The Art of Inheriting Secrets

by O'Neal, Barbara

  “Well, hello, Countess.”

  I practically jumped out of my skin, shaken out of my dreamworld by a voice that was totally out of context. Grant stood like a surly giant on the stairs, his hair greasy and tousled, along with his clothes, which looked as if he’d slept in them. He probably had. It was a long trip from San Francisco to London.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Just thought I’d come see for myself what you’d inherited.”

  I moved to close the door, suddenly aware of the paintings stacked like gold bricks against the wall. He’d know exactly what they were. “I am not going to talk to you without a lawyer.”

  His flat palm and a carefully placed foot kept the door from closing. “C’mon, Olivia. I never thought you’d be this person, all materialistic and shit. We were good together, and if the situation were reversed, I’d do the right thing.”

  “I’m doing what’s right.” I looked up and shrugged. “Which I already told you. I don’t know why you came all this way.”

  He tossed his hair out of his eyes. “Just let me talk to you for five minutes, will you?”

  “What is there to talk about? We broke up. I’m finished.” I fingered my phone in my pocket, wondering if I should call the police.

  “Did you break up because of all this?” He gestured toward the town and consciously or unconsciously toward Rosemere. “I had the driver take me by the estate, and it’s a fucking castle! Did you think I wouldn’t live up to some class standard?”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  He looked over my shoulder. “More of your mother’s paintings?”

  “None of your business.”

  The proprietor of the shop, my landlady, stepped out on the landing, her tiny arms folded over her chest. “Everything okay here?”

  “It’s fine, Mrs. Su.”

  “We’re old friends,” Grant said over his shoulder. “Nothing to worry about.”

  She stayed put, and I was grateful.

  Another foot on the narrow stairs made Grant turn. I peered around the door and saw Samir, freshly showered and wearing a linen shirt the color of new leaves. Despite the tension of the moment, I felt a surge of lust over the glow of his skin, the curve of his mouth. “Sorry to keep you waiting, Olivia,” he said in crisp British, the crispest I’d ever heard from him. “Are you ready to go?”

  I leapt at the manufactured excuse to escape. “Sure.” My hands were shaking a little as I moved to close my door.

  Smoothly, Samir said, “Hello. Samir Malakar.”

  “Samir, this is my ex-boyfriend Grant. I’ve told you about him.”

  “Nice, Olivia,” Grant spat out. “Jesus Christ.”

  Had he always been so crude? It had never seemed like it before, but maybe England was changing me.

  “You go now,” Mrs. Su said to Grant.

  He eyed her. “I don’t need directions from the landlady.”

  “Go, Grant. I have nothing to say.”

  For one more minute, he stood stubbornly on the stairs, looking from me to Samir and back. “This is your boy toy, huh? He gets the money, and you get hot young cock.”

  My ears went bright red. “You need to leave, or I’m going to call the police.”

  He laughed in an exaggerated way. “Fine. I’ll see you in court.”

  He headed down the stairs, and Samir stepped sideways into an alcove to allow it. I half expected Grant to throw an elbow, but he only glared.

  Samir came up, touched Mrs. Su’s arm. “Thank you.”

  “I don’t like him.”

  I looked up at Samir. “We have to get all the paintings out of here.”

  “Yeah, we will,” he said and closed the door to the apartment. “Are you all right? He was pretty nasty.”

  “I’m fine.” The green shirt was open at the throat, and I swayed forward as if drawn by a magnet to kiss the hollow there.

  “I was charged with bringing kisses,” he said. Swinging me around to press my back against the wall, he leaned in and kissed me, and I met it eagerly, opening to his tongue, running my hands under his shirt, over his smooth, muscular back. In seconds we were lost.

  Over my lips, he said, “All I have thought about all day is this.” His hands ran down my sides, pulled up my hem, skimmed my thighs. “I have had so many fantasies about this dress,” he said and pressed into me.

