The Last Baron Read online

  The Last Baron

  Saber Vale

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Also by Saber Vale

  Chapter 1

  I stood on the side of the road in the chilling rain, looking up at the ancient medieval castle, it’s spires silhouetted against the purple, clouded sky in the fading evening light. It was spring, but felt like mid-winter, cold and wet, windy and dismal-dark, complimenting the castle’s already grey, Gothic allure.

  Castle Griffenburg looked like something out of a fairy tale, or really, probably, a horror story.

  I’d been there half a dozen times as a little girl, but suddenly it seemed foreign, ominous, not at all the cheerful fairytale castle I remembered. I worried, suddenly, if I’d built it up in my imagination, this magical place where everything could be perfect again, where my dreams could live on without the burden and demands of daily life. I needed an escape, and I’d been sure the castle could be my respite. I’d fantasized about returning to my ancestral home, cleaning and restoring, writing and re-living my childhood so much that it never occurred to me that it might be more trouble than it was worth.

  Without my mother beside me extolling it’s virtues and values, though, I suddenly wondered if I’d really feel any connection to it at all, or if the strange, cavernous, maze-like citadel would be no more welcoming to me than it was to marauding Bohemian soldiers hundreds of years before.

  It was the closest thing to a home I’d ever had, but the sight of it sent a chill up my spine.

  Maybe, I thought, I’d made a huge mistake. Maybe I should have stayed in California, tried to find a real job, and let the castle remain as it was in my memory, a perfect symbol of opulence and majesty, reminding me that in spite of everything, I was a somebody, the last living Baroness Von Griffenberg.

  I waited, standing like a wet cat in the cold drizzle, on the bus to take me up the mountainside for two hours before I realized it wasn’t coming. When I finally dragged my already beat-to-hell suitcase through the desolate Bavarian town at the foot of the castle mountain, in to a coffee shop (the only storefront open), I asked a barista and learned that it had stopped running years before.

  I was so exhausted, but even darker rain clouds were gathering menacingly over the town, enrobing the castle and urging me to act. I had no where else to go and I couldn’t really afford a hotel room. I needed to get to the castle.

  “How am I supposed to get up there?” I asked the barista, sighing and switching from German to English.

  She looked at me like I was crazy and also like I was annoying her.

  “Why would you want to?” she asked, “it’s not really open to the public.”

  “No, I…” I stopped myself from rolling my eyes.

  “It’s also haunted by the dead girl,” she said casually, as though telling me it had termites.

  I stared at her bluntly, biting my tongue so I didn’t correct ehr. There’s no such thing as ghosts and, anyway, I’d slept there as a kid enough times to know it certainly wasn’t haunted.

  Her mention of the girl disturbed me. It was a part of the castle’s history I knew almost nothing about, and really didn’t want to explore. It wasn’t just part of the castle’s history, she was part of my history, and it bugged me that the barista was talking about it so casually and openly the way she was. I knew better than to say anything.

  I certainly didn’t want to tell her the truth, that in spite of my ripped jeans, beat-up keds, t-shirt and, and an old Berkley hoodie, I was technically a member of Bavarian nobility, the new owner of the castle. My dark hair, nearly onyx-colored eyes, and round face made me look nothing like the blond, thin women who seemed to be everywhere around me, but I was, however tangentially, one of them.

  “It’s sometimes better if people don’t know you’re noble,” my mother had said to me once, when she was trying to make a landlord feel bad for us, staving off an eviction for another precious few days.

  She’d kept it a secret when we wanted to seem pathetic, and made a point of sharing when she wanted to be respected or admired. She used her nearly useless title to to gain admittance into private clubs who wanted a royal-sounding name on their roster and to convince wealthier, older men to marry her. She’d held onto it the way a family passes down a precious heirloom that’s become shabby with overuse, a worn-out symbol of long faded glory.

  She’d felt so entitled to luxury, and had never been able to be satisfied with life. She’d thrown everything away as many times as she’d had it all, waking me to help her pack in the middle of the night while her latest conquest slept, suspecting nothing.

  When she’d finally married Rex Spalding, the wealthiest man she could ever hope to meet, I thought she might have finally achieved her social-climbing dreams. I hoped so, but we’d mostly lost touch. I remaindered her too much, I think, of the life she’d had before.

  Through it all, I had never thought about owning the castle.

  I had honestly assumed it had been sold already, so I’d pushed it out of my mind long before, relegating it to memory. My mother couldn’t be counted on, so I didn’t count on her. I’d put every ounce of energy into finding a way to love life without seeking men, money, and status, and had certainly avoided all three. I would never be desperate, never count on a man or his money to save me, no matter how hard my back was pressed against the wall. I saw how doing so made my mother vulnerable to another’s whims over and over again.

