“Let’s see how it goes before you congratulate me.”
“It will be wonderful—you’ll see.” She slung a cloth bag over her shoulder diagonally. “Show me the rose gardens, will you? I want to harvest some petals for rosewater.”
We walked in the warm sunshine. Steam rose from a field in the distance, and the air was filled with the twittering of dozens of birds hidden in trees and fields. In the pocket of my sundress, my phone buzzed with a text. My heart gave a little jolt, as if I were seventeen, and I tugged it out so eagerly, it got tangled in the fabric of my pocket.
I am useless today, it read. I can only think of your skin.
That very skin flushed as if he were trailing his fingers over it. I swallowed and, slowing to type accurately, wrote, Lips. I can only think of your lips. Kissing you. A thousand times. A million.
Mmm. What would a gathering of kisses be?
A rain of kisses.
There was a long pause. Then, I shall look forward to that rain.
I glanced at Pavi. “Sorry.” I tucked the phone back in my pocket.
“You’re blushing,” she said.
I pressed my hands to my face. “Oh, I think it’s just hot.”
“Not particularly.”
I couldn’t look at her and kept walking, not at all sure what exactly I should do. Say.
“So,” she said, “you and Samir?”
“Hmm?”
“I have eyes. I saw you in the parking lot the other day. You were both practically on fire.”
“We were?”
“Incandescent,” she said. “And he didn’t come for dinner last night.”
We entered the garden, and the smell of roses hung in the warm air, spicy and sweet. One tall white blossom, a little past its peak, offered a perfume of oranges. I touched the delicate petals, plucked one to rub between my fingers, thinking of our fingertips, mine and Samir’s, touching in the car. It made me very slightly dizzy.
“He’s . . .” A vision of his mouth, his way of teasing me ever so gently, his clarity of thinking, moved through me, and I touched my belly, wordless.
She only reached for my hand and held it for a moment. Her face was so much like her brother’s that I loved it just for that, and then I wondered if I loved his face, too, because it made me think of hers. “Just know that people won’t like it.”
“People?”
“The village. In general.” She moved her hand over my knuckles. “The earl in particular.” She knew he’d been mentoring me.
“Well, he wants to marry me off to his nephew, so . . .”
Pavi laughed. “Dynasties.” She didn’t let go. “My mother is going to be here soon.”
“Samir said she was coming.” I took a breath. “She won’t like me?”
“No, not for him.”
I bent my head, suddenly embarrassed, seeing myself through a mother’s eyes—the older woman. Mrs. Robinson. “I hardly know what to think. It’s all brand-new,” I whispered.
“Not really,” she said. “It’s been there since you arrived.”
I thought of the very first day, when he’d showed me through the house. Had I known then? “I’ve never met anyone like him.”
She smiled, and in this the siblings were different. Where Samir’s grin was wide and open, her smile made of her mouth a pursed heart. “Good response.” She patted my hand and released me, then briskly produced a thin net bag and a pair of scissors. “Let’s find the very most aromatic of all the roses.”
I laughed. “What a luscious task! How do you make the rosewater? And what do you use it for?”
“Haven’t you explored it?”
“Not really. I might have come across it in a recipe or two, but I haven’t made any study of it yet.” I smelled a bright-red bloom and found it disappointingly bland. “This has a pretty color but no scent.”
“You’ll want to write about rosewater,” she said with her customary confidence.
“I’ll give it some thought,” I said. “But that reminds me—I’ve been wondering if you would want to write one on coriander? A guest column for the magazine.”
She halted, eyes wide. “Are you fucking with me?”
“No! Why would I do that?”
“Oh my God! Yes, yes, yes!” She did a little dance, then halted, frowning. “You’re not doing this because of Samir, are you?”
“No!” I touched my heart, held up my right hand. “I swear. I’ve thought about it several times. I just remembered to ask you.”
She lifted one perfectly arched brow. “Okay. I’d love to. Though truthfully, I would have done it even if you were.”
