The Art of Inheriting Secrets Read online

  PREVIOUS BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR

  The Lost Recipe for Happiness

  The Secret of Everything

  How to Bake a Perfect Life

  The Garden of Happy Endings

  The All You Can Dream Buffet

  No Place Like Home

  A Piece of Heaven

  The Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue

  Lady Luck’s Map of Vegas

  The Scent of Hours

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Barbara O’Neal

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503901391

  ISBN-10: 1503901394

  Cover design by Rachel Adam Rogers

  For my uncle Tony, who loved good books and good food and India. You are always in my heart.

  Contents

  Spring

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Summer

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Spring

  Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.

  —M. F. K. Fisher

  Chapter One

  My first glimpse of Rosemere Priory came just before dusk, when the last of the day’s sunlight fingered the old stones a rosy gold. It was vast and rambling, bay upon bay of Elizabethan windows, with two crenellated towers pointing into an eggplant sky.

  Everything I knew about my mother shattered in that instant. I recognized it, of course, from her fantastical paintings. I recognized the woods, too, and the owl that flapped its wings and flew out of an upper window and probably even the fox that dashed across the rutted road, its fat tail sailing behind it.

  I simply believed that she’d made it all up.

  My grief, still so raw only a month after her death, dug its fingers into my lungs. I peered through the window of the hired car as if she might appear.

  My tidy, reserved English mother. She never spoke of her life before arriving in San Francisco in her twenties, where she met and married my father. Once I was born, she settled in to illustrate children’s books and create a series of exquisitely detailed paintings of a wild English wood, alternately seductive and threatening.

  As the car slowed over a potholed, neglected drive, I saw where those paintings had been born. All these years, I believed that she’d fled some backward town in search of a better life, though now I didn’t know why I made that up.

  “This is the house?” I asked the driver, a sixtysomething man in a black uniform, complete with a cap and a neat tie, who’d been hired by the solicitor to meet me at the airport.

  “No mistaking it, is there?” he said and stopped the car.

  We both stared at the vast mansion. Vines covered her face, wantonly crawling through the broken windowpanes. “How long since anyone lived here?”

  He rubbed his chin. “Forty years or better, I’d say. When I was a boy, there were festivals and picnics on the grounds. All very grand.”

  “What happened?”

  “Now that’s the thing everybody’d like to know, miss. One day, it was all thriving and busy, and the next, the lot of them disappeared.”

  “The lot of them?”

  “The old lady died, as I recall. But her son and daughter went abroad and never came back.”

  Son? I knew nothing about an uncle. A flutter of wings moved in my throat. “Do you remember them?”

  “’Course. Lord Shaw, the Earl of Rosemere, was my age, though we had no dealings to speak of. Lady Caroline was a great beauty, but she kept to herself.”

  Caroline. That would have been my mother.

  Lady Caroline.

  “We can head to town,” I said. “They’ll be expecting me.”

  “Right.”

  I found myself watching the house recede in the side mirror, imposing and impossibly huge. Ruined.

  Mother, I thought, heart aching. Why did you hide from me all these years?

  My mother’s solicitor had arranged for accommodations in the local village, Saint Ives Cross, which was locked up tight when we arrived at six p.m. Full dark had already engulfed it. In my jet-lagged, disconnected state, my only impression was of half-timbered second stories leaning over narrow lanes and pools of light falling on the pavement from the streetlights. A central square held an ancient stone marker, the indication of a medieval market town. I knew from an article that I’d written on the history of markets that it was called a butter cross, and something about knowing that grounded me a bit. The evening was damp and cold, but even so, I could smell earth and growth, even this early in the year, February.

  The driver carried my bag into the hotel, and I followed behind him in a daze, trying to control the limp that sometimes still plagued me.

  I found myself in a tiny lobby with an unmanned desk. The counter flowed directly into a pub, where a scattering of patrons stared at me openly, hands gripped around their pints. I gave a nod, but only one woman acknowledged it.

  My driver gave me his card. “You give me a call if you need anything, Lady Shaw.”

  I shook my head, wanting to protest the title. Behind me, a little rustle told me the people at the bar, three men and two women, had heard plainly enough. Flustered, I said, “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”

  He tipped his hat. I focused on sliding the card firmly into my wallet, willing someone to appear at the desk to check me in before I fell over from exhaustion.

  At last, a stout woman with short white hair shot through with steely streaks appeared. “Help you?”

  “Yes. My name is Olivia Shaw. I believe Jonathan Haver made a reservation for me?”

  She gave me a glare, took a key from a hook, and slapped it down on the counter. “Third floor. Up the stairs to the back there.”

  I gripped my cane tightly. “Is there an elevator? I’m not able to navigate stairs easily.”

