The Chateau of Happily-Ever-Afters
‘You’ve got to come to the window eventually,’ he shouts in his Scottish accent. ‘If you don’t close it, I’m going to find a ladder and climb in, so you may as well just show yourself.’
Bollocks. I’m only on the first floor, he wouldn’t need a very big ladder, and there were a few outbuildings in the grounds. You can be sure there’s a ladder lying around somewhere.
‘What do you want?’ I shout back.
‘A Lotto win, a milky latte with just a hint of macadamia nut, and one of those human-sized hamster wheels!’
‘Well, the only thing you’re going to find here are dust bunnies the size of bowling balls, so you may as well leave.’
He laughs. ‘Okay, we’ll start with the basics. How about access to my own property?’
‘This isn’t your property,’ I shout out. ‘It’s Eulalie’s, and she wouldn’t want you here.’
‘We both signed documents that say otherwise.’
I stand up, suddenly seething at his nerve. ‘I don’t care. You’re obviously only here because—’
‘Nice dust.’ He nods towards me.
I glance down at myself. Great. I’m wearing more dust than a sock that’s been lost behind the washing machine for two years, and when I look behind me, there’s a body-width trail where I’ve unintentionally cleaned the carpet with my clothing.
‘Anyone would think you’d been hunting for treasure,’ he says from the courtyard.
I look down and glare at him. ‘Well, I haven’t. Some of us are interested in more than money.’
‘Yeah. You’re here because you loved my great-aunt so much, and you—’
‘She wasn’t your great-aunt. You didn’t even know her.’
‘You weren’t even related to her!’
‘Family is about more than blood. She chose who to leave this place to, and it wasn’t you.’
‘Maybe she would’ve if she’d known I existed.’
I huff, trying to ignore the niggling voice in my head. Eulalie and I were the closest thing each other had to family, but if she’d have known she had real family, would I really be the sole inheritor of this place? Probably not. ‘Well, you’re obviously only after one thing and you’re wasting your time. There’s no treasure here.’
He nods towards me again. ‘And you know that because you’ve been rolling around on the floor trying to find it?’
‘No, I haven’t. But I knew Eulalie. She had a vivid imagination and she liked to tell stories. This treasure is her idea of a laugh. It doesn’t exist.’
‘From what I gathered at the solicitor’s office, you said that about the château too, and yet…’ He gestures at the building in front of him.
All right, he’s got a point about that, but this is different. I can kind of understand that Eulalie would have kept quiet about owning a castle in France. I know she loved it too much to sell it, and any form of renting it out would’ve been too much work at her age, but if she’d had a treasure chest full of gold sitting in the basement, she wouldn’t have struggled to make ends meet.
He’s still looking up at me expectantly. ‘Yeah, well, I have the key and I’m not letting you in.’
He laughs again, like I’m too pathetic to be taken seriously. I ignore the voice in my head that says I am being utterly pathetic here.
The laugh turns into a falsely sweet smile as he looks up at me. ‘You might have the key, but do you know what I’ve got?’
‘Your ticket home, with a bit of luck.’
He grins. ‘I’ve got all the patience in the world. I’ve got no job to get back to. I’ve got no reason to leave this courtyard. So I hope you stopped for food supplies in your rush to beat me here, because I did. I’m set for weeks, me. I’m going to stay right here. So, if I can’t get in, you can’t get out. Think about that when you’ve eaten the packed lunch your mummy made for your trip back to the school playground.’
I go to respond but nothing comes out. Bollocks. He’s right, of course. I haven’t eaten since the train switch in Calais this morning. Food didn’t even cross my mind. Somewhere downstairs, there’s my handbag with a half-eaten packet of chocolate digestives in it… No, actually, I ate those in the taxi. No one in their right mind would leave half a packet of chocolate digestives.
‘Oh, sod off,’ I say, pulling the window shut hard enough that the glass threatens to make an escape.
Great. My stomach has already started rumbling, I’ve got no ingredients to make anything with, ordering a takeaway would involve having to open the door, if I could get one ordered in French anyway, and I can’t get out without him getting in.
