The Art of Inheriting Secrets

by Barbara O'Neal

  “Yes, please.”

  “Good. Now, let’s go back to town. I’m famished.” One long-fingered hand settled over his belly. “Do you need anything from the hotel?”

  “No, thanks.” I was so weary of the single room and the sound of karaoke. Closing the door behind me, I said, “I do need to look for a place to stay. I really miss cooking for myself.”

  “Talk to Helen Richmond. She knows everything.”

  “The bakery woman?”

  “Yes. And have you ever tried her carrot cake?”

  “No.”

  “Trust me: that’s a treat you don’t want to miss.”

  We drove to his cottage. It seemed straightforward enough until I sat next to him in the small car, and I found my head filled with the scent of him, grass and twilight and earth. I was unexpectedly overcome, noticing his wrists and the shift of muscles in his forearm as he moved, the shape of his thighs. It made it hard to talk, to think of anything to say that wouldn’t be completely idiotic, so I stayed quiet.

  I was no innocent. I knew my way around courting and rituals and how to play it cool, but in all my life, I’d never simply breathed the smell of another human being and wanted to scramble out of my clothes instantly. It made him seem dangerous. It made me feel unstable.

  “Is everything all right?” he asked.

  “Fine,” I said brightly.

  Inside his cottage, he said, “I won’t be a minute. Make yourself at home.” From his phone, he swiped an app, and the stereo came on, playing something bluesy, easy. “This okay?”

  “Yeah. Great.”

  The cat came running, stopped a moment to greet me and allow himself to be petted, then dashed into the hallway.

  Where Samir was shedding his clothes. Taking a shower. It made me dizzy to think of it.

  Enough. I tucked my hands behind my waist and browsed the shelves of books. Some of it was what a student of literature would have collected, classics and modern literary novels, British, Indian, and American writers.

  But there were also old genre paperbacks, mostly science fiction and horror; history of various eras; a lot of military history; and many novels. I noticed a lot of magic realism—Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez and Alice Hoffman. I tugged down Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, a small book with an art deco cover, and a wave of warmth spread through me—it was one of my favorites, magic realism centered on food and sex. Leafing through the pages, I revisited the pleasure of the reading, feeling myself on a foggy winter day in San Francisco drinking hot chocolate. I loved that he had it on his shelf. I would have to remember to ask him about it.

  Ah, reading. The best of all things. I tucked the book back in its place.

  And there, on the end, were three hardcover novels with paper dust jackets written by Samir Malakar. I kept my hands tucked behind my back. The titles seemed literary. I wondered which one had been first.

  From the doorway, he said, “It’s all right. Go ahead.”

  He stood on the threshold, drying his hair. His skin was still damp, and a clean camp shirt clung to his shoulders. His feet were bare, and like his hands, they were long and graceful. I looked away. “Which one was first?”

  “Long Days.”

  I took it off the shelf. The cover was artful and abstract, but instead of a serious tone, it had a cheery sort of art that signaled a comedic novel. Something eased in my shoulders. Of course he would write comedy. Flipping to the jacket copy, I read a summary of the story about a young man running wild in the freedom of London but finding his way back to himself. I looked at the back flap, and there was Samir, much younger, looking back at me with his very cheery smile. His hair was quite short, and he’d not yet grown the goatee, but he was utterly and perfectly beautiful and couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.

  “Will you let me read it?”

  A slight shrug. “If you want to.”

  Reluctantly but with respect for his actual wishes, I closed the book and set it back on the shelf. “Not until you really don’t mind.”

  A softness between us then. “Thank you.”

  In time, perhaps he would trust me enough to share. In the meantime, there were plenty of other things to occupy my thoughts.

  It started to pour just before we left his cottage, and we both were drenched before we even made it to the car. Laughing, we tumbled in, dripping, and I wiped my face. “Nice to have sunshine while it lasted, I suppose.”

  “April showers bring May flowers.” He started the car. “My father will be glad to see you again. He spoke highly of you.”

