The Art of Inheriting Secrets Page 2

  A medieval church stood on a rise at the opposite end of the square, and I aimed for it, peering in the rest of the windows I passed: the ubiquitous wool shop that looked as if it had been established in the thirties, a kitchen shop with bright-turquoise bowls and small appliances on display, a bakery that let the smell of coffee into the air, and a currently closed Indian restaurant with white-covered tables that made me suddenly homesick for my San Francisco neighborhood.

  At the church, I paused to admire blackened headstones, unable to read more than a couple, then rounded the corner and walked up a slight rise to see beyond.

  And there, rising from a nest of forest, flaws erased by distance, was Rosemere Priory. My breath caught at the splendor of it, the even rows of windows, the towers, the lands spreading around it with embroidered green skirts. Thirty-seven rooms! I’d never lived in a house with more than eight. What did you even do with so many rooms?

  A light drizzle began to fall, and I opened the umbrella, unable to tear myself away just yet. Even if I’d had no connection to the mansion, I would have been enraptured. My mind struggled to encompass that it was the house of my ancestors. Ancient. Brooding. Beautiful.

  And holder of my mother’s secrets.

  As I returned to the hotel, the rain picked up. The hems of my jeans were soggy by the time I came in, shaking off the wet.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of something coming toward me and braced myself in time to turn and see a giant dog suddenly screeching to a halt.

  “Bernard!” a woman cried, racing behind the furry, well-tended Saint Bernard. “Oh, good, he stopped. He doesn’t always yet.”

  The woman was as well tended as the dog, a slim-hipped blonde in a thick wool tunic and leggings tucked into whimsically flowered rain boots. “Hello,” she said. “You must be Olivia. Jonathan is a friend of mine, and he sent me to rescue you—he feels wretched about the missed appointment. I’m Rebecca Poole.”

  I took her outstretched hand. Her fingers were cold. “Hello.”

  “Oh, my goodness, you have the lightning bolt!”

  “The lightning bolt?” Self-consciously, I touched my right eye. My blue iris was marked with a diagonal yellow zigzag I’d hated with a passion as a child.

  “It’s famous in your family. It’s not always a lightning bolt. Sometimes it’s a sun around the pupil, sometimes something else. A lot of the villagers have it too.” Her sideways smile gave her a knowing expression. “Lords will wander, don’t you know.”

  Blinking, I asked, “It’s a family trait?”

  “Yes! Didn’t your mother tell you?”

  I took a breath. “Do you mind if we sit? My leg—”

  She finally noticed my cane, and her hands flew in the air. “Sorry! Of course. Though I was planning to whisk you away to luncheon if you like. I’d love to welcome you to the neighborhood.”

  “That would be wonderful, thank you.” I raised a finger. “Just give me one minute—”

  “Of course!”

  I sat down on the chair in the tiny lobby and rubbed the tight spot just below my knee. “I’ll want to grab my purse,” I said. “And my phone.”

  “Let’s have Sarah fetch them, shall we?”

  As I rubbed my knee, the dog eased closer and gave me a hopeful look. His eyes were the color of whiskey, and he snuffled over my wrist, very politely. He didn’t slobber, which so many Saint Bernards did. “You’re a pretty boy, aren’t you?” His fur was silky. I touched his ears, scrubbed under his chin, found the magic spot on his chest. He groaned, leaning closer.

  “Good dog, Bernard,” Rebecca cooed. “He’s only two. I have to keep bringing him with me everywhere because he was so impolite as a pup, and we can’t have a dog this size knocking people down, can we? Are you a dog person?”

  A Technicolor picture of my dog, Arrow, glossy and healthy, flashed in my brain, ears flying as he raced down the beach, back when he’d still been young and strong. “I am,” I said simply.

  Sarah arrived with my purse and phone. “It rang as I was coming along, though of course I didn’t answer it.”

  “Thanks.” I glanced at the screen. Grant, my fiancé. “I should return this call before we leave.”

