A Rather Lovely Inheritance

by C. A. Belmond

  Chapter Ten

  WE WERE ON A NARROW DIRT ROAD WITH ONLY OCCASIONAL driveways opening out onto it, but finally we reached a gravel path half choked with tall overgrown shrubbery, and I spotted a little tiled sign with the name that Great-Aunt Penelope had given her villa, Temps Joyeux.

  “ ‘Happy Times,’ ” I translated.“Funny, isn’t it? In French it sounds okay, but in English it sounds like a cemetery or a rest home. You’d think Aunt Penelope could come up with something a little more sophisticated than that.”

  “We Laidleys are not a very imaginative bunch, I’m afraid,” Jeremy chuckled as the car went crunching over the gravel drive. Weeds and underbrush were poking out here and there, but it was the big old trees that were really making headway, overhead, like a shady canopy. It felt as if we were driving inside a green tunnel, because the drive twisted and curved several times before it finally opened up into a straight path to a small gravel clearing.

  Directly ahead of us was an unused, peeling fountain in the center, filled with autumn leaves. The villa loomed behind it. Jeremy pulled the car to a stop, and the engine noise retreated into an abrupt silence. Dust rose around us from the sudden stop of the tires. Jeremy waited till it settled, then lowered his window.

  “Hear that?” he whispered. “Total silence. Except for the birds. And if you listen closely, I bet you can hear the sea.”

  We sat there quietly, and you could indeed hear, far off, a sort of whispering, washing sound of the sea lapping up against the rocks. “Oh!” I sighed, inhaling deeply. “What is that wonderful smell? Honeysuckle?”

  “Jasmine,” he said, pointing to vines growing against one side of the villa, where little white-and-yellowish trumpets gave off the scent, leaning toward the back of the house, indicating where the sunny side was. The front of the house, which faced us, was the shady side, and the sun was sinking lower behind it, but I could still make out the color of the pale peach walls, the Matisse-blue shutters at the windows, the burgundy door.The back of the house faced south and would have the view of the sea.

  I couldn’t wait another minute. I grabbed my portfolio to take notes, and I sprang from my seat. “Jeremy!” I cried. “Let’s go look!”

  I felt as if we were kids again, exploring somebody’s abandoned house. I would have run around to the back of the house to see the view and peer in the windows, but Jeremy picked up his briefcase, marched up the front steps, and put the key in the lock. That was when it dawned on me that the new owner of the villa was my childhood pal, who wiped his feet on the mat respectfully before entering. He deserves this, I thought. It was great that he’d be rewarded for his steadfast protection of the family interests.

  “Come along, then,” he said to me, amused. I followed him inside. “Be careful, there’s no electric on,” he cautioned as we fumbled in the dark.Then there was a little beam of light.

  “You brought a flashlight,” I said, looking admiringly at the slim, compact tool.

  “A torch,” he corrected. “Will you never learn to speak proper English, child?”

  We entered, shuffling together, following the beam of his flashlight into a small circular foyer that was flanked by two opposing staircases leading up. A narrow shaft of sunlight shone from the open door of the drawing room, which was straight ahead, under the stairs, so we gravitated there first. Jeremy led the way in, but we’d gone only a few steps when we both paused.

  It looked as though a roomful of ghosts were standing there waiting for us. Then I realized that it was all furniture, draped in white sheets to keep the dust off. There must be a chandelier overhead, I observed, because it was covered with a balloon of white, too, like a puffy cloud. Jeremy reached out and threw back a corner of one of the sheets, then another and another, just enough to reveal a credenza here, a sofa there, a table nearby. I identified most of the pieces from my years of scouring antiques shops, and wrote them all down.

  “That’s a Russian clock, early twentieth century. That chest of drawers is mahogany, Italian, late eighteen hundreds.The sofa’s French Empire. That secretaire is to die for. Russian or Swedish, maybe.Yessir, Rollo will do all right.”

  “Nice to have a pro like you around. Makes it all easier,” Jeremy commented. He said he’d pass my notes on to Severine’s assistant, who would do a final tally on the French possessions.

  “Rollo’s welcome to this furniture!” he observed. “It’s too heavy and depressing. If I had to stare at these things all day, I’d go barmy.”

