The Art of Inheriting Secrets Page 13

  “Well, they’re pretty spectacular. It’s like Tulip Lane, coming down this road.”

  “Gardening is a competitive sport around here.”

  “So I heard. Jocasta told me that I would have to learn my garden techniques.”

  “Did you call her, then?”

  “I did! We had a meeting on Tuesday, and she’s very confident she’ll want to feature the house.”

  “That’s great!” He tossed his head to fling curls out of his face, then slipped his gloves off and threw them in the wheelbarrow. “Come in.”

  He held the door, and I brushed by him, willing myself to just be normal. Inside, sunlight tumbled through the wide picture window, revealing a room that was both masculine and comfortable. A tweedy sofa sat beneath the window, with brightly colored throws flung on the arm. Books filled every available shelf, and stacks sat on chairs and along the wall. A giant Siamese cat reclined in the sunshine and lifted his head as we came in, meowing in greeting. “What a cutie!” I said, reaching out to rub his back, creamy with tan stripes.

  Samir leaned over and scratched the cat’s belly. “Billi. He’s a rag doll. The only thing of any value to come out of my marriage.”

  “Marriage?” My ears roared a little. “You seem too young to have been married and divorced already.”

  “It was unfortunate,” he said, “but I’m not so young, really.” His long fingers nudged the cat’s chin upward. “And I’m told I’m an old soul.”

  “Are you?” I petted the cat, feeling a low, warm purr beneath my fingers. “I sometimes think I’m a brand-new one.”

  He shook his head. “No. You’re an ancient one. Clear-eyed.”

  “Ha. Thanks.” That green bloom filled the air between us again, rustling beneath my skin, making me want to look closely at his mouth. Instead, I looked at the books. “You’re a big reader.” So inane, and I knew it the second it was out of my mouth. “Sorry; that was stupid. I just feel all thumbs.”

  He laughed softly. “It’s all right. Come through here. Let’s have tea. Tea’s always good for that.”

  For what, I wondered? Giving me back my dignity? My brain?

  The kitchen was tiny, but a door stood open to a back garden, and he pointed toward it. “Have a look at the back, and I’ll put the kettle on.”

  “Thanks.” I managed to get myself outside without being an idiot again, and once out there, I took a breath, inhaling the fragrant coolness lurking in the barely green shadows. The back garden was as splendid as the front, the borders bursting with color and coordinated height. A small greenhouse stood in the far corner, and beyond the fence the hillside dropped away to show fields on one side and an ugly clutter of rooftops, all made of the same red tiles, on the other.

  As I sat down at the small table, the cat sauntered out and meowed at me. I patted my lap. “Come on; I don’t mind.”

  He leapt up, all fifteen pounds of elegantly soft fur, and lolled across my legs. “Thank you,” I said quietly, rubbing his belly. “I could use a little unconditional love today.” He flicked his tail against my arm. “Everything is just a little topsy-turvy, and I haven’t had my dog to talk to or my mom, and I’m feeling a little adrift.”

  A low, deep purr rumbled into my belly, and he turned his head to look up at me, the blue eyes at half-mast, which someone had told me was an expression of trust. “You’re a sweetie, aren’t you?”

  He blinked, and I blinked back, cat shorthand for love. Something at the back of my neck eased. In a tree nearby, a bird twittered, and far in the distance was the sound of a mower. A bee bumped along a row of some small white flowers I didn’t recognize, and I stroked the cat and let go of a long-held breath.

  “He has that effect on people,” Samir said, carrying a brass tray with a pot of tea and accompaniments, including a little plate of cookies. “I only had digestives, I’m afraid. I don’t get many passersby.”

  “I love them. English cookies are one of the best things about this country.”

  His grin flashed, and he poured tea into two mugs. “Do you not have them in America?”

  “Not like this.”

  He chuckled. “What does that mean?”

  “English biscuits are so . . . restrained.”

