The Art of Inheriting Secrets

by O'Neal, Barbara

  “Is that safe?”

  I gestured around the room, barely furnished. “There’s nothing to steal but my good pots, and anyway, it would be awkward for people to come over here.”

  “Fair enough.”

  My phone buzzed with a text. “That’s Samir,” I said. “He’s made it to London and will be here when he’s had a shower.”

  “Good.” She shook her head, frowning. “I wish Samir would stop it with this whole thatcher thing. I don’t like Tony. He’s capricious and erratic.” She narrowed her eyes. “I also think he’s got something going with that Rebecca person.”

  “Do you think so? I thought that the first time I met them.”

  “I just don’t like him. And anyway, it’s dangerous for Sam to be climbing up on those roofs all the time. I worry about it.”

  I didn’t feel I had a right to say anything about that. As we walked up the hill, I did say, “I’ve been reading his books.”

  “And?”

  “He’s a wonderful writer, but he’s much better with the science fiction than the literary stuff. The first one is great and funny and real, but—”

  “Science fiction?” She halted.

  “Damn,” I said, quietly, and paused. “Let’s just leave this right here, okay? I can’t say anything more.”

  For a moment, she narrowed her eyes at me. Then she smiled, and the dimple appeared in her cheek. “You’re right. And I’m so, so glad he’s writing again.”

  Miming a zipper across my lips, I tossed away the key.

  “I understand.”

  By ten the trucks and tables were in place, and although a few clouds scuttled over the sky, it looked to be a beautiful day. Some of the women tenants had gathered flowers into wild bundles they tucked into canning jars of various colors, and crews of moms from the elementary and preschools made sure the tablecloths were secured and that there were plenty of paper plates and cutlery. A bake sale to benefit the local mobile library set up just outside the Rosemere kitchen, and they asked if they could charge a pound for tours of the kitchen, which had more takers than I would have ever expected.

  I changed into a fluttery dress, which made me think of the first day I met the earl and his garden party. It had not been long ago at all, and yet he’d made his way into my heart.

  But I felt the part of a countess as I greeted villagers and other locals who made their way to the picnic. The hem of my dress fluttered around my knees, and a soft breeze brushed through my hair. Children tumbled over the grass, and the men—and some of the women—gathered around pints of good brown ale, and the music was exactly right.

  Standing there looking at everyone, at all of it, I felt a sense of pride. “Is this what you wanted, Mom?” I said under my breath.

  Peter came up to me, dressed in clothes I’d never seen, a pair of khaki trousers and a striped shirt pressed crisply, the sleeves actual points above his elbows. A pretty woman of indeterminate age stood beside him. “You pulled it off, my lady!” he cried. His hair, which had always been under his cap, was a mix of auburn and gray, making his eyes quite spectacularly blue.

  “Just for you, Mr. Jenkins,” I said and took his hand. “You were the first to tell me about the picnics.”

  “Ah, now.” He turned to include the woman. “This is my wife, Pat. Patricia, that is. She’s a teacher, third grade.”

  “So nice to meet you, Patricia. You must be a brave woman to teach third grade. They’re suddenly not little kids anymore, are they?”

  “It’s true. I’m so honored to meet you. We saw you on Restoration Diva. It was thrilling!”

  “Jocasta is supposed to be here today, if you want to meet her.”

  “You don’t say!” Peter beamed. “You reckon I could take her picture?”

  “I’m sure you can.”

  Behind them, coming up the path from the village, were Mr. and Mrs. Malakar, and behind them was Samir, loping along with an attitude of peaceful enjoyment. A slight smile played on his lips, and he was dressed beautifully in the green linen shirt I found so lovely and black jeans and the pointy-toed shoes Londoners were wearing this year.

  But the best of it was the moment he spied me. I clasped my hands, waiting, and I knew the exact instant he caught sight of me—his entire being lit up. His face brightened. His posture lengthened, and his body turned toward me, breaking away from everything, his focus pure and direct.

  He smiled.

