King of the Castle we want a party in a castle
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Restoring The Castle Ch. 04 free porn video
Ally woke up with the words on her lips. She realized she had actually mouthed them aloud. It had been some time—long before the bombing, even before she and Chad had gotten serious, since she had had the dream that had her saying the sentence over and over again. It was only now that she realized it had been that long.
‘Who’s my father?’
It had been the special phrase that she’d held close to her and had brought out to see the light of day only when she was mad at her mother—when she wanted to see her mother’s mood darken. When she had the feeling that her relationship with her mother was too out of balance and she wasn’t being given the proper consideration. And her mother would always stop dead in her tracks, whatever she was doing. She’d pull herself up and say, ‘You don’t really want to know. Making one up would be so much better than the reality. Albert Einstein can be your father if that will make you feel smarter.’
Once when her mother had really been in a rage over botched hotel arrangements when the symphony was playing in Vienna, Ally heard Miranda swear about some hotel functionary and saying, ‘Those East Europeans are all alike.’
Ally had asked ‘alike like who?’ and Miranda had said, ‘Like your father.’
Miranda had immediately realized what she had said and had instantly calmed down and left the room, returning a short time later after she had taken charge and brought order out of chaos on the hotel arrangements pretending that she’d said nothing untoward before she left. But when Ally started to return to her question, dazed that her mother had revealed this much, Miranda severely shushed her and moved the discussion and the action to something else. The first chance Ally got, though, she’d sought out maps and books that would tell her where Eastern Europe was. It turned out to be a much bigger place than would readily reveal who her father was.
Fathers had always been a taboo topic between Miranda and Ally—and Ally only brought the subject up when she wanted to irritate her mother. It wasn’t until Ally’s teens, though, that she really considered the topic in relationship to her own father. A father was never mentioned as a family role, and Ally lived such an isolated life from other children and from family situations that it just didn’t occur to her much that families traditionally came with a set of parents.
She was very much aware that Miranda hadn’t had a father of her own but that she’d been raised in the large townhouse of her mother’s Manhattan robber baron father among an extended family existing almost entirely of women except for Miranda’s grandfather, a stern, foreboding figure who left little doubt that Miranda and her mother were under his roof at his sufferance. When Ally was very young, Miranda would tell her stories about her mean great-grandfather that would curl Ally’s toes.
Miranda had been home schooled, so Ally was as well. When she’d come of age, Miranda had been shipped off to Wellesley, so naturally Ally had been too. But Miranda had studied musical composition and theory and Ally had rebelled to the extent that she took up theater arts—primarily stage design and construction. Miranda never got to finish college, though. Early in her senior year, her grandfather died and she and her mother were shipped off to less-wealthy, dry-as-toast maternal relatives in Minnesota. Miranda spoke of them not at all in later life, and they were bland enough to slip off Ally’s radar of family tree interest. It was only years later, after a lengthy internal fight in the family that no one bothered to tell Miranda or her mother about that they found that Ally’s great-grandfather had inexplicably left the two of them millions in trust funds.
Long before this came into light, though, Miranda had to have a job to hold up her mother’s and her end in the household, her mother never having been trained for anything outside of the house, and in 1964 she managed to land a temporary assistant job with the fifty-eight-year old conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony, August Donáti, a Hungarian-born conductor and composer. The two immediately hit it off and Miranda proved to be the perfect personal assistant and quickly received the job permanently. Donáti was on the move shortly thereafter, going first, to London to conduct the BBC Symphony, and then to Sweden to conduct the Stockholm Symphony and subsequently, in 1970, to Washington, D.C., and the National Symphony.
Miranda traveled the world with him, devoting her every waking moment to handling his personal affairs, seeing even more of him, some said, than did his concert pianist wife, Erica. Donáti was at the National Symphony until the late 1970s and then moved on to the Detroit Symphony. By that time, though, Miranda had somehow acquired a baby daughter of her own, born in 1976, and, even more surprising, didn’t go with Donáti to Detroit. What she told people if they asked—and they certainly had to be either brave or stupid to dare to ask—why she hadn’t gone to Detroit was that she’d had quite enough cold weather, thank you very much, when she’d lived in Minneapolis and Stockholm. Knowing how icy she could be even without the weather, people were content to accept this explanation.
