The Country House

All day long they had patiently inspected abandoned barns and old farmhouses, protesting quietly, politely, as the agent drove them along miles of white-board fences; the search took them over roads that crossed muddy, meandering Goose Creek, and through an intricate network of rutted lanes in northern Virginia—circling Middleburg, Aldie, and Upperville—all the way from Leesburg to Warrenton, through a flurry of yellow leaves on a windy, sunny day in November, the cool autumn day John F. Kennedy was elected president.

The agent, who was tall and thin, had a soft Virginia accent and prominent wristbones. He wore an old tweed riding jacket and walked with a limp to all the ruined stone houses and dilapidated stables.

"Now this is real estate," he would intone, as if pronouncing a benediction over each site. "I believe in real estate."

Late in the afternoon, when they were weary and discouraged, he began talking ruefully about "this key-in-the-lock place," and headed his old Dodge back in the direction of Middleburg. It wasn't the phrase he wanted, but like all his descriptions it was maddeningly close. "It's a place that needs no tending," he went on, "a place to leave and return to without worries."

It turned out to be a secluded one-story frame house on seventeen acres, approached by a long dirt road, narrowing to barely discernible tracks left by vehicles of the agent's company, which had built the house a year earlier with materials left over from construction of a housing development in suburban Washington; modest and serviceable, undistinguished by historical placement or architectural design (a friend subsequently described its style as "early Howard Johnson"), on a hill looking west over a russet tapestry of woods and fields. In the distance, the Blue Ridge Mountains marched along the western horizon. A simple weekend retreat, key-in-the-lock sort of place. They bought it immediately.

Melinda Derby went up to Macy's in New York and furnished the entire house in one day. Her young husband, Larry, went to the county commissioner's office in Leesburg and gathered up several dozen pamphlets on soil erosion, treated fence posts, septic tanks, and artesian wells. They brought trees up from the woods—sycamores, dogwoods, and maples—and planted them around the house. After a few years of soil tests, seeding, and mowing, most of the coarse brown broom-grass was banished from the long hill sloping down to the tree line. Bluegrass began its fitful fight for prominence. Larry and a helper constructed a post-and-rail fence that embraced five acres, two horses, one pony, and a little barn. They planted a small apple orchard and put out some pine trees along the horse-field fence.

The four Derby children constructed rafts—one success took them down Goose Creek to the Potomac—and a shelter for overnight hikes under an enormous granite boulder jutting out from a ledge over the creek. On snowy winter weekends they saucered down the long slope and skated on a pond in the horse field. Once, after a sudden snowstorm, the family was marooned for five days, William still in diapers and Elizabeth with what looked like the mumps. They were finally rescued by an army helicopter. Autumn was for riding; each child learned on the pony, graduating in time to the horses. Elizabeth was the most skillful. The three boys rode casually, exuberantly, without style, and usually without saddles, desperados in this elegant foxhunting country. In spring there were wildflower expeditions, and canoeing for miles down the swollen brown waters of the creek. In summer a wide hammock hung in a small grove of locust trees near the house, and all meals were eaten at a big breezy picnic table on a terrace overlooking the pastures, the thick woods, and beyond them, appearing hazily, the mountains. There were pheasants and quail and wild turkeys in abundance. At dawn deer came to a salt lick at the edge of the woods. In the evening, just after sunset, planes leaving the newly constructed Dulles Airport rose high above the house...