  I’d tried, briefly, to date, but what I’d really wanted, the gnawing desire inside of me, could never be satisfied by the gentle, conscientious classmates I’d gone out (and then home) with. I couldn’t really put into words what I really did want. Something like pleasure, but different. Pain? Loss of control? I wasn’t sure, so how could I look for it? The last thing I wanted was to pursue a feeling, the way my mother had, and end up a searching, desperate woman, forever unsatisfied.

  I’d focused all of my energy on developing my mind, and I knew for certain that I’d graduate college, get a Phd., become a professor, and never leave the cloistered, protective halls of academia for as long as I lived. I’d never have to worry myself with anything but my work, and it wouldn’t matter that I’d never be rich.

  Then, I didn’t get accepted into the only Phd. program I’d applied to. In one fell swoop I’d lost my dreams, my access to student housing, and the funding I’d expected to carry me through to my first job. After I shook off my shock, realizing I needed money fast, and had sent off a book proposal immediately to a small history book press, but the tiny advance I’d gotten from that effort was evaporating as quickly as a rain puddle on a hot summer day. I could hardly afford the tiny room I rented in a huge, over-crowded house in Berkeley.

  I had no idea what to do, so it almost seemed serendipitous to get word about the castle the way that I did. With one horrible phone call, thousands of tons of stone and brick, countless locked, mysterious rooms and their contents, and the title of Baroness all technically belonged to me.

  When I’d gotten the news I’d been overwhelmed, but also, I’m ashamed to admit, deeply relieved.

  I’d badly needed a place to live, and my options were getting bleak.

  My mother, I learned, had died in a plane crash about four months before, on a flight over Mount K
ilimajaro with her new husband.

  I hadn’t even been informed until they recovered the plane ten days after the crash, and an official in Tanzania somehow found my phone number on my college’s website.

  A man with a strong African accent had called me at my office, asking me for an outrageous fee to send her remains before I’d even processed the news he’d given me, that she was dead, and had been for ten days.

  She and Rex Spalding, a billionaire investor fifteen years her senior, were both killed on impact along with their pilot. They were taking a detour to look at the mountain on the way to a luxurious hunting camp in southern Kenya, I guess. It had taken the Tanzanian government so long to figure out how to get in touch with me that she, and the stepfather I’d met only once, had already been cremated.

  I’d received a box filled with her ashes postmarked from halfway around the world two weeks later. I guess Rex’s estate had paid for it, because I’d insisted I couldn’t afford the cost of shipment, even when they’d threatened to throw the box of her ashes in the garbage.

  It had, in a certain way, amused me to think of my mother’s final resting place being a dumpster, but I know it would have horrified her and I was glad when she was sent along. I’d brought a small silver box filled with her ashes with me to Griffenberg, so I could inter her in the vault below the castle, as she’d always hoped she might be.

  As her only heir, in spite of my mother being married to an obscenely wealthy business man, I was left with almost nothing but Griffenburg. They’d signed an ironclad prenuptial agreement that ensured I would never see a penny of the Spalding fortune, which was fine, completely fine, with me.

  Then, as it turned out, in a cruel twist of fate which felt like a cosmic joke, I learned from an attorney that I didn’t even own the castle outright.

  My mother had apparently sold half of the castle’s ownership to her husband as part of their prenuptial agreement, so he would pay off her many, many debts before they wed. That meant that my stepbrother, who I’d never met, Cormac James Spalding, owned forty-nine percent of my birthright.

  Considering the fact that he was suddenly a multi-millionaire (billionaire, even?) I didn’t think I’d ever hear from him.

  What would a billionaire want with an ancient castle in the middle of nowhere? If I ever needed to sell it or donate it to a preservation society, I’d need his permission, but I was fairly certain a South-African billionaire who’d never set foot in Griffenberg wouldn’t be very particular about what I did with the place.

  I didn’t have a plan exactly, other than to live there for a little while while I figured things out and tried to write my book. I was broke until I finished it, but I needed to live somewhere in the meantime, and figure out what I’d do next.

  I stood, staring at the barista, lost in thought, until I suddenly snapped out of it, realizing how weird I must seem to her.

  I became suddenly aware of a man behind me, speaking in hushed tones about business in what seemed like and Australian accent.

  I hadn’t meant to hold up the line.

  “I’m a writer, I write about… history… the middle ages…,” I said,“can I just get a coffee?”

  “Ya,” the barista said with a shrug.

  She didn’t care who I was and certainly didn’t care or suspect that in another lifetime I might have owned the land we stood on, and all surrounding land, for miles.

  After taking my steaming mug I turned and nearly ran into the man standing behind me, much closer than I’d realized.

  “Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” I gasped, as coffee splashed out onto what looked like a very expensive pair of brown leather shoes.

  When I glanced up, I stared into a disarming pair of blue-green eyes and an affable, golden-tan, broadly smiling face.

  “It’s nothing,” he said in a warm congenial voice, his accent deeply charming, “please, don’t worry, I don’t care at all.”