She stayed in Washington, D.C., and became the rock for the new conductor of the National Symphony, the Russian-born cellist, Misha Recevich. Sometime in these years in Washington she had become close friends with Angela and Dennis Harris.
Rumors were rife that Miranda and Donáti were lovers. Conversely, some said, rather cattily, that Miranda was a man hater even in those days and that her bitterness had interfered with her close working relationship with the conductor, a relationship that had also strained Donáti’s marriage. All of this, of course, is inevitable among high strung, intensely professional musicians, Angela Harris had taken Miranda under her wing. She then became such a substitute intimate friend that, whereas such spats normally would be patched up and Miranda and Erica should have become close again, Angela now was too fully in the picture. The wags said this was the real reason Miranda didn’t go to Detroit—that she hadn’t become comfortable with Ilse again and that Donáti couldn’t take the two most-important women in his life sparring. One had to go, and Miranda was the one who bowed out.
Other speculators, pointing to the child, Alice, who had seemed to have just appeared backstage one day, opined that either the Donátis were not that pleased with Miranda with a child in tow or that, although refusing to even hint who the father was, Miranda felt she could not leave Washington, D.C., where the father lived.
Whatever the reason, Miranda transferred her miracle worker ways easily enough to the new conductor, Recevich. Since Miranda had first come to Washington with Donáti, the symphony had played in Constitutional Hall, the headquarters of the Daughters of the American Revolution, which, at the time, had the largest concert hall in the nation’s capital. The Kennedy Center was built in 1986 and the symphony moved there. Miranda was never as comfortable at the new venue as she had been at the old, though, and she only stuck it out there for five more years, before, having recently learned that she was worth the millions her grandfather had left her, she was talking of retirement and looking for some appropriate, private and isolated, place to settle down.
The Harrises had just moved to the smaller Washington village near the Blue Ridge in northern Virginia, and Angela found the castle, which was of elegant European design, something that pleased the international traveler, Miranda. So, taking her young teen daughter with her, and contracting to work checking orchestral compositions at home to fill in the time she didn’t spend developing the castle’s formal gardens, Miranda moved into Banffy.
As Ally lay there, slowly waking up to a new day in Angela Harris’s guest bedroom, she entertai
ned the question of her parentage for the first time in more than a year. She had no trouble deciding why she was bringing up the question now. She just didn’t know why she hadn’t given the likelihood greater consideration before. The previous day she had had two encounters with the past that linked in a way that was so obvious to her now that she was flabbergasted it hadn’t occurred before.
August Donáti. It must have been August Donáti who had fathered her, despite his age at the time. Sixty-year-old men were known to be able to father children. Not that he’d ever been in a position to be more than biological contributor of the necessary material, of course. It was all so obvious now.
And what had triggered this revelation from the previous day’s events? First had been those silver cups. The initials ‘A.D.’ on the cups. She had seen the initials before, and her mother’s companion cup, but they had meant little to her. The previous day, in her mother’s living room in the castle, though, had been the first time in many years that she remembered there was an inscription on the reverse side, ‘Forgotten Never.’ The initials, of course, were those of the conductor. And then there was the phonograph record Lois had given her from her mother—what had seemed to be Miranda’s most precious possession when she was fleeing a burning building. August Donáti had been the conductor of the works on that record.
What would have been more natural in the 1975–76 time period? Her mother’s whole life was devoted to August Donáti’s needs. When would she have had time to meet another lover than the conductor? And because he was as old as he was and already in a longstanding marriage, of course he wouldn’t have considered reordering his life to make a home with Miranda and her daughter. This even provided the best explanation of why Miranda had had the apparent falling out with the conductor’s wife and hadn’t gone with him to Detroit. There was a love child that the conductor and Miranda shared.
And August Donáti had been born and raised in Hungary—an Eastern Europe country.
Yes, it all fit into place. It perhaps should have lifted a great burden of doubt off Ally’s shoulders to know the likelihood of this after all these years. But, strangely, it didn’t. It didn’t make her resent Donáti—certainly not in the vein that her mother resented all men. He had died in the late eighties, so there wasn’t even any question of connecting with him after all these years. Erica was still alive—Angela got letters from her—but she wouldn’t want to become any closer than that to her husband’s love child either.
