The Art of Inheriting Secrets

by O'Neal, Barbara

  “Jonathan Haver was picked up in Rome, Rebecca Poole and Tony Willow in London, and”—he paused—“Judith and Rick Vickers, your former caretakers, en route to England.”

  My mouth dropped open, and I looked at Samir with wide eyes. “Wow. That’s incredible. Do you need me to do something?”

  “Eventually, you’ll be called upon, but nothing for now. I just wanted to give you the good news personally.”

  “Thank you. So much.”

  “You’re quite welcome, my lady. Thank you for all you’re doing for us.”

  I hung up and told Samir. “I doubt if I’ll get any money back, but at least they don’t get away with it.”

  He high-fived me. “That’s great.”

  “Now, about that chai?”

  He picked up the packets and spice boxes. “How did you know the right things to buy?”

  “It’s chai,” I said with a shrug, smiling over my shoulder.

  “But this is my special blend, my very own. You can’t have known that.”

  My sketchbooks were on the counter, and I opened one to a watercolor-and-pen sketch of his chai. “Water. Cinnamon stick, star anise, whole allspice”—I held my place with one finger—“which is a very nice touch, by the way. Whole peppercorns, cloves, cardamom pods, coriander, ginger, black tea.”

  He smiled. “Well done. Where are the pots and pans?”

  “Below, in that cupboard.”

  As he measured spices, I was aware of a sense of deep contentment. He wore a loose shirt and sweats, his feet bare, his hair loose and tumbling. I watched him count out peppercorns and cardamom pods. “What’s the difference between black and green cardamom?” I asked.

  “One is ripe?” he offered.

  I laughed. “Okay, I guess I need to ask Pavi.”

  “Better choice. Or look it up on Google.”

  “More fun to ask Pavi. She always weaves a story around food. Did I tell you she’s writing an article for Egg and Hen?”

  “No! That’s fantastic. She must be thrilled.”

  “I knew she’d be a great writer, just from reading her menu. And now I see her brother has the same touch with words. Which of your parents taught you that?”

  “Both of them, really, but my mother is a poet.”

  The facts of her rearranged themselves. “Is she published?”

  “In India. She writes in Marathi.”

  “Hmm. What does she write about?”

  “Nature, rain, and skies and cows.”

  “Cows?”

  A slight tilt of his head. “She’s fond of cows. Animals.”

  As the spices simmered, he reached for my book. “This is your sketchbook?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said, closing it. “My mother was the artist. I just play around.”

  “May I?”

  My hand covered it for a moment, while I measured my fear that he would find them primitive. “You can’t laugh.”

  “I would never laugh at you. With you, but never at you.”

  I lifted my hand, let him take the book and open it.

  “Food! Of course.” He looked through the pages slowly. “You are not your mother,” he said easily.

  “No.” I laughed and stood up to begin making the toast. I’d bought a good hearty loaf from Helen’s bakery and fresh butter from a farm stand. Slicing the bread as evenly as I could, I arranged the slices on a cookie sheet.

  “You do share a sense of whimsy with her,” he commented, turning the page to show me the sketch I’d made of cakes and slices of pie in a case, with the ghostly reflection of my own face in the glass, eyes big and greedy. “I love it.”

  “Thank you.” Spreading butter over the bread, I asked, “You see whimsy in my mother’s work?”

  “Yes, don’t you?”

  “More threat. It always seems there is something lurking. Some dark danger.”

  He held my sketchbook open in his palms. “Her brother, I would guess.”

  “What did he do, I wonder?”

  “We’ll probably never know. And maybe that’s better.”

  “Is it, though? Secrets just fester.” I opened a small box of brown sugar and sprinkled it over the butter. “I do hope you’ll feel comfortable letting out Violet and Nandini’s secret at some point.”

  He looked away, ostensibly leafing through more pages. “I’m sure I will.”

  “Does it embarrass you?”

