“My dear children, that is marvelous!” she raved, acting as though they had accomplished something no one else had since Mary with Jesus. “I might remind you that it took you thirty days what it took your father and me thirty years to accomplish. You are to be congratulated on your speed, and your good fortune! What clever children you are!” She toasted them and they laughed. But she was enormously pleased for them, and she told Sarah again that having William had been the happiest moment in her life, and had remained thus in all the years since then. But as the doctor had done, she urged her not to be foolish and overdo, lest it hurt the baby or herself.

“Really, I’m fine.” She felt surprisingly well, and the doctor had said they could make love, “reasonably,” he had suggested they not hang off the chandelier or try to set any Olympic records, which Sarah had passed on to William. But he was desperately afraid that making love at all would hurt her or the baby. “I promise you, it won’t do anything. He said so.”

“How does he know?”

“He’s a doctor,” she reassured him.

“Maybe he’s no good. Maybe we should see someone else.”

“William, he was your mother’s doctor before you were born.”

“Precisely. He’s too old. We’ll see someone younger.”

He actually went so far as to find a specialist for her, and just to humor him, she saw him, and he told her all the same things as kindly old Lord Allthorpe, who Sarah much preferred. And by then she was two months pregnant, and had had no problems.

“What I want to know is when are we going back to France,” she said after they’d been in London for a month. She was dying to get started on their new home.

“Are you serious?” William looked horrified. “You want to go now? Don’t you want to wait until after the baby?”

“Of course not. Why wait all these months when we could be working on it now? I’m not sick, for heaven’s sake, darling, I’m pregnant”

“I know. But what if something happens?” He looked frantic and wished she weren’t so determined. But even old Lord Allthorpe agreed that there was no real reason for her to stay at home, and as long as she didn’t wear herself out completely, or carry anything too heavy, he thought the project in France would be fine.

“Keeping busy will be the best thing for her,” he assured them, and then suggested they wait till March, so she would be fully three months pregnant before they left. It was the only compromise Sarah was willing to make. She would wait until March to go back to France, but not a moment longer. She was dying to get to work on the château.

William tried to drag out his projects at Whitfield as best he could, and his mother kept urging him to tell Sarah to take it easy.

“Mother, I try, but she doesn’t listen,” he finally said in a moment of exasperation.

“She’s just a child herself. She doesn’t realize one has to be careful. She wouldn’t want to lose this baby.” But Sarah had already learned that lesson the hard way long before. And she was more careful than William thought, taking naps, and getting off her feet, and resting when she was tired. She had no intention of losing this baby. Nor did she intend to sit around. And she pressed him until finally he was ready to go back to France, and couldn’t stall her any longer. By then it was mid-March, and she was threatening to leave without him.

They went to Paris on the royal yacht, when Lord Mountbatten was on his way to see the Duke of Windsor, and he agreed to take the young couple over as a favor. “Dickie,” as William and his contemporaries called him, was a very handsome man, and Sarah amused him during the entire crossing, telling him about the château and the work they were going to do there.

“William, old man, sounds like you have your work cut out for you.” But he thought it would be good for them too. It was obvious that they were very much in love, and very excited about their project.

William had had the concierge at the Ritz hire a car for them, and they had managed to find a small hotel two and a half hours outside Paris, not far from their crumbling château. They rented the top floor of the hotel, and planned to live there until they had made the château habitable again, which they both knew could be a long time.

“It might be years, you know,” William grumbled as they saw it again. And he spent the next two weeks lining up workmen. Eventually, he had hired a sizeable crew, and they began by prying off the boards and shutters to see what lay within. There were surprises everywhere as they worked, and some of them were happy ones, and some of them were not. The main living room was a splendid room, and eventually they found three salons, with beautiful boiseries, and fading gilt on some of the moldings; there were marble fireplaces and beautiful floors. But in some places the wood had been destroyed by mold and years of dampness, and animals who had ventured in through the boards and gnawed at the lovely moldings here and there.