Still, it was nice to have a mystery laid to rest—or at least that there was a rational explanation that could help her to stop speculating about her past. She hadn’t really realized until now how much that question had weighed on her.
When Ally came down for breakfast, she found that Angela wasn’t there. As the cook was bringing out a basket of warm rolls and an assortment of jellies, she said, ‘Mrs. Harris called while you were taking your shower. She has gone to Mrs. Aylor’s farm and called when she got there and asked me to the tell you that this is one of your mother’s good days, but that you should come over within an hour or two and plan not to stay too long. There is no telling how long her good day will last. She tires so easily around strangers. Oh, excuse me. I didn’t mean to put it that way.’
‘That’s perfectly OK, Sally Ann,’ Ally quickly said. ‘I’ve been gone for several years and I’m afraid that I am a stranger to my mother now, with her condition and all. We’ll try to fix that, but it’s best I face the truth of it.’
She was met at the door of Lois’s house much as she had been the previous day, but this time Lois had a smile on her face that beamed from one ear to the other.
‘Praise the Lord, this is one of her best days in weeks. And she knows you’re coming. I don’t think I’d mention that you were here yesterday, though. That is sure to confuse and worry her, and confusion is what sometimes makes her sink into herself.’
‘Of course. Thanks for mentioning it, Lois.’
They moved down the front hall beside the staircase to the second level and toward the sunroom porch at the back of the house. Half way there, though, Lois, who was leading, stopped, turned to Ally, and laid a hand on her arm. ‘Mrs. Harris told me you showed her the phonograph record I gave you yesterday. It seemed to upset her a bit, and she said more than once that she hoped you wouldn’t tell your mother you received that, so . . .’
‘No, that’s fine, Lois. I won’t mention it.’
Ten more steps and they were at the doorway of the sunporch, which was full of sunshine, and were standing in front of two women, holding hands and also looking radiant despite their ages. The two were sitting at the table facing the doorway.
The difference in the atmosphere on the porch between the previous day and this one was remarkable. There was a twinkle in the eyes of both Miranda and Angela. The two must have just recovered from having a good, shared laugh, and the faces of both lit up even more when they saw Ally at the door.
‘Ally!’ Miranda exclaimed, and Ally almost broke out in tears at the single word of recognition, imbued with love and welcome. ‘Come here and let me give you a hug, child.’
Suddenly Ally was that child again, wanting nothing more than to be in her mother’s comforting arms.
Angela sat, beaming and watching Ally come and lean down into her mother for an enveloping hug and a kiss on both cheeks.
‘I didn’t know what to expect. They’d told me you’d been badly injured and that there had been some surgeries—some reconstruction—but I can’t see it, and you are beautiful. Even more beautiful than you ever were before.’
‘Most of the wounds are on the inside, Mother,’ Ally murmured. ‘We needn’t dwell on those, but I would like to tell you about them.’ She started to cry—like she hadn’t cried for anyone since the bombing. There was nothing like a mother’s comfort. She started to whisper of all she had endured in the last several months and of the hurting she still felt, both in body and soul. She only spoke of Chad briefly, though, because she knew her mother wouldn’t be pleased to hear about any men in her life.
Lois had brought a chair for her, and mother and daughter just sat side by side, in an embrace, while Miranda rocked her daughter back and forth and made calming noises at all Ally was telling her. Miranda’s voice droned on in a murmur, telling her daughter repeatedly that everything would be OK.
And here, on this day, for the first time since she’d lost Chad and her body had been broken, Ally accepted that, yes, it would be OK. It wasn’t OK right at this moment, but she had inherited the strength of her mother, and someday everything would be OK again.
* * * *
Sally Ann had driven Ally to Lois’s farm on her way to the market, and Ally opted to walk back to Angela’s house rather than wait for her in the car after the all-too-brief meeting with her mother in which Miranda seemed as lucid as ever. Angela had said it would be good for Ally not to stay too long the first time and for Angela to stay a few minutes longer to help calm Miranda down slowly.
