The Art of Inheriting Secrets Read online

  The phone was easy enough. I bought exactly the same model as my American phone and transferred all the contacts and apps right there in the store. It was amazing how much more grounded I felt, walking out of the store. When I sat down, I checked to be sure Peter’s number was there, and right below it was Samir Malakar.

  Impulsively, without giving myself a chance to think about it, I texted him, the skin on the back of my neck rustling. Hello, Olivia Shaw here. Maybe go back to the house sometime soon? I want to see what’s really there. I sent it. Then I added, This is my new number.

  It was the first time I’d been out and about since I had arrived in England, and it was pleasant to take a few minutes to people watch. Setting the phone down face first, I crossed my arms and looked around me, wishing suddenly for a sketchbook. I’d never been an artist like my mother, but as long as I could remember, I’d loved sketching. I hadn’t been doing much recently but itched for proper materials now.

  On a Friday morning, it was a thin crowd of mothers with toddlers and old women in tidy trousers, the odd business person in a suit.

  From my bag, I took out a Moleskine notebook and a pen that I always carried for essay ideas and made notes on the setting. The clothes and attitudes of the passersby, the kind of shops that populated the hallways, the cakes in the case, so different from what I’d see at Starbucks in the US—these heavier slices, richer and smaller, along with an array of little tarts.

  I sketched them, finding my lines ragged and unsure at first. Then as I let go a bit, the contours took on more confidence. My pen made the wavy line of a tartlet, the voluptuous rounds of a danish.

  The barista, a leggy girl with wispy black hair, came from behind the counter to wipe down tables, and I asked, “Which one of those cakes is your favorite?”

  “Carrot,” she said without hesitation. “Do you want to try one?”

  If I ate cake every time I sat down for coffee, I’d be as big as a castle by the time I went back to skinny San Francisco. “No, thanks. I was just admiring them. What’s that one?”

  “Apple cake.” She brushed hair off her face. “That one is a brandenburg, and that’s raspberry oat. You’re not English.”

  “No, American.”

  “Yeah? You don’t really have an American accent.”

  People said this to me all the time. I was never sure if it was because my accent was western or because my mother’s accent had influenced me. I gave her a wry smile. “In some places these days, that’s not such a bad thing.”

  She grinned.

  On the table, my phone buzzed, and I turned it over to see a text.

  Hullo. Samir here. Want to tour today? No work bcuz rain.

  I picked it up. Yes! In Letchworth now. Back in hour or 2.

  K. Text when you’re back.

  K.

  Perfect. I could get some kind of idea of what a rescue would look like, and he would be a good guide. “Thanks,” I said to the girl on my way out.

  She waved. “Bye now.”

  Out in the shopping center, I looked for a clothing shop that might give me ideas of what to wear to the garden party. I only realized I was trying to imagine what my mother would wear when I entered one clothing store and saw the quality of the fabric and turned around and walked right back out. Nice enough, but my mother had had very high standards. She’d always dressed exquisitely, simply, in very good fabrics—wool trousers and crisp blouses, nothing ever slightly stained or ill fitting. Even when she painted, she wore a long smock that kept her clothes tidy.

  She had, however, disliked wearing shoes. It was one of the quirks that made her so adorable, her taste for very soft, warm socks that she wore inside all the time. In the summertime, she puttered around her garden in bare feet, singing quietly as she snipped the heads of dead flowers, plucked weeds from the roots. Her skin was fair, so she wore a big straw hat to shade her face, but her hands—her hands were always tanned and stained and entirely unladylike.

  I smiled to myself, thinking of that, and rounded a corner. A woman in a good camel hair coat and a jaunty scarf passed me, leaving a trail of her scent. It was my mother’s perfume, Joy, but it also held the faint undertone of her hair—something I didn’t even realize I associated with my mother until it slammed me, breaking my heart afresh.

  I had to sit down on a bench, scrambling in my bag for my sunglasses. And tissues. I bent my head so that my hair would hide my face and tried to discreetly wipe my dripping nose, my watering eyes, all the while trying to breathe through the wave of pain.

  Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom.

  After a moment, it eased, as always. I looked around to see if anyone was staring at me, but of course, nobody was. It was England. Everyone would give me my privacy even if I were sobbing loudly in the middle of the place. A relief, really.

  I felt her with me, my mother, and took a breath, talking to her softly. “You’d just die if I did this with you, right? Die, haha—get it?”

  She would have laughed. I knew it.

  Taking in a bracing breath, I righted myself and looked from one end to the other of the center. I would not find what I was looking for here and would likely have to go to London for that kind of clothing. In the meantime, I probably had something that would get me through.

  Texting Peter as I walked, I headed for the parking lot. In the car, I had a sudden yen. “Is there an art store in town, Peter?” I could pick up a better sketchbook and a few pens and maybe even a small box of watercolors. It would give me something to do and a way to capture memories.

  After lunch, Samir picked me up in a small dark-blue car, and I realized I’d been thinking a guy who worked in the building trades would drive a truck, as Tony did. It was pouring again, so I dashed from the door of the hotel through the door he’d flung open, yelping a little as I landed and tugged the door closed behind me.

  He grinned, those black curls tumbling around his arresting face, and I suddenly wished that he were a little older. Flustered, I blurted out, “So wet!” which was ridiculously obvious.

  “My mum says England is a cold, wet, miserable country. Which is why”—he swerved easily into a faintly wider spot in the road to let a truck rumble by, approximately two and a half inches from my door, then swerved back onto the road—“she left it.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “Back to India. She was there until she was fourteen, and she has rheumatoid arthritis. The weather here was not good for her.”

  The way he said it, his face wiped clean of all emotion, spoke volumes. “How long ago?”

  “Two years.” Short, end of subject. Another car whizzed by a half inch away, and he muttered under his breath a word I couldn’t quite catch.

  “Where does all this traffic come from? It’s such a small village!”

  “This is the road to Tesco over in Stevenage and to the railway station in Letchworth. But really, these roads were never meant to carry so much traffic, were they? Built for wagons and”—he swung left beneath a row of trees with branches meeting overhead; in summer it would be a green tunnel, dark and deep—“horses.”

  The road was paved but barely wider than the car—and again I glimpsed the forest of my mother’s paintings, mysterious and dangerous and intriguing. “My mother painted these woods endlessly.” I peered out. “Endlessly. Hundreds of times. Maybe thousands, in books and paintings and drawings.”

  “Did she?” He glanced at me, downshifting so we could climb the steeply rising hill.

  “Yeah.” Rain swashed overhead, over the windscreen, through the branches, making a humid, close cave of the car. I could smell something in his hair, elusively familiar, and thought of my breakdown at the shopping center this morning. “And never told me that it was a real place! I’m mad at her about that.”

  “Fair enough.” The car rocked a bit, bumping our shoulders together. “Sorry. It’s the rough and dirty way to get here. If you want to walk, this is the way you’ll come from the village.”

>   “Not on that busy road?”

  “No, there’s a footpath behind the church. I’ll show you if you like.”

  “I do love to walk. I hope to find places to get some good long walks in, actually, once I get my bearings.”

  “Do you know about the right-of-ways?”

  I shook my head.

  “All of Britain is lined with footpaths, everywhere. An old man in the village walks the ones around here in rotation to keep them open. Dr. Mooney. You should meet him.”

  I smiled.

  “What?”

  “You seem to know everyone in town.”

  A one-shoulder shrug, a little shake of his head. “I love Dr. Mooney. He used to be the town doctor, but he retired. Sometimes I walk with him. He tells good stories.”

  We emerged at the foot of the track that went between farmland and the farmhouses. From this side, I could see chickens pecking away beneath shelters behind the cottages and the starts of home plots. Again, it seemed to me a prosperous place—why let the house go so desperately?

  He parked beneath a shed. “Pretty sure we can get in through that door. Wait here, and let me check.”