  “What kind of fantasies?” I breathed.

  “This,” he said and, with a single movement, pulled the two sides of the V neckline apart, revealing my breasts in a lacy little bra I’d known he would see. “Oh, yeah, this,” he said and kissed my throat, my breasts, then my mouth.

  I was already on fire, unfastening his jeans, shoving them off, and he was pulling up my skirt, yanking down my panties, and then we were tangled, deep, tongues and hands and legs and everything.

  When we were finished, panting, me leaning on the wall, he touched his forehead to mine. “I’ve lost my mind over you, Olivia.”

  “Me too.” I kissed him again, ran my hands over his lower back.

  We didn’t get to the lamb chops.

  Later, we raided the kitchen for apples and cheese and opened beers. “You think your mother’s next clue will be among these paintings?” Samir asked, settling cross-legged on the floor. His feet were bare.

  “Maybe. It’s my next best guess.”

  “All right. Let’s take a look at what’s here. Then we can take them over to the space above Coriander until tomorrow.”

  I nodded, worrying again about Grant coming back. “The earl warned me that people would be coming after a piece of the pie. I didn’t think one of them would be Grant.”

  Samir said, “You don’t believe you have to worry about me, do you?”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about at first. “Worry?”

  “That I’m a fortune hunter.”

  “Well, it would help if I had a fortune.” I wiped my fingers on a napkin. “I suppose I could be worried that you’re after my Starbucks card, but then again, you’d have to drive to London to use it.”

  “Starbuck’s card?” He paused. “Is it a credit card?”

  “Oh, honey, no. It’s a rewards card. You get stars every time you use it to pay or order or whatever. You preload it with money, and then it makes everything go faster.”

  He tucked his lower lip under his upper. Raised a brow. “That’s a thing?”

  “Yes,” I said very seriously and leaned close to whisper. “You can get free coffee.”

  He shook his head. “Americans.”

  I grinned. The paper on the painting was loose, and he made an exaggerated examination of his hands, then held one up. I nodded, and he tore the paper away.

  We both sucked in our breath at the exact same instant. It was a small, exquisite painting rendered in oils, unmistakably Monet.

  Samir said, “Do you think it’s real?”

  My heart was pounding. I reached for the painting, holding it up. “I have no idea, but it’s brilliant, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. We should see what else there is.”

  I picked up the plate of cheese and apples. “Let’s wash our hands.”

  “Good idea.”

  In the end, most of the paintings were clearly important, but I didn’t recognize any others as priceless. One other kept nagging me. “This might be Constable,” I said. “That’s a Constable kind of sky, for sure.”

  “I don’t know that leaving these with Pavi is the best idea,” Samir said. “She would take good care of them, but God, what if there was a fire or some such thing?”

  “Right. It might be hard to tell the insurance company that we had a painting worth millions in the lot.” I stood up, looking at the paintings all in a line. “I don’t know what the clue in the bedroom was, though, unless the photos were the clue.”

  “But why lead us to the paintings?”

  I tapped my nose with my index finger, thinking. Looking at them all in a row. “Maybe just for the money the
y’d bring. Or she wanted them safeguarded.”

  “So she left them wrapped up in a crumbling manor house for God knows how long?” He scowled. “That makes no sense at all.”

  “I don’t think it was very long,” I said. “Maybe only a few months. I’m starting to think she might have had an illness she didn’t tell me about.” I shifted angles, looking at the assembled artwork from another position. “She smoked for fifty years. Her lungs were crap.”

  “I’m sorry, Olivia.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But even if she was ill, why do it this way?”

  “She loved treasure hunts.” I shrugged, picked up one painting, and traded it with another without much thought. My hands moved without my brain, until I’d rearranged all of them into a rainbow—which was perfectly filled out.

