“I promise. And I did discuss the job in San Francisco with you, but this house just threw itself at me.”
“As long as it’s not a woman,” she growled at him, and looked at the photographs on his phone again. There was no question, it was a beautiful home, or had been, but it looked enormous, impossible to maintain, and in need of a lot of loving touches and a mountain of furniture to make it livable. It was of a bygone era that no longer even existed or made sense in the modern world. She wouldn’t dream of living at the Frick either, although she loved it. “Do you really think it will work for us and the kids?” She couldn’t see how or imagine what it would cost them to furnish, and she commented on that too.
“Charlie can roller-skate in the ballroom. He’ll love it, and think of the parties the kids can give. And the bank told me that there is a storage unit with a lot of the original furniture that one of the previous owners didn’t use, but kept in case it ever became a museum, and out of respect for the original owners. I don’t know what the stuff looks like, but we can go through it and see if we want to use it.”
“I need to come out and see it,” Sybil said, looking distracted. She had to see what he had gotten them into. She was trying to be a good sport about it.
“I want you to,” Blake encouraged her, relieved that he had come to talk to her in person and now she knew. “You have to see it.” He looked excited and proud as he said it, and she wasn’t sure whether to kill him or kiss him.
“I’ll go back with you. I’ll write my article on the plane.” She didn’t want to wait a minute longer, and if she needed to have painting done on the rooms they’d live in, she needed to do it right away. They were moving to San Francisco in three weeks, and she had to get organized. This was going to take a lot more than rented furniture or staging to get it up and running, which was precisely what she hadn’t wanted. But now he’d gotten them into this, and she wanted to see if they could make the best of it, or if he was totally insane. The latter seemed more likely.
“Are you furious with me for buying the house, Syb?” he asked her, looking worried, and she laughed at him.
“I’ll let you know after I see it. Until then, you’re on probation.” It sounded fair to him. He knew he had really pushed her, with the job, the move, and now the Butterfield Mansion. “You’d better behave yourself in the meantime.”
“I promise,” he said, smiling at her, grateful that she was an extraordinary woman. He knew he was a lucky man, and she had always felt lucky too, although she had no idea what they were going to do with a century-old mansion, no matter how beautiful he said it was.
They spent the weekend together, doing things around the house, talking, and in and out of bed when they could get away with it, when the kids were out. She got their housekeeper to come in on Sunday to stay with the children so she could go to San Francisco with Blake. They boarded a 6 P.M. flight, which was due to arrive at 9:15 P.M. local time, midnight in New York. She had scheduled an appointment the next morning to see the house with the realtor. Blake had meetings and didn’t have time to go with her, but he felt confident that she would fall in love with the house too. She had asked him a million questions during the weekend, and they had told the children about their new home. Charlie liked the idea of roller-skating in the ballroom, Andy said it looked like a Federal Reserve Bank, and Caroline wanted to see a picture of her bedroom and thought the house was cool. They weren’t totally sold on it, but Sybil could tell they would get there, if she and Blake pushed them a little to convince them, and believed in the house themselves as the right home for them, which she didn’t yet, but Blake did.
“Are there ghosts?” Charlie had asked, looking panicked when he saw the photographs, and Sybil smiled at him.
“Of course not, silly. There are no such things. Don’t get started on that.” Caroline had made ghostly noises to tease him, and Sybil had reprimanded her immediately, so she stopped, but at six he was easy to tease. “If there are ghosts, I hope they know how to use a mop and a vacuum cleaner,” she said and Charlie laughed.
Sybil studied the photographs again once they were on the flight to San Francisco, after she wrote her article on her computer. She had brought all her notes and research with her and finished it while Blake watched a movie. She was still wondering how Blake had gotten her into yet another challenging adventure, but he was relieved that she wasn’t mad at him, although she was still skeptical and uneasy about his buying the Butterfield Mansion, no matter how good an investment he said it was. She’d put the last touches on her article for The New York Times by the time they landed, and Blake was sound asleep. She looked over at him and smiled, thinking that it was lucky they loved each other. If they didn’t, she might have strangled him for buying a twenty-thousand-square-foot mansion. But what the hell, life with him was evolving, she just wasn’t sure into what.
When Sybil got to the Butterfield Mansion by cab the next morning she stood at the gate and stared at it for a long moment, trying to absorb the fact that this was now her home. She couldn’t relate to it, or even understand it, as the realtor opened the gate and she walked into the courtyard, looking up at the elegant windows and the dignified architecture. She had to admit, it was one of the most beautiful houses she’d ever seen. Walking through it took her breath away. There was room after room of century-old grandeur, remarkable workmanship, exquisite moldings and carvings, lovely floors that had withstood the test of time, the wood-paneled library, the graceful splendor of the ballroom—although she had no idea what they’d do with it, other than letting the children play there or give parties for their new friends, or set up a basketball hoop and use it as a gym, which seemed like a sacrilege. But she couldn’t imagine living in a house that size.