CHAPTER 1
THE DOWNS
I idled outside the ornate, twenty-foot-high gates, not thinking about the grand adventure that, for months, I’d been so excited to embark on, I could barely stand myself.
Instead, I was concentrating on the sudden bizarre feeling I had, which I’d never felt before.
A feeling that assaulted me (and that violent of a word was an apropos descriptor) the second I saw those gates.
It was a feeling so strong, I was idling in the road in front of the gates of a drive I was supposed to be turning into, a drive on a fortunately not very busy road, and yet for some reason, I was unable to turn in.
I didn’t understand what I was feeling. It was, in my cadre of as yet experienced emotions, undefined.
I was exhilarated, yet alarmed.
Excited, yet terrified.
It was kind of like the sensation you get before you go into a haunted house.
You know it’s going to be fun, but even so, you’re facing the unexpected.
What you further know is, what’s about to happen will be completely out of your control.
But in order to face that unexpected—though what you could expect was that you were going to have the pants frightened off you—you had to let go, put one foot in front of the other, trust, and know things are going to scare you, but in the end, you’ll be laughing.
It took some effort to pocket this strange emotion so I could peer down the lane beyond the gates.
The lane was shaded with beautiful old trees and carpeted with vibrant green lawns.
It was then, out of nowhere, although this time predictably, I felt a strong pang of melancholy.
I did this even though I’d never met him. He was gone before I was alive.
Even so, I knew my great-grandfather had seen these gates. He’d been driven through them. He’d stayed in the massive house that lay beyond the intricate wrought iron and parkland.
In that house, he’d convalesced.
In that house, he’d fallen in love.
In the end, he’d left this extraordinary estate with a broken heart.
And I was there to tell his story.
On that thought, taking a bracing breath, I turned into the lane, stopped beside the security speaker and noted it had a camera.
I hit the button to roll down my window and was about to reach out and hit the one that would call to the house, but the speaker squawked at me before I could even raise my hand.
“Ms. Dupree?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Can you please hold your passport or some other official photo identification to the camera?” the speaker requested.
Unsurprised by this request, for I knew what lay beyond those gates, and thus I knew they wouldn’t let anyone through them who shouldn’t be going through them, I turned to my bag, pulled out my passport, opened it to the picture page and held it to the camera.
“One moment please,” the speaker said.
Although I wasn’t surprised they had security, and it was not just a couple of Ring cameras, I wondered what they could do with my passport information that would take a moment.