  My throat closed with pain, with the severity of missing her, the sweetness of this gesture. The work it must have taken. “I used to do this in her studio when I was a little girl. Move the paintings into making the colors of a rainbow. It almost never works this perfectly.” I pointed: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. “Roy G. Biv.” The red was another of the series from the pasha and the harem girl, and each painting moved through the spectrum in exactly the right hue. The Monet, real or copied, was the violet.

  Samir started shooting photos. “There might be something in the artists’ names or the subjects.” He shot the entire line as a panorama, then each one in turn. “Do you know who all of the artists are?”

  “No. We can probably run an image search on Google.”

  He tucked the phone back in his pocket and stretched his legs out, hands behind him, studying the paintings. I captured the image of him in my memory—the beautiful hands, his long body, his grace. He was utterly comfortable with himself, something that was very rare. It was true of Pavi too—she was exactly herself. It must have been some aspect of the way they had been raised. Mother or father? I would be curious to see.

  “They’re all exactly the same size,” Samir said slowly, “and exactly the right hue. There must have been a lot more paintings to choose from.”

  The knowledge sank in. “All of them. All of the paintings from the house. She stashed them. But where?” My head was starting to hurt with figuring it out, and I was getting very hungry. “It’s too late for the supper I’d planned to cook, but we both need to eat.”

  He hopped up and flung his arms around me from behind. “I’m so sorry, Olivia. You’ve been looking forward to cooking, and I ruined it.”

  I laughed, pointing toward the dry-erase board, where I’d drawn his portrait. “You helped me with another goal, so it’s all right.” I leaned backward into him. “We do need to eat, and we need to figure out what to do with the paintings. I don’t want to leave them.”

  “You live right next to a fish-and-chips shop. One of the better ones around, actually, which is why there is a line of cars to the motorway every Friday night.”

  “Well, then, let’s have fish-and-chips and figure this out.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  In the end, we hashed out a midway solution—we borrowed Pavi’s van, loaded the paintings up, and drove them to Marswick Hall. It was after dark when we arrived, and I assumed we might not see the earl, but he met us by the servant’s entrance, using only his cane. “Hello, hello!” He wore a crisp striped shirt and slacks and his usual orthopedic shoes. His color was good.

  “Lord Barber, this is Samir Malakar. He’s been helping me with just about everything in the house. Samir, Lord Barber, the Earl of Marswick.”

  “Good to meet you, lad. Olivia has spoken highly of you.”

  I had? I didn’t remember that.

  “Let’s see this haul, shall we?”

  Four young men from the estate carried the paintings inside to a room I’d never visited. It was long and dark, with lamps offering feeble light against the shadows. The walls were hung cheek by jowl with paintings of all eras and sizes.

  “They’ll be safe here until you get them appraised,” George said, gesturing to the carriers to line them up at waist height along a massive sideboard. Most of them fit on the ledge. The others were lined up below, against the footers. “Gerald, see to more light, will you, please?” he said to one of the young men.

  As I looked at them side by side like this again, something bothered me. I narrowed my eyes. What was I missing?

  When the lights came on, the paintings were more dazzling than they’d seemed in my small rooms. George made an approving noise, limping forward to look at each one closely. “The frames are gone, but these paintings hung in the library and study of Rosemere.” With his cane, he pointed to the clouds I had thought were Constable and confirmed it. “Constable, and the Monet. This is an early effort by Wootton. And this is a portrait of your uncle Roger.” He shook his head, staring at a light-infused portrait of a very handsome young man, maybe twenty, with piercing eyes and a dissolute mouth. “The women loved him, they did. Fools. Something happened to the lad in India—that’s always been my theory.” He turned. “Anyway. They’re safe here for now.”

  “Thank you, George.”

  “Of course. Will you be to luncheon on Wednesday?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” I stepped up to give him a kiss on the cheek, as I always did, but he caught my elbow.

  “Will you spare a moment for an old man?”

  “Of course.” I glanced over my shoulder to see Samir looking around slowly. Taking it in. I realized that I knew he was cataloguing the paintings, the details of the room—click, click, click—as every writer did in an unfamiliar world.

