Castle of the Wolf Read Free

Fussell?”
    Yet Dorinda was not yet finished. “The Noire Forêt ?” She shuddered delicately and quite suddenly seemed to have lost interest in acquiring the property after all. “What an odious place! I have heard it is barely civilized. Whatever did your père think of, my dear Hailstone, to purchase a house somewhere like that in the first place?”
    Mr. Weatherby gave her a bland smile. “Then you should consider yourself lucky, my lady, that the castle has been deeded to your sister-in-law. Miss Fussell?” His kind, watery eyes turned to Cissy once more.
    A castle?
    Who would have thought that her father owned a castle in Baden? He had friends there, for sure, living somewhere near Freiburg, where, as he had told her, small, man-made streams ran through the streets and filled the town with their faint babbling. Each year her father had received a carefully wrapped and boxed bottle of kirsch from the Black Forest. On the cold days of autumn and winter, he had liked to put a glass of kirsch in his cocoa —“To warm my old bones,” as he had said. Yet her father had not been that old, or so it had seemed to her. Surely not old enough to die…
    “Miss Fussell?”
    Cissy shook her head to clear the cobwebs from her brain.
    A castle in the Black Forest.
    “The…” She forced herself to concentrate. It would not do to live in the past. If you lived in the immediate past, her father used to say, it was escape. But if you lived in ages long gone, then it was called studies. At the memory, she almost felt like smiling. Almost. “The letter.”
    “Yes, Miss Fussell.” She could hear concern in the lawyer’s voice. “Do you wish me to read it out aloud?”
    A castle in the Black Forest.
    For me?
    “To my only daughter, Miss Celia Fussell, I bequeath the estate of Wolfenbach…” —it seemed to Cissy as if she could hear her father’s voice, slightly rough and raspy with tobacco smoke— “under the conditions as explained in the letter enclosed.”
    What conditions?
    Cissy met the lawyer’s gaze. Worry had darkened his eyes. Did he know what the letter contained? She moistened her lips and shot a look at the piece of folded paper he held out to her. Suddenly, her mouth went dry. “If you would be so kind,” she managed.
    Mr. Weatherby nodded, then broke the wax seal. Carefully, he opened the letter and smoothed out the paper with long swipes of his hand. His eyes flitted over the page, darting back and forth as if caught in the web of her father’s spiky handwriting. After a moment, the lawyer cleared his throat delicately, adjusted his glasses once more, and looked up. “Lord Hailstone wrote this letter a few years prior to the existing will. The date given is the twenty-fourth of August, 1820.”
    “But…but…” Agitation made George splutter. “That’s your birthday, Cis!”
    Her twentieth birthday. The day she had resigned herself to the fate of being on the shelf forevermore. For a moment, the memory hurt. Even now. Even after all these years.
    “Why would Papa write such a letter on your birthday?” George sounded puzzled.
    “ Très morbidé ,” Dorinda commented, obviously piqued because so much attention was focused on her sister-in-law.
    Mr. Weatherby chose to ignore her remark. His eyes remained fixed on Cissy. “Miss Fussell? Do you wish me to continue?”
    She gave herself a mental shake and straightened her shoulders. “Of course.” Pleased, she noted how calm her voice sounded. As if nothing fazed her, not even the memory of that summer after her one and only season in London. Twenty years of age and no hopes for the future. How strange that it had not seemed to matter these past seven years. And how strange that it mattered now, more than ever.
    Cissy folded her hands in her lap to prevent them from shaking while she listened to the even voice of the lawyer reading out her father’s last wishes:
    “‘My dearest daughter, when I am no longer among the living and this comes