  From this angle high on the hill, I could see over the tops of the farmhouses toward the wood and the open fields. The angle of the road hid the town, but I knew it was there, just beyond my view. The whole was blurred beneath the gray rain, but far away on the horizon, impossibly blue, was a swath of cloudless sky.

  Samir called out, “We’re in!”

  I dashed out of the car and splashed through the mud underfoot. In the vestibule, plain and empty except for a single forgotten broom hanging from a hook, I stomped my feet. “Should we take off our shoes?”

  He only looked at me.

  “No, you’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking. Lead the way.”

  He ducked into a narrow passageway, turned a corner, and headed up a set of stairs. The walls were stone, the wooden banister utterly plain. “Servants’ stairs,” I said.

  “Yeah. But this takes us to some less damaged parts of the house, so you can see that it’s not all like what we saw last week.”

  He tried to open a door on the next floor, but even when we both yanked on it, it wouldn’t budge. “Swollen. It’s all right. We can go up another floor and come back down the other side.”

  A couple of mullioned windows spaced at intervals as we climbed offered a view of the landscape, the soft greens of emerging spring, arrowed rows of dark pines, and when we climbed above a hedge, a tumble of gray ruins. Maybe the old abbey.

  At the next floor, the door was off the upper hinge, sprawling sideways. Samir pulled it upright to give us passage, gesturing for me to go first. I shook my head. “Not a chance. You first.”

  “Really?” His eyes twinkled. “Afraid of ghosts?”

  “And spiders.” Afraid of all kinds of nameless things, actually. I touched my chest. “I’m hyperventilating right now.”

  His grin flashed, and for a moment I forgot what we were doing. It was a wide, beautiful smile, with good strong white teeth, teeth that had been well tended, given braces and routine checkups, but it was the way it changed his face that made me nearly stumble, as if someone had flung open the curtains in a dark room, allowing sunlight to come flooding in. A generous, genuine expression. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had given me such an unguarded smile or looked at me so directly.

  “My sister, Pavi, and I used to sneak in here all the time.” He held out a long-fingered hand, and I took it, letting him draw me forward. “It will be fine.”

  I stepped over the threshold, and although I wanted to cling to him—my heart was honestly skittering in terror—I forced myself to let go, hovering just beside his arm. In front of us was one long section of the letter E that made up all Elizabethan houses. A corridor ran all the way to the other end, where it ended in a room so damaged I could see light coming in from above. To our left was a staircase and—I moved impulsively toward it—the light- and color-soaked grand staircase.

  Samir caught my elbow. “Carefully,” he said.

  I nodded and paid attention to where I was stepping, over a carpet that once must have had a pattern, toward a bannister that overlooked the stairs. The warm golden wood of the walls glowed from the light falling through the stained glass that had been taken long ago from the ruined abbey. As if to show off, a thick shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds and set half the window ablaze, giving the entire great hall an aura of life.

  “Oh, wow,” Samir murmured.

  “Seriously.” I looked down toward the littered stairs and across to the shadowy gallery. “How do you get there?”

  “Stairs from the ballroom, but that’s one part of the house that’s very badly damaged.” He lifted a hand diagonally toward the back left corner and spread the other arm toward the front right. “Both corners and a lot of the rest of it is fine.”

  Encouraged by the sunshine, I said, “Show me.”

  We turned back from the stairs and headed for the corridor. Doors, some open, some closed, broke the line of the hallway, allowing in a few muted swaths of pale light. The old floorboards creaked with our steps.

  “Creepy,” I said. “Are these all bedrooms?”

  “Yeah. I don’t remember what’s in all of them, but there isn’t as much furniture up here. Maybe guest bedrooms or something like that.”

  “Because who doesn’t need seven or ten guest bedrooms?”

  “My friends sleep on my sofa when we drink too much.”

  “In my world, they’d stagger home in an Uber.”

  “Mine live further away, I think.”

