The Art of Inheriting Secrets

by Barbara O'Neal

  “How do you do,” he said without inflection. His accent was less plummy than hers.

  “Nice to meet you,” I returned as blandly.

  The other man stomped his feet on the mat outside. He was as tall as Tony but younger by a decade. Black curls, wild with rain, tumbled around a face drawn with no small drama—large dark eyes beneath black brows, a wide mouth. As he came inside, he caught sight of me, and I had the sense that I’d startled him.

  “Hello,” he said after a moment and gave me a grin. “You must be the new countess. The whole village is on fire with your arrival.”

  Heat burned along my neck up to my ears. I shook my head. “Yes, but please call me Olivia.”

  “Olivia it is.” He crossed to offer his hand. “Samir Malakar. Most people call me Sam.”

  “Which do you prefer?”

  “Samir, actually.”

  I smiled. “All right, Samir. It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Come, everyone. Come sit. You, too, Olivia.” Rebecca spread cloth mats on the old wooden table. I stood and carried my tea, but the cold, damp day had caught up with me, and my limp was irredeemably pronounced.

  Embarrassing. The younger thatcher reached for my cup silently, and I allowed him to take it as I leaned on the wall and navigated up the single step. He placed the cup in front of me.

  “Thanks.”

  Rebecca, dishing up stew, said, “We were just discussing Rosemere. Olivia had no idea it even existed until a week ago.”

  Samir shook out his napkin and inclined his head my direction. “That must have been a strange day.”

  “To say the least.”

  Rebecca laughed. “You’re so American!” She placed a bowl of rich brown stew in front of me, full of chunks of carrots and meat and potatoes. It smelled exactly the way you’d want stew to smell on a rainy day in February.

  But I remembered she’d said venison, which I’d eaten only once or twice and never enjoyed. It was always so gamey and tough, and I couldn’t help thinking of the deer that wandered through my mother’s neighborhood, with their big dark eyes and long eyelashes. They had nibbled all the roses until my mother had wanted to kill them.

  A story I might not want to share right that moment.

  “American how?” I asked, my hands in my lap.

  She handed Tony a bowl, and he took it, and in the gesture, I saw a flash of something intimate. Were they lovers?

  Rebecca brought her own bowl to the table. “American because you don’t seem to realize that you’ve inherited an entire estate and a title to go with it.” Her t’s were crisp, each one enunciated. “The average Englishwoman would kill for that.”

  I said, “It’s just . . . kind of ridiculous.”

  “It’s the lottery!” Tony said.

  “Not if there’s no money to go with it,” Samir said.

  “As if you’d know,” Rebecca said. “Please, everyone, let’s begin.”

  Samir shrugged but didn’t seem put out by her sharpness.

  I picked up my spoon—clearly real silver, recently polished, but not so recently that it hadn’t been used since. The other three dug in with clear enjoyment, so I gingerly took a small spoonful.

  Oh. I touched my lips.

  Time halted.

  Every now and then, a mouthful of food tilted the world on its axis. This was one of them. The stew was dark and rich, meaty, herby. Thick broth and tender carrots and cubes of potato, hints of spice and aromatic vegetables. I moved my spoon through the opaque lake of gravy, imagining words that might describe it in an essay. I’d use the setting of the room, the AGA cooker in the corner, and the mullioned windows and the thatchers in their jeans.

  “This is venison?” I asked and took a larger spoonful. “It’s amazing.”

  “Thank you,” Rebecca said mildly. “Have you never had it?”

  “Not like this. We don’t really eat it in the US.” I tasted again, mulled the flavors: red wine, garlic, bacon, and something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. “There’s a hint of sweetness. Not honey, I don’t think, or brown sugar.”

  Tony chuckled. “She’ll never tell you her secrets.”

  “Of course I will. Red currant jam.” She inclined her head. “Well done, actually. Are you a chef?”

  “Food writer. Until I broke my leg, I was the editor at a food magazine. I mean, I still am, just on a leave of absence.”