The sun is dropping in the sky, casting shadows across the courtyard from the trees, and I hide at the corner of the window and watch as Nephew-git McLoophole saunters back to his car. He does something to make his seat tilt back, then he sprawls into it, putting his feet up on the dashboard. He lifts his sunglasses out of his shirt, slides them on and settles back with his arms behind his head. He looks like he’s going to bed in a luxurious hotel, not a small-willy-syndrome car.
Well, of all the things that have gone wrong in my life lately, this is definitely at the top of the list. My grand plan was to refuse him entry and send him packing with his tail between his legs. How did I end up getting myself trapped in here with no way out other than surrendering? And why didn’t it even cross my mind that, in a house that’s been unoccupied for twenty years, any food left in the cupboards would be likely to have sell-by dates so old they’d be written in roman numerals?
As I stand there trying to brush muck off my once-lemon T-shirt, ignoring the rumbling in my stomach, which has got more insistent since his smug display outside, my mind wanders to treasure.
What if he has a point? All the times I sat and listened to Eulalie talking about an English girl falling in love with a French duke, the lavish château they shared… I always thought they were embellished versions of reality. I knew her husband had been French and they’d spent their married life in Normandy, but there was so much glamour and luxury in her stories, and she was such a fan of unrealistic romance books, and she had been alone for so long. I always assumed she was rewriting her own memories into a love story, that there was some truth, but mostly she was just a lonely old lady who wanted to remember an ordinary life as extraordinary.
And now I’m standing in the middle of her stories. Her husband really was a duke. There really was a château. The moat with a bridge across it. The grand ballroom I peeked into downstairs. It was all real. Is it really that far-fetched to think there might be some truth in Eulalie’s treasure riddle?
All Loophole-git out there wants to do is squeeze as much money as he can from this place. He’s already said he wants to sell. He doesn’t care about the personal meaning. Eulalie could have sold this place years ago and made herself rich. But she chose not to. Just as she chose to leave it to me because she knew I wouldn’t. She didn’t have children, but if she had, she would have left it to them as a family legacy. I’m not family by blood, but I know this place is worth more than money. But money is my only chance of getting Nephew-git McLoophole out of my life. And it’s the one thing I don’t have.
Unless there’s treasure.
And I find it first.
If there is some kind of treasure hidden here, I can use it to buy his half of the château. It’s the only way of un-loopholing him and setting things right again. He’ll get what he wants, which is undoubtedly money, and I’ll get to keep the château, which is what Eulalie wanted. It’ll give him a fair share of the inheritance, which she would probably have wanted him to have if she’d known him. If there’s treasure here, it’s my only chance to make things right.
It will be a nightmare with him involved. He’ll march in and take whatever he wants. There’s a lot of antique-looking furniture lying around. He could gut the place and what right would I have to stop him? None. The only thing my co-ownership means is that he can’t sell the château without my consent, but he’s so good at loopholes, I even wonder how watertight that might be.
If there’s any hint of truth in that treasure riddle… it would be worth looking. While I’m in here and he’s out there.
Chapter Four
It’s a good plan until it gets completely dark outside. Although there are plenty of lights in the château, most of them fancy crystal chandeliers, I can’t get any of them to switch on. The electricity supply has probably been cut off after so many years of the place being empty. Which is just great when you’re treasure hunting in the dark. I didn’t think to bring a torch with me, and after using my phone’s flashlight to poke around a couple of rooms, the battery has died, and without an electricity supply, I can’t charge it.
It’s getting quite dangerous actually. It’s pitch-black inside now and there aren’t even any streetlamps to let in light from outside like there are at home. I have no way of telling where I’m going or what I’m looking at, my legs are covered in bruises from walking into things, and this is an old house that makes a lot of creaking noises. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t keep looking at shadows and trying to work out the difference between the noise of a pipe expanding and an axe murderer coming to kill me.
Just as I’m thinking of giving up until morning, I see something. I’m on one of the lower floors, although I have no idea exactly where. I’ve lost track of how many sets of stairs I’ve gone up and down. I’m in a small room, much smaller than the others in the house, and as I’m about to walk out, a glint of silver catches my eye. I crouch down to the floor and try to see through the wooden boards in the way. There’s a hole at the base of the wall that’s been boarded up, and whatever that silver thing is, it’s hidden between the walls.