  And I, standing there in the wavery shade of a chestnut tree, beamed the same bright, hungry light toward him. When he reached me, he took my hand and came very close. “I wish I could kiss you. It feels a thousand years since I’ve seen you.”

  “Ditto,” I said breathily. “But I can say you are a sight for sore eyes.”

  “As you are.” He let go of my hand, brushing the back of his knuckles over the back of mine. “I’ll leave you to it and see if Pavi needs me. Me and you tonight, yes?”

  “Yes. I’ll introduce you to my cat.”

  He laughed.

  Mr. and Mrs. Malakar came up, and Mr. Malakar bowed slightly. “Lady Shaw, you are the very vision of your grandmother.”

  “Thank you. Welcome.” I turned to Mrs. Malakar, who was a hair taller than her husband. Today she wore a simple, patterned cotton dress, sleeveless, her hair sleek and shiny. On her wrist was a carved silver cuff. “I’m glad to see you again, Mrs. Malakar. I hope you forgive my strangeness the other day.”

  “Nothing to forgive. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “I am going to find a beer,” Mr. Malakar said.

  She nodded and stood there, waiting for him to depart. Nervousness shimmied up my spine.

  When we were alone, just the two of us beneath the tall, elegant tree, she fixed her sober gaze on me. “You seem like a very nice woman, Lady Shaw.”

  “Please,” I said, “call me Olivia.”

  “I’m sorry; I can’t. You are Lady Shaw, whether you are comfortable with it or not.” She turned toward the picnic, all the villagers and the food trucks. With a hand as long and graceful as her son’s, she gestured toward the fields, the house. “You are the daughter of a long line, and despite your lack of training, you are, by all accounts, stepping up admirably to learn what you must do to honor your family. I respect that.”

  “Thank you.” I squared my shoulders. “But?”

  “Samir has already had a disaster of a marriage with a woman of a social class far above him. I would not like to see him repeat it.”

  “With all due respect, Mrs. Malakar, he’s a grown man. He can make his own decisions.”

  As if to illuminate our conversation, Samir appeared with two little girls, one on each hip. They had adorned their faces with paint, and ribbons rippled away from their hair. Mrs. Malakar said, “He’s going to be a very good father one day. As his father was. Is.”

  One little girl patted his cheek, and he laughed. “He’s a kind man,” I agreed.

  Mrs. Malakar folded her hands. “I will speak frankly. You are too old for him, Lady Shaw. Even if you were to marry immediately, you will only have, what . . . a year, two, maybe even five to have children?”

  The words stung, and I felt color flood my cheeks. “It’s ridiculous to even think like that. We’ve only just met.”

  “I think you know that is not true. Please don’t be selfish. I understand quite well why you care for him. He’s a good man and wise beyond his years. But true love is unselfish.”

  I didn’t look at her as the heat spread from my cheeks to my ears and down to my throat, bringing with it a small roar that blocked out all sound. I willed myself to be dignified as she walked away, my eyes on Samir, playing with the two girls and a little cadre of boys who joined in.

  Love is unselfish.

  But I didn’t feel unselfish. I felt greedy and hungry. I wanted my hands on him, but I also wanted his voice in my ear, his thoughts tumbling into and tangling with my own. I wanted to walk the fields with him in the early morning and listen to his finge
rs on the keys as he wrote his stories. I wanted the tenderness of his breath and yes—a child with his face, his ready smile. All those things. I didn’t feel faint and accommodating. I felt Amazonian, empowered by the fierceness of my feelings.

  Shake it off, I thought, and I dove back into the whirl of the picnic, trying to greet each and every person there. Jocasta arrived and created a stir, but so many of the locals remembered her as a girl that it settled down fairly quickly.

  Pavi rushed over at one point, taking my arm urgently. “Jocasta is going to film the restaurant Monday as part of the village segment for Rosemere!”

  “That’s amazing! You’ll be famous.”

  “I’m so excited and so terrified. She warned me to get ready. I’m going to have to do a ton of work, so I’m probably going to cut out a little early. Will you be all right?”