  “Really? I felt like I might have brought up bad memories.”

  “Well, sure. You did. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t like you.” The windshield wipers—windscreen, I corrected myself—slapped hard against the heavy rain. “He’s never stopped wondering what happened to his sister. The loss killed my grandmother.”

  “It’s tragic. I can’t imagine how that would feel.”

  “Nor I.” He swung into the back of the restaurant. “Ready to make a run for it?”

  “I don’t know about running, but I’ll hobble as fast as I can.”

  “Three, two, one!”

  We slammed our doors and ran for the building, where a rectangle of light formed a beacon falling from the door of the kitchen. Pavi appeared, dressed in chef’s whites, and flung open the screen. “Hurry!”

  I ran in first, nearly falling flat on my back when my feet went skidding across the floor. Pavi caught my wrist, and Samir caught my back, and I was upright again before I even really had a chance to register that I had almost fallen. “Whoo! Thanks!” I wiped my dripping hair from my face. “It’s raining cows and chickens out there!”

  “Where is your umbrella, Samir?”

  He shrugged. “Somewhere. We’re all right, aren’t we, Olivia?”

  I laughed. “Fine.”

  Pavi hugged me. “I’m so happy to see you again. Tonight, I’m experimenting. You’ll have to tell me what you think.”

  Instead of going into the restaurant, she led the way up a narrow, ancient stairway to the second floor, then the third. “We live on the third and fourth floors,” she said. “The second has been overtaken by supplies and whatnot.”

  “Better to use the ground level for table space,” I said, understanding instantly. The square footage of the restaurant was not huge, and the kitchens were squeezed into the rest.

  “Yes.” She entered an open door at the top of the stairs and called out, “Dad? We have a guest.”

  He set aside his newspaper. “Lady Shaw.” He stood and half bowed in a formal way. “So nice to see you again.”

  “You don’t have to be formal with me,” I said, helplessly. “Really. Will you please call me Olivia?”

  “I will try.”

  “Over here. Samir, fetch the rice.”

  Samir said, “The Restoration Diva came to see Rosemere today.”

  “Jocasta Edwards?” Harshad said. “I love her show! She’s very famous.”

  “So is Olivia, Dad,” Pavi said.

  “Not at all,” I protested. “But she was wonderful. She grew up nearby, I gather. She attended some of the events at Rosemere. You might have met her, Harshad.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Anyway, what did she say, Olivia?” Samir prompted.

  “Well, she looked at the house and the gardens and said it’s going to cost a fortune to fix all of it.”

  “No surprise,” Pavi said.

  I ran down the list of things she’d said about the gardens and the house. “She asked me to think about what might be done to bring in money once the house is restored, and I’m a little flummoxed.”

  “You could have a safari park, like Longleat,” Harshad said.

  Samir laughed. “With elephants and giraffes?”

  “Why not?”

  “A lot of upkeep,” Pavi said. “Imagine how much it costs to feed them.”

  “True,” Harshad conceded.<
br />
  “What about something to do with food?” Pavi asked. “That’s your passion—maybe a cooking school or something like that?”

  “Definitely a possibility.” I tore a tiny bit of naan from my plate. “What other kinds of things do people do? I mean, tours, of course, but I’m not sure Rosemere would bring in that many people.”

  “You could have a literary festival,” Pavi said, and I didn’t imagine the sideways glance she shot her brother.

  He glared at her. “Or a food festival.”

  “You should have picnics again. I miss those picnics,” Harshad said sadly. “Not that they will bring in money, I suppose.”

  “How often did they have them?”

  “Every fourth Saturday, from May to September.”

  I thought of the wide green lawn spread between the house and the garden and wondered what it would take to bring the main kitchen into some kind of order. Would the stove work and the sink? That might be enough. In the meantime, maybe food trucks or something like an open-air kitchen.

  “Now that might be something to think about. I wonder if local chefs”—I wrapped my palm around Pavi’s arm—“could be convinced to come and cook?”

