Unfortunately, Theodore and his wife Millicent had disliked tea and found fencing exhausting. The butler quit; the fencing-master, Michaela Kirovsky’s grandfather, became the castle caretaker. The Hydes, meanwhile, decided that what they really liked was collecting old European buildings. Once the castle was in place, they purchased a thirteenth-century French chapel that was a mini-version of Chartres. That Gothic jewel had been painstakingly reconstructed not far from the castle, on the Hydes’ sloping forty acres below Fox Creek and above Cottonwood Creek, the wide body of water that runs through Aspen Meadow. Then, before their dreams of purchasing a ruined abbey could be realized, Theodore and Millicent had both been killed in a railroad accident.
Their only son, Edwin - facing a Depression economy, played-out silver mines, and no financial assets aside from his parents’ estate - had tried to turn the castle into a hotel. This failed, as did mounting Aspen Meadow’s first and last circus on the castle grounds. After hiring ranchers to cart away mountains of elephant manure, Edwin and his wife had been reduced to charging for tours of the castle.
Their son, Eliot, had returned to the castle almost nine years ago, after his parents’ death and his own failure in academia. At thirty-nine, he hadn’t accumulated much in the way of savings, and those had drained swiftly away as he, too, struggled to make a living from giving tours and renting out the French chapel by Cottonwood Creek, now christened Hyde Chapel. By the time Eliot hired Sukie to organize the place, he’d stopped the tours and sunk into a depression. Income from renting the chapel was down, and stories in town had him living like a hermit in one room of his castle.
The family of the fencing-master, meanwhile, had been offered one whole wing of the castle rent-free, as long as they remained the caretakers. It was in their palatial fencing loft that young Michaela Kirovsky’s grandfather and father had taught her to fence, a skill that subsequently provided income for her, when she became the fencing coach at Elk Park Prep. Beside me, Arch was fast asleep. There was more to the tale of Eliot Hyde and Sukie Rourke. In fact, the months-old series of events were now routinely chronicled by townsfolk over coffee and doughnuts. Oddly, You can’t be too clean seemed to be the moral of the story.
When then forty-seven-year-old Eliot hired thirty-five-year-old Sukie, she had crisply informed him that she, would not work in the castle as long as the stench remained from the castle’s medieval toilets. Unfortunately, these thirty-three so-called “garderobes” - actually ancient narrow bathrooms corbeled out over the castle walls - had not been cleaned before leaving England. Also central to the Sukie story was an acknowledgment of one of the flaws of medieval military architecture: Each garderobe had its own shaft into the moat. Those shafts had proved a convenient, if messy, mode of entry to attackers of Richard the Lionheart’s Chateau Gaillard on the Seine, but Sukie hadn’t cared about old tales of invaders. Back in medieval days, each castle garderobe shaft emptied into a cesspit or the moat itself, both of which had been periodically cleaned out. But the medieval folks had not cleaned the garderobe shafts. Ever. After all these years, they still stank.
Yes, the story went, medieval courtiers had tossed down herbs, straw, and old letters to absorb some of the filth, but the latrine stench invariably sent foul smells throughout the castle. The British construction folks who’d taken the castle apart eighty years earlier to be shipped here to America had pulled down the shafts in sections. And the shafts had also been reassembled that way, much to Sukie’s disgust.
So: For Sukie’s first order of organizing business, she’d had each and every garderobe and shaft disassembled to be cleaned and disinfected.
And then. Think of flushing things down the toilet, I’d said to Arch, when Sukie’s subsequent discovery made national headlines. You might flush down things that made you angry, like a dunning bill for canceled phone service, or a Dear John letter from someone who’d sworn to love you forever. Or… say you received a letter from the government denying you guardianship of your beloved, orphaned nephew. That denial made you so enraged, you threw that bureaucrat’s epistle down the toilet shaft, where it… stuck… .
In 1533, that was just what the Earl of Uckfield had done. His petition to raise his wealthy nine-year-old nephew, the orphan of his ultrarich brother-in- law, a duke, had been turned down by the monarch. In a fury, the earl had flung that letter down one of his garderobe shafts. And that was where the missive had stayed for over four centuries. It had taken a compulsively clean Swiss woman, ordering that the shaft be scrubbed, before the discovery was made.
