The Art of Inheriting Secrets Page 9

  She was also good-looking in a way that would play well on camera—wide mouth; straight, strong nose; and penetrating dark eyes, which she fixed on me. “Lady Shaw,” she said, extending a hand. “Jocasta Edwards. Very happy to meet you.”

  “Oh, please call me Olivia! This is Ann Chop, who was showing me the medicinal gardens. The garden club in Saint Ives Cross looks after them.”

  “I’m such a fan,” Ann said. “I’ve watched every episode. My favorite was the season on Turlington Castle.”

  “Oh, that was a good one. I love it when things work out, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, thank you, dear. It breaks my heart when these old piles can’t be saved, so I do my best.” She shook Ann’s hand, then purposefully turned to introduce me to her cameraman, a man in his late twenties with a tousle of blond hair and plenty of hipster facial hair. “This is Ian, and if you don’t mind, he’ll shoot our meeting so that we can have some footage later if it works out to feature the house on the show. Is that all right?”

  For a moment, I wondered if that was a good idea. Secrets might be uncovered here, things I might not want the world to know. But honestly, I was so over my head with this whole thing that the revelation of secrets that were decades or centuries old seemed minor. Jocasta had access to the kind of information I would need, going forward, and I would take what help I could get. “Sure, that’s fine.”

  We did not explore the entire house, but I took her on the same basic journey Samir had taken me on last week, up the back stairs to the third floor, then down to see various highlights. She paused to have Ian film the derelict ballroom, silently assessing it, and made notes on various things along the way. She pointed her cameraman to capture the bathtub that had fallen through the floor, and I held my nose and led them to the ruined room where it looked as if there had been a campfire.

  We stopped in Violet’s room, and she gasped aloud. “That painting is an Ingres.”

  I looked over her shoulder. “I thought it seemed familiar.”

  She stepped into the room, turning in a slow circle to look at the rest of it. “Incredible.” In the hallway, she cocked her head. “Where is the rest of the artwork?”

  “I have asked the same question. No one seems to know. The library is empty too.”

  She pursed her lips. “Why take all but the paintings in Violet’s room?”

  I opened my hands and shrugged in the universal expression of bewilderment. “No idea.”

  On her notepad, she scribbled for a while. “There’s more to this story. Something isn’t jibing.”

  “A lot of things,” I agreed.

  “It may be that digging into all of this will turn up unsavory or unpleasant family secrets,” she said. “It happens quite a lot. Are you prepared for that? That there might be something you’d rather not have known?”

  “Well, until a month ago, I had no idea any of this existed, so I’m not attached to a particular version of history.”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s true.” She peered over the railing to the ballroom again. “You knew your mother. What if the secrets are about her?”

  “I think she must have had some kind of secret, or she wouldn’t have left here the way she did, just abandoning it.”

  Jocasta nodded, moving around the room slowly, looking at things. Standing by the bed, she paused. “This room is just what I might have imagined. When I was a girl, the countess held a ball for all the girls in the county. I suppose it was to give us a taste of life at a different level, what to wear and how to conduct ourselves. I was twelve, and I wore a blue gown, and I’d never felt so beautiful in my life.”

  “Was my mother there?”

  “Of course! By then she must have been twenty or so and as glamorous to all of us as a film star. Princess Grace, perhaps. Sad, a little aloof, very kind.”

  It was so easy to imagine my mother with a sleek, swinging pageboy, rounding a room full of adolescent girls to engage each one. “Thank you for that story and for the insight on my grandmother. I keep getting mixed messages about her.”

  “The countess was a very large personality. You’d love her or hate her. Of course, later in life, she grew more eccentric and extreme—I’ve always thought she must have had dementia.”

  “Did you ever meet my uncle?”

  “That would be Roger. He must have been around, but I don’t remember him.”

  We continued the tour and ended at the foot of the grand staircase. No cats were in evidence today, or they were more careful than they usually were. The cameraman filmed the entire space, making sounds of awe as he panned over the wood, glowing in the light that fell so luxuriously through the stained glass window. Ruby and sapphire and topaz bars of light spilled over the stairs and the walls, as if we were inside a kaleidoscope. “It’s astonishing, isn’t it?”

  Jocasta nodded. “It’s a remarkable property, even more than I remembered from childhood.” She eyed the gallery and the abbey window, then leveled a gaze at me. “It’s also terribly damaged. It’s going to take a fortune to repair and probably years of work. Are you up for that?”

  “I honestly don’t know.” The ghost of my mother walked down the stairs, through red and blue and yellow light, and I watched her descend with my grandmother’s eyes. Both of them had hated it. Why would I save it? “But it pains me to imagine it falling down, being lost.”

  “Me too,” she said. “Come on—let’s look at the gardens. That might be the first place we could turn around to make money.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  We left through the back door. “Kitchen is remarkably untouched,” she commented as we passed through it again. “This could almost be a flat, if you wanted a base camp.”

  I imagined myself living there alone, with the house silent and empty around me, and shuddered. “I’d rather check out the carriage house. Someone told me there are some flats there.”