  “Editor,” Samir echoed. “Would we know it?”

  “I don’t know.” He didn’t strike me as the foodie type, not to mention it was an American magazine. “Egg and Hen?”

  His lips turned down in a quizzical expression. “Really.”

  “Do you know it?”

  “I do. My sister has a stack of them. She’s really into all that,” he said. “She runs the Indian restaurant in town.”

  “Oh! I saw it this morning. It looks like a nice place. Upscale.”

  “Yeah. She’s worked very hard. And she’ll be dying to meet you when I tell her.”

  “I’ll have to check out her food. North Indian, South?”

  “She’s created something new. She should tell you about it herself.” He returned his focus to the stew, eating with the gusto of a man who’d been doing hard physical work all morning. When he’d taken a sip of tea, he looked at me again. His lashes were remarkably thick, giving his eyes the same softness as the deer in my mother’s neighborhood. “It must be pretty exciting, a job like that.”

  “Yeah.” My chest ached a little. “It’s a great job. I miss it.”

  “But now,” Rebecca said, “you have this amazing new adventure, and you won’t have to work, will you?” Before I could say I couldn’t imagine a world without working, she said, “Go back, though. Why is it ridiculous to inherit?”

  “I don’t know.” I paused, trying to bring my discomfort into focus. “The woman I knew as my mother was a painter, not an heiress. She lived in the same house my entire life. And”—I paused, my hands in my lap—“she never told me about any of this. There must have been a reason. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “I don’t know. I guess maybe that’s what I need to find out before I make any decisions.”

  Tony said, “It’s cursed, you know.”

  “Of course it is,” Rebecca said. “All old English houses are cursed.”

  “This is worse. Real. The Rosemere men die violent deaths,” Tony said, glowering from below heavy brows. “Murder, war, suicide. Hard to deny it.”

  I thought of my mother running to America. “What about the women?”

  “They’re fine. Just the men.”

  “Why the curse?” I asked.

  Samir said, “It was the curse of a village girl who fell in love with a monk when it was a priory. She’s said to haunt the ruins of the church. Or the well, depending on who tells it.”

  Rebecca said, “I’ve never heard that. How did you know it?”

  “My grandmother was part of the household there when the old countess came back from India.” Samir looked at me. “Your grandmother.”

  My grandmother. The sense of my life as a box of puzzle pieces struck me again. I met his open, somehow cheerful gaze. “What else do you know?”

  “A bit. My father knows more.” He broke a hearty chunk of bread and dipped it in his bowl, holding it in long fingers as he added, “If the rain stops, I’ll drive you up to the house after lunch, and you can look around. If you like.”

  “Sam, you surprise me!” Rebecca said. “A man of hidden depths.”

  He gave her a half shrug, and I thought there was something droll in a slight lift of his eyebrows as he stirred the stew. “You see what you wanna see,” he said.

  It made me think of a cartoon I’d loved as a child, The Point. “In the Pointless Forest,” I said without thinking and tried to whistle the song “Me and My Arrow.”

  He looked at me, something new in his expression. “This is the town, and these are the people.”

  I wanted to
give him a high five. “My dog’s name was Arrow.”

  “Bit obvious, isn’t it?”

  I laughed. “I suppose. It’s just easier than Oblio. And he did have a very pointed nose.”

  “Point made,” he said without smiling but shot me a sideways look to see if I got it.

  I laughed.

  “Sam,” Rebecca said. “More stew?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Chapter Three

  As if it wanted to accommodate me, the rain did stop after lunch. Rebecca and I drove up in her Range Rover while Tony and Samir followed in Tony’s work truck. Under other circumstances, the distance would have been walkable, if a little steep, on a road that wound along the fields and climbed the hill. Today it was too muddy.

  Our approach this time was from the rear. The house appeared as we turned the corner. Under the low clouds, it shone bright gold and looked considerably less tattered than it had yesterday from the taxi. I recognized the roofline, the trees marching away from the rise, from my mother’s paintings. I thought of her, all these years, painting the place she’d left long ago, and it made me ache a little.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Rebecca said. “It gives me a thrill every time.”

