The Chateau of Happily-Ever-Afters: a laugh-out-loud romcom!

Bollocks. I’m only on the first floor, he wouldn’t need a very big ladder, and there were a few outbuildings in the grounds. You can be sure there’s a ladder lying around somewhere.

‘What do you want?’ I shout back.

‘A Lotto win, a milky latte with just a hint of macadamia nut, and one of those human-sized hamster wheels!’

‘Well, the only thing you’re going to find here are dust bunnies the size of bowling balls, so you may as well leave.’

He laughs. ‘Okay, we’ll start with the basics. How about access to my own property?’

‘This isn’t your property,’ I shout out. ‘It’s Eulalie’s, and she wouldn’t want you here.’

‘We both signed documents that say otherwise.’

I stand up, suddenly seething at his nerve. ‘I don’t care. You’re obviously only here because—’

‘Nice dust.’ He nods towards me.

I glance down at myself. Great. I’m wearing more dust than a sock that’s been lost behind the washing machine for two years, and when I look behind me, there’s a body-width trail where I’ve unintentionally cleaned the carpet with my clothing.

‘Anyone would think you’d been hunting for treasure,’ he says from the courtyard.

I look down and glare at him. ‘Well, I haven’t. Some of us are interested in more than money.’

‘Yeah. You’re here because you loved my great-aunt so much, and you—’

‘She wasn’t your great-aunt. You didn’t even know her.’

‘You weren’t even related to her!’

‘Family is about more than blood. She chose who to leave this place to, and it wasn’t you.’

‘Maybe she would’ve if she’d known I existed.’

I huff, trying to ignore the niggling voice in my head. Eulalie and I were the closest thing each other had to family, but if she’d have known she had real family, would I really be the sole inheritor of this place? Probably not. ‘Well, you’re obviously only after one thing and you’re wasting your time. There’s no treasure here.’

He nods towards me again. ‘And you know that because you’ve been rolling around on the floor trying to find it?’

‘No, I haven’t. But I knew Eulalie. She had a vivid imagination and she liked to tell stories. This treasure is her idea of a laugh. It doesn’t exist.’

‘From what I gathered at the solicitor’s office, you said that about the château too, and yet…’ He gestures at the building in front of him.

All right, he’s got a point about that, but this is different. I can kind of understand that Eulalie would have kept quiet about owning a castle in France. I know she loved it too much to sell it, and any form of renting it out would’ve been too much work at her age, but if she’d had a treasure chest full of gold sitting in the basement, she wouldn’t have struggled to make ends meet.

He’s still looking up at me expectantly. ‘Yeah, well, I have the key and I’m not letting you in.’

He laughs again, like I’m too pathetic to be taken seriously. I ignore the voice in my head that says I am being utterly pathetic here.

The laugh turns into a falsely sweet smile as he looks up at me. ‘You might have the key, but do you know what I’ve got?’

‘Your ticket home, with a bit of luck.’

He grins. ‘I’ve got all the patience in the world. I’ve got no job to get back to. I’ve got no reason to leave this courtyard. So I hope you stopped for food supplies in your rush to beat me here, because I did. I’m set for weeks, me. I’m going to stay right here. So, if I can’t get in, you can’t get out. Think about that when you’ve eaten the packed lunch your mummy made for your trip back to the school playground.’

I go to respond but nothing comes out. Bollocks. He’s right, of course. I haven’t eaten since the train switch in Calais this morning. Food didn’t even cross my mind. Somewhere downstairs, there’s my handbag with a half-eaten packet of chocolate digestives in it… No, actually, I ate those in the taxi. No one in their right mind would leave half a packet of chocolate digestives.

‘Oh, sod off,’ I say, pulling the window shut hard enough that the glass threatens to make an escape.

Great. My stomach has already started rumbling, I’ve got no ingredients to make anything with, ordering a takeaway would involve having to open the door, if I could get one ordered in French anyway, and I can’t get out without him getting in.

The sun is dropping in the sky, casting shadows across the courtyard from the trees, and I hide at the corner of the window and watch as Nephew-git McLoophole saunters back to his car. He does something to make his seat tilt back, then he sprawls into it, putting his feet up on the dashboard. He lifts his sunglasses out of his shirt, slides them on and settles back with his arms behind his head. He looks like he’s going to bed in a luxurious hotel, not a small-willy-syndrome car.

Well, of all the things that have gone wrong in my life lately, this is definitely at the top of the list. My grand plan was to refuse him entry and send him packing with his tail between his legs. How did I end up getting myself trapped in here with no way out other than surrendering? And why didn’t it even cross my mind that, in a house that’s been unoccupied for twenty years, any food left in the cupboards would be likely to have sell-by dates so old they’d be written in roman numerals?