  “As we are,” he said, smiling. “Sugar? Milk?”

  “Both, please.”

  He stirred them in and set the cup close to my right hand, then gave me a pair of digestives on a paper napkin. “We wouldn’t want to disturb Billi, would we?”

  “No.” I stroked his fur, down his belly, finding quiet in the movement. Again, I found my breath easing. Life had been completely insane for months now. “How old is he?”

  “Don’t know, really. He showed up in the back garden one day, as if it were his home, and never left again.”

  “Someone must have missed a cat like this!”

  “I searched for an owner, went to the veterinarians in the area, the rescue centers, all the things you’re meant to do, but never found one.”

  I looked up. “He must have been meant for you, then.”

  He nodded, a little sadly, I thought. “He came to see me through the breakup.” He tugged Billi’s ear, and the cat meowed softly, pleased. “Do you have pets?”

  “I did. A dog. He died a few months ago.”

  He didn’t look away as people so often did when you confessed a grief. Just kept looking at me directly for a moment, then said, “So you’ve broken your leg and lost your dog and your mother and inherited a title you knew nothing about in just a few months?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “It sounds like a lot when you say it like that.”

  “It does. It is.”

  “The leg and the dog happened the same night.” I took another sip of tea, finding it did somehow fortify me. “He was very old for a shepherd mix, nearly sixteen, but it happened kind of suddenly—he just couldn’t breathe one night, and I rushed him to the vet, but they couldn’t do anything.” I cleared my throat. “It was a rainy night, and I was not in the greatest shape on the drive back, and I just wrecked the car.” A whispering memory of breaking glass, flashing lights, the look of worry on the doctor’s face as she examined me. “It’s mostly a blur, but I shattered my right tibia, punctured a lung, and was in the hospital for nine days.”

  “Olivia!” He leaned forward and circled one hand around my forearm, almost exactly the same gesture of comfort his sister had used. “Perhaps you need some brandy in your tea.”

  I laughed. “The cat will do. And biscuits.” I looked away from the kindness of his gaze, feeling embarrassed and revealed and somehow relieved, as if offering the story took a little weight out of the bag of awfulness I’d been carrying around with me.

  When the quiet stretched, I looked over at him. “Sorry—that was probably too much.”

  His hand lingered, fingertips against my inner wrist. “Not at all. I was trying to think of a way to say how sorry I am that all those things happened in a way that wouldn’t be dismissive.”

  That river of emotion that was traveling so close to the surface of my skin nearly overflowed again, and I nodded. “Thanks.”

  As if he sensed that, he straightened. “Let me tell you about those books.”

  “Please.”

  “I’ve always been a reader, but when I returned to the village, I did nothing but read for an entire year. I had failed at everything I’d tried and couldn’t bear to talk to people, so I rented this cottage from a friend of my mother, and Billi and I holed up here, and I read.”

  “That was the end of your marriage?”

  He nodded, with a wry twist of his mouth. “She’s an architect in London. She wanted me to be—” He sighed. “Something I couldn’t be.”

  I wanted to prompt him with questions, but it seemed the wrong thing in this quiet afternoon. I nibbled the digestive and waited. He brushed curls out of his face, then held them away for a long moment as he stared into the near past. “It didn’t last very long, only two years.”

>   “Oh, ow!” I covered my heart with a hand. “I’m sorry.”

  “I knew better. I should never have begun, and I knew it, but—” He sighed again, lifted one side of his mouth. “She was the corollary of that beast women like—only men are simpler than women. Drama,” he said and shook his head. “So much drama.”

  A Taylor Swift song popped into my head, and I sang a line.

  Samir laughed. “Yes.”

  “Pavi told me you both went to London for school. Did you drop out to become a thatcher?”

  “No. At university, I read literature. I became a professor.” He plucked a broken piece of biscuit off the plate. “A writer.”

  “Really? What kind of writing?”