  I nodded.

  “On the left are what remain of the gardens.” She pointed at a series of walls and terraces, tumbling down the hill. “They were created in the eighteenth century and were really quite famous. The old countess—I supposed that’s your grandmother—brought them back to life, but you see what time does.”

  I nodded. Everything was overgrown, the bare lines visible here and there.

  “On the right are the farms, which as you see are fully functional. The family never participated in the enclosures, so some of the tenants’ families have been here since the estate was created.”

  The fields were winter empty, but they rolled out in tidy rows, broken here and there with cottages and hedgerows. “How many people are farming here?”

  Rebecca frowned. “I don’t actually know. That would be a question for Jonathan. Enough to at least keep the taxes paid on the place.”

  “What do they grow?”

  “Rape, mostly, some barley. Obviously sheep.” She gestured toward a field of white bodies grazing in the distance. “A few other things, but the canola oil is the main thing.” She braked and let me look out across the fields for a minute. “It’s beautiful when it’s in bloom—bright-yellow flowers across the whole countryside.”

  At the top of the hill, she parked, and we climbed out, waiting for Tony and Samir to pull in beside us. I took the chance to turn in a slow circle, trying to take it in—the farms and cottages, as quaint as a calendar picture. The ruined garden tumbled down the hill like an exhausted courtesan, and nearby crouched a wreck of a conservatory, glowing greenish blue in the cool light. I knew I would have to explore inside. Impulsively, I took my phone out and shot a series of photos. My fingers itched to sketch it all, but I’d left my sketchbook in the hotel room.

  When I’d looked at the estate from the front the first day, the whole estate had appeared deserted. From this side, there were plenty of signs of life. A dormant garden waited for spring at the foot of what I assumed were the kitchen steps. “Who lives here?” I asked.

  Rebecca answered, “The caretakers. There’s been someone here since your mother and her brother disappeared—forty years? Fifty?—although I believe they’re on holiday at the moment.”

  Again, the brother. I needed to find out more about him. Why was I inheriting, when surely the brother or his heirs would have claim? “Not very much caretaking. Why didn’t they keep the house up?”

  Samir stood beside me. “They’ve done what they could. It was already falling apart before everyone left. Your grandmother hated it and wanted it to fall down.”

  “Why?”

  He glanced down at me, and I realized that he really was quite tall. “That’s a long story. Come; let’s go inside.”

  “Don’t you need a key?”

  “No. Lock’s broken.”

  “I’ve been living down the hill for years and never knew I could get inside!” Rebecca made a soft noise of excitement. “Are you coming, Tony?”

  He lit a cigarette and shook his head. “I’ll wait.”

  She hesitated, glancing first at the house, looming over us, and back to him. “I’m just dying to see it.”

  A nod. He exhaled a cloud of blue smoke.

  We three headed for the back door.

  As Samir opened the door and stepped in, I found my heart pounding at what we might find. He turned, holding out a hand. “Countess,” he said, ever-so-faintly ironic.

  Twisting my lips at the title, I took his hand, navigated the battered steps, and found myself in a big plain room, clean enough. Shelves and cupboards lined the entire space, mostly empty.

  “This must be part of the pantry,” Rebecca said.

  It was very cold inside, though without the bite we’d felt exiting the car, and utterly still. I followed Samir into the next room, which turned out to be a big kitchen, circa 1960. Yellowed sheet linoleum covered the floor, and stacks of boxes were piled on the counters, willy-nilly, as if the room had become a dumping ground.

  But the windows were enormous, letting in great swaths of light even through the decades of dirt that had collected. A monstrous turquoise stove crouched beneath a hood. “An AGA!” Rebecca exclaimed, running fingers through the dust. “This was very top of the line at the time. I wonder if it still works?”

  I’d done a feature on the British stoves. “Not sure they ever really die, do they?”

  “We used to sneak in here and play when I was a child,” Samir said. “Dare each other to see who could go the farthest alone.”