As I stand there trying to brush muck off my once-lemon T-shirt, ignoring the rumbling in my stomach, which has got more insistent since his smug display outside, my mind wanders to treasure.

What if he has a point? All the times I sat and listened to Eulalie talking about an English girl falling in love with a French duke, the lavish château they shared… I always thought they were embellished versions of reality. I knew her husband had been French and they’d spent their married life in Normandy, but there was so much glamour and luxury in her stories, and she was such a fan of unrealistic romance books, and she had been alone for so long. I always assumed she was rewriting her own memories into a love story, that there was some truth, but mostly she was just a lonely old lady who wanted to remember an ordinary life as extraordinary.

And now I’m standing in the middle of her stories. Her husband really was a duke. There really was a château. The moat with a bridge across it. The grand ballroom I peeked into downstairs. It was all real. Is it really that far-fetched to think there might be some truth in Eulalie’s treasure riddle?

All Loophole-git out there wants to do is squeeze as much money as he can from this place. He’s already said he wants to sell. He doesn’t care about the personal meaning. Eulalie could have sold this place years ago and made herself rich. But she chose not to. Just as she chose to leave it to me because she knew I wouldn’t. She didn’t have children, but if she had, she would have left it to them as a family legacy. I’m not family by blood, but I know this place is worth more than money. But money is my only chance of getting Nephew-git McLoophole out of my life. And it’s the one thing I don’t have.

Unless there’s treasure.

And I find it first.

If there is some kind of treasure hidden here, I can use it to buy his half of the château. It’s the only way of un-loopholing him and setting things right again. He’ll get what he wants, which is undoubtedly money, and I’ll get to keep the château, which is what Eulalie wanted. It’ll give him a fair share of the inheritance, which she would probably have wanted him to have if she’d known him. If there’s treasure here, it’s my only chance to make things right.

It will be a nightmare with him involved. He’ll march in and take whatever he wants. There’s a lot of antique-looking furniture lying around. He could gut the place and what right would I have to stop him? None. The only thing my co-ownership means is that he can’t sell the château without my consent, but he’s so good at loopholes, I even wonder how watertight that might be.

If there’s any hint of truth in that treasure riddle… it would be worth looking. While I’m in here and he’s out there.

Chapter Four (#ulink_bcda3c91-ff46-581d-bdd4-92024e528ab8)

It’s a good plan until it gets completely dark outside. Although there are plenty of lights in the château, most of them fancy crystal chandeliers, I can’t get any of them to switch on. The electricity supply has probably been cut off after so many years of the place being empty. Which is just great when you’re treasure hunting in the dark. I didn’t think to bring a torch with me, and after using my phone’s flashlight to poke around a couple of rooms, the battery has died, and without an electricity supply, I can’t charge it.

It’s getting quite dangerous actually. It’s pitch-black inside now and there aren’t even any streetlamps to let in light from outside like there are at home. I have no way of telling where I’m going or what I’m looking at, my legs are covered in bruises from walking into things, and this is an old house that makes a lot of creaking noises. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t keep looking at shadows and trying to work out the difference between the noise of a pipe expanding and an axe murderer coming to kill me.

Just as I’m thinking of giving up until morning, I see something. I’m on one of the lower floors, although I have no idea exactly where. I’ve lost track of how many sets of stairs I’ve gone up and down. I’m in a small room, much smaller than the others in the house, and as I’m about to walk out, a glint of silver catches my eye. I crouch down to the floor and try to see through the wooden boards in the way. There’s a hole at the base of the wall that’s been boarded up, and whatever that silver thing is, it’s hidden between the walls.

It would be a good hiding place for treasure…

I scoot backwards and kick out one of the boards. It’s so old that it crumbles under the heel of my shoe, and I scramble to clear enough space to get my arm through.

I stretch my hand in, trying not to think about the cobwebs that cling to me. It’s still out of reach though, and I break more wood away and try again, getting further, to my shoulder this time, but still not far enough. Only one of the wooden boards crumbles, leaving a slim gap into the wall cavity; the other one is rock solid and I need a crowbar to prise it off, but it’s too dark to go hunting for tools.

Right, come on, Wendy. Enough pratting around. If Loophole-git McNephew was in here, he’d be through that hole by now with the promise of treasure, and you wouldn’t be getting a sniff of it. I’ve got to get this before he does.

I look at the gap. It doesn’t look completely impossible. I mean, if I breathe in and squash my boobs down a bit… surely I could get in there with just a bit of squeezing. What could possibly go wrong?