  “Yes, yes, yes. Do whatever you need to do.”

  She squeezed my hands, made a little squeak of sound, and dashed off.

  A shadow fell across the landscape, and I started.

  “Are you all right?” It was Alexander Barber with a slim, tall man in a beautifully tailored suit.

  “Yes. Wool gathering, I’m afraid.” I reached for his hands, stood on my toes to give his cheek a kiss. “How are you? I wasn’t sure I would see you today.”

  “We’re doing all right. Poor Claudia has the worst of it. She sends her regrets, but she’s really quite broken up.”

  “I’ll make a point of going to see her next week if you don’t think it’s too soon.”

  “No, that would be lovely.” He turned, drawing forward his companion. “I’d like you to meet my partner, Joshua Gains. He’s an art dealer in the city.”

  “It’s a pleasure, Lady Shaw,” the man said. He had large, pale eyes, and his hair was fading backward from his forehead, but there was a solid clarity in his gaze, and I immediately liked him.

  “My mother was an artist, you know.”

  “Yes, I’ve seen some of her work. Extraordinary. And tortured.”

  I nodded. “Please, both of you enjoy yourselves. We’ve hired some of the best new chefs in the area, and they’re getting rave reviews.”

  Alexander said, “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like a moment, Olivia. Can we walk?”

  “Of course.”

  He gave his partner a nod, and we headed away from the crowd.

  “We’re renovating the gardens,” I said. “Would you like to see them?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  I led the way. “It really is the most remarkable day. We’ve been worried all week that it would pour.”

  “It’s lovely. I haven’t been to the estate before. It lies in quite a pretty spot.”

  “What’s on your mind, Alex?”

  He stopped at the top of the garden and withdrew two envelopes. “I’ve done some footwork, and it appears there has been quite a lot of surveying and plotting going on over your land here.”

  I accepted the envelopes. “Shall I open them now?”

  “It would be better to wait.” He tucked his hands behind his back. The sun struck his eyelashes and teased out the gold in his hair, and I recognized again that he was a very handsome, virile man. The ladies of the country would be crushed to discover he had no intention of marrying, at least not one of them. “That information and the parties behind it are in one envelope. In the other is my offer for the estate.”

  Startled, I looked up. “Offer?”

  “I know you’ve given this your best, and you’ve been so much more successful than anyone expected, but I humbly suggest that it takes a lot of skill and balance to run an estate of this size.”

  “I see. And you’re going save me from myself?”

  He met my eyes. “It wasn’t meant like that.”

  “Well, I’m only a woman. What could I know of what you mean?”

  “Olivia.”

  “I have no intention of selling. Not to you; not to the silent investors who made an offer on the land via Haver, who seems to have run off with a rather enormous sum; and not to whoever this is”—I waved the envelopes—“who wants to build yet another ugly housing estate.”

  “You have my word that I would not build housing estates,” he said. “My goal is to protect and keep the land.”

  “That’s good to know. I guess you can just make me a promise, cross your heart and hope to die, and I’ll believe you.” He started to speak, and I raised my hand. “No. It’s your turn to listen.”

  His mouth set.

  “I am over my head: there’s no question. I may very well fail. But I’m not going to just roll over and let you whisk my inheritance away from me.”

  “Very well. I admire your grit.” He nodded. “The offer stands, and if you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

  I smiled. “I do.”

  With a jaunty salute, he started back to his partner. Standing on the hillock, looking down at the gathering, I felt my skirt rustling around my legs and the breeze dancing in my hair as I watched the gathered number weave together and apart, celebrating new life. New purpose.

  No, I would not sell to anyone.

  By the time all the stragglers and the food trucks had departed, I was exhausted both from the effort of smiling and trying to remember names and the very physical work of the day. Pavi had packed up by two to return to town, and I stayed to supervise the cleanup.

