Simon shrugged. “Insofar as we feel able.”
“Yes. And there is a fringe benefit that you may consider of some importance.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Among the guests will be a few who are quite influential, I understand, in the world of entertainment. You say you are not now one of the big names of show business, but… I of course know nothing of magic myself. Would there be any special equipment, or prearrangements that you require?”
Margie was about to speak, probably with questions to ask, but Simon had taken her hand and now squeezed it gently, signalling for silence. He said: “We can provide all the special equipment we’ll need. Where’s this house?”
“In the far suburbs—rather far out even to be called suburbs, I’m afraid; about two hours’ drive. You’ll need rather detailed instructions on how to get there.” Again, the small superior smile. “When you see the house, you’ll understand what I mean about the medieval theme being fitting.”
THREE
Mrs. Hildegard Littlewood, nee Hildy Nordberg, was dressed for tennis, having just recently ascended from practice on her court. She was standing on the roof of her castle, leaning her forearms and elbows on what her bridegroom had recently told her ought to be called a merlon. It was the portion of a battlement that stuck up like a giant squared tooth. With fingers hooked over the rising edge of stone, Hildy could feel how her thick new golden wedding ring caught and grated on the edge. With her eyes closed in summer sunshine, she was trying to fight back a threatened bout of near-hysterical giggles. She had the feeling that if she once let the laughter get started it was going to get out of hand at once. Sometimes lately it had seemed to Hildy that if she could allow herself one good bout of hysteria she would get it out of her system and would then be able to settle down. But she wasn’t familiar enough with hysteria to know if it might be managed that way. In fact she had never had trouble with it before. And she wasn’t sure, either, how long she was going to be alone on the roof before someone came up looking for her.
She told herself now for the thousandth time that she had no realistic cause for unhappiness. Quite the contrary. Absolutely the contrary. And in fact she wasn’t really unhappy. It was just that two months ago she had been a part-time student and part-time waitress, supporting herself after a fashion by dishing out pizza in a roadside place just outside Los Angeles. And today here she was just finished with a workout on her own tennis court in Illinois, with more money in more bank accounts than she knew what to do with, and standing on top of her own imported, reconstructed… no, it was just too ridiculous.
Hildy pulled hard on the mortared stones. A sound between a laugh and a faint shriek escaped her lips. But then nothing more came. A genuinely relieving outburst was evidently not as near the surface as she had thought.
She released her grip on the edge of the parapet and turned, opening her eyes to summer sunshine that warmed the stone-paved castle roof and the nearby treetops that screened away most of the outside world. If you could see me now… but what made her overload of success all the more traumatic was that there was practically no one to whom she could say that, even on the phone or in a letter.
Hildy had moved around a lot in her young life. What little had been left of her family when she was growing 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?”