  His eyes flew open to meet my gaze. “No! Not even a little. I just worry about my father. He’s sixty-five years old. It might hurt him.”

  “Maybe he would surprise you.” I sprinkled ground cinnamon over the bread, then opened the roasting oven and slid the tray in. “I had to Google how to do this in the AGA.”

  “It’s quite the thing, isn’t it?”

  “It is. For a cook, this is a dream machine. I will have to make more friends so I can have parties.”

  He came over to stir the spices and bent his head to smell the brew. “Ready,” he said, and he took the pot off the burner and measured tea into it to steep. “I have friends. I’ll share them.”

  Leaning on the counter, I narrowed my eyes. “Do you? I’ve never seen any evidence of that.”

  “That’s because,” he said in his low voice, the smooth, seductive rumble, “I never want to see them anymore.” He settled his arms on either side of me, leaning in, pressing our bodies together. “I only want rains of kisses.” He dropped them on my forehead, my nose, my cheeks, my mouth. “I’m greedy for you.”

  I caught his face. “Me too,” I whispered. “Greedy for everything about you.”

  “The whole time we were in Devon, I wanted to come back here. I thought about just leaving a hundred times.”

  “You did?”

  He nodded and ran his hands through my hair, under it, through it, pulling it away from my face. I tipped my head back into his hands, luxuriating. “I would rather be here, right now, with you, than anywhere.”

  “It’s lucky, then, isn’t it, that we’re here? So greedy.” He unbuttoned my top button, then the next. I kept my hands where they were and let him.

  “Our food will be ruined.”

  “Does it matter?” He opened the shirt, exposing my chest, ran his fingers over my torso, my belly. Bent down and kissed my throat.

  “Well, we don’t really want it to burn.”

  “No.” He pushed the shirt off my shoulders. “We could eat naked.”

  “I will if you will.”

  He tugged off his shirt, shimmied out of his sweats, and stood there with his arms out. “Done.”

  I swallowed. “Your body is amazing.”

  “You are not naked yet.”

  I stepped out of my yoga pants. “Better?”

  “You’d better get the toast.”

  I gave him a look.

  He laughed. “Carefully.”

  So I carefully did, and then there wasn’t any talking for a while; there was only our greed, our devouring, hands and limbs and joining. As we lay in a tangle afterward, he said quietly, “I am in love with you, Olivia Shaw. You may as well know it.”

  I turned in his arms, skimming up his naked torso to kiss his beautiful mouth and look directly into his dark and starry eyes. I took a breath. “Your mother told me I should let you go because love is unselfish and you need to have children.”

  “She said that?”

  I lowered my eyes, feeling again the heat of embarrassment and rejection that had washed over me at that moment. “Yes.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “In a way, she’s right.” I traced the shape of his goatee, then the lower edge of his mouth. “If you want children, I’m getting a bit too old.”

  He waited.

  “But I am in love with you, too, Samir Malakar.”

  “That is the right answer,” he murmured and tumbled me sideways, kissing my mouth. “All the rest . . . will work out.”

  As we kissed again, and I breathed him in, I suddenly smelled smoke. �
�Did you take the chai off the burner?”

  He raised his head, frowning. “I did. But that’s definitely smoke.”

  We bolted to our feet, scrambling into our clothes. I ran to the kitchen, but it was as serene as when we left it. The smell of smoke was stronger, and I noticed an odd patch of pink light on the floor and went to the window.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “It’s the house.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  By the time we reached the house, feet in whatever we could pull on the fastest, the fire was burning hard enough to make a roaring noise, and it flickered out the back of the kitchen, through the big window I had always admired so much. In the distance, a siren sounded, but there wasn’t time to wait. I ran down the hill to the tenants, knocking on doors, crying for help.

  Samir ran around the far end of the house to see if there was any water for the construction workers and found a hose he turned on full. By then, the tenants were gathering, running up the hill with buckets, and in just a few minutes, a bucket brigade was organized. I stood between two people I didn’t know, transferring water forward, buckets back, over and over. Shouts rang out, and orders were issued, and the fire truck attached itself to a water source near the tenant cottages.