“Good. I’ll send you an email on word count and tone, though I’m sure you’ve read plenty of them.”
“Every single one.”
We ambled through the roses, Pavi a few steps ahead of me. The rows between bushes were overgrown with grass and wildflowers, but many—most—of the roses were healthy enough.
“I can’t get over how many of them are still alive. No one has tended this garden for forty years.”
“Someone must have taken care of them sometimes. You see they’ve been pruned now and then, and—oh, look!”
Gliding through the garden was a peacock. It might even have been the same one I’d seen before, with a tall crown and gorgeous deep-blue chest. Arrogantly, he turned his face away from us, as if we were below his notice, and called out to the forest. From the trees came an answer, and he strutted off, king of his domain. “They are so beautiful.” Pavi sighed.
“Samir told me there is a flock that lives in the forest.”
“Roses and peacocks. It’s like the setting for a fairy tale.”
I looked around. “It’s going to take more than a kiss to save this place.” I thought of the single rose blooming into the parlor when Samir and I had first walked through. “But it does feel sometimes like it’s under an enchantment.”
One tall rose drew my eye, a castle atop a small hill, with tangles of white damask roses around it, as if on guard. The rose was orange and yellow with touches of pink, and I recognized it immediately from a hundred of my mother’s paintings. It seemed larger than others of the same type, as haughty as the peacock, and I rounded the overgrown white roses to see if I could find a way in.
Pavi, however, was enchanted by the damasks. “These are prime,” she cried, burying her nose in a mass of them. “The perfect flower for rosewater. It will be clear and very, very fragrant.”
“Look at the size of that!” I cocked my head at the peach-colored rose. “I always thought she was exaggerating.”
“You lost me.”
“My mother painted this rose. Over and over. Let me borrow your shears, will you? I want to cut some and take them back with me.”
“I’ll do it. I have the gloves.”
As she cut a passageway through the thicket of white roses, I picked up the branches she’d dropped. When I could get through, carefully, I bent my head to the giant blossoms and reared back. It had a strange, feral scent. “I’m not sure I like this one.”
But I found the first bracket of five leaves, as my mother had taught me, and clipped a blossom, then another, reaching back to hand them to Pavi. As I handed her the last one, I caught my arm on a thorn, opening a long scratch that immediately beaded up with bright-red blood.
“Ooh, careful,” Pavi teased. “Don’t want to fall asleep for a hundred years!”
“No worries.” It stung a bit, and I let it bleed a bit to get any bacteria out, and anyway, I wanted to trim a couple of canes away while I had a chance. Reaching down over the white roses, I said, “Don’t do anything with it yet. I want to shoot some photos so I can reference the paintings later.”
“It’s visually very appealing, isn’t it?” She held it in her hands, took a big sniff, and said, “That’s a strange one. I don’t think I like it either.”
“Probably bred for size, and that threw something off.” I pruned the bush and then straightened, look
ing around at the view from this slightly higher spot. The house was clearly visible, the back windows that would have once been my mother’s room, the tumbledown wall that had just fallen into the ballroom. As I turned, I could see the abbey and the first of the fields. “Gorgeous spot. I should make a note of it and ask for a bench here.”
“It reminds me a bit of Sissinghurst. Have you been there?”
“No.”
“You might like to visit as you’re going through the renovations.”
“Which reminds me—the cameraman is coming back to go through Violet’s room with me. Do you want to come?”
She shook her head. “I hated that room, even when we were kids.”
“Really? There’s so much stuff in there!”
“It’s sad. The way they just left her things.”
I thought of the photos, what we had discovered about Violet and Nandini, pushed it away so she wouldn’t see anything on my face. “It’s all good. Thanks for your help this morning.”
“I’ll walk back with you. I have plenty of rose petals.” She opened the canvas bag to show me a pillowcase’s worth of white petals. “These are very nice. I’ll make you some rosewater toner.”
“What does it do?”