  “I like it,” Samir said.

  I warmed to the idea. “I participated in the organization of food fairs several times, and this could be done on a much smaller scale, just for the locals.”

  “That’s brilliant!” Pavi said and leaned forward eagerly. “You said you’re doing stories in Egg and Hen on English food, right? What if you do stories on each of the chefs who come cook?”

  “I love it.” I could see the spread of magazine pages in my imagination—the velvety green countryside, an English food truck, some gorgeous crumble on a plate. It felt good to have something I felt competent about, something in my actual world, to focus on. “We could just use the lawns, set up tents and lavatories.” I looked at Harshad. “Every fourth Saturday, huh?”

  He beamed at me. “Yes.”

  “That might be biting off more than I can chew, but I’d love to do it a couple of times this summer, just to see what happens. Will you help me, Pavi? It might be challenging to get it ready by May, but definitely by June.”

  “I’m in.”

  I allowed myself to look at Samir, who regarded me with a reserved expression. “What do you think?”

  “People will love it. It’s a great idea.”

  I raised a brow. “And maybe one day we will have a literary festival too.”

  Overhead, a gigantic clap of thunder rattled the roof, and we all laughed. “Nix that idea, I guess.”

  After dinner, Pavi headed down to the kitchen, and Samir insisted on taking me to the hotel. I didn’t really want to walk in the cold rain. This time, it was he who was quiet, and I let him be. My mind was filled with ideas, plans, hopes for the future.

  When we pulled up in front of the hotel, I said, “Thanks for everything, Samir. I don’t know what I would have done here without you and Pavi.”

  “You are quite welcome.” He worked his hands on the steering wheel. “Listen, do you want to have a beer or something?”

  “Like at the pub?”

  “Not there. Everyone will talk too much.”

  “Talk too much?”

  “Gossip. About us.”

  “Does it matter?”

  He nodded, staring out into the rain. “I think it might. There’s another pub down the road a bit.”

  “The rain is awful.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. Never mind.” He tossed his hair out of his face. “I just—”

  “Why don’t you come in? We could go down the hall. There’s a little room down there, and we could have Allen bring—”

  “Same trouble. Everyone will start gossiping. The last thing you need right now.” He moved his hands back and forth on the steering wheel. “The thing is, I just want to explain about the book. Books.”

  Inside the car, we were enveloped in the sound of the pouring rain, our breaths making the air moist and warm. His arm rested against my shoulder, and I had to shift a little, putting my back to the door, to look at him properly. “You don’t have to explain anything.”

  Our eyes met. We were at such close quarters, and that waft of his skin filled my head, and I wanted to touch his curls, his jaw. I thought of his bare feet.

  “That’s not really why,” he said softly and shifted, sliding a hand around my neck to pull me closer. A rush of both wild yearning and abject terror wound through me, and then my hands were on his shoulders, and his other hand cupped my face. His fingertips touched the line of my cheekbone. For an endless, charged moment, he only looked down at me. Then he tilted his head, closed the gap.

  Kissed me.

  My head whirled, and I had to hold on to him, or I would have spun right out of the car into the night and the rain. His lips were pillowy soft yet firm, warm and lush, and I could not help but open my mouth, wanting to drink him in as if he were a potion, a potion that tasted of candied fennel from the dish on the table, the brushes of his mustache tickling my lip. The sensation made me giddy, and I wanted to laugh, but I only touched his face, the lines of that facial hair, moving closer, then closer still, both of us leaning in harder, going deeper, tiny noises escaping me and him and me again. I lifted my hands to his hair, and a curl embraced my finger, glossy and cool and silky. His thumb moved on my throat, up, down, settled in the hollow between my collarbones.

  And then suddenly, I was thinking of that picture of him at twenty-five, looking so young, and the fact that I would be forty at the end of the summer—and the town and the gossip and the weirdness of the situation. I panicked, wondering if I would lose his friendship, his company, and I pulled away inelegantly. Sharply. “I don’t know if—”

  “Don’t think.” He bent and caught my mouth again. His thumbs tilted my chin upward. “Come back with me to my house.”