It would be a good hiding place for treasure…
I scoot backwards and kick out one of the boards. It’s so old that it crumbles under the heel of my shoe, and I scramble to clear enough space to get my arm through.
I stretch my hand in, trying not to think about the cobwebs that cling to me. It’s still out of reach though, and I break more wood away and try again, getting further, to my shoulder this time, but still not far enough. Only one of the wooden boards crumbles, leaving a slim gap into the wall cavity; the other one is rock solid and I need a crowbar to prise it off, but it’s too dark to go hunting for tools.
Right, come on, Wendy. Enough pratting around. If Loophole-git McNephew was in here, he’d be through that hole by now with the promise of treasure, and you wouldn’t be getting a sniff of it. I’ve got to get this before he does.
I look at the gap. It doesn’t look completely impossible. I mean, if I breathe in and squash my boobs down a bit… surely I could get in there with just a bit of squeezing. What could possibly go wrong?
I’m stuck.
I am stuck halfway into a wall in a French château, my phone is not only dead but in the upstairs room where I left it, and no one knows I’m here. No one is going to come looking for me.
And I locked out the only person within a five-mile radius.
Well, this is just great, isn’t it?
I wriggle and struggle, trying every way I can think of to free myself, but I have to face facts.
I am going to die here.
Within hours of arriving, I will disprove Eulalie’s belief that this place will give anyone who lives here a happily ever after.
It should be renamed The Château of the Grim Reaper.
I’m going to starve to death. Unless the spiders eat me first.
Or that noise upstairs actually is an axe murderer.
I lose track of time as I lie there waiting for death to take me, trying to work out what will kill me first. Starvation? Dehydration? Choking to death on dust, or suffocation by cobweb? Being cannibalised by French spiders?
I’ll wait until morning and then start shouting for help. There’s got to be a neighbour somewhere nearby who might hear. Maybe Nephew McGit will hear and phone the fire brigade to break in and cut me free. Even letting him in is better than dying. Probably.
I must have dozed off eventually, despite the wooden board digging into my stomach, because the next thing I’m aware of is laughter. Laughter with a Scottish twang to it. And a shutter noise and flash of light.
‘Did you just take a photo of me?’ I shout at him, so annoyed that I suck in a mouthful of cobweb and choke on it.
He’s laughing so hard he can barely catch his breath to answer me. ‘I came in here to find nothing but a pair of legs sticking out of a wall. Of course I took a photo. Hold on a sec while I put it on Instagram.’
‘Don’t you dare!’ I kick out at him and miss. ‘You bloody loophole git!’
‘Or Julian, as people tend to call me,’ he says. ‘And it’s nice to see you don’t believe there’s any treasure and you weren’t looking for it.’
‘I wasn’t.’
He laughs again. ‘No? Then what exactly are you doing halfway inside a wall? Please do tell, because I can’t wait to hear the explanation for this.’
I huff and roll my eyes even though he can’t see me. ‘There’s something in here.’
‘Something that might be treasure?’
‘Maybe.’ I’m sure he can hear how sulky I sound, even though everything is muffled through the wall.
‘Ah-ha! So you do think there’s something in that riddle!’
‘No. I just saw something… and I thought… it doesn’t matter.’
‘Let me guess, you thought you’d lock me out to get a head start, and if you found anything, you’d hide it and pretend you hadn’t?’
‘No.’
‘Okay then,’ he says cheerfully as his footsteps head away. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’
‘No, wait!’ I shout after him. ‘I might need a bit of help here.’
I imagine him folding his arms across his chest. ‘Why should I help you when you can’t even answer a question honestly?’
‘What, the treasure?’ I sigh. ‘Oh, come on, like you wouldn’t have done the same thing!’
‘I wouldn’t have made you sleep in your car all night!’
‘It’s August in France, for bollocks’ sake. What were you worried about? Freezing to death in a freak ice storm?’
‘It’s just not a very nice thing to do.’
‘Well, I’m sorry,’ I mutter, sounding the least sorry I’ve ever been. ‘Besides, I’ve been stuck in a wall all night. I think I got my comeuppance, don’t you?’
He laughs. ‘I don’t know. I could leave you there a while longer to find out…’
‘Julian!’
‘Julian what?’