  “Take your time; take your time.” Rebecca leapt up and whistled for Bernard, who agreeably trotted behind her, leaving me alone in the pub to dial home.

  Grant picked up on the third ring. “Olivia! I thought I’d missed you. How’s it going?”

  I imagined him in our top-floor San Francisco apartment—a tall, solid man with artfully shaggy hair and paint-stained fingers. We’d met at a showing of my mother’s work eight years ago, and he’d pursued me with a single-minded focus that had flattered me deeply. A big man with clear gold-green eyes, he painted abstracts that were well received in some circles. I didn’t ordinarily attract that kind of attention, and I had allowed him to take me to dinner. His knowledge of food and art, his general amiability, had won me over. Within months, he’d moved into my apartment, a jewel I’d snagged only by being in the right place at the right time.

  His studio in that apartment was on the airy top level. It was a room filled with light and plants and artwork—my mother’s and his and a few pieces I had bought before I met him, mostly whimsical renditions of food.

  It seemed far, far away. I said, “The lawyer is stuck out of town somewhere, so I still don’t have any details.”

  “Well, there’s no rush. Take your time and figure it out. I’ll manage the sale of your mom’s house.”

  I hadn’t told him everything, only that my mother had affairs that needed to be settled here. Since I’d already hired the Realtor when this business had come up, the obvious way to manage it for a week or two seemed to be to let Grant loosely oversee everything. “Did the Realtor give you a date yet?”

  “The house could go up for sale as soon as next week. She expects to get three mil.” His voice was this side of a chortle. “And she expects at least a couple of offers within hours.”

  Even after taxes, that was a lot of money. It was also not surprising. California real estate was stratospheric, and anything in the Bay Area was even more ridiculous. West Menlo Park was adjacent to Stanford and a plethora of tech campuses. “We knew it would go like that.”

  “We might really be able to buy this apartment, Olivia. That would be so awesome.”

  It was something we’d never had a prayer of pulling off before this. Even renting it had been a massive stroke of luck. It belonged to friends of mine from the magazine who’d adopted a baby and wanted to move out of the city. It was a gorgeous space on the top floor of a good building, but the killer was an outdoor space as large as the apartment itself with views of the bay in one direction and the city center in another. The couple had been making noises about selling it over the past year, but until now, there’d been no way we could have raised the funds to even consider it.

  Now, everything was happening at once. I’d trade it all for one more hour with my mother, drinking tea and talking about . . . anything. Rubbing a finger over my eyebrow to keep my emotions in check, I said, “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Nancy is sending you an email,” he said, “but basically, she wants to clear out the house. No one will keep it”—the lot would be scraped in order to build something new—“so you might as well go ahead and get rid of everything.”

  “No.” It pained me to think of all my mother’s things being handled by other people. Strangers. “I need to be the one to go through everything. I’ll only be here for a week or two, and when I get back, I can sort through it.”

  “Would it really hurt anything to move it all to a storage facility?”

  “What’s the rush? It’s only been a month.”

  “Okay, sweetheart. Your call.” He was using the voice I’d come to know too well—the patient voice. The she’ll-feel-better-soon voice. There were times lately I didn’t even like this man, much less want to marry him. Many times. Sometimes I thought I’d never
really loved him much at all. “I’ll let her know.”

  “I’ll get everything here sorted out, and then I can deal with everything there. One thing at a time.”

  “All right.” I could hear him take a deep breath. “But I want to point out that you’ve been in a holding pattern for months. Don’t you want to get back to your real life?”

  The lake of grief in my chest sloshed a little. Maybe I wasn’t really angry with him but at the way events in the past eight months had overturned my life. A flash of my mother’s hands, splattered with paint as she stood before a canvas, washed over me, along with an image of those same fine, thin hands resting on her torso in the hospital.

  Really, how could she possibly be gone? I kept waiting for someone to pop up and say it was all a mistake.

  “I guess. I’m just not sure about anything right now.”

  “I know, sweetheart. Why don’t you think about it for a day or two? Maybe the best thing would be to start the next chapter of your life as soon as possible. Nothing has been the same since the accident.”

