She had just cleared past the grape vines of the Mountain Castle winery and knew she was back on her mother's land for the first time in nearly seven years.
Ally stopped on the side of the narrow, winding, graveled road up into the mountains in a fold between the southern slope of Mount Marshall and a shorter mountain called The Peak, northwest of the small town of Washington. This quaint little hamlet on the verge between northern Virginia's hunt country and the Blue Ridge mountains wasn't the nation's capital Washington; it was a town also named Washington, but often called "Little Washington," with the distinction of being the first town to name itself after the first U.S. president.
It was only the small strip of land the road was on, though, that was her mother's land from the lane at the bottom of the mountain right up to the lower edge of the castle's front lawn. The Shenandoah National Park had slowly acquired all of the land around the small plateau the castle stood on so that it now encroached on all sides. The park had been after Miranda Templeton to donate or sell her land for decades, but, stubborn in nearly all things, Miranda had refused to even talk to them about it. Ally assumed that one day the government would just seize the land by right of eminent domain. She hoped her mother was gone before then, or there surely would be homicides involved.
She stepped out of the rental car and moved, with the aid of a cane, around to the hood. Initially, her eyes went anywhere but up the slope to where, from here, the first full glimpse of the castle could be seen. Her own car, a BMW convertible, could have been gotten out of storage as soon as she'd arrived back in Washington, D.C. The State Department would have permitted that and then would have put it back in storage at its expense if she wanted if she went out on another foreign assignment. State had been great about everything. But Ally didn't want to do anything yet that moved toward a decision on her future having been made.
She wanted to take no steps toward permanence until she could work out in her mind where to go from here. Chad had been her decision on where to go. Thanks probably to her mother's strong attitudes on the topic, Chad had been the first man Ally had been intimate with—had even been let through her intellectual and emotional shell to any extent. When she had committed to him, she had jettisoned all that had been her before. Now that he was gone, she felt totally empty. She needed to reinvent herself again. She wasn't really sure how to even start doing that—or what direction to do it in. She was still in shock.
She'd been back a month, moving from Sibley Hospital, thanks to the arrangements that State had made, to a rehab facility, and then to a bedroom in a colleague's house in Arlington. She knew she couldn't stay there indefinitely, though. Only now, when she'd been given a clean bill of health, as long as she continued with a rehab regime for her leg at home, had she rented a car and driven into the northern Virginia countryside—not more than twenty-five miles from where she had been staying—to check up on her mother and the castle.
She didn't know where she'd be staying tonight. She didn't even know where her mother was. She hadn't called her since the bombing. She hadn't been able to while she was in the hospital and being rehabilitated, and when she'd returned to the States she always seemed on the cusp of coming to see her mother face to face rather than calling. More significantly, her mother hadn't contacted her either. The doctor had said it was simple smoke inhalation that her mother had suffered from this latest fire. She should have recovered from that now. Surely State had contacted Miranda about Ally's condition. But she hadn't called. Such was the relationship between the two that this was exactly the sort of situation in which neither could think of what to say to the other.
Ally thought she knew the major reason her mother hadn't contacted her. It was the second serious fire. Ally had refused to come back to the castle after the second fire. She'd had left no uncertainty about being livid that her mother wouldn't give up her dangerous smoking habits. They had frequently met in New York City while Ally was working on Broadway play sets there after graduate school and then later, in Washington, D.C., when Ally had taken and passed the Foreign Service exam, but the meetings were always away from the castle.
Although they'd made up since that first fire, Ally had been furious that her mother had burned out the part of the castle Ally had lived in—and had let her mother know in no uncertain terms how she felt. It had been the first time Ally had spoken to her mother that way. The two women had been inseparable before that. Ally was thirty-six; she hadn't been a child for some time. Indeed, under her mother's wing and in her mother's swirling world of symphonies and international travel, Ally had never been a child. There had been no separation at all between them until Ally went off to study drama, and specifically set design, at Wellesley. And even after having taken her masters from Columbia following that, Miranda had been intimately involved in Ally's decisions to work on Broadway for a few years and then to go with the State Department to work in its cultural affairs department. It had only been Miranda's burning of the castle that second time that had begun to open a chasm between them—which had only widened when Ally told Miranda about Chad. And now there had been yet another fire Miranda had caused.
Miranda hadn't reacted well to Ally having found a man to love. Not at all well. Over the past month, Ally had even wondered whether the latest fire had been at least a subconscious signal by her mother on the impending change in Ally's marital status.
Steeling herself, Ally found the strength to look up the slope at the castle. From this distance it looked intact. The fires hadn't destroyed the stucco-covered stone façade. It was only by looking more closely that Ally could see the blank stares of the glassless windows, which, in several places, no longer opened onto a roof-covered interior. She had purposely stopped here to look at the castle, and to squint her eyes in doing so. She could only take the ruination of it in degrees.
