“Want to go exploring?” She was always adventuresome and young and he enjoyed that about her.
“I suppose we could. But what if we get shot by some angry landlord?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll protect you. Besides, it looks like the place has been deserted for years,” she encouraged him.
“The whole country looks like that, you goose. This isn’t England.”
“Oh, you snob!” she hooted at him, and they began to walk down the lane that drifted away from the gates. They decided to leave their car near the road, so as not to draw more attention to their adventure.
And for a long time, it appeared to be nothing more than an old country road, until at last there was a long allée, bordered by huge trees, and overgrown with bushes. Had it been tidier, it might even have looked a little like the entrance to Whitfield, or the Southampton estate.
“It’s pretty here.” They could hear birds singing in the trees, and she hummed as they wandered through the tall grass and the bushes.
“I don’t think there’s much here,” William finally said, when they were almost at the end of the double border of tall trees, and just as he said it, he saw an enormous stone building in the distance. “Good Lord, what is that?” It looked like Versailles, sitting there, except as they approached they could see that it was in desperate need of repair. The entire place was ramshackle and deserted, and some of the outbuildings seemed almost ready to collapse. There was a small cottage at the foot of the hill that must have been a caretaker’s cottage years before, but now it was barely still a building.
There were stables off to the right, and huge barns for carriages as well. William was fascinated and glanced inside as they walked past them. There were two ancient carriages still sitting there, with the crest of the family carefully gilded on the panels.
“What an amazing place.” He smiled at her, glad that she had urged him to explore it.
“What do you suppose it is?” Sarah looked around her, at the carriages, the halters, the old blacksmith tools, with fascination.
“It’s an old château, and those were the stables. The whole place looks as though it’s been deserted for two hundred years.”
“Maybe it has been.” She smiled excitedly. “Maybe there’s a ghost!” He began to make ghostly noises then, and pretended to lunge at her as they went back to the road, and headed up the hill to what looked like a castle in a fairy story, or a dream. It was clearly not as old as Whitfield was, or as Belinda and George’s castle where they had met, but William estimated that this one was easily two hundred and fifty or three hundred years old, and as they approached it, they saw that the architecture was very fine. There had obviously been a park, and gardens, and perhaps even a maze, most of which was overgrown now, and the entrance to the house was truly regal as they stood before it. William tried the windows and the doors, but they were all locked. But a look into the shuttered rooms, through rotting slats, showed lovely floors, delicately carved moldings, and high ceilings. It was hard to see more, but it was clearly an incredible place. Being there was like taking a huge step back in time, and reaching out to the time of Louis XIV or XV or XVI. One expected a carriage full of men in wigs with satin breeches to come around the corner at full tilt at any moment, and to ask them why they were there.
“Whose do you suppose it was?” she asked, greatly intrigued by the surroundings.
“The locals ought to know. It can’t be much of a secret. It’s an enormous place.”
“Do you suppose anyone still owns it?” It looked as though it had been abandoned years ago, but someone had to own it.
“Someone must But obviously not anyone who wants it, or can afford to keep it up.” It was in a terrible state, even the marble front steps were badly broken. It all looked as though it had been deserted for decades.
But Sarah’s eyes had lit up as she looked around her. “Wouldn’t you love to take a place like this, tear it apart, and put it back together again, the way it once was … you know, restore it perfectly to everything it used to be.” Her eyes danced just thinking of it, and he rolled his eyes in feigned horror and exhaustion.
“Do you have any idea how much work that would be? Can you even imagine it … not to mention the cost. It would take an army of workers just to bring this place around, and the entire Bank of England.”
“But think of how beautiful it would be in the end. It really would be worth it.”
“To whom?” He laughed, looking at her in amusement. He had never seen her so excited about anything since they’d met. “How can you get so worked up over a place like this? It’s an absolute disaster.” But the truth was, it excited him too. But the enormity of the work that needed to be done was more than a little daunting. “Well ask about it when we get back to the road again. I’m sure they’ll tell us ten people were murdered here, and it’s a terrible place.” He teased her about it all the way back to the car, but she didn’t want to hear it. She thought it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, and if she could have, she would have bought it then and there, she said, and William readily believed she would have.
As it turned out, they met an old farmer just near the main road, and William asked him in French about the crumbling château they had just seen, and he had a great deal to tell them. Sarah struggled to understand as much as she could, and she got most of it. But afterwards, William filled her in on the rest of the details. The place they had seen was called Le Château de la Meuze, and it had been deserted for some eighty years, since the late 1850s. It had been inhabited before that by the same family for more than two hundred years, but the last of them had died out, having no children. It was passed on through generations of cousins and distant relatives after that, and the old man was no longer sure who owned it. He said there had still been people there when he was a boy, an old woman who couldn’t take care of the place, La Comtesse de la Meuze, who was a cousin of the French kings. But she died when he was a child, and the place had been shuttered up ever since then.
“How sad. Why hasn’t anyone ever tried to fix it up, I wonder.”
“It would take too much money probably. The French have had some hard times. And places like this aren’t easy to run once you restore them.” He knew only too well how much money and attention it took to run Whitfield, and this would be far more costly.
“I think it’s a shame.” She looked sad as she thought of the old house, thinking of what it might have been, or had been once. She would have loved to roll up her sleeves and help William restore it.
They got back in the car and he looked at her curiously. “Are you serious, Sarah? Do you really love this place? Would you really like doing something like this?”
“I’d love it.” Her eyes lit up.
“It’s a hell of a lot of work. And it doesn’t really work unless you do some of it yourself. You have to hammer and bang and work and sweat along with the men who help you do it. You know, I saw Belinda and George restore their place, and you have no idea how much work that was.” But he also knew how much they loved it, and how dear to them it had become in the process.
“Yes, but that place is much more complicated than this, and it’s a lot older,” Sarah explained, wishing she could wave a magic wand and take possession of the Château de le Meuze.
“This wouldn’t be easy either,” William said intelligently. “Absolutely everything needs to be restored, even the caretaker’s cottage and the barns and stables.”
“I don’t care,” she said stubbornly. “I’d love to do something like this”—she looked up at him—“if you’d help me.”
“I thought I was beyond taking on a project like this. It’s taken me fifteen years to get Whitfield running right, but I don’t know, you make it sound very exciting.” He smiled at her, feeling lucky and happy again, as he had since they’d met.