I huff, more annoyed at my own stupidity than at him. ‘Julian, please, you’re my only hope.’
‘Now that wasn’t so hard, was it? Hold still. I’ll use this hammer to pull the other board out.’
‘Where did you get a hammer from?’
‘Hanging on the other wall. This is some kind of tool cupboard.’
Great. It’s a shame I didn’t see that last night. I could’ve used the hammer to pull the silver box closer and not got into this mess in the first place.
I don’t dare to take a breath as he prises the other board away and I can finally move for the first time in hours. I scramble and push myself backwards to get out of the wall, bringing a cloud of dust with me. Julian holds out his hand to help me up but I smack it away and struggle to my feet by myself. I don’t need Nephew-git’s help with anything else, ever.
Every part of me is stiff and aching from being stuck in place for so long, I’m covered in dirt and debris from the floor, and I’ve got cobwebs in places I didn’t know cobwebs could exist. I pull my hair out of the plait it’s in and shake it so hard that I start coughing and spluttering again.
‘Would you like some water?’ He holds a bottle out to me.
No, not from him. But the only tap I found in the château yesterday spurted brown goo at me and, of course, I didn’t bring any of my own.
I choke a garbled agreement and grab the bottle off him, not intending to be quite so snatchy.
I know he’s watching me as I pour water down my parched throat and I try to block him out. It’s not easy. Through the curtain of my hair, I can see his brown boots crossed over each other where he’s leaning against the wall, and despite the musty, damp wood smell in this room, his aftershave has somehow overpowered it. I glance up and he’s still looking at me. ‘You haven’t poisoned this, have you?’ I ask, wondering if he’s waiting for me to drop dead, and if it’s a question I should have considered before I poured half of it down my throat.
‘I suppose you’ll have to wait and see,’ he says with a shrug.
I start gagging and try to spit out what I’ve already swallowed, but he starts laughing. ‘I’m joking, Wendy. I considered it but I left the cyanide at home. Thought the French police might have something to say about it if I got searched on the ferry.’
‘Then why are you looking at me?’ I snap, annoyed at myself for falling for it.
‘I’m not. I’m looking at the centipede in your hair.’
I scream and start slapping wildly at my head.
He laughs that infuriating laugh again. ‘Bloody hell, it’s only a wee centipede. I’ll get it if you hold still.’
It’s not easy to stay still when every inch of your skin is crawling, but I try to stop flapping around as he strides across the room and reaches his big hand out. I squeeze my eyes shut and let him extract the wriggly thing from my hair.
Instead of stamping on the centipede like I thought he would, Julian crouches down and sets it back inside the hole I’ve just escaped from. ‘Couldn’t you have killed it?’
‘Why should I kill it? It’s been in this house a lot longer than you have. Why does it deserve to die because you’ve invaded its home?’ He stands back up and faces me.
I go to snap something in response but my eyes lock on to his blue ones and my train of thought stops abruptly. He’s right, isn’t he? Why should I be angry at him for not killing an animal, even an insect with far too many legs? It’s kind of nice, actually. I’ve never met anyone who would think twice about stamping on an insect before.
I try not to look at the hint of chest showing under the charcoal-grey shirt that’s so far open he may as well not be wearing one. I’ve never been particularly taken with muscular men, but no one can deny that his chest curves in all the right places.
‘Wendy?’ He clicks his fingers like it’s not the first time he’s said it.
When I look up, he’s smirking again and there’s laughter in his blue eyes. He knows exactly what my attention was on. ‘Hmm?’
‘I said, how far did you get in your search last night? Did you find anything interesting before you attacked the helpless, unsuspecting wall?’
‘Not very,’ I mutter, glaring at him, mostly because there’s no point in even trying to pretend I wasn’t looking for it. I’m just as bad as him. ‘We’ve got no electricity so it was pointless after dark. We’ll have to phone the electric company and get them to switch us back on. I expect it’s been shut off after so many years of the place being empty.’
‘Nah. No way does a place this far out in the countryside get electricity from the grid. There’ll be a generator outside somewhere that probably needs a good oil-up. I’ll see if I can find it later.’
I hadn’t even thought of that. And I’d thought I was being clever to deduce that the electric had been cut off. He’s undoubtedly right. Again. ‘How did you get in here anyway?’