“It’s very good for the complexion.”
As we walked back up the road toward the house, a woman carrying a woven basket met us at the junction to the cottages. She was tall and redheaded, wearing jeans and red-flowered wellies. “Hullo, Olivia,” she said. “I don’t know if you’ll remember me—”
Smoothly, I said, “Of course I do, Elizabeth.” She was one of the tenants I’d visited on the earl’s instruction. “How could I forget your rhubarb crumble?”
“Thank you.” She blushed slightly across her freckled cheeks. “I saw you walking to the roses earlier and waited for you to come back. We have a bumper crop of asparagus this year, and you said you’d been pining for your own cooking. I thought you might enjoy some.”
I poked my head into the basket and made a low noise of approval. “Pavi, look at these.” The spears were thick as my thumb, perfectly pointed. We both sighed. “Pavi runs Coriander, the Indian-fusion restaurant in town.”
“Oh, we love it. The mulligatawny is one of my husband’s favorite things.”
“Thank you.” Pavi took an asparagus out of the basket, admiring it, then biting into it. “These are fantastic. Would you sell them?”
Elizabeth’s mouth turned down. “Not today, but tomorrow I’ll have more. How many could you use?”
“How many will you sell? I’m an asparagus fanatic, and the season—the true season—is very short.”
“Would you like a look at the garden? I have to admit I’m quite proud of it. When I married Joseph, it was sorely neglected, and I’ve brought it back to health.”
“Yes! I’d love to!”
“I’m afraid I have to meet the cameraman,” I said, holding the basket close. “Thank you, Elizabeth.”
As I carried the basket up the hill, I was imagining a dozen ways I might use the asparagus to feed Samir, blissfully unaware of everything that would come between us and those exquisite spears.
Chapter Eighteen
Along with the camera crew—who filmed the site of the abbey where the excavation was ongoing, then joined me in the house—Jocasta had sent movers. I directed them to organize and pack everything in a way that would make it easier for me to review later. The paintings were taken down and carefully wrapped for storage with the other possibly valuable items from the first round of clearing. I looked at each one as it was removed from the wall, but there were no more messages. I hadn’t expected there to be.
By two, Ian was finished filming and dropped me off at my flat. Sunshine poured in the back windows, making the rooms stuffy, and I settled everything on the wooden kitchen table and opened the windows to let in the breeze. Below, in the garden, the Chinese woman who ran the fish-and-chips shop was leading a group in tai chi. The sight of them, all dressed in easy clothes, some barefoot, moving with deliberation, calmed something in me, and I actually let go of a breath.
I told myself I needed to get back to yoga, but I was already thinking about the asparagus and what to pair it with. Asparagus and peas and . . . lamb, of course, with fresh herbs and new potatoes. Kicking off my shoes, I started making a list in my head of all the ingredients I’d need to pick up from the market.
The place had come furnished, but I hadn’t done much serious cooking yet. The cupboard yielded a heavy skillet and one medium-sized pan, but when I tested to see if they’d both fit on the tiny stove, the answer was no. I’d have to cook in shifts.
And for one moment, I imagined what it would be like to cook on the AGA in the kitchen at Rosemere. What if the kitchen wasn’t a commercial kitchen at all but filled with a big wooden table and lots of cupboards, and I opened up the back wall to french doors that looked out over the fields? What if it was my kitchen, and my friends came in to eat there, and we drank wine and watched the sunset? What if I had a family gathered around a big farmhouse table?
The vision pierced me. All at once, I realized maybe it could be a home eventually. Maybe not all of it—who wanted to live in thirty-seven rooms?—but some big portions of it. It excited me, and I thought suddenly of my friend Renate, a designer who had moved to New York three years ago, breaking my friendship heart. We were still friends, but coast-to-coast friendships were never the same. She would love the idea of transforming those ancient spaces into a welcoming, comfortable place. I would have to remember to email her.