  At the first open door, we peered in, and for the first time, I forgot to be frightened. Letting go of Samir’s arm, I stepped inside the room, drawn by the view through long, mullioned windows. They looked out over farms and fields and undulating hills, the forest crouching on the edge like the border into Fairy Land. Playful beams of light broke through the clouds here and there, fingering a field, a tree, a distant rise.

  The sight caught in my throat, as if my ancestors were standing beside me, puffed up with pride. “Lovely,” I murmured and forced myself to shake off the fanciful feeling. Everything in the room was coated in decades of dust, but most of it was still intact—the four-poster bed with a blue or faded-purple cover, a large wardrobe, a rug on the floor. The drapes were tattered, rotted. Faintly, I smelled cat urine and mold. “It’s really not in terrible condition here, is it?”

  He was performing another sort of inspection, stomping a heel down on the floor in various places and slamming the flat of his palm along the walls at intervals. “Seems sound enough.” He pointed at a landscape. “Here’s one of the paintings—you asked why there weren’t any downstairs.”

  It didn’t look notable in any way, but I was hardly an expert in English landscape painting. “I guess I need to have someone come in to appraise anything that’s left and clear out the rest.”

  “Sure.” He brushed dust from the top of a bureau. “Are you going to keep it, the house?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. Haver certainly seems to think it’s a white elephant, but I’m not going to make any decisions until I have more information.” Feeling less superstitious, I led the way down the hall, and we looked in all of the rooms on the floor, just to get a feel for them. Most of them were in stages of disrepair—mold on the walls or the fabrics, holes in the curtains, and even some vines growing through openings—but two others were simply as dusty as the first. I imagined a ball, visitors coming in from all over England, or perhaps a house party. Most of my idea of old houses had come from Downton Abbey, and I imagined women in delicate Edwardian dresses headed for dinner, ropes of pearls and rubies looped around their thin necks. As if to accommodate my vision, I opened one of the doors to find a peacock-themed room, redolent with the fading colonial era.

  The other door hung at a bad angle, and when Samir poked his head in, his hand pushed me backward. “Stay back. The
floor’s gone.”

  “Really? Let me see.”

  He used his body as a protective device, and I peered over his arm to see what must have been a bathroom, half the floor dropping away. Below, the bathtub had landed on its side next to another bathtub below. I laughed. “It’s like one of those commercials for impotence,” I said without thinking and blushed.

  “Sorry?” He looked at me, one side of his mouth curling into an expression I already recognized meant he was going to tease. “One can buy it? Is it expensive?”

  “No. You know what I mean. Drugs for . . .” I peered into the mess of the bathroom. “They always show two bathtubs side by side.”

  “Maybe instead of drugs, they should try getting into the same tub.”

  I laughed.

  He kept his arm out as we moved away, as if I were a small child who might tilt over the edge. “Let me show you the bad part here,” he said, “and then we’ll go down to the floor below, and I’ll show you my favorite room. You’ll like it.”

  “Will I?”

  “I’m quite sure.”

  We walked to the end of the hallway, past a door that opened into a storage area I peeked into. It was immediately darker and cold, and a ripple shimmered down my spine. It was part of the south tower, the walls unfinished stone. Dusty and filled with the detritus of decades. I closed the door and hurried to catch up to Samir. He opened a door at the end of the hall and stepped back. “The floor here is bad, so don’t go in.”

  A wave of rot and bad air spilled out, and I stepped back, covering my face with my arm. “Ugh!”

  “Pavi would never come down this corridor.”

  There had obviously been a fire. Smoke stains ran up the walls, and shreds of fabric were all that remained from the draperies—which, ironically, exposed the view. These were the bay windows to the front of the house. On the floors below, they were covered with vines and roses, but here the vista was unobstructed, a clear picture of the roofs of Saint Ives Cross and the church on the hill.

  “The views are absolutely amazing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where was the fire? We are . . .” I turned my head, narrowed my eyes. “Two floors above the dining room and parlor, right?”