“I can see Arthur’s house,” I told her excitedly, stepping past the pram. “It’s over there.”
I peered eagerly through the wrought-iron gate and across a broad expanse of open meadow to the low rise upon which Quentin Hargreaves had built his faux abbey. Aunt Dimity’s Victorian ancestors had poured scorn upon “Quentin’s Folly,” but it filled me with delight.
“Oh, Bess,” I whispered. “It’s wonderful.”
From a distance, Hillfont Abbey looked more like a fanciful fortress than a sober monastery. Its basic layout was quite simple—a square tower flanked by a pair of three-story wings—but the magic was in the details.
The central tower was crenellated and pierced by lancet windows. The three-story wings were festooned with spires, turrets, chimney clusters, stepped gables, projecting bays, and slender corner towers with conical caps. The building seemed to possess every shade of Cotswold stone—gray roofs, golden turrets, cream-colored embrasures, butterscotch walls—and it was surrounded by a crazy quilt of courtyards and gardens enclosed by another stone wall.
A flag hung from a pole atop the central tower. When it fluttered in a passing breeze, I caught a glimpse of a multicolored emblem centered on a sky-blue ground. I was too far away to decipher the emblem, but I was willing to swear that it wasn’t a Union Jack.
“Quentin Hargreaves probably designed his own flag, too,” I said to Bess. “Should I ask your brothers to design a flag for our family? I’ll bet your grandaunts would have a lot to say about a family flag emblazoned with ponies, cookies, and dinosaurs.”
I began to chuckle but fell silent when a strange buzzing noise reached my ears. It sounded as if someone had crossed a lawnmower with a sewing machine, then tossed a hornets’ nest into the mix for good measure. Stranger still, the noise seemed to be coming from the sky.
I tilted my head back to see if the Summer King or one of his grandchildren had launched a marvelous, motorized kite into the air, but the buzzing noise didn’t come from a kite. It came from a tiny aircraft that looked as though it had been cobbled together from a lawn chair, spare pram wheels, and leftover kite fabric.
The craft’s single, lime-green wing and its tail wings looked marginally reliable, but they were attached to a frame that appeared to be made out of duct tape and plastic pipes. It had no fuselage, no windshield, no doors, no protective shell of any kind, and its buzzing engine sat directly above the pilot’s bare head.
My mouth fell open as the flimsy airplane circled once, twice, three times around the abbey, then swooped low to land in the meadow. I held my breath as it touched down and didn’t breathe again until it had rolled to within twenty yards of the wrought-iron gate. When it finally came to a full stop, I saw that its pilot had white hair and a short, neatly trimmed beard.
“Arthur may be slightly mad, Bess,” I conceded, pressing a hand to my heaving chest, “but we can’t fault his courage.”
Arthur Hargreaves switched off the engine and unbuckled a shoulder harness and a seat belt. He stashed his goggles and his bulbous ear protectors beneath his seat, then climbed out of the lawn chair and stretched his arms above his head, as if they were stiff. He was dressed in a loose-fitting Hawaiian shirt, khaki cargo shorts, and the same soiled sneakers he’d worn when I’d first met him, but his grapevine crown was missing.
“He must have left it at home so it wouldn’t blow away,” I whispered to Bess. “If the Summer King had abdicated, it would be raining.”
I watched in silence as Arthur secured the little plane, tethering it to stakes he drove into the ground by the simple expedient of stomping on them. He stood back to survey his handiwork, then began to make his way to the abbey.
“Arthur?” I called through the gate. I plucked a clean diaper from the diaper bag and waved it to get his attention. “Arthur! Over here!”
He swung around and looked toward me. A broad grin split his bearded face when he spotted the flapping diaper.
“Lori!” he shouted back. “Good to see you!”
I returned the diaper to the diaper bag and waited expectantly as the Summer King ambled toward me. When he reached the gate, I meant to say, “Hello again, Arthur. I hope Bess and I aren’t intruding.” Instead, the first thing that came into my head popped out of my mouth.
“That is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” I gushed, sounding—even to my own ears—like a starstruck twelve-year-old. “Absolutely the coolest.” I slipped my arm through the gate to point at the tiny aircraft. “Did you make it yourself?”