  “What would you prefer? Deco?” I teased.

  “Deco would be great,” he said. I pointed out the octagonal door handles and blue-tiled fireplace.

  “Here’s something else you’d like,” I said, having pulled back the coverings of an adorable black baby grand piano after I’d spied the foot-pedals sticking out. He plinked a few keys, conjuring up the melody of “A Hard Day’s Night,” but it sounded positively ghostly.

  Even in the shadows I could see that it was a lovely villa, but needed repair. Paint was peeling from the walls, and the wood floors were scuffed. We walked back through the circular foyer, where the two staircases, one to the left, one to the right, met again overhead. The second-floor hallway above was more like a balcony, so that you could gaze back down at the foyer where we were standing.

  Jeremy looked from the stairs to me and I practically read his mind, but as usual it was me, the dumb American, who said it aloud. “Race you!” I cried. I took the left staircase, he took the right, and I beat him by a fraction.

  “You’re still light as a feather,” he murmured with grudging admiration. “I could never outrun you. Do you still swim as straight and fast as an eel?”

  “Jeremy, look,” I said, flinging open doors. “One, two, three, four bedrooms!”

  “Watch out!” he said sharply, and a second later I stumbled. The floor had something sticking out of it, but it wasn’t a nail. A slat of wood had come loose and was raised—that’s all it was. Jeremy took me by the hand as if I were a naughty little girl.

  “Come with me,” he said sternly. “If you fall through the floor now, they’ll think I killed you for the inheritance.”

  We walked through each bedroom briefly. The master bedroom, decorated with fading blue-and-white-striped wallpaper with pale pink cabbage roses twining through it, was on the southeast side of the house, where the morning sun would come pouring in the windows of the French doors, which opened onto a balcony.This, I later realized, was the only room in the house that had been cleaned and dusted and looked as if someone had lived here. Aunt Penelope had died right in that bed, so neatly made with a soft blue counterpane.

  I didn’t want to mention it to Jeremy, but he seemed to be thinking the same thing, because after a pause he said, “She must have gotten comfort from this place if she came here to die. But I can’t help thinking she’d feel like one of the ghosts.”

  We were quiet for awhile. Finally he pointed. “Balcony here,” he said. I peered out. It was one continuous balcony that ran all along the width of the house on the south side.

  “Hey. If your guests walk out there from their room, they can sneak along to your side and peer right into your bed,” I observed.

  “Hmm, that’s true,” Jeremy noted. Adjacent to the bedroom was a small white bathroom, with bidet, sink and mirror, claw-foot tub, and the kind of old toilet where you pull a chain from a box above. Over the tub was a skylight, so you could gaze at the stars at night from your bath. There were charming old gold-and-white fixtures. Jeremy ran water in the sink, which came out brown at first but cleared, with good pressure. No pipes groaned in protest.

  “Plumbing doesn’t look too bad.That’s a surprise,” he observed. I had recovered from my initial emotional reaction to the bedroom, and now I noticed a teakwood object at the foot of the bed. I drew closer to examine it. “What’s that?” Jeremy asked. “A bed tray?”

  “A writing desk,” I said, lifting the lid and showing him the slots for pens and the wells for ink b
ottles, all carved smoothly out of rosewood and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. “Antiques dealers love these desks,” I said. “They were used by housewives and army generals alike for centuries! You could just pick ’em up and take ’em with you in your carriage as you were fleeing revolutions and overthrowing governments. Every step of the way, people wrote letters because, after all, they didn’t have telephones, or even telegraphs. This beauty is from the late seventeen hundreds, I think, and it’s English. Probably—” I stopped dead as I pulled open a little drawer where writing paper was usually kept.There was no paper in there at all.Two faces stared back at me—mine, and Jeremy’s, in two distinct photographs.

  “Hang on!” Jeremy exclaimed.“That’s us at the beach!” We peered closer. Somebody had snapped close-ups of us that summer, without our ever knowing it. Goose-bumps rose on my arms. Jeremy had the same thought. “Looks like Aunt Pen took snaps of us on the sneak.”

  “I look like a redheaded scarecrow,” I groaned.

