instead on his afternoon walks, Kelly thought this was as good as it got.
She had her son again. She didn’t have to include herself any more than occasionally in the life of the castle.
She could swallow guilt about the load Rafael was carrying. He was still a de Boutaine, and the way he made her feel scared her witless. She was right to stay aloof.
But, ‘Why don’t you like my Uncle Rafael?’ Matty asked as he skipped ahead through the fabulous woodland around the castle and she thought, uh-oh, had it been as obvious as that?
‘I don’t not like him.’
‘You haven’t even seen his dungeon.’
‘He hasn’t asked me.’
‘Yes, he did. He asked you to see it on the day all his tools arrived and you didn’t say anything. It’s really cool down there. You should see the things he’s making. He’s working on a new base at the moment that will fit spaceships. He says I can have the pro…prot…protype.’
‘Prototype?’
‘Yes,’ Matty said in satisfaction. ‘Will you come and see it?’
‘I think your Uncle Rafael is too busy for visitors.’
‘That’s silly,’ Matty said and tucked his hand confidingly into hers. ‘I want to show you the…prototype. Can you come and see when we get back from the walk?’
There was a cost, she thought. She’d accepted Matty’s invitation to walk with him with pleasure. How could she make the boundaries clear when she kept crossing them?
He was looking up at her, anxious, sensing that things weren’t right. ‘My Uncle Rafael is very kind,’ he said, as if he felt the need to reassure her.
‘I’m sure he is.’
‘He might even make you something.’
‘He makes things for children.’
‘And for big kids too,’ Matty said. ‘Aunt Laura and I read about Robo-Craft on the Internet. It says it’s for kids from five to a hundred and five. How old are you?’
‘Twenty-nine,’ she said faintly.
‘See,’ Matty said. ‘It’s perfect for you. You will come and see it, won’t you? Oh, look, Mama! There’s a deer with a baby.’
He was finding it really hard to concentrate. There were so many intrusions.
Back in Manhattan, the intrusions had all been work-related. They’d been annoying but Anna had protected him from the worst and they hadn’t taken him out of his head like the intrusions here.
He was trying to develop a new base. He had it almost right. Manhattan was gearing up for production for the Christmas rush-that meant he had to get it perfect by the end of this month.
But so far today he’d had Matty three times, Crater twice about finances for the treasury and now an alderman from the town with a list a mile long and a need to talk to him about land stabilization above Zunderfied.
He knew nothing about land stabilization.
He had to learn.
At the end of the basement room there was a narrow window almost at ceiling level. It was ground level outside.
He could see Kelly and Matty out on the far side of the forecourt, heading into the woods.
For one daft minute he felt an almost irresistible urge to join them.
Yeah. As if he needed domesticity added to his duties.
He had to focus.
‘Maybe we need to get the land surveyed,’ the man said. ‘There are some who say the need is urgent. What if we contact the university and see if we can get experts to tell us what they think?’
‘Who says the need is urgent?’ Rafael asked uneasily, still looking out of the window. They looked great, he thought-Kelly and Matty.
She was still wearing that appalling sweater.
‘Only a couple of the old men,’ the alderman said soothingly, but he still looked anxious. ‘There seems no immediate threat. I’ll contact the university.’
‘Let’s do that immediately,’ Rafael said, thinking about the raw scar above the town and feeling more uneasy. ‘Can you set that in train? If we offer generous funding we should get people here straight away.’
The man’s anxious look faded. He left, relieved, and Rafael turned again to his mechanical base.
His mind wasn’t on it.
Instead, he stared out of the window again. Kelly and Matty were out there somewhere.
And a little town with erosion above it and waterlogged soil.
There was nothing more he could do. Was there?
Damn.
And then they came. The knock on the door was more tentative than Matty’s usual bang, but that was the only unusual part. Before he could respond, Matty had the door open and was dragging his mother inside.
‘He’s here. You don’t have to wait. He always says come in. Uncle Rafael, Mama has come to look at your prototype.’
Matty was tugging his mother by the hand. Kelly looked completely disoriented, embarrassed, confused…
Adorable.
He could so easily slip into this, he thought. He could pick up where his cousin had left off.
Right. As if Kelly would ever want that. And where did that leave him? Right in the middle of the royal mess with no way of walking, even after twenty years.
Maybe he could have a good time for twenty years.
‘Hi,’ he said and smiled and she looked even more confused. Even more adorable.
‘Matty wanted to show me your toys.’
‘Would you like a guided tour?’
She gazed round, clearly astonished. ‘It’s a workshop.’
It was. The big underground cavern had been transformed. Back in Manhattan, he’d had a workshop set apart from the normal production premises, specially set up so he could have time alone to think, to work peaceably on his latest ideas. He’d had the entire contents transported here. Anna had supervised the shift. Nothing had gone wrong, and already he had a workplace he loved.
And he had the work he loved. His father had introduced him to woodwork, and to rudimentary mechanics. The two of them had worked together when Rafael was a kid, in the slivers of time his father had been able to spare from his royal duties.
Those slivers of time had seemed like gold. They’d instilled in Rafael a love of working with his hands, and now it was the place he found peace.
Did Kelly find such peace in her books?
‘You know how Robo-Craft works?’ he asked her.
‘I’ve seen it in the shops,’ Kelly said and that was enough encouragement for Matty to gasp in shock and drag her to the table.
‘You mean you don’t even know how it works? Look, Mama. It’s very, very wonderful. Uncle Rafael invented it all by himself.’
He set a tiny mechanism on the middle of the table, then grabbed a sizeable plank, balanced it on top of the mechanism and flipped the switch.
The plank swung round like a slow ceiling fan.
‘Now look,’ Matty ordered and fiddled with the controls.
The plank swayed like a drunken ceiling fan.
‘And now…’
The mechanism lifted, rolled. Amazingly the plank stayed balanced. The whole thing started moving steadily to the side of the table.
‘Will it go up?’ Matty demanded.
‘I suspect our plank is too heavy for launch,’ Rafael said. ‘Why not make something that looks like a rocket?