Suddenly, there were too many things to remember. I was juggling so many ideas that I was getting dizzy with it. It was the way my mind worked—a thousand tasks spinning at once—but when it got to this point, I needed to get lists going. Carrying my dry-erase marker over to the board on the wall, I made a to-do list. I knew people who used digital tools, but I needed to have them in the physical world. The tasks were more manageable when I just looked at them in a tidy row:
Send Renate an email
Market: lamb, butter, potatoes, peas, rosemary, good salt
Next clue in treasure hunt. Paintings?
Smiling, I then added,
Have wild sex with Samir as often as possible
I surrounded this with spirals and hearts. It turned out that falling in love at thirty-nine was just as heady as it had been at nineteen and twenty-nine. I found myself drawing his face: those heavy brows; the straight, bold nose; his lush mouth; the suggestion of his tumbling hair, all in orange dry-erase marker.
For no reason, for every reason, I laughed, capped the pen, and went off to the market to gather supper.
I did my shopping, then stopped in at Haver’s office. Mrs. Wells was there at her desk, and she looked instantly on guard when I came in. Coolly, she said, “I’m afraid he isn’t in.”
“That’s fine. I just wanted to be sure you had all the permissions you need to release the files to the accountant I hired.”
“We have the information,” she said stiffly, moving a piece of paper on her desk. “Thank you.”
She turned her attention to the computer. When I stood there a little longer, she deigned to look at me. “Is there anything else?”
“There’s no judgment on the firm, Mrs. Wells. I am just not an expert on any of this, and I need some help understanding what is going on with the estate.”
“It’s none of my concern,” she said, typing something.
“No, it isn’t,” I said, “but I had hoped we could be polite to one another.”
“Of course,” she said and dropped her hands on her lap. “What else can I do for you?”
“Do you know when Mr. Haver will be back?”
“He’s gone to Mallorca on holiday. It will be a few weeks.”
“Weeks,” I said. “I assume he left the contact information for the banks?”
“Yes.” Wordlessly, she flipped through a file and brought out a single sheaf of paper.
; “Thank you.” I tucked it into my shoulder bag. “See you soon, I guess.”
“Or perhaps you’ll find everything you need in the next village over.” She pushed up her glasses and focused on the screen.
Ah. A faux pas. I should have found an accountant in Saint Ives Cross. I nodded, creasing the paper. “I’m sure I’ll find everything I need right here. Thank you, Mrs. Wells.”
Out in the still-warm day, I told myself it was a good lesson. No matter how I felt about Haver, I had nothing against Mrs. Wells, and I was sorry I’d hurt her feelings.
But it was annoying that Haver was out of town. I had a lot of questions, and now it would be that much longer before I could get the answers. In the meantime, I needed to move the accounts to my own control, and I would do that in the morning. Something else to add to my to-do list.
Just now, however, the sun was warm on my arms, and I had a lovely meal I looked forward to cooking. Even the challenges of the tiny stove and limited tools would be fun. A man passed me, and I realized he was a regular at the pub. “Good afternoon,” I said.
He tipped his hat with a little bow.
I had planned to pick up some little something for dessert at the bakery, but of course, it closed at 1:00 p.m., or whenever they ran out of goods for the day. No matter.
With my bag on my arm, I slowed to text Samir: I hope you’re very hungry. I am so happy to cook! It’s been ages.
I thought it might take a while for a response, but it came through almost immediately. Oh, yeah. I’m famished, all right.
I stopped to text more easily, the bag swinging on my wrist. When will you be finished?
I’m just feeding my cat. Do you want me to bring anything?
Kisses. I smiled as I sent the text.
At the doorway to the stairs, I paused to scramble for my keys, always lost in the bottom of my bag no matter how often I tried to create a system of pockets for things. I opened the door and skipped up the stairs to my door. It took a moment to unlock it, as always, because the key was old, but eventually, it turned, and I dropped the bag on the counter.
The Art of Inheriting Secrets Page 23