  My palms fit themselves to his shoulders, and as we kissed, I shuddered to imagine him in bed naked. All of him and all of me and—

  I pushed away, pushed away again, hands on his chest. “Samir. Stop. Think. This is craziness.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re so much younger than me!”

  He laughed softly. “Five years is nothing.”

  “Seven.”

  “Still nothing.” He leaned closer, brushed his lips over my chin, traced my shoulder.

  “But . . . everything is so chaotic. I don’t know what’s going to happen or . . . anything.”

  Abruptly, he straightened. “You’re serious.”

  My heart raced, squeezed, and I wanted him desperately, but just now . . . could I bear it? “It feels a little overwhelming.”

  He looked out the window. Placed his hands precisely on the steering wheel again. “My apologies. I misjudged . . . things.”

  “No.” I touched my chest, which was still burning. “It’s not that.”

  “Just forget it, Olivia. I made a mistake.”

  For a moment, I sat there in the cocoon of the car, wanting to climb over to him and sit in his lap and press my body into his. But at what cost? To me, to him? I just wasn’t sure I was ready for any more emotion, and my gut told me it could be a lot of emotion in regard to Samir.

  Still, for a moment, I hesitated, a little dizzy with the line of his profile, the shape of his hands. My heart thudded in fear, in longing, in—

  “Good night,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Yep.”

  I opened the door and dashed into the rain, feeling my skin sizzle as the rain hit it.

  Summer

  Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

  —Henry James

  Chapter Twelve

  Almost overnight, full spring exploded across the countryside. Crops grew like Jack’s beanstalk in the fields, and bluebells carpeted the forests. The weeks whirled by in a rush of meetings and meals and phone calls with Ameri
ca. Jocasta sent a parade of experts just popping in to check things out, each accompanied by the cameraman, Ian. We filmed the segments that would air at the start and end of each program, and I felt a little nervous, imagining what it would be like to be on television.

  The positives outweighed any nerves or negatives, however. Two contractors examined the house from roof (bad) to foundation (good, mostly) and gave me staggeringly enormous bids. I took them into London to an architect I’d hired and asked her to go over them. She was an expert in listed properties, and within a week, she pronounced both bids sound. I hired her to draw up the initial plans, with the understanding that Hortense and her planning committee would have to approve them. “No worries,” she said. “A Hortense serves on every local council. She will give you trouble, but I’ll do my best to keep it to a minimum.”

  I hired the second contractor just because I liked his demeanor and the fact that he didn’t talk down to me. He gave me a plan for the stages of the work—working south to north, first the roof, then the ground floor, to include the kitchen, dining room, parlors, and servant areas. While the work on the roof was being addressed, they would restore the flat in the carriage house.

  The deposit for the work came from the rents, much to my surprise. Haver had given me a check for the past six months, nearly £100,000, which would be gobbled up quickly by such mammoth tasks, but I only needed it to tide me over until the monies from my mother’s Menlo Park house came through.

  Walking away from his office, however, I realized that I needed an accountant. Someone not Haver, who was a lawyer anyway. I’d ask the earl to recommend someone.

  First up, of course, were the plans we had to submit to the house commissioner, or rather Hortense. While the architect drew up plans for me to look over, I rented a flat over one of the shops on the high street in the village. It wasn’t much more than a bedroom/living room and kitchen, but the windows overlooked the hills and a tumble of back gardens, and I was finally able to start cooking for myself, which instantly made me feel more grounded.

  The flat also gave me a base of operations. On a gigantic dry-erase board I bought at the stationer’s shop, I was able to create a command center to try to keep my life in some kind of order. I divided the board into sections—the articles and columns I was working on, Rosemere tasks (house/garden), Mom mystery, Violet timeline, and last but not least, picnic. When I ran the magazine, we’d used this method to plan each magazine, and I was attached to the visuals.