up had been second and third generation Californians, with Okie restlessness intact. Continual moving continually made the latest crop of new friends drop away, and old friends were nonexistent. And then her mother, the remaining family remnant, died. And there Hildy had been, waiting on tables, that day two months ago when Saul Littlewood had just happened to come in looking for some lunch.
One of the less visible changes in her life since that day was that now her trains of thought tended to become easily derailed. Another recurrent thought came interrupting now: some of these treetops really ought to be trimmed, at least a little. And then, every night, one light ought to be left on in one window of the upper castle, probably right in that narrow window of the single tower that rose above the roof and battlements. That way they could have the place photographed for a paperback book cover… Hildy had tried this joke a couple of times on Saul, who each time had looked at her indulgently, smiled a little helplessly in his serious way, and hadn’t appeared to really get the joke at all…
Whenever Hildy tried to tell someone, calmly and factually, what had happened between the two of them on that first day in the pizza parlor, she wound up having to say that she had simply let him pick her up. Which was undeniably true as far as it went. But putting it that way didn’t begin to tell the truth of what had happened between the two of them at first sight.
All right, she advised herself now, run through it once more in your mind, and then stop dwelling on it, and then let’s concentrate on where life ought to go from here.
Once more, now, she told herself that at the time she first met Saul, she hadn’t really been Cinderella. Neither dirt-poor nor uneducated. Anyway, poverty, Hildy had decided, was far more a state of mind, or perhaps a statement of social position, than it was a measure of actual money available. It was just that when she first met Saul she had been only nineteen years old and her own sole support, and the degree in computer science that was going to make her independent and successful was a number of years that seemed like a good part of a lifetime in the future. And Saul was still far from being used to the possession of wealth himself, though wealth had been in his family for generations. He was still walking on air with the reality of the whole vast inheritance, that day when he just strolled into the pizza place, and looked at Hildy and said—
Hildy’s rather feverish reverie was broken at this point by the sound of a door opening. In contrast to the stones surrounding it, it was an ordinary-looking twentieth century door, only a few decades old. Sturdy, weatherproofed wood with a no-nonsense modern lock, it was set in the side of the round watchtower that extended up ten feet or so above the roof. Old Grandfather Littlewood, as Saul and Vivian kept saying, might have been eccentric to import and rebuild himself a French castle, but he had not been daft enough to want to live in an unmodernized one.
As the door swung outward across stone flags, a young woman’s face wreathed in black curls came into view around its edge. The face lit with a friendly smile at the sight of Hildy.
“There you are.” This was Vivian, Saul’s sister. At the twenty-eight she claimed, she was a couple of years younger than Saul, and looked considerably younger still. Her basically pale skin, like her brother’s, seemed to resist tan and sunburn alike; but recent weeks in Hawaii and California had managed to impart a light bronze tint to both of them. Vivian was not as tall as her brother, but even more innately elegant. Hildy, in contrast, had white-blond hair and Scandinavian blue eyes. Her short frame was shapely enough, and not at all fat, but she was definitely on the sturdy side. With slightly improved reflexes she might have made a tennis champion; she could never have become a fashion model.
Vivian, wearing jeans and a trim shirt that displayed her own thin figure to good advantage, came forward smiling. “If you’re in the midst of some serious meditation I don’t have to interrupt it.”
Hildy, who had found herself getting on much better than she had expected with Vivian, was determined to be cheerful. “Oh, I can meditate any time. What’s up?”
Her sister-in-law put on a look of mild concern. “It’s just that the great housewarming weekend starts in a very few days now, and we were insisting that all the guests and all the help have medieval dress of some sort. And I’m afraid that so far I have done zilch about what I’m going to wear, and—”
“Oh, the weekend. Oh my God yes, a costume. There’s been so much else to do I’ve just completely—”
“I know, dear. Me too. Anyway, Saul and I have just decided to dash into the city. He with more business to be done, as usual. Me to track down this place I’ve heard about where they make you costumes that are really clothes, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh. Oh yes. I’d better come along. How are you going?”