  “Novels. Nothing you’ve read, I’m sure. They never particularly did anything out in the world.”

  “Wait. You’ve written actual novels? More than one?”

  I saw the tension in his shoulders. “Three. All but the first complete failures, and I learned my lesson.”

  For a minute, I held the knowledge in my mouth, rolling it around like a hard candy, sweet and lingering. It brought certain things about him into focus—his attention to detail, his long memory, his encyclopedic knowledge of the house and village and land. His intelligence.

  “Huh,” I said and sipped my tea. The cat leapt down, and I settled a little more. “I don’t actually believe that.”

  “Believe what?”

  “That you learned your lesson, by which I guess you probably mean you gave up. Books fail for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with the writer, but you know that too.” I paused. “Did you write the wrong books?”

  He raised one thick brow, so like his father’s. “I don’t know. When I look back, it’s all this crazy blur—dinner parties and literary gigs and the students and the writing. That’s when I met Tapasi, at a party for the first book.” He shook his head and repeated, “A blur.”

  “Believe me: I know the feeling.” I let go of a humorless laugh and swung my body forward, elbows on the table. “I broke up with my boyfriend today.”

  “Today,” he repeated, pointing at the ground, at this moment in time.

  “Yeah. That’s why I was out walking. We were together for eight years. Eight.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “It was way past time.” I shook my head. “When I needed to take Arrow, my dog, to the vet because he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t go because he was fucking painting.” I glanced at him. “Sorry.”

  He smiled a little. “I’ve heard it before.”

  My anger, as hot and liquid as magma, pushed deep into the center of my body for months and months and months, geysered upward. “When I was in intensive care, he came to see me once a day, for like five minutes, and then he couldn’t be bothered to get the apartment ready for me to come home with my crutches and cast, and I had to go stay with my mother. Which ended up being a good thing, because she died, but still”—I looked at Samir, and I hadn’t lost him; he was listening intently—“why didn’t I break up with him months ago? How could I not have seen him more clearly? He’s a jerk. A big fat jerk.”

  “You’ve done it now, though.” He held up a fist. We bumped.

  I picked up my cup to toast. “To the end of bad relationships.”

  “The end.” He drank and picked up the pot to pour more in both of our cups. “Did you enjoy your visit with the earl?”

  “You know what? I actually did. The party itself was kind of weird, all those people and I didn’t really know what to say to them. But the earl is wonderful. He’s a great old man, and he knew my mom and grandmother.”

  “I’m glad. You seemed nervous about it.”

  “And you seemed a little hostile.” It popped out before I could stop it.

  For a moment, he regarded me. Took a sip of his tea, then leaned back. “I suppose I was. This is a very classist country, and no one ever forgets it for a moment.” He steepled his fingers, and in the gesture, I could see the professor he’d been. “It’s just always there, judging everything.”

  “Right, the class thing here is strange. I mean, I’m American. We don’t do class.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  Startled, I looked at him. He only looked back with his liquid black eyes. I said, “It’s not like here.”

  “Perhaps not. But you can’t possibly think it doesn’t exist.”

  “I guess.” I thought of those dinners I’d eaten, the very privilege of living in San Francisco at all, the homeless people down on Treat Avenue, the neighborhood where my mother’s house had sold for millions, the stories of people riding the train for two hours to get to work from places as distant as Stockton, people being taxed out of the homes they’d lived in for decades. “I mean, yeah, of course it does.” Thinking more, I felt a little ashamed—the country had been under siege over class for several years now. “But it’s different, don’t you think? America is essentially a meritocracy, in that you can earn your way up the ranks via education and money.”

  “But can you, really? University is wildly expensive, is it not? Not everyone can afford the cost.”

  I nodded. “That’s true. But we don’t really judge people on accents.”

  His mouth lifted on one side. “Don’t you?”

  And again, I realized I was wrong. Dialect and regionalities did influence the perception of class. “Huh. Right again.”

