Keys to the Castle (24 page)

The fact of the matter was that Ash had been right: The castle was not particularly livable at all, especially with a child thrown into the mix, and after the first couple of weeks of novelty had worn off, Sara began to see that. The rooms upstairs were too large and linear and the rooms downstairs were too cold and empty. And while Alyssa had a wonderful time skating along the marble hallways in her socks and knocking down plastic bowling pins with a plastic bowling ball in an empty reception room, this was hardly a home. She couldn't picture Daniel as having grown up here. She couldn't imagine any child growing up here, but dozens of them had, for generation after generation after generation.

Tentatively she had started to explore the other rooms, gently tugging dust covers off antique furniture, polishing grime off of windows and tarnish off of metal. When Ash had taken her on her first brisk tour of the castle he had done so as part estate agent, part museum curator. He'd pointed out the things he thought would interest her—number of bathrooms and beds, fireplaces, hand-painted tiles, imported fixtures, square footage, connections to history, practical usages. It had all blended together for her in a kind of daze of disbelief. But now, on her own, she slowly began to uncover a way of life that made sense to her.

There was an entire apartment located on the second floor, far removed from the showy Queen's Chamber and the bland taupe hotel rooms, and it was in these rooms that a family had lived. The bedrooms were elaborate, to be sure, with tall four-posters and separate sitting areas and heavy carpets, now rolled up and stored under canvas. There were separate dressing rooms with empty clothing racks and shelves, and crystal chandeliers, and tall-ceilinged, elegant bathrooms, which did not appear to have functional plumbing. But there was also a cozy central sitting room with comfortable, modern furniture, and even a television set, and a small, bright, red-tiled kitchen whose plumbing, once again, did not work. Sara felt like a burglar as she went through these private rooms, because so much of the family—Daniel's family—was left behind. A book on a nightstand. A carved wooden truck that she almost crunched underfoot. It had to have been Daniel's toy when he was a child. The ghosts of those who belonged here were everywhere, and she was careful to touch nothing, to disturb nothing, because she was, after all, the intruder.

She wasn't comfortable opening up that section of the house again, but she had to find a way to make her stay here—and Alyssa's—more functional. That was when she decided that, if four-hundred-year-old walls could be painted taupe, they could also be painted vanilla; that carpet could be ripped up and soft floral rugs placed in their stead; that stiff brown industrial draperies could be replaced with floaty sheers and easy-care bedding could be upgraded to something slightly more luxurious. And that the toilets—all of them—needed to work.

To that end, she called Pietro, who came with his silent, grumpy father and his trail of cigarette smoke to examine the situation.
“Sì, signorina,”
he assured her cheerfully. “We will make for you the most beautiful WC in all the valley, we will build it
magnifico
,
sì
? Do you know Britney Spears?”

Sara regretfully admitted that she did not, and reminded him that she really didn't need an entirely new bathroom built; all she wanted was for the existing ones to work. He assured her that all would be well, and returned the next morning with hammers and crowbars and lengths of pipe—and Papa—and the reconstruction began.

Her life from that point on took on the rhythm of hammers and buzz saws and high-speed Italian shouted at full volume. She stopped wincing at the sound of crashing tile. She resisted the urge to peek behind the carefully hung tarps when Pietro and his father left every evening. She learned to be unsurprised when she turned on a tap and nothing came out.

She moved the furniture out, opened a can of vanilla-colored paint, and started painting the bedrooms. She gave Alyssa a paintbrush, and she painted, too. She pored over the catalogue Mrs. Harrison had sent her, and soon trucks began to arrive. A bed with rails that needed to be assembled. Draperies that needed to be hemmed. Shelving that needed to be installed.

“Ah,
bella signorina
,” exclaimed Pietro with passionate dismay as he was leaving one evening. He came into the room that Sara was redecorating for Alyssa. One wall was painted a pale lemon yellow, and so was Alyssa's face, her hands, and her shoes. Sara climbed down from the stepladder, wiping her hands on her smock.

“You work so hard to make pretty the walls of the little one,” he said sadly. “Look at your hands! Look at the tiredness in your eyes!” And suddenly his face cleared. “I will send you a painter of walls!” he decided. “Yes, that is it. My cousin Marco, he is an artiste par excellence and he will come and make walls for the little one. But not today. Today he is in Venezia, making love to his beautiful lady. Maybe next week, no? Or the week after. So you will put down the paintbrush now and come with me. The WC, she is
finito
!”

His last words wiped out everything he had said before. Sara scooped up Alyssa, yellow paint and all, and hurried after Pietro.

The toilet she had asked them to replace was in the main corridor, in between the room that she was occupying and the room that she hoped soon to have ready for Alyssa. It had been an awkward, cumbersome affair, with miles of black-and-white tile, a tiny lightbulb dangling from the ceiling, and a shower, sans doors, smack in the middle of the room. The dingy, nonfunctioning toilet was in a tiny closet with a hook-and-latch closure in the corner of the room.

Signor Contandino stood erect and solemn-faced before the tarp-draped entrance to the bathroom. As Sara approached, he ripped aside the tarp and gestured her, with a dramatic sweep of his arm, to enter.

The black-and-white tile had been polished to a blinding sheen. The lavatory, once a pedestrian affair with rusted parts, had been upgraded to a sleek marble slab with a fountainhead faucet and cherub-ornamented handles. And, while one still had to walk through the shower in the middle of the room to reach it, the toilet was a dramatic fixture on an elevated platform on the other side, sleek and oval and accompanied by a matching bidet, in brilliant red. And even as Sara, wide-eyed, drew in a breath of appreciation, Pietro crossed the room, pushed a button, and demonstrated the truly magnificent flushing power of the new appliance.