“Your husband wants to fly, he’s really happy with his new license. We can land at Meigs, that’s right on the lakefront you know, and be in and out of the city in no time, comparatively speaking.”
“Great idea.” Hildy looked at her new wristwatch. “Give me ten minutes to get changed?”
“Sure. I doubt we’re going to leave inside of half an hour anyway. The great tycoon’s still on the phone.”
“Good,” said Hildy, wondering not for the first time if it was this casual put-down attitude of Vivian’s that kept her from getting married. And Hildy started for the door in the tower and the stair inside it. But then she found herself delaying involuntarily for one more look around.
“There are moments,” said Vivian, watching her now with quiet amusement, “when I envy you.”
“Why?” Hildy asked in wonder.
“Because. To you all this is so very new. This was more or less our family home, Saul and I spent a fair amount of time here, visiting Grandfather, when we were kids. There was wealth around, even if we didn’t have much.” Vivian waved her hand. No need to go into all that again now; Hildy had heard often enough already the tangled tale of family politics, quarrels, disinheritance, legal maneuverings. But now the older generation were all gone and the courts’ final ruling had come down. The castle and its grounds were only a small part of Saul’s and Vivian’s inheritance.
“I envy you most of the time, I think.” Hildy murmured now. “That you can take to all this naturally.” She looked around again; “I think I’m falling in love with the place.”
The roof where they stood was perhaps two hundred feet above the broad, brown surface of the Sauk, which flowed at the foot of the high bluffs on which the castle perched. The river, slow now with summer, was visible only in dots and patches hazed by the green of the nearby crowns. In fact, when you looked out in any direction from the roof, what you could see was mainly the tops of nearby trees. The grounds of the castle, small airstrip included, covered about ten or twelve acres, most of it right atop the riverside bluffs and down their slope. The bluffs, heavily wooded, were much too steep ever to have been cultivated, or even put to pasture. The river and its shorelines along here, Hidly had thought, probably looked much the same now as they had during Indian times.
The rich countryside that surrounded the river on both sides could be seen from the castle roof only in leaf- clouded patches, through and over the uppermost branches of trees that must have been little more than saplings, if indeed they had existed at all, when Grandfather Littlewood bought the land. If Hildy let her imagination try, it could build on the hints of things seen tantalizingly through the summer trees, working to convince her that she was now in fact the mistress of some huge feudal domain. If the land in feudal times had not really looked like this round the castle’s original site, it should have.
There were vast fields of summer corn out there, along with square miles of other crops that she could not so easily identify. There were sprawling, sloping creekbed pasturelands, supporting tidy herds of dairy cows, with here and there some sheep. Most of the fields were bordered by thick hedgerows that Saul said sheltered small game in plenty. Orchards and pastures provided patches of woods, besides the wooded land of the river bluffs and islands. Saul had told her that there had been wild deer here in the valley when he was growing up, and he thought there probably still were, at least a few. He could remember Grandfather Littlewood telling stories of wild wolves, running right here along the Sauk… the more Hildy heard of Grandfather Littlewood, the more she wished that she could have met him.
The trees around the castle prevented a rooftop observer from being able to see any of the prosperous modern farmhouses and barns very plainly; with very little effort a feudal illusion could be sustained. What buildings were visible through clear gaps in greenery were miles away, too distant for detail to be seen. In winter, Hildy supposed, with the leaves gone, the view of the countryside around must be considerably plainer—and of course it must then be easier for the outside world to see the castle, too. To see it, for example, from the narrow highway that threaded along the river’s farther shore, and maybe even from Frenchman’s Bend, the little town on the far shore half a mile upstream. She could see nothing of the town now, and very little of the highway even when the breeze stirred branches. The breeze was picking up a little now, she noticed, and there were gray clouds in the southwest.