  An image rose in my mind: that stack of pages on his desk, revealed by the bright moon.

  “Samir, I’ll be right back.”

  “I’ll wait outside.”

  “That isn’t necessary,” George said. “It will only be a moment.”

  I followed his shuffling steps into the study, where he took an envelope out of the desk. “Your mother said if you found the paintings, you were to have this.”

  My throat tightened. “If I found the paintings?”

  He nodded.

  The envelope was brown paper, and I could feel something hard inside. Ripping it open, hoping for a letter or note, I found only a plain brass key. It might have gone to anything and had no identifying marks. “This is it? Nothing else?”

  “No.” He sat down in his chair, hands piled one atop the other on the handle of his cane.

  “She came to England,” I said, staring at the key.

  “Yes. She came to see me last summer.”

  “So she knew she was dying.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she say what she was dying of?”

  “No. Cancer, one gathers.”

  Of course. She would never have told me she had a terminal disease, and pneumonia often carried off a cancer patient. I nodded, staring at the key. “I don’t suppose she told you why she set up this long, crazy treasure hunt rather than just telling me about all of it?”

  His smile was bittersweet. “I’m sorry, my dear; she did not. I reckon you’ll find out soon enough.”

  I sighed, suddenly extremely tired. “All right. Thank you.” I bent and kissed his cheek. “See you on Wednesday.”

  As I straightened, he said, “Isn’t your young man the one who wrote a novel, from Saint Ives Cross?”

  “Yes.”

  “I read about him. Seems a smart fellow. But you know, you’ll need someone to help you with Rosemere.”

  I smiled fondly. “I know. You want me to marry your nephew, but I’m afraid I’m too American for that plan.”

  “Very well. Remember your position—that’s all.”

  “I’ll do my best.” Carrying the key tightly, I headed back to the library.

  “You’re going to have to tell me about your book,” I said when I found Samir. “Everyone knows about it except me.”

  “Who knows?”

  “The earl. Pet
er, the driver, the other day. He said you were famous.”

  “Clearly, that is not true.”

  “Still,” I said.

  “I noticed something while you were in there.” He drew me toward the paintings. “They’re all the same size. Exactly.”

  I closed my eyes, recognizing the truth. “That’s what was bothering me too.” With a sigh, I crossed the room and picked two of them up, turned them over. The canvases had been aged and weathered, but in an eerily similar fashion. “They’re copies.”

  “All of them?”

  “I don’t know.” We reached for the paintings and turned them over one at a time. Out of the lot of fourteen, three were clearly copies. The rest appeared to be original, but they would have to be evaluated.

  “Do you think your mother did the copies?”

  I shrugged. “I doubt it very much. She wouldn’t do this kind of thing, and anyway, she was pretty feverishly working on a project of her own the past year.” Suddenly aware of the butler waiting by the door, I said, “We should go.”

  We walked out to the van.

  He opened my door, quiet. Around us, the night sang its own song, crickets in the shrubs and water running somewhere far away. An owl hooted at the moon.

  “You can read it,” he said. “I told you that before.”

  “No. Not until you give it to me.” I swung my feet into the van. “I can wait.”

  He didn’t say anything else, just came around and climbed in and started the engine. For a long moment, he sat in the dark with his hands on the steering wheel.

  “Is something wrong?”

  That same bright moon from the night before poured cold light through the windscreen. “It’s just . . . that room. All those paintings. All that time and history. That’s your world now.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “It is, Olivia. And the fact remains that our social classes are vastly different.”

  “Don’t,” I said, and to emphasize my point, I covered his mouth with my fingers. “Let’s just be us. Let it be.” I took my hand away. “Okay?”

  He captured my fingers. “We’re tired. Let’s go to sleep, shall we?”

  “Side by side?”

  “Yes.” He shifted, pulling out of the drive. “What did the earl want?”