“Bravo, bravo!” cried Sara, clapping her hands, and Alyssa echoed, bouncing up and down, “Bravo, potty!”

Pietro, with eyes sparkling, declared, “Come!” He caught her arm and propelled her down the corridor to the next bathroom, which also featured a sleek red oval fully flushing toilet, and the next, and finally into the apartment suite with its dust-covered furniture . . . but with bathrooms fully restored, polished, and functioning with red toilets that flushed perfectly and matching bidets that did precisely what bidets were supposed to do.

By this time Sara had set Alyssa on the floor, overcome with wonder “Pietro . . . Signor Contandino . . . it's more than I asked for, more than I expected . . .
C'est magnifico! Grazie! Grazie!
” She turned to Pietro, her eyes wide with wonder. “You got the water running in this part of the castle! Does the kitchen work, too?”

Pietro shrugged modestly. “
Sì
, it was nothing.
Mi
papa, it is he who makes the water stop when the rooms are closed. It is he who makes everything work fine.”

Alyssa was scampering delightedly from one room to another, flushing toilets and declaring,
“Les WC sont rouges!”

“What color?” Sara challenged absently, for her duties as English coach were never done.

“Red! The WCs is red!”

“Are,” corrected Sara. “Are red.” She turned to Signor Contandino. “You must have built the red kitchen,” she realized suddenly. “And remodeled this entire part of the house?”

The signor remained stoic, but Pietro grinned. “It is so. When the big roof, she started to fall in, they say to my papa, Can you make us a place to live in the other part of the palazzo, and he says,
Sì. Et voilà!
You know Angelina Jolie, yes?”

Sara shook her head, catching Alyssa by the back of her T-shirt as she raced by and hoisting her once again to her hip. “Do you know what's on the other side of the castle? Behind those locked doors?”

Pietro translated the question for his papa, who gave a terse answer. Pietro returned to her with a shrug. “Boxes. And other things you don't want.”

“What kind of things?”

He made an elaborate wiggling motion with his hand, which ended by tweaking Alyssa's nose and making her squeal with laughter.
“Serpenti e ratti.”

“Serpent . . . Snakes?” Sara pulled Alyssa close, her eyes widening involuntarily. “And—did you say rats?”

He grinned. “We go now. You want something fixed, you call Pietro, eh?”

“Yes,” she exclaimed gratefully, still thinking about serpents and rats. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

However, as thrilling as it was to be able to flush any toilet in the house and to anticipate a shower with more than a trickle of water, Sara couldn't help but wish Pietro had not given her quite so vivid a picture as to what might be lurking behind those locked doors. And when, later that afternoon, she went to remove the drop cloths that covered the furniture she had piled in the middle of the room she was painting and a mouse the approximate size of a small lapdog scuttled across the room, her overreaction was predictable.

She slept with a sturdy length of two-by-four beside her bed that night, and in the morning she called Mrs. Harrison.

Ash arrived after dinner the next day. Sara, in shorts, lace-up boots, and elbow-length industrial gloves—just in case another rodent should make an appearance—had just finished dragging out a roll of the twenty-year-old Berber carpet she had removed from one of the bedrooms. She dumped it in the front drive, where it joined a pile of other castoffs that Pietro had promised to haul away in his truck the next morning. She sat on the front step, with the cool interior of the castle at her back, to catch her breath. That was when she heard the sound of an approaching car. She stood up.

Ash stopped his car—a red Porsche this time—in front of the trash pile and got out, looking immaculate in tan slacks and blue blazer with an open-collared blue shirt. Sara wiped a hand across her face, remembering the grimy gloves too late, and then quickly stripped off the gloves and lifted the corner of her T-shirt to scrub the dirt from her face—which probably afforded Ash more of a view than she had intended. She could see the amusement in his eyes as he removed his sunglasses and she faced him down.

“Housecleaning?” he inquired politely.

She approached the car. “Are you the exterminator?”

“Or maybe I'm the rat.”

“Is that multiple choice?”

He grinned. “It's good to see you're keeping busy, Sara. But . . .” They were close enough now that he could reach out and remove the remainder of the smudge from her face with his fingertip, which he did, lightly. “Where is your cap? Your cheeks are the color of pimentos.”

The color she felt stinging her face was not due to sun exposure but to something else entirely . . . Pleasure? Excitement? Simple relief to see him? Her heart had speeded the moment she heard the crunch of his tires on the marble drive and had increased in pace the closer he got until now it was practically skittering in her chest. She had missed him. She had simply missed him.

And she hated that.

She shrugged away his touch and replied, a little irritably, “I've been working all day. I'm overheated. And I think Mrs. Harrison is a tattletale.”

His hand fell lightly to her shoulder, fingers touching the back of her neck. “
Spy
, I think, is a more accurate term.” A brief caress against her hairline, so quick as to be almost imagined, and he dropped his hand. “Besides, I've brought along a little something to assist with your rodent problem. Where is Alyssa?”

But no sooner had he spoken than she came charging out of the open door, her arms open wide, crying, “
Petit-papa, petit-papa
, you came, you came, you came!” She flung herself into his arms and began covering his face with happy kisses, and he, laughing, reciprocated. He started to speak to her in French, but she caught his face between both of her plump little hands and reprimanded seriously, “We speak English at Rondelais.”

Ash turned a meaningful look on Sara. “Do we indeed? Well, now, I think that is an excellent policy, providing, of course, that we know enough English words.” He set her on her feet and reached in to the floorboard of the Porsche. “Do you, for example, happen to know the English word for this?”