‘I went for a walk and met our neighbour. Lovely old chap, lives at a farm about three miles down the road. Doesn’t speak a word of English, of course, but turns out he was good friends with Eulalie and her husband, and when she left, she gave him the spare key so he could keep an eye on things in exchange for grazing his sheep in our empty pastures.’
‘If he doesn’t speak a word of English, how did you get all of that?’
‘I speak fluent French.’
‘Of course you do,’ I mutter as I pull my hopefully insect-free hair back. You could fit what I remember of French on the bottom of an ant’s foot. Bonjour. Uno, dos, tres… Oh wait, that’s not even French, is it? I should’ve picked up a phrasebook at the train station yesterday.
‘So, this treasure then…’ He nods towards the wall. ‘Shall I see if I can reach it or would you like another try?’
‘I think I’ve crawled into enough holes for one day, thank you.’
He smirks again and I look away, trying to concentrate on the room I couldn’t see in the dark last night. He’s right about this being a tool room of some kind. There are work benches around the walls and mops and buckets and a broom propped up in one corner, an array of tools attached to the far wall. It’s only a tool room and it’s bigger than my entire flat at home.
Julian reaches the box with no trouble and I frown at the back of his head as he pulls it out. Is there anything he doesn’t make look easy? I’d obviously nudged it closer with all my struggling. That’s definitely it.
‘So…’ I watch in anticipation as he stays crouched on the floor, smoothing his hand across the top of the dirty silver box. We could be holding a fortune here and he’s bloody feeling the indentation of whatever French wording is etched on the top.
‘Oh yeah, this is definitely treasure.’ He looks up at me with that smirk again. ‘Congratulations, you’ve found a bonafide French rat box.’
‘What’s that?’
His face screws up in revulsion as he opens it. ‘You know. You put the rat poison in, the rats go into the box, eat the poison and can’t get back out again, so they snuff it in there. Well done, you’ve found the twenty-year-old bones of a dead rat. Here.’
He hands the open box to me and I shriek and stumble away. ‘Seriously? I nearly died for a dead rat?’
He bursts out laughing as he fits the lid securely back on the box. ‘Nothing like a bit of melodrama first thing in the morning. I didn’t realise getting stuck in a wall was such a near-death experience.’
‘I was alone! It was scary! I didn’t think anyone could get in to help me!’
‘Yeah, well, if you will insist on acting like a child and shutting the door in people’s faces. The solicitor never did say how old you are but I assume it’s in the single digits. Did someone have to sign a permission slip for you to come here?’
‘At least I’m not wearing a shirt that was clearly made for someone much younger. You must’ve got that from the children’s department,’ I say, even though he looks better than he did in the suit the other day.
‘Which is a step up from your current fashion choices, which seem to be showcasing the contents of a floor that hasn’t been cleaned since the nineties.’
I start brushing off the grime that’s ingrained in my clothes, trying to ignore him as he starts undoing the buttons of his shirt. ‘Why are you doing that?’
‘Well, if you have such a big problem with my shirt then it’s only fair I take it off. If you wanted a proper gawp at my abs you should’ve just said so.’ He slides the shirt off his tanned shoulders, flexing his bloody huge biceps and rolling his six-pack.
My eyes don’t know where to look first and I force myself to turn away so I don’t give him the satisfaction.
‘Okay, so…’ he says after a long silence. ‘Thanks for saving my life, Julian. Sorry for locking you out and for the crick in your neck from making you sleep in the car all night just so I could get a head start on the treasure hunting and keep it all from you.’
‘It wasn’t because of that.’
He doesn’t say anything but I can practically hear the raised eyebrow.
‘Fine,’ I mutter. ‘Sorry. And thank you for rescuing me.’
‘You’re welcome. I’m always happy to help idiots in distress.’ He claps his hands together. ‘There, now that’s settled and it’s daylight, I’m going to have a look round the grounds and see what’s growing on our fifteen acres.’
I hate the emphasis he puts on ‘our’. He’s doing it on purpose. ‘I was just about to do that.’
‘No, you were going to stay stuck in that wall until the end of time. Maybe after a few weeks of starvation, you’d have lost enough weight to free yourself.’