The Chateau of Happily-Ever-Afters. Jaimie Admans

for another entrance. I haven’t had a chance to find out if there’s a back door yet, but hopefully it’s still locked. The place would’ve been ransacked by burglars if there were any unlocked doors. He can’t get in. I just have to keep telling myself that.

      I get more antsy as the minutes tick by. He hasn’t left yet. And I can’t see what he’s doing. I wish these doors weren’t solid wood and had a window to peek out of.

      Just as I’m thinking about going back upstairs and peeping out of the open window, his voice filters in from outside.

      ‘Wendy! Come to the window!’

      I can’t. I can’t go up there and talk to him. I’m not good at talking to people. It’s probably why I’m so bad at my job. Pushing samples of food is mostly about engaging with people, talking them into trying something new and then buying it, and my boss is constantly on my case about poor sales figures.

      If I talk to him, he’s going to want an explanation for why I slammed the doors in his face, and the only one I can come up with is that I’ve temporarily forgotten I’m thirty-three and not an immature eight-year-old.

      ‘I know you’re in there!’

      I leave the wooden support of the front doors and creep up the stairs. Not that creeping makes much difference – everything in this house creaks loudly enough that someone in the next village can probably hear it. I get to the landing and do an SAS-style crawl across the grimy floor so he can’t see me from outside, until I’m lying on my belly under the window.

      ‘You’ve got to come to the window eventually,’ he shouts in his Scottish accent. ‘If you don’t close it, I’m going to find a ladder and climb in, so you may as well just show yourself.’

      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