  “I look like a tall mop with eyes,” Jeremy noted. I turned the photos over, searching for a date to confirm. But the inky script on mine said only Penny without her braces, and Jeremy’s said, Musical like his dad, which made Jeremy snort.There were no other photos in the box. Just a card from Jeremy’s law firm with the name and address and phone number.

  “Jeremy,” I said in a low, mysterious tone, “it’s as if she knew we’d come here together. Maybe there’s something about this place, and her life, that she wants us to find out about.” The more I thought about it, the more I warmed to my idea. “Why else would she divvy it up so that you got the house and I got the garage?”

  He stared at me. “And Rollo got the furniture, remember? Nothing very mystical about dividing your estate among your blood relatives so that the government doesn’t get it! Penny,” he said gently,“you want to be careful about romanticizing this. Most people just sell off what they inherit.”

  “Phooey,” I said in embarrassment, for lack of a better retort.“You won’t dare sell off this great villa, will you?”

  “Not bloody likely,” he admitted. “It’s lovely. But is the rest of it in good shape? Come along now. Use your detecting skills to finish this tally-up, all right?” Jeremy said teasingly, as he led me away to the next room.

  We started making up names for each bedroom.The first was the Rose Room, because of the pink cabbage roses on the wallpaper. Next came the Bastille Day Room, because it was red and blue. It was followed by the Renaissance Room, a smaller one, which had tile on the ceiling, painted with cherubs and clouds and doves.

  “That’s rather pretty,” Jeremy observed.

  “Italian,” I said. “They used to do that for people they loved. For brides, or children, even newborn babies. Paint the ceiling, or even the roof of a crib, to make them see something happy when they opened their eyes in the morning.”

  The last bedroom we called the Japanese Room, with its wallpaper of pagodas and little ladies with paper umbrellas crossing arched bridges. All four rooms were laid out in a row, one after another, flanked by the balcony on the outside, parallel to the hallway on the inside. The three guest rooms had to share a bathroom at the end of the hall, a pale, sea-foam green, with the same kind of old-fashioned toilet and a narrower tub. Some of the floor tiles were loose.

  We went back downstairs, and discovered a door at the foot of each staircase.The one on the right was only a closet, with nothing in it but an awful-looking old mop.The door on the left led to a dining room with heavy, dusty red draperies, drawn together; and a long table with eight hideous-looking chairs with high backs made of carved wooden snakelike squiggles.

  Beyond the dining room was the kitchen, which had a door leading outside to a small enclosed porch with a bench, and a shelf containing kitchen-garden tools—a basket, watering can, snippers, gloves. The porch had an outdoor stone staircase that went past those climbing jasmine vines and ended at an herb patch.

  The kitchen was most in need of repair, having an ancient black stove, a sink with rusty tap, an old-fashioned icebox, and a pantry. A staircase beside the pantry led down to a wine cellar, with rickety steps that felt more like a ladder. Jeremy flashed his light around, and we examined a few dusty bottles of some old port and sherry, but the racks were mostly empty, strung with elaborately thick spiderwebs that made me dread coming across their architects.

  “Looks like Aunt Pen and her chums drank up all the wine,” Jeremy said approvingly. I was still worrying about finding a monster spider colony, so I was glad to leave the cellar.

  We returned to the dining room, and Jeremy pulled back the drapery, which raised a cloud of dust, making us cough, but it was worth it—there were French doors that opened onto a slate patio with big terracotta flowerpots, a cast-iron table and chairs, and, a few steps down, an old tiled swimming pool filled with nothing but leaves.

  The pool was rimmed on the far side with dense shrubbery, where the property stopped abruptly. Cautiously we went out and peered beyond the shrubbery, and there we discovered that this villa, like the olive trees we’d seen all along the way, was simply clinging to a patch of earth on a cliff, one dollhouse among many. There were houses above us, houses below us, all perched on terraced “steps” that gazed out at the gorgeous Mediterranean Sea.The fiery orange sun was just slipping softly into the sweet blue sea far below, leaving a rippling golden path across the waves to the horizon, connecting land to sea in the mind’s eye.