They called it the castle, although it did have a name—Banffy. And it wasn't really a castle in dimensions. It had been constructed as a scaled-down replica of a real castle in Transylvania. The larger, grander—but not more impressive; most certainly not in location—Transylvanian version had begun construction in 1437 and was built for one of the most prominent and powerful families in Transylvania for many centuries, the Banffys, whose patriarchs regularly were appointed as governors of the region. It began life as a typical stronghold bastion, but as wars became more sophisticated and organized, it was turned into a Baroque palace in the mid eighteenth century. Extensive renovations were undertaken to expand it and modify it into the Gothic Revival style in the mid nineteenth century.
This was the point at which the Virginia version of Banffy was conceived and executed. One of the architects on the nineteenth-century renovation of the Transylvanian version, Stephen Monyer, immigrated to Virginia. Looking for someplace that would remind him of the topography of Transylvania, he settled on the mid slope of the 3,300-foot-high Mount Marshall at the northern end of the Blue Ridge Mountains. His Virginia version was faithful to the redone Gothic Revival style of the original in every way except for scale. It was a hidden gem, tucked away in the folds of the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge, the heights of which had been taken over by the federal government in the 1920s to carve out a national park extending from northern Virginia down to the Smokies in Georgia. The string of mountaintops was crowned by both a top-of-the-world parkway, named the Skyline Drive in the northern section and the Blue Ridge Parkway in the south, and a section of the Appalachian hiking trail that went from the far north to the far south of the country's eastern coast.
Previous owners of the American version of the castle, all generational members of the Monyer families, had stubbornly rebuffed the government's attempts to add the Banffy acreage to the park until the last of the Monyers had died, when the federal government was no longer budgeting for such acquisitions. Now everyone had more or less forgotten there was a castle hidden on the southern slope of Mount Marshall. Miranda Templeton had only heard about the castle when she was visiting friends in the town of Washington at the foot of the mountain. It was a time when she was looking for a retreat, if not necessarily a castle, as well as a time when she had inherited money to indulge herself in a remembrance of the many years she had traveled with symphony orchestras in Europe. So, she bought Banffy castle and devoted years to restoring the gardens—and, incrementally burning out the interior of the castle in unintentional acts of forgetfulness and in having only slapdash repairs made that moved her into ever-smaller habitable areas of the building.
It had been the news reports of the first fire that had alerted the park officials to the unfinished business of land acquisition on the side of Mount Marshall. After a few years of unsuccessfully working on Miranda to donate or sell, though, they had given up their interest yet again.
The building had never really been able to claim full habitability even during the three years Ally had lived there with her mother before going off to Wellesley. After the first fire, they essentially lived in two rooms and a kitchen downstairs and two bedrooms, Miranda's study, and a bath upstairs. But the rooms they did live in were elegantly outfitted and maintained. Ally had been there long enough, however, to be smitten by the minor grandeur and unique beauty of the building; the gardens, that her mother lovingly restored and maintained; and the quiet, private mountain beauty of its location. She had always dreamed of restoring the castle interior fully one day. But her mother's smoking habit and her eccentric willingness to "make do" had made that day an ever-more-remote possibility.
Ally returned to the driver's seat and started the car on its steep, hairpin-curved drive up to Banffy. As she drove, she tried—unsuccessfully—not to look at the castle as its ruination became increasingly apparent. Thus it was that, as she drew closer, she saw the tail end of a red truck disappear on a track into the forest at the upslope side of the property. It was only a glimpse, but it arrested her attention because she knew that the track went nowhere—or at least had gone nowhere when she'd lived here. Trekkers on the Appalachian Trail sometimes found their way down this track from the summit of Mount Marshall to be flabbergasted at coming out into the formal gardens of a small castle ruins, but vehicles couldn't get far on it now. It was part of an old, disused fire trail that had become overgrown and impassable even for jeeps.
She brought the rental car to a stop short of a yellow caution tape that had been strung in front of the castle—probably after the most recent fire. She could have gone on, as the tape was down on the ground across the driveway, but she didn't, almost as if she welcomed the instruction not to come closer to the structure.
Her heart ached as she sat there and looked at what had become of Banffy. On this, the front façade, both stories of the building were just a shell. She laughed a low, ironic laugh when it occurred to her that her home now closely resembled the palace it was modeled on—more than it had for a very long time. The Transylvania Banffy Castle had been gutted in World War II and only now was starting to be restored. Wouldn't it be something, she thought, if the two were being restored at the same time?
As she got out of the car, having worked up the courage to go inside and see what, if anything still existed, she heard the crunch of tires on the gravel of the mountain driveway. Turning, she saw that it was a sheriff's car. So, she stood by the fender of her car and waited for the other vehicle to come to a stop near her. Out of the cruiser, taking his time getting his bulk out from behind the steering wheel, emerged a florid-faced, bullet-headed, middle-aged man who Ally reasoned must be the local sheriff. No one else on the sheriff's staff would have been permitted to let themselves go to pot like this and still keep their job. In this county, she knew, the sheriff was elected—and anyone was free to run for the job.
The man walked around to the passenger side of his cruiser, but still a good six yards from where Ally stood. He tipped his hat and said, "Good day, miss. I'm Sheriff Ed Shiflet. Is there something I can help you with? This here is restricted property, I'm afraid."
"It's OK, sheriff. I'm Ally Templeton, the owner's daughter—well, a co-owner of the property. I've just now returned to Virginia to see what has happened here."