There was a huge, handsome dining room, a series of smaller salons, still on the main floor, an extraordinary wood-panelled library, and a baronial hall worthy of any English castle, and a kitchen so antiquated it reminded Sarah of some of the museums she’d visited with her parents the year before. There were tools there that surely no one had used for two hundred years, and she collected them carefully with the intent to save them. And they carefully stored the two carriages they had found in the barn.

William ventured cautiously upstairs after their initial investigations on the main floor of the château. But he absolutely refused to let Sarah join him, for fear that the floors might cave in, but he found them all surprisingly solid, and eventually he let Sarah come up to see what he’d found. There were at least a dozen large sunny rooms, again with lovely boiseries, and beautifully shaped windows, and there was a handsome sitting room with a marble fireplace, which looked out over the main entrance and what had once been the park and the gardens of the château. But suddenly Sarah realized as she walked from room to room, that there were no bathrooms. Of course, she laughed to herself, there wouldn’t have been. They took baths in tubs in their dressing rooms, and they had chamber pots instead of toilets.

There was a lot of work to do, but it was clearly well worth doing. And even William looked excited now. He made drawings for the men, and drew up work schedules and spent every day from dawn to dusk giving directions, while Sarah worked beside him, sanding down old wood, refinishing floors, cleaning boiseries, repairing gilt, and polishing brass and bronze until it shone, and eventually she spent most of every day painting. And while they worked on the main house, William had assigned a crew of young boys to repair the caretaker’s cottage so that eventually they could move there from the hotel, and be right on the site of their enormous project.

The caretaker’s cottage was small. It had a tiny living room, a smaller bedroom beside it, and a large cozy kitchen, and upstairs there were two slightly larger sunny bedrooms. But it was certainly adequate for them, and possibly even a serving girl downstairs, if eventually Sarah felt she needed one. They had a bedroom for themselves, and even one for their baby when it arrived.

She could feel the baby moving inside her now, and each time she felt it, she smiled, convinced that it would be a boy and look just like William. She told him that from time to time, and he insisted that he didn’t care if it was a girl, they wanted more anyway. “And it’s not as though we’re supplying an heir to the throne,” he teased her, but there was still his title, and the matter of inheriting Whitfield and its lands.

But they both had more than Whitfield, or even their château, on their minds these days. In March, Hitler had raised his ugly head, and had “absorbed” Czechoslovakia, claiming that in effect, it no longer existed as a separate entity anymore. He had, in effect, swallowed ten million persons who were not Germans. And he had no sooner devoured them, than he turned his sights on Poland, and began threatening them about issues that had been a problem for some time, in Danzig, and elsewhere.

A week after all that, the Spanish Civil War came to an end, having taken well over a million lives, as the well-being of Spain lay in ruins.

But April was worse. Imitating his German friend, Mussolini took over Albania, and the British and French governments began to growl, and offered Greece and Romania their help if they felt it was needed. They had offered the same thing weeks before to Poland, promising this time to stand by if Hitler came any closer.

By May, Mussolini and Hitler had signed an alliance, each promising to follow the other into war, and similar discussions between France, England, and Russia stopped and started, and went nowhere. It was a dismal spring for world politics, and the Whitfields were deeply concerned, yet at the same time they were moving ahead with their enormous work at the Château de la Meuze, and Sarah was deeply engrossed in her baby. She was six months pregnant by then, and although he didn’t say so to her, William thought she was enormous. But they were both tall, and it was reasonable to think that their child might be large. He would feel it moving inside her at night as they lay in bed, and once in a while when he moved close to her, he’d feel the baby kick him.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” He was fascinated by it, by the life he felt inside her, her growing shape, and the baby that would soon come from the love they had shared. The miracle of it all still overwhelmed him. He still made love to her from time to time, but he was more and more afraid to hurt her, and she seemed less interested now. She was hard at work on the château, and by the time they fell into bed at night they were both exhausted. And in the morning the workmen arrived at six o’clock and began hammering and banging.