  In the lobby, the dog gave a short woof, as if to emphasize the point. “Look, someone is waiting for me right now. I’ve gotta go.”

  “It’s all good. Love you.”

  I almost said the words back, but they stuck in my throat, either a half truth or an untruth; I didn’t know which. Instead, I simply hung up. He probably didn’t even notice.

  Rebecca drove a champagne-colored Range Rover, which carried us over the narrow roads between fields into a thick forest. “This is all part of the estate,” she said, waving a hand. “Almost two thousand hectares, most of it forest and farmland.”

  I blinked. “Estate?”

  “Rosemere.” She gave me a quizzical look. “Your estate.”

  My grasp of land measurements was nonexistent, but it seemed like a lot. “Two thousand? That’s like a whole park or something, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. It’s enormous. Didn’t you know?”

  “I don’t know anything,” I admitted. “About any of it.”

  “Your mother never told you?”

  “Not even on her deathbed.”

  We bumped onto a smaller lane, and she shot me another measuring glance I couldn’t quite interpret. Had I said something wrong?

  “All right, then,” she said at last. “That gives us a place to start.”

  The lane swerved downward, and a house came into view. “This is the beginning of our acreage, Dovecote,” she said, gesturing. “The boundary between Rosemere and us is this bank of trees.” The house, rambling and whitewashed with a thatched roof, sat at the edge of a lush paddock where a trio of horses grazed.

  “Gorgeous horses,” I commented.

  “Do you ride?”

  “No, not really.” I smiled. “I’m guessing you do.”

  She laughed, and again I noticed how unlike it was from everything else about her, loud and hooting. “I do,” she said. “But mainly I breed racehorses. Point-to-point, amateur steeplechase, not the big leagues. The big gray is my champion,” she said. “Pewter.”

  Pewter’s tail swished, and he lifted his head in our direction. All three horses wore blankets, and I liked the look of the horse with a red coat and black mane. Steeplechase. I didn’t want to confess that I didn’t know what steeplechase was but tucked the word away for later on a growing list of things I needed to research. It felt as if I’d fallen down a rabbit hole, and everything that served me back in my own world was useless here.

  As we pulled into the drive, I admired the house, which was long and rambling, two stories of sturdy walls beneath the thick thatch roof. Two men were at work on it, one high against the gray sky, weaving a pattern along the roofline, and the other carrying a bundle of thatch up a ladder.

  “I noticed all the thatch in the village this morning,” I said. “I had the impression that real thatch was on its way out.”

  “It is,” she said, “but we are lucky in Saint Ives Cross, because Tony there—on the top—is a master thatcher from one of the oldest families on record. Handed down from father to son since the sixteenth century.” She dropped her keys in her purse. “See how he’s weaving the pattern? It’s his signature. Every thatcher has one.”

  Both men were dark haired and tall, with long limbs. “Is that his son, then?”

  “Oh, no. Tony’s a wild one, never married. The other fellow is Sam, his journeyman.”

  The one carrying thatch slung it against the roof and climbed sideways on a thin wooden shelf. It made me dizzy.

  As I swung my legs around to get out, I realized that my whole leg was getting stiff in the damp, cold day. Beneath my feet, the ground was muddy, and I took a moment to balance carefully—it was amazing how fast your balance went off!—hearing my mother remind me to put my best face forward. In her memory, I methodically measured out one solid step and then another.

  In front of me, Rebecca called up to the thatchers, “You must come in and have some venison stew, boys. It’s going to rain again any moment.”

  Venison. My heart sank.

  “Come on, then,” Rebecca said, sweeping me inside. “Let’s get you settled. Cup of tea?”

  A friendly fire burned low on the hearth, and I sank into a big, soft chair nearby, looking around: two rooms with wide-paneled wood floors, a sitting room with the fireplace, and a kitchen with mullioned windows looking out toward a garden.