  “Should have said in the reservation.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t think to—”

  “Humph.” It was an actual word. In my dizzy state, I had to bite my lip to avoid breaking into exhausted laughter. “Already the countess, are you?”

  In my capacity as editor of a highly respected food magazine, I was used to travel and curt manners, but her rudeness seemed over the top. Taking a breath, I said, “Look, I’ve been traveling for nearly twenty-f
our hours, and stairs are a challenge for me at the moment.” Follow conciliatory with steel: that was my motto. “Do you have a room I can reach more easily, or shall I call my driver back and have him take me somewhere else?”

  For a moment, she stared at me. Hostile. Furious, even.

  What the hell?

  Finally, she snatched the key from the counter, hung it back on its hook, and took another. “You’ll hear the pub, but no one’ll be singing until Friday.” She leaned over the bar. “Allen! Come show the lady to her room.”

  A youth, no more than twenty, rushed from the back of the bar, graceful as a cheetah. “Hello,” he said, grabbing my bag. “This way.”

  We wound down a corridor beneath the stairs and across a tidy dining room furnished in chintz. “Breakfast here, miss, starting at seven. She quits at nine sharp.”

  “Thank you.”

  We walked down another corridor to the end, where a wide door opened into a very pretty room. I sighed in relief, offering him a pound coin. “Wonderful.”

  He pocketed the tip with a smile. “No trouble.”

  “Does the pub serve food?”

  “Best fish-and-chips in town. I could bring you a plate if you like? Or a glass of wine?”

  “A pint of ale,” I said, eyeing the wingback chair that stood by the grate. “And the fish-and-chips sound perfect.”

  He gave a nod. “Right back, my lady.”

  “You don’t have to—” I began.

  But he was already gone.

  When Allen returned with the food, he showed me how to light the gas fire, handed me a scrap of paper with the Wi-Fi password, and said he’d send someone round in an hour for the tray.

  Eating the hot, flaky fish, seasoned liberally with malt vinegar the way my mother served it, I sank into the relief of being here, away from the craziness of my life the past few months.

  My mother’s sudden and crushing death had been the final blow in a series of disasters that plagued my thirty-eighth year. It had begun with a car accident that shattered my right tibia, which meant I could not manage the stairs in the San Francisco loft I’d shared with my fiancé, Grant, for six years, so I’d temporarily moved into my mother’s ranch house in Menlo Park to recover. It was the house I’d grown up in, and although my mother wasn’t the sentimental type and had done over my childhood bedroom with clean green lines, there were enough echoes of my teenaged self in the kitchen and bathroom to depress me, even without the fact that I felt wretched about imposing on my sixty-four-year-old mother, who’d suffered from bad health for two decades. And I was furious with Grant, who’d barely made the trip from our apartment—originally my apartment—once or twice a week.

  I was still furious with him, honestly. I’d told him almost nothing about what I was doing on this trip, only that I needed to settle some of my mother’s affairs. It was probably time to break it off, something else I had to think about while I was away.

  But that was the other point of worry—the time, or rather lack of time, I had to wrap this up. The injury and resulting surgery had forced me to take a leave of absence from my position as editor at the Egg and Hen, one of the premier food magazines in the country. It had started as an eight-week leave. Now the count was fifteen weeks and growing.

  A month ago, I’d gone back to writing and some editing, remotely, and I really wanted to get back before I lost my position entirely. I loved the magazine, the beauty of food and the industry, and I’d worked my ass off to get the position. Breathing down my neck, some kindly and some not so much, were a string of others just as ambitious, all of whom would be deliriously thrilled to take my place. I had to get back to it soon or lose it.

  The final blow in this string of misfortune had been the death of my mother. She fell ill, pneumonia, just after Christmas. Not a surprise after a decade of lung issues. What was a surprise was that she died of it, simply and swiftly, in two weeks’ time.

  Leading to my discovery of the increasingly more urgent letters in her study from a solicitor in England, asking what to do about a legal matter he seemed to understand but I did not.

  Which led to the phone call that led me to this moment, eating fish-and-chips in a damp English hotel room, with the locals calling me “lady.”

  It was a lot to absorb.

  So instead, I did what I’d done since I was a child—I took comfort in food. Not in a binge-eating sort of way, which wasn’t focusing at all, but grounding myself in the here and now by noticing exactly what I ate.

  Right now, in this hotel room in front of a gas fire, the fish was fresh and sturdy beneath its crisp breading, the chips thick and expertly salted. My pint of ale was the color of walnuts, with flavor that had been developed over centuries. Salt eddied through my mouth, grounding me, and I thought of an essay M. F. K. Fisher had written about a meal she’d eaten in Paris after getting stuck on a train. It made me feel cosmopolitan rather than lonely. For the first moment since my mother died, I felt something akin to peace. Maybe I’d write about it in the morning.