The letter denying the earl custody of his nephew had been signed by Henry VIII. It bore the king’s initials, H. R., and his royal seal.
The letter sold for twelve million pounds at Spink’s, a leading London auction gallery. Eliot had immediately married Sukie, christening her his twenty-million-dollar woman. After their honeymoon, he announced to the media, Sukie would be embarking on a cleaning expedition of the other thirty-two garderobe shafts in the castle.
She hadn’t found anything else. Eliot hadn’t minded.
The day after Sukie’s call, I’d gone to Hyde Castle. Once seated in the imposing living room, I drank tea and ate stale, mail-ordered scones, made tolerable only by heaping tablespoons of homemade strawberry jam, Eliot’s one and only specialty. With great fanfare, tall, handsome Eliot Hyde brewed our tea. Eliot dressed like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character; for tea, he wore herringbone knickerbockers and a silk scarf. When he brewed the tea, there was no dumping of hot water over a teabag. No: Eliot tossed his silk scarf over his shoulder, removed the lid from a bone china teapot in the shape of a prissy-faced English butler, cleared his throat, and meticulously, s-l-o-w-I-y poured boiling water over Golden Tips leaves. Then he covered the pot with a cozy. Finally, he asked Sukie honeykins, as he called her, to time the steeping.
Good tea, bad food, I’d reflected, as I sipped the dark brew moments later. I’m going to love this place.
I’d told them yes, February was almost completely open for me. My son was in school every day. And I could hire Julian
Teller, our former boarder, to help with the catering, as he was taking only a half-load this semester at the University of Colorado. Plus, I added, Julian had toured the castle during his time at Elk Park Prep, and knew his way around.
I’d listened to their food proposals, nodded, and written up a contract. Eliot’s ideas sounded awfully work- intensive, but focusing on paying work, instead of on the Lauderdales, their bloodthirsty lawyer, and their Jaguar- driving cronies, was a welcome relief. In the end, Eliot and Sukie had booked Goldilocks’ Catering for two events. First would be an Anglophile lunch in appreciation of the big donors who’d paid for the new marble labyrinth set into the floor of Hyde Chapel. The second was an Elizabethan feast that would double as the end-of-season banquet for the Elk Park Prep fencing team. Eliot had been quick to clarify that the Tudor upper crust had only seen a feast as a grand meal. A banquet, on the other hand, had
been an elaborate dessert course served later, often in a charming banquet-house not unlike our modern gazebo. These days, the terms feast and banquet had become synonymous, alas. In any event, Michaela Kirovsky wanted to hold her team’s banquet at the castle.
For the opportunity to test feast-giving in their Great Hall, Eliot and Sukie were picking up half the tab.
Eliot, meanwhile, would continue working, planning, and publicizing, to ready the castle for opening as a conference center.
“That’s my dream,” he’d informed me, although his dark brown eyes looked unexpectedly sad. Above the creamy silk shirt and scarf, he had a beautifully featured, smooth-shaven face, framed by long, wavy, light brown hair. If my catered events went well, he added, we’d work out further bookings featuring historic English food.
I’d set aside any hesitation. My only other February commitment was making cookies and punch for the Elk Park Prep Valentine’s Day Dance. The chapel lunch had been scheduled for today, Monday; the Elizabethan feast, for this Friday. I’d asked Michaela Kirovsky if the fencing team wanted swordfish. Her white hair had jounced around her pale face as she laughed at my suggestion. No swordfish, Eliot had protested. The recipes he wanted me to test on the students and their parents were more of the English court variety. So I’d ordered veal roasts, to be served with a potato dish, a shrimp dish for those Catholics who’d rejected Vatican II, a rice dish, a plum tart… and Eliot and I would come up with the rest of the details this week.
Okay. Back to the present, to five minutes to six, to be exact. The sun would be rising soon on a day which found Arch and me temporarily homeless. Time to get moving.
To get to the castle, the van would have to pass through antique gates that were over half a mile from the castle itself. Those gates, bearing the Hyde coat of arms and several other painted shields Sukie had unearthed in a Denver antique shop, had been open when I’d visited three weeks ago. Were they electronically armed before sunup? I had no idea.
I stared again at the bank’s digital clock. The van was becoming warm. If I waited too long, the cooked chicken would begin to spoil. After the first question of catering: How does the food look.? there is always the