  He smiled. “Class does exist in America. You’re just more subtle.”

  “And we don’t have the nobility.”

  “Exactly.”

  “It does appear that the British Indian population is very upwardly mobile, or at least some segments are.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, that’s true. But it’s also true that there are no great British Indian estates that are centuries old. Like yours.”

  I searched his face. Was that bitterness I heard or only observation? “I hardly know what to think of it.”

  “You will.”

  “Yes. And anyway, I’m told you can buy titles these days. That’s what I think a lot of the people at that party want. To buy Rosemere to get themselves a title.”

  “Almost certainly. And they want to make a fortune creating housing estates.” He gestured toward the uniform, ugly red roofs. “What a shame that would be, to see your land turned into that.”

  My gut ached a little as I imagined those rolling fields all turned to houses. “There used to be picnics on the estate. Did you know that?”

  “I might have heard my dad talk about them.” His phone buzzed, moving a little on the table, and he glanced at the face. “Ack. Forgot. I’m sorry. I’m going to have to get cleaned up. I have dinner plans.”

  I practically leapt to my feet. “Of course. I’m sorry to keep you.”

  He caught my arm. “I invited you in, remember?” He dropped his hand but stood there in the dappled sunlight slanting down from the tree overhead. Light danced on the crown of his head and along his brow, spilling into the hollow of his throat. He was like something the forest conjured. “I enjoy your company, Olivia. That’s been rare in my life recently.”

  I swallowed. “Me too. Thanks for letting me spill my guts today.”

  “Anytime.”

  He walked me through the house, past all the books, and I paused. “Which of your books would you tell me to read?”

  “None of them,” he said with a small smile.

  I faced him. “You know I’ll just go to my room and look you up, right?”

  “I would rather you did not.” He crossed his arms. Such a defensive posture.

  “Why?”

  He sighed. “They’re all products of that big disaster of a time in my life—that’s all. It has no bearing on now.”

  “Even the first one?”

  A shrug, and he looked over my head to some nameless place in the past.

  Inclining my head, I said, “Okay. I’ll leave it alone for now, then. But not forever.”

  H
e smiled. “Thank you, Olivia.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  On the stoop he said, “Text me after you speak with the Restoration woman. It’s meant to be a week of fine weather, so we’ll be working late, but I’d love to know what she says.”

  “Sure.” I raised a hand and let myself out the gate, feeling his gaze on my back as I headed down the hill. Or maybe I only hoped he was watching me go.

  Dinner plans surely meant a woman. And of course a man like that would have tons of women in his life. I thought about him sitting alone in that bookish room with his cat nearby, reading and reading to cure a broken heart, and it gave me a pang.

  Stop it.

  Firmly, I focused my attention on the reminder from my stomach that it was time for dinner, and it had been a long day of nibbles and snacks. Time for something robust. I thought of the Sunday roast at the pub—why not? I could write about it. What could be more English than that?

  Chapter Eleven

  It took some doing to find an evening when Rebecca’s husband would be home for a dinner, but we worked out a time, and she picked me up in the Range Rover, smelling wonderfully of some spicy cologne.

  “We’re going to have to get you out of there,” she said as I climbed in the vehicle. “It must be hellish on the weekend. Don’t they have karaoke?”

  I laughed. “They certainly do. And football or something on weeknights.”

  “Maybe cricket.”

  Bernard sat in the back seat neatly and huffed a soft greeting. I turned and said hello. Would I want a Saint Bernard? I tested the idea. No. Too big. “I really miss having a dog.”

  “They’re good company,” she agreed.

  “My old dog died six months ago. He was a rescue, a shepherd-husky mix.”

  “He must have shed bushels.”

  I chuckled. “I could have made blankets for the world every spring.”

  “The world is divided into those who love animals and those who do not,” she said. “I can never quite imagine what people who don’t have pets do when they have a bad day.”

  “I know.” It made me like her better. “How did the thatching turn out?”