The walk, which wasn’t all that long a distance, was something Ally felt she needed to calm herself as well. She loved the small country village of Washington, often called Little Washington, to differentiate it from its much bigger brother up on the Potomac, Washington, D.C. Founded in the mid eighteenth century and still a small village of no more than five blocks by two blocks, and having a population of about 150 permanent residents, the village had managed to remain quaint by playing on its favorable position in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains and opening its well-preserved and maintained colonial buildings up as bed and breakfasts and high-end gift and antique stores.
The Inn at Li
ttle Washington held down the village’s main intersection and kept the village on the ‘to see’ map by maintaining its five-diamond/five-star hotel and dining room rating for probably longer than any other establishment in the greater Washington, D.C., region. The town was helped by all of the wealthy country estates in the surrounding area maintained by the important and rich of the nation’s capital who wanted to live plantation style rather than in District of Colombia or northern Virginia or southern Maryland suburbs and high rises. The village was seventy miles in road-trip distance and about two hundred and fifty years in time from its bigger brother.
Ally hadn’t made it into the center of the village from Lois’ farm before a police cruiser pulled up beside her and Sheriff Shiflet leaned out of the side window, gave her a look that was a cross between a grimace and a sneer, and asked in a blustery voice, ‘Car trouble? Need a lift to somewhere?’
‘No thanks, sheriff,’ Ally answered, not stopping, but slowing down. Shiflet’s car was keeping pace with her. ‘I’ve just been to Lois Aylor’s farm to visit my mother, and I’m walking back into town. I’m staying with Angela Harris.’
‘Seeing your mother, eh? And staying at the Harrises’? So you’ve decided not to stay up at the castle?’
‘Not for a while at least. Angela’s an old friend. We have a lot of catching up to do.’
‘Given thought to the need to tear the place up there down? As I said, the judge won’t wait long to give an order himself, and you very well could end up spending more to get it done on his schedule.’
‘No, I’m still thinking that one out.’ Ally didn’t know why she didn’t tell the sheriff straight out that she’d decided to take on the restoration of the castle as a project. He just seemed much too anxious for her to tear it down, and he irritated her.
‘It would be best all the way around. And your mother could go into a home somewhere away from here.’
‘Sheriff, I really don’t think . . .’ She was having a hard time completing that sentence. He was being entirely too pushy. She hadn’t even thought of taking her mother away from here.
‘Yep, best for all, I suppose,’ he continued. ‘It would stop a lot of talk, it would. A lot of talk about your mother and those missing men. Probably the best way to protect her.’
‘I hardly think my mother needs protection,’ Ally retorted, finding it very hard now not to show how steamed she was. ‘And I’m surprised that law enforcement pays that much attention to malicious rumors.’
‘OK, Ms. Templeton. You have a nice day now. And I’d give it all a little thought, if I was you.’
With that, the sheriff picked up speed with his cruiser and made a smooth left-hand turn at the inn’s intersection, without even hesitating at the four-way stop sign, and was gone from Ally’s view.
The tension he had brought to her hadn’t gone away by the time she reached Angela’s house. She was fumbling with the key in the lock on the front door until she realized the door wasn’t locked and remembered that Angela had told her there wasn’t much locking of doors in the village. Without really giving it much thought, she went straight for her cell phone and rang through to one of her colleagues at the State Department in D.C.’s Foggy Bottom district.
‘Hello, Rachel? It’s Ally. Ally Templeton. Yes, fine, thank you. Glad to be back. Yes, I’ll be here in Little Washington for a while. Say, I’m calling because I wondered if you might do me a favor . . . yes, just checking with anyone you can rustle up in our embassy in Prague. Could you ask someone there to check on whether a symphony violinist, Dennis Harris . . . yes, an old friend of my mothers. You remember she was the conductor’s assistant at the National Symphony. Could you ask for an advisory on whether Dennis Harris is living in Prague? No, not a great hurry. But I’ll call you back at the end of the week, if you don’t mind. Yes, the mountains are restful. Just what I need for now. Yes, every day in every way I’m healing a bit more, Thanks. No, I don’t know when I’ll be back at work.’
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