  The one person I’d not seen and had expected to was Rebecca. All afternoon, I’d half waited for her arrival, but she never showed, nor had her husband. Odd, considering how solicitous they’d been. I wondered what had happened.

  As the last truck bumped down the road, the sun played peekaboo with a bank of lavender clouds. Samir had driven his parents home and now returned with a pack over his shoulder. “I haven’t had a chance to tell you how lovely you look,” he said and bent to kiss me.

  I met his kiss, twining my fingers more tightly around his. “So do you. I love that color on you.”

  “I’ll wear it every day if you like.” He raised his head and touched his nose to the tip of mine. “God, it feels like a year since we had time together.”

  “I know.” I tugged his hand. “Let me show you my new flat.”

  “That went very well, I thought,” he said as we walked hand in hand over the path to the carriage house.

  “It was a great success, and Jocasta raved about Pavi’s food, so that will be good for her when the show airs.” The shadow of his mother’s comments rippled over my pleasure, but I brushed them away. “I’ve been reading your books.”

  “More than one at once?”

  “Dipping through them to see what I see.”

  “Mmm.” Against the gold-and-lavender sky, his profile was still. “You needn’t give me reports. Everyone always feels they must prove they have read them, but I don’t need that.”

  “You’re very funny, but not in a mean way, which I love, and there’s a tenderness in your approach to the world that I find very touching.”

  “Tender? I don’t know that I’ve heard that before. What do you mean?” He paused, and I had to smile—what writer could resist hearing more about the perception of his work? I myself could never resist.

  “You really see things as they are. The beauty—or maybe the particularity—of everything, and you’re fond of it all. Awe is in all of it.” I inclined my head. “There’s a lot of wisdom in that, being so present.”

  “Awe,” he said quietly, brushing hair away from my face. “Thank you.”

  “I’m awed by you,” I said. “I feel like I made you up, that you can’t possibly be the man you seem to be.”

  “I’m as flawed as any,” he said.

  “I know. I see you, you know.”

  He swallowed. “And I see you.”

  “What do you see?”

  “Intelligence and curiosity and open-mindedness. A certain delicacy, a little brokenness.”

  “My mother.”

  He nodded. “And your do
g and the loss of your health and your work. You became unmoored when all those things happened.”

  “I did.”

  “You’re afraid too. Afraid you won’t find your place, that if you do, it might be taken.”

  The words cut a bit too close, and I scowled at him. “That’s enough, sir.”

  He grinned, but then his attention was caught by something behind me. “Oh, look!” He turned me gently by my shoulders, and there in front of us was Rosemere, the sun striking the windows with gold, setting the stones afire with rose.

  “It’s beautiful,” I breathed. He stood behind me, his hands on my shoulders, and I covered one of his hands with my own.

  “It’s been standing here for six hundred years,” he said quietly, “those very windows looking out to those very same fields. It’s hard to even imagine what that means, six hundred years.”

  “I know. All those lives, the mornings and the evenings, the dinners and the disasters and the Christmas mornings. So many of them.”

  “And there will be more, because of you.” He kissed my head, and I leaned into him.

  “Thank you, Samir,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “For just . . . you.”

  He wrapped his arms around my shoulders. “Thank you for the very same thing.”

  Later, after we’d reunited properly after four entire days apart, we puttered into the kitchen. “I have everything you need for chai,” I said proudly, opening a cupboard. “Will you make some? I’ll make my very special broiled cinnamon toast.”

  “Done.”

  My phone rang, and when I glanced at the screen, I saw that it was the constable. “Hmm,” I said and answered. “Hello?”

  “Hello, Lady Shaw. I’m calling with some news. Is this a good time?”

  “Of course.” I widened my eyes at Samir, who plucked a banana out of a bowl and peeled it. “What’s up?”

  “We’ve been coordinating with the Turkish government and local officials, and we’ve made several arrests in your case.”

  “My case?”

  “The serious fraud case? Regarding Haver and various others?”

  “Oh!” I realized that my solicitor had actually undertaken the work of getting the police on the case. “That’s great. Who was arrested?”