  Bernard flopped down on the rug in front of me, and a yellow cat came running from another room to swirl up to him. He gave it a lick, and it settled down next to his furry body. “That’s adorable,” I commented.

  “They’re the best of friends.” Rebecca bustled around the kitchen, filling a kettle. “Jimmy’s mother rejected him when he was about four or five weeks old, and Bernard was in love.”

  “You’d get a million hits on YouTube.”

  “Mmm.” She shrugged. “Who has time for that?”

  Her attitude was vaguely startling, another reminder that I’d left my world behind. In the arty, techy Bay Area, everyone used all social media all the time. I had to admit I was enjoying the break. “Right.” My leg loosened next to the fire, and I stretched it out a little. “Have you lived here a long time?”

  “Not terribly, just five years. My husband, Philip, and I met in London, and we both wanted to find an old property to renovate, one where I could raise my horses. Dovecote is perfect.” Grabbing a shawl from the back of the sofa, she sat down in front of me. “It took us nearly a year to make it livable. I’ll give you a tour after lunch if you like.”

  “I’d love it.”

  “Philip’s in banking, so he stays in the city during the week, then comes up on weekends. I rattle around a little on my own, but it’s been my dream since I was a child, so I’m very pleased to be here.”

  “I can see why.”

  The kettle began to whistle, and she hopped up. “Sugar, milk?”

  “Both, please.” I watched her pour water into the pot, her figure slim and elegant, her long blonde hair cut ruler straight just below her shoulder blades. “Did you work in the city too?”

  “Oh, yes. I was a banker as well, though one of us had to step away when we got married—we both worked for the same company. It grew . . . complicated.” She carried a tray over. “The house and stables are my project now—and the racing is an absolute delight.”

  “You do the racing yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Impressive.” I accepted a cup of tea on a saucer.

  “So you really don’t know anything about the Rosemere estate?” she asked.

  “Nothing. My mother died a month ago, and when I was going through her things, I found the papers from Jonathan Haver. When I called him a week ago, that was the first I’d heard of any of it.”

  “Papers?” she asked.

  A little bit too much blandness in her tone alerted me to keep details to myself. “I haven’t made full sense of it, but there’s evidently been some interest in buyin
g the property.”

  “Ah, of course.” Rain began to spatter the windows, and Rebecca looked up at the ceiling, as if she could see through to the thatcher. “Tony will be along now. He’s crotchety, so don’t mind his manners.”

  I shrugged.

  “What kind of interest—have you heard?” She sipped her tea. “The house is a wreck. I mean, a falling-down disaster of a house, but it’s listed, so you can’t touch a bloody thing without permission.”

  “Mr. Haver mentioned that the house was listed, too, but I don’t know what that is exactly. Historically protected or something?”

  “It’s a headache is what it is. Dovecote’s only a Grade II, and we had to practically turn ourselves inside out to get a proper sink in the powder room. The local council is overseen by Mrs. Stonebridge—”

  I laughed. It was the kind of name a battle-ax in an old cozy mystery might have. “Not really?”

  “I swear. Hortense Stonebridge, and she guards the listed buildings like a general.” She settled her cup on its saucer. “And listed means historical. A Grade I building means it’s valuable or significant to the history of the country. Or a few other designations, but mainly it just means you have to get approval for every step of renovation. Grade II is a step below that, but she put us through our paces.”

  “Sounds daunting.”

  A knock sounded at the door, and Rebecca jumped up. “Come in, come in,” she said, offering a towel hung by the door.

  Two big dogs ran in, dashing directly for Bernard until their master halted them with a no-nonsense “Sit!” They screeched to a halt. The cat bolted.

  Crotchety had made me think of someone old, but the man who ducked under the threshold was my age or a little older, maybe forty, tall and fit in a long-worn brown leather jacket and jeans. He gave me a dismissive glance and shook himself out of the jacket. “If it rains for long, I’ll just come back tomorrow. Can’t work with wet thatch.”

  “Olivia Shaw, this is Tony Willow. Olivia is the new Countess of Rosemere.”