank it was attached to. Beneath it was a built-out secret compartment with walls of cedar.

  “This place is just full of surprises, I’ve heard,” she said, kneeling down beside me to see what was inside.

  “I’m afraid to look,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because, we keep finding out… strange things,” I admitted, “my great-grandfather had a very… non-traditional personal life, crazy stuff has happened, noises… dreams…”

  “Cormac alluded to that,” Darleen said, “he honestly seemed a little bit… obsessed by everything.”

  I thought about Cormac standing there in front of me in his jeans and the leather gloves, the hot electricity in the room. He was probably as weirded out as I was, but he was drawn to the weirdness instead of afraid of it. He wanted to see where it could take us.

  Darleen reached a hand in, fished around, and pulled out a wooden cigar box that still, ever-so-faintly, smelled like vanilla and cedar. I breathed it in, thinking of my grandfather, who, like his own father, loved cigars.

  “We don’t have to open it,” I said.

  “No, let’s do it,” I breathed, not wanting to be afraid.

  She opened the box, and there was nothing but a ring of keys.

  “Huh,” I said, picking them up.