  The fire roared and cast hellish light over our sweaty faces. It seemed to hardly be dented, and I kept glancing up at the flames in despair as they lasciviously licked the one part of the house that was in decent condition, that kitchen I had come to admire and the rooms above it. My mother’s room.

  A bolt of lightning was nearly lost in the chaos, but it was impossible to miss the rain that exploded from the sky just after, rain so cold and heavy that we were all drenched and shivering in moments. We kept working, bucket after bucket after bucket, until my arms ached and felt like noodles, so weak I could barely lift them.

  The rain did the work, in the end, splashing out the flames, giving us more water to throw with our buckets and hoses. It was nearly dawn before it was entirely out, a dawn we greeted with sooty faces, drinking tea from paper cups—the efforts of a trio of the tenants—and eating donuts Helen had brought to the scene. Every face looked as shell-shocked as I felt, but I doubted any of them held the ballast of despair that threatened to sink me right through the ground.

  Beyond the shelter of the trees, rain continued to pour, making of the grounds a mud field. Firemen crisscrossed the yard, conferring with each other. One by one, the tenants came to me, offered a kind word, touched my arm, drifted back home. “Thank you,” I said to each one. “Thank you.”

  Samir brought me a sweater from the flat and a fresh cup of his chai. “You should eat,” he said.

  I shook my head. “I want to know what they find out.”

  “They’re not going to have answers today.”

  “How bad do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know,” he said heavily, looking upward, but the dark was thick enough to hide any real evidence. “Bad.”

  My vision of the kitchen with its big farmhouse table and family and friends gathered around it floated over my imagination, and I felt the loss of it in a kick. “Why did it have to be at this end, not the other?”

  He shook his head. “Random fate.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “What? In fate? I don’t know. I don’t know why things happen, Olivia, but I know it’s up to us to make sense of them. Just”—he slid an arm around my shoulders—“don’t try tonight. Let’s go back to your flat and get some rest. It will be easier to manage in the morning.”

  “Everyone is going to know we’re together after this,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t mind now?”

  “Olivia,” he said firmly. “You’ve suffered a blow, and you’re exhausted. I don’t want to fight with you. Let’s go back and get some rest.”

  Irrationally, his calm only made me want to fight the more, but I had no energy or words left in me. More loss. “Fine,” I said churlishly and let him lead me back to the flat.

  The sound of knocking hauled me from sleep. I had no idea what time it was or how long I’d been asleep, but there was muted light in the room, maybe afternoon-rain light. In the other room, I heard Samir and another man talking, and after a moment, Samir appeared at the door. “Olivia, you’ll want to hear this.”

  I flung back the covers and made sure I was relatively decent, pulling a brush through my hair and slipping into a bra before I padded out into the other room. An official in a police uniform stood there, and when he turned, I saw that it was Inspector Greg, who’d been at the dig. “Inspector,” I said, frowning in confusion. “Have you already found criminal intent in the fire?”

  “I’m afraid this is unrelated, Lady Shaw. The garden club was in the rose garden this morning, and one whole section of the garden washed into the stream. Bones washed up.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t understand. Bones?”

  “Bodies,” he clarified. “This time, we’re fairly sure it’s the girl who disappeared.”

  “Sanvi?”

  He looked at his notes. “Yes. Sanvi Malakar.”

  “My aunt,” Samir said.

  “We recovered some personal effects,” he said. “I believe your father has been contacted for identification.”

  He nodded. “And the other body?”

  “It’s not quite as clear, but there is some speculation that it could be the Earl of Rosemere, Roger Shaw. Your uncle.”

  I sank onto a stool, mind reeling. “They were buried together?”

  “It appears that might be the case.”

  “Any signs that suggest the cause of death?” I asked.