  “It’s really not that terrible,” I said. “I imagined much worse.”

  “Just wait.” He waved a hand for us to follow. We picked our way through the maze of boxes, exiting through a more formal pantry, lined with shelves and cupboards. I wanted to peek inside and see if any dishes were left, dishes my mother might have eaten on as a child, maybe, or just something beautiful and old. I resisted the exploration and trailed Samir into another room.

  “This is a little creepier,” I admitted. Vines grew over and through the windows, creating a green interior. A dining room table with sixteen or twenty chairs was littered with chunks of fallen plaster, with more debris on the floor. Wallpaper hung in strips. A great crawling black stain marked one wall and half the remaining ceiling, but I also noticed a lighter rectangle on another wall. “Where’s the art? Wouldn’t there be portraits or something?”

  “I dunno.” He tucked his hands into the pockets of his hoodie, mouth turning downward. “There’re some paintings upstairs in one of the bedrooms, but they’re not portraits. Kind of fantastical.”

  I thought of my mother’s work. “Are they forests?”

  He swung around to look at me. “No. Gardens and things.”

  Behind me, Rebecca squeaked. “Mouse!” she cried and bolted, right back out the way we’d come.

  I turned, looking, but if there had been a mouse, it had fled in terror. I shook my head, and Samir led the way through a pile of debris in the doorway into another room that must have been a sitting room or the like. Wooden panel doors hung at an angle, and the ceiling-high mullioned windows were almost entirely covered with growth.

  “Look at that.” He pointed, and I saw a blooming rose, white or pink, like a nightlight in the darkness. “It must be warmer in here than outside.”

  “It makes me think of Beauty and the Beast,” I said, and I couldn’t help picking my way over to the rose to touch it. “A house under a long curse.”

  “What did it take to break it? The curse?”

  “The beast has to learn to love and accept love in return.” I bent my head to the rose and was pleased to discover it smelled of lemons.

  “Yeah, yeah. Women always like those brooding beastly types.”

  I smiled, coming b
ack to his side. “You are not in that category, are you?”

  “No.” He sighed.

  “Don’t lose hope. Women eventually learn that beasts are only beastly.”

  He raised one thick brow. “Do they?”

  “Mmm.”

  “Good to know.” He offered a hand to help me over a rotted ottoman. “All right?”

  “I’m good. Lead the way.”

  “This is the best part of whole house.” He paused in the doorway, his eyes glittering. “Ready?”

  “Yes.”

  He pushed at the door with a shoulder, pretty hard, and the door gave with a groan, dust flying into the air. We tumbled into a vast hallway with a wide carved staircase. Light filled the room.

  “Oh, wow.” I made my way into the center and looked up.

  The area was enormous, three stories high, and every inch was paneled with elaborately detailed squares of golden wood. It glowed with the light coming in through an enormous stained glass window made of three broad arches, each showing a saint in what I imagined were acts of miraculousness. I knew the deep reds and clear blues were signs of early stained glass. Not a single pane was broken. I pressed a fist to my chest. “It must be eleventh or twelfth century. How in the world has it survived?”

  “Crazy, right?” He was looking upward, too, black hair tumbling backward away from the strong bones of his face, high cheekbones, carved jaw. “They say it’s the window from the abbey.”

  “Where’s the abbey?”

  “Just south. It’s only a ruin now, but it’s on an old pagan site, they say. There’s a spring, and some of the local witches tend the herb garden.”

  I laughed. “Really?”

  “Really. It’s been there since medieval times, and it’s supposed to be full of all sorts of blessed plants and healing herbs.” He pronounced the h in herbs. “It’s meant to be one of the best gardens of its kind.”

  “Medieval,” I echoed. “So much time.” Looking upward, I thought of my mother, once upon a time, coming down the steps and before her, my grandmother and her mother, stretching back to the Elizabethans who’d moved the window and even further back to the monks who’d lived in the abbey. I moved around the space, looking at the carvings in the paneling. “It’s amazing that this is still in such good shape.”