  But for now, it was a relief to be far away from the drama of my life, with a full belly and a sense of quiet stealing over me.

  As I was falling asleep, my brain fancifully tried to write limericks with fish-and-chips at the center. They were incredibly clever in my compromised state, and I told myself to remember them in the morning.

  It was probably just as well that I didn’t.

  Chapter Two

  “I’m so sorry,” the solicitor, Jonathan Haver, said in his modulated voice over the phone the next morning. “I’m well and truly stuck out here.”

  Taking a breath to keep my voice calm, I said, “I see. When do you think you’ll be back?”

  “I’m afraid it could be a couple of days. The roads are flooded from all the rain. I’m dreadfully sorry.”

  I looked out the window to the gray morning. “Things happen. I did have the driver take me out to the house yesterday when I arrived, just to get a feeling for what’s going on.”

  “I see. I assumed you’d be fatigued after such a long trip.”

  “Yes, well, I’m very anxious to get things going, Mr. Haver. I’m in the middle of selling my mother’s house in California, and I’ve been away from my job for much too long. I really need to get back. What can we do to settle this?”

  “Well,” he said cautiously, “you’ve seen the state of the house.”

  “Where I come from, no one cares about the building on a piece of land.”

  “Oh, my dear. I’m afraid Rosemere Priory is a Grade I–listed building, which means that not only can it not be torn down, but it can’t even be upgraded without approval from the listing committee.”

  “It didn’t look as if it could be repaired.”

  “I suppose anything is repairable with enough time and money.”

  “But you don’t think it’s worth it.”

  “Frankly, no. It has been neglected for forty years, and even if it could be shored up, these houses are dreadfully difficult to keep. There are more than thirty-five rooms—thirty-seven, to be exact. Imagine heating all of that. The roof alone will devour pounds like tea cakes. Then there’s trying to stave off damp and rot and—”

  “So what can be done?”

  “Sooner or later, I expect it will simply fall down.”

  A visual of those golden walls tumbling into ruin gave me a sharp, unexpected pang. “How long did my mother’s family live there?”

  “Three or four hundred years, I expect.”

  Centuries. The shimmer of time prickled the edges of my skull, but before I could come up with anything to say, a murmuring in the background came through, and he said, “Look, I’ll give you all the details when we meet. In the meantime, I’m going to send a friend of mine over. Rebecca Poole and her husband own the acreage bordering Rosemere. She’ll be able to answer some of your questions.”

  I’d had my breakfast—eggs and beans and tomatoes—before taking the call from Mr. Haver. The skies outside
threatened rain, but I needed to walk a little to shake the tightness from my leg.

  A younger woman watched the pub and front desk this morning, a pretty girl with bright-blue eyes in a Snow White face. She smiled as I approached the desk. “Good morning, Lady Shaw,” she said. “I’m Sarah. Did you have a good sleep?”

  I waved my hand, wincing in embarrassment. “Oh, please don’t call me that. Just Olivia is fine.”

  Her smile was crooked. “How about Ms. Shaw?”

  “That’s fine.”

  “What else may I help you with?”

  “I’m going to take a walk, but the solicitor is sending someone over to speak with me. If anyone comes, will you ask them to wait? I won’t be long.”

  “Of course. Take your time.” She glanced over her shoulder through a mullioned window. “The rain might chase you back. Do you have a brolly?”

  I lifted the long, sturdy umbrella I’d brought with me. One thing England and San Francisco shared was a tendency toward rain. “Covered.”

  Out on the sidewalk, I was one of only a handful of humans. A man in a fishing cap and a sweater vest walked a little dog who wore a knitted coat, the dog’s short legs flying. A pair of middle-aged women in raincoats hurried between shops.

  The fresh air eased my mood, as always. I’d been a walker all my life, trained at my mother’s side from the time I was a small child. She had walked miles every day, and before I injured my leg, so had I. A scent of water and fertile earth filled the air. In the near distance, picturesque hills undulated behind Elizabethan buildings, looking as if they might fall over under their thatch roofs. The actual thatch surprised me, as I’d read an article on the expense and trouble of the material, and it looked surprisingly heavy.

  The short, narrow lane opened to the square, a wide-open parkway with the butter cross in the middle. The narrow streets on all four sides were cobblestone, worn to slippery pale gray, and there was a fair amount of car traffic moving through, particularly on one side. Shops lined the street level—a handful of restaurants, a chemist, a sewing shop with a dusty-looking machine in the window. A bookshop stood at one corner, its mullioned window stacked with multicolored volumes, luring me closer. It wasn’t open yet, but I promised myself I could come back later and browse. My spirits lifted.