  “Both bodies show signs of fire damage,” he said. “That’s all we know.”

  “Fire?” I said and looked at Samir, who had the same thought I did. The bedroom that was so damaged. My heart skittered at the implications. The possibilities.

  My mother.

  “What do you need from me?” I asked the detective.

  “Nothing for now.”

  “Where were the bodies found—do you know? What part of the garden?”

  “All I know is that it was nearby a wall and a stream. The landslide knocked the wall down.”

  I nodded. I knew exactly where it was. The hill where the giant orange rose bloomed. The rose that my mother had painted over and over and over, for decades.

  When the detective left, Samir said, “Are you all right for a little while? I should go see how my father is doing.”

  “Of course. I’m fine.”

  He lifted one heavy brow.

  I shook my head. “Not fine as in ‘all is well’ but fine in the sense that you don’t have to worry about me. I have some things to do. Some things to think about.”

  “Such as?”

  “Everything. What I’m doing here.”

  “You’re just tired. Don’t give up.”

  “My mother did have something to do with Sanvi’s disappearance,” I said heavily. “You mother said so, and I was deeply offended. But she was right.”

  “Don’t jump to conclusions, Olivia,” he said, a gentle hand on my shoulder. “You’re overwhelmed—the earl and the fire and now this. You can’t make any decisions right now.”

  “I made the decision to come here when I was overwhelmed.”

  “And?”

  “Maybe I’ve been making one terrible decision after another. Maybe I’m still doing that. Alexander said yesterday that I’m in over my head, and he’s totally right. He offered me a huge sum for the estate.” I looked up at him. “Maybe I should take it.”

  “You’re not seriously considering selling? He’ll never give the house what you will.”

  “The house is not salvageable!” I cried. “Not now. All that progress we made is just—poof!” I snapped my fingers. “Gone.” I peered up at him in despair. “Don’t you see? It just can’t be saved.”

  “No, I don’t see,” he said, taking my wrist in hand. “You’re not a quitter, Oli
via. You’re not going to give up like that. Did you see all those people here yesterday? How happy they were? Rosemere is a symbol for the village, a piece of history. There’s been a surge of interest through the television show. You mustn’t give up.”

  “He said he wouldn’t develop the land.”

  “You’re serious.” He straightened, frowning. “You’re really thinking of selling?”

  I took a breath. “I don’t know what else to do. There isn’t enough money to fix it.”

  “So it will take longer. You can live here and go inch by inch.”

  I shrugged. “Go see your dad. I’ll be fine.”

  For one long moment, he measured me.

  “Honestly,” I cried. “Would it be so terrible to just let go? I would be very wealthy. Life would be so much easier.”

  “Is that what you want? Really? To have an easy life? Jet set around, maybe?”

  “Would that be so bad? We could do anything, go anywhere.” A sense of lightness filled my chest. “It would be fun.”

  “That isn’t who you are. You’re afraid. And you cannot have a life of great meaning if you make decisions out of fear.”

  “Haven’t you ever been afraid, Samir?”

  “Of course I have! And I’ve fallen on my face, in public, with the entire world waiting for me to do it.” He spread his hands in the air, like a prophet. “Nothing happened! It all blew by.”

  “But you’ve been afraid to let people know about us.”

  “Not because I don’t want them to know,” he cried. “Because I don’t want anyone interfering before we understand ourselves what we are, where we are going.” He swallowed, touched his chest. “This . . . thing between us feels so important, and I didn’t want anyone else in it until we solidified it.”

  I flung myself at him then, let him wrap me close, my cheek against his heart, his hands in my hair. I held on tight. “This scares me too,” I whispered. “I’m afraid I’ll be broken into a million pieces.”

  “But what if we soar? What if we—what if this—is the way the gods rectify some terrible wrong?” He pulled back, held my face. “What if we can make things right for those who lost? Our grandmothers? What if”—he pressed his hands more tightly to my head—“this our test?”