the end of the driveway, and the girls clambered up the gravel drive, wriggling with anticipation, dragging suitcases on wheels that caught on the stones.
Before they became part-time residents of Brackenhill, the sisters had not known the castle existed. They’d never been there, never visited their aunt and uncle. Their mother had said the drive was too far; her sister was unkind, she’d said. Then suddenly, one summer, for no obvious reason, everything had changed. Their mother had announced she couldn’t work at night, sleep during the day, and trust that they would behave themselves all summer. Julia, newly thirteen, had been caught sneaking a neighbor boy into her bedroom. Their mother, strangely pious when it suited her, had taken to praying about Julia’s virtue until she’d somehow stumbled on an elegant solution: the girls would spend the summer with her sister in the Catskills.
That was Hannah’s first glimpse of the castle, and of Aunt Fae and Uncle Stuart, hands gripped together at the gate, mouths set in a line.
Aunt Fae was Mom’s sister, and Mom spoke of her only in the pejorative, her tone lilting a bit, dragging out the -ae, mocking her in a way Hannah and her sister didn’t understand. Oh, you know Fae, she’d say, but in truth they didn’t. Not really. She and her husband had come to visit a handful of times in their lives. If asked, they’d have to concentrate to come up with their aunt’s and uncle’s names.
They knew Aunt Fae was more rounded in the middle than Mom, who was bony and flat. After that first summer they knew Fae would hug them in a way Mom never did. They knew Uncle Stuart would bop the crowns of their heads with a soft closed fist and a little pop of his tongue. They knew their aunt and uncle would laugh sometimes, shockingly, from the back of their throats, in a way their mother and stepfather did not. Yet Aunt Fae’s eyes were always a bit rheumy, like she’d just finished crying.
But that first summer of 1998, all they knew was they got to live in a castle for almost three months. The castle was a square, with turrets at each corner and a courtyard at the center, bursting with flowers and arbors, stone walkways. It smelled like peonies and honeysuckle, the whole expanse of garden exploding with reds, yellows, pinks; deep-orange lilies; sedum and daisies; tall splashes of lupine and irises. Deep-green vines fingered their way up the stone walls, wrapped around lancet windows, their Gothic arches softened in the midday sun.
Hannah took a room in the turret, the round expanse of windows looking out into that courtyard. She saw it all for the first time, flinging open the windows to smell the lavender, freesia. She hoped she’d never go home again, back to the powder-blue-and-white bedroom, the stale silence of her mother’s absence, and felt disloyal. Julia took the room next to hers, down the hall (what a long hall! Built for cartwheels!), but eyed Hannah’s exuberance enviously, a thirteen-year-old who wanted desperately to be a teenager and still a child at the same time. They discovered a door between their rooms—technically two doors, with a small space between them. Julia would sometimes leave Hannah notes or tiny gifts in that little space. At least, in the beginning.
Hannah squealed with delight at her first view of the woods, trees and trees as far as she could see from her bedroom window—“A thousand acres in all,” Aunt Fae told her proudly—imagining hours of lost time, exploring, finding brooks, salamanders, tree hideouts, secret passageways. Nothing but her imagination, stretched far and wide, and her best friend, Julia. The Beaverkill River ran below Valley Road to the west, shallow and burbling in the dry July heat. The girls could hear it from the castle, an always-welcoming music box, mixed with the sounds of the birds, the silence of the mountains, and the smell of pine and something earthy and rotting.
Hannah discovered that if she lay in the right place, right in the center of the courtyard between the honeysuckle and the roses, next to the fountain, she could see all four turrets at once in periphery, their towers poking at the listing clouds, the blue above her like a song, and she’d never known happiness like that, a bubble in her chest about to burst, gasping like she couldn’t catch her breath. Even years later, Hannah couldn’t remember a better kind of peace.