  “I…” I felt frozen as I gazed at the man, who was tall and broad shouldered, wearing a very nice suit, and sat down his cellphone instantly to grab a napkin, handing me one and using the other to clean his shoe.

  “Please, really, don’t worry,” he said again, “it’s a pair of shoes, who cares? Did you say you were a history writer?”

  His suit was cut perfectly, but his hair was a little bit shaggy, almost like a surfer’s, and he had a few days worth of golden stubble on his cheeks.

  “Oh, yes, well… sort of,” I said with a nervous smile, “I have a book proposal out, but I haven’t published anything yet except for papers. I only just finished graduate school.”

  Not by my own volition…

  “Are you… familiar with the area?” he asked, gesturing at the town and raising an eyebrow, “if so, I’d love to grab my coffee and pick your brain.”

  “Oh,” I blushed, “sure, but I don’t know if I’ll be any help. I don’t have too much specific knowledge about Griffenberg, I mostly studied French history…”

  I’d almost avoided my own heritage in school, just as I’d avoided letting anyone know about my my mother’s title, which probably wasn’t even officially recognized anywhere at all.

  “Ok, give me just a second,” he said, his full, dark lips smiling broadly.

  I found a table, my heart fluttering curiously in my chest.

  “So,” he said, sliding into a chair opposite me with a noticeable gracefulness, “tell me everything you know about the town of Griffen and Griffenburg Castle.”

  “Oh, well,” I said with a shrug, “it’s a very old fortress, the first towers dating back to the late thirteen hundreds. The town is on the border of Austria and Germany, claimed by both countries at different times…”

  “Anything particularly interesting about it?” he asked, sipping his coffee.

  He looked at me with intensity, completely earnest, like there was no one in the world more fascinating than me.

  Men typically got fidgety and distracted when I told them about my work, which gave be a great excuse to avoid dating altogether.

  “Oh, well, it’s just your typical serfdom, a castle where the manor born, The Baron Griffen ruled over a town, farmed, paid a tribute to the king… I hear it’s very well preserved…”

  I thought back to my childhood, tiptoeing through the cavernous stone hallways beneath the castle, rain water feeding the dark green moss that seemed to creep into every corner of stone, seeing the doors to rooms that had been sealed for generations, locked shut with enormous iron padlocks.

  “When was the last time anyone lived there?” he asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know, there’s probably a caretaker there now,” I said, feeling a pang of guilt.

  I’d never tried to contact them before I booked my flight, and I would be a complete surprise when I showed up.

  “So you haven’t heard anything specific about it’s more recent history, specifically the last hundred years?”

  “Uh,” I said, thinking back to the one story that had been told in hushed tones whenever we visited, a story I knew about, but didn’t really know, “I don’t remember anything so, no, not really.”

  “…and you’ve never been there?”

  I gave him a long look.

  Was he trying to catch me in a lie?

  His questions had become more like an interrogation than a polite conversation.

  “What is your interest in the castle?” I asked.

  The handsome man shrugged and smirked at me.

  “I’m doing some business in the area, and I like… I like to look at architectural marvels when I’m traveling…”

  “Oh, well, it’s a pretty typical castle for its time period,” I said, “it’s beautiful, but I wouldn’t call it a marvel.”

  “So you’ve never heard anything about, say, a murder?”

  I shuddered, but hoped he hadn’t seen.

  “I’ve heard some things,” I admitted, trying not to react at all, “whatever happened wasn’t as salacious as some people would lik
e to think.”

  “So you do know about it? Why didn’t you mention it?”

  Whatever had happened had ruined my family name and made my grandfather destitute, unable to do business in the region, but it wasn’t the sort of thing we would have talked a lot about in my family.

  In fact, I really didn’t know anything at all. A girl had died. Everything else was a secret.

  “I don’t knew very much, what I know are rumors and I’m not concerned with rumors,” I said, not wanting him to press the issue, taking a sip of my coffee, glancing around like he was boring me, “the more recent history of the castle isn’t that interesting to me. I studied the middle ages, not the nineteen twenties or thirties, whenever the… event… took place.”

  “Hmm,” he said, smirking as if to hint that he didn’t believe me “so did you come to town to research the castle?”

  “Oh, no, just…” I looked around the cafe, not sure what I should say (I’ve never been very good at lying), “I guess, wanted to go some place quiet to work on my paper. I thought this town, being nearby the castle, would be as good a place as any.”

  His eyes glittered with a sort of mischievousness, like he knew my story didn’t make sense.

  “So you studied French history, but you chose a minuscule town on the border of Germany and Austria, just randomly, huh? Like spinning a globe and putting a finger down?”

  “Well, I study French Medieval history, and this town is still structured in much the same way it was in the middle ages, the castle was pretty well preserved, it’s not very different…”

  I felt like I was spinning a lie, and it was obvious.

  “Some of the townspeople told me it was haunted…”