  “Oh, Jeremy!” I breathed. “Isn’t it beautiful? Aren’t you so happy, to be so lucky?”

  “Yes,” he said softly. “And yes, and yes.”

  I closed my eyes and sighed.When I opened them he was smiling at me.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” he asked. “The garage, my girl.”

  I gave him a sideways squint. “Thought you’d never ask,” I said. “See how cool I’ve been about it?” We dashed across the lawn to the garage.

  It was a silly-looking shed, an absurd, relatively pint-sized replica of the house, only it wore its roof at a rakish angle, like a hat on a tipsy guest. Jeremy had to lift a wooden arm that barricaded its double doors. The oak doors were surprisingly heavy and didn’t hang quite level, but we managed to shove them open. Jeremy led the way in, shining his flashlight ahead, and I followed. But then he stopped short so suddenly that I collided with him, crashing into his back.

  “What is it?” I cried.

  “A houseguest,” he said in a falsely calm voice. “Look.”

  There was a car in there all right, with its front facing us. But when Jeremy aimed his light across its hood, two red eyes were staring back at us.They weren’t like any eyes you’d want to see on a living creature. They looked unearthly, unblinking, like a stranger from Mars. While I stood there watching, however, the serpent uncoiled itself and shyly slithered across the hood, down to the ground, and made haste for a hole in the stone wall through which some light shone, indicating how it had gotten in there in the first place. Expertly, it vanished.

  “Snake!” I said unnecessarily, in a pip-squeak of a voice.

  “There goes your first possession,” Jeremy said, sweeping his light in an arc around the car. One of the headlights was broken, and looked as if it was stuffed with hay. I hoped it wasn’t the snake’s nest. I found myself tiptoeing, stepping quickly and lightly so that my feet wouldn’t be in one place too long for any other snakes to glide over.

  “I hope we don’t surprise a rabid raccoon or something,” I said nervously. But Jeremy was moving closer to the car, shining his light on a silver hood ornament that looked like a snorting giant lizard leaping on its hind legs.

  “My God,” he breathed. “It is. I can’t believe it, but it is.”

  “Is what?” I asked nervously.

  “It’s a Dragonetta!” Jeremy said triumphantly, as he circled around it with excitement, examining the steering wheel and the rearview mirrors and the door handles. “From the look of it I’d say it’s a 1936. I’ll bet Aunt Pen
was the first owner, too, which is incredible luck.” He peered inside. “Rather neglected, though.Whoa, I’ll bet that’s the original horsehair upholstery. Looks like mice have been lodging here, but, thankfully, nobody’s home now. But they tore up some of the leather, and shit all over it.”

  “Don’t touch it,” I said, remembering some obscure thing I’d read.

  “I never touch mouse shit,” he said gravely.

  “No, the horsehair,” I said. “I think you can get anthrax from it.”

  “Nonsense,” he said, getting more warmed up about the car by the minute. “This could be fixed. My God, an original Dragonetta. What a find.The engines on these cars were big for the time, and the body was light, framed in wood, made by hand.The power and lightness mean it just flies down the road.Those engines were built to last forever, back in the days before all the good ones went into airplanes.” He was still halfway through the window, peering in, but now he backed himself out and looked at me almost sternly.

  “Do you know how lucky you are to inherit a car like this?” he demanded.

  “Why? Is it worth a lot of money?” I asked.

  “Oh, you’d have to put some serious cash into it to make it worth a lot,” he said dismissively. “It’s not the money, my dear child. It’s that you are one of maybe ten people in the entire world who have one.” Then suddenly he grinned. “Have I actually found the one antique that I know more about than you?”

  “That’s right!” I conceded. It was something I’d almost forgotten: his boyish love of great cars. As a kid he’d collected magazine photos of “orphans,” or vintage cars with nameplates that were no longer made, like Packards, REOs, Franklins. He could reel off car statistics—year first made, year last made, engine size, performance ratings—the way most kids quote baseball statistics. When he spoke about his favorite autos, his normal noncommittal reserve gave way to a radiant exuberance that he didn’t exhibit for anything else. But, as I recalled, he’d kept this passion a secret from the grown-ups, perhaps anticipating his father’s disapproval.