  “Let’s have a look on the way back up the hill.” She marched down the road, and I followed, trying to keep pace, but the slope was substantial, and I could feel the irritation starting in my leg.

  “Do you mind if we slow down?”

  “Of course. I’m so sorry.” She gave a shout of laughter. “No one has ever been able to keep up with me.”

  We stopped at the foot of the hill. “I did a bit of research yesterday, and what I remembered proved to be true. One of your ancestors created these eighteenth-century gardens, with topiary and knot gardens and all that. It was one of the more splendid places in Hertfordshire, and people traveled miles to see it.

  “It was damaged in the war, but your grandmother brought it up to snuff, and it brought in tourists like a sighting of the Virgin Mary. It turned a tidy profit.” She turned to the cameraman. “Do you have the map?”

  From a leather satchel on his shoulder, he tugged out a folded piece of paper and handed it over. She unfolded it, shifted the orientation. “Here we go.” She headed down a path, untidy, nearly buried, but still visible.

  “These are the terraces,” she said, waving a hand. “They’re a Georgian invention, part of the craze for everything Italian. The young lords made their grand tours and came back enamored with Italy or the Moors or some new tree.” She pointed. “Those are tulip trees, I believe. Beautiful in the spring. And those are daffodils popping up. They’ll be blooming in a week or so, I’d say.”

  I imagined one of my ancestors as a dashing young lord, dazzled by the terraced gardens of Italy. “I’m not an experienced gardener,” I admitted. “I’ve always lived in the city. My mother has—had—a beautiful garden.”

  “Well, you’ll have a chance to learn here if you wish.” She gave me a half smile. “We expect our lords and ladies to know these things. And you must buy yourself a good hound.”

  I laughed but heard the kernel of truth in it. Point taken. I’d have to educate myself if I planned to stay.

  The paths wandered through deciduous forest,
opening here for a pool, long and still, the water overgrown with algae and muck, and yet it had a powerful spirit. I halted, captured by the moodiness of the spot, the whispering edge of coolness wafting out of the shadows. A bridge crossed over the pool, green with time, and I imagined a lovers’ rendezvous. With my camera phone, I shot a photo and then another. “This is a beautiful spot.”

  “There are several ponds and pools throughout. This one looks to be in fairly decent shape. It only wants a bit of scrubbing and water lilies.”

  I imagined the water clean, reflecting the sky and trees and clouds. “I’d want a bench here.”

  “Yes.”

  Jocasta marched on, and I hurried to follow, but the cameraman, too, was taken by the spot. He lingered until Jocasta called to him.

  The gardens meandered along banks of rhododendron—“This will be magnificent in a month”—and what must have once been a knot garden that meandered into a half-walled garden. We paused at the edge of an enormous field of rose bushes just leafing out on their leggy stalks. “How could they have survived so well?” I said in wonder.

  “Well, they’ve gone wild, haven’t they?”

  “My mother had a rose garden. I suppose I know why now.”

  Jocasta looked at me. “We’ll want to tell this part of the story, that you had no idea you were an heiress. We’ll probably do some digging to see what happened to your uncle, too, tell some more of the history of the house.”

  “I assumed you would.”

  “Have you heard much of the story—of the house, that is?”

  “Some. I love the bit about the mistress of Charles II who convinced him a woman could inherit.”

  “Else you’d not be here, would you?”

  “Right. Nor would my grandmother have had to leave India.”

  “The twists and turns of history.”

  “Of life,” I added.

  The walled garden gave way to another that made use of a ruin from the monastery days. Overgrown beds and pots and shrubs gone amok couldn’t hide what had once been a most romantic spot—private and designed for contemplation. A stream ran alongside it. “This comes from the spring at the center of the medicinal garden,” Jocasta said, consulting her map. “The building might have been a buttery or the like, since it would have been cooler here by the stream.” Fig vines covered the old stone, but everything else was overgrown beyond recognition.

  At a hedge, Jocasta stopped. “This is the pièce de résistance. The maze.”

  “A maze?” My inner seven-year-old perked up. “How do we get in?”

  “The problem would be getting out, since it hasn’t been tended and we haven’t a proper guide.” She walked along, however, and came to an opening cut into the hedge like a window. “Oh, this is a delight. Look!”

  I peered through the opening and saw that it opened onto another square, just slightly off from the first, which opened onto another so that I could see a long way into the maze, but not all the way. At each window, you’d be able to see just a little further. “Magical!”

  “It is.” She clapped her hands. “Get this, Ian, and we’ll head back up to the top of the hill. Shouldn’t be much farther.”

  As we emerged from the overgrown garden, I saw we had made it to the top of the garden and the ruined conservatory I’d spied the first day with Rebecca. “That’ll have to come down, I expect,” Jocasta said.

  “No, really?” I stood looking at it with my hands at my sides, feeling all the things we’d seen move through me again—the jeweled light in the stairway, the still pool, the magic of the maze—and now this beautiful wreck of a conservatory. Plants grew all through the broken glass, in and out, and it seemed so very sad that such a beautiful thing could have been lost like this. “It couldn’t cost that much to restore, could it?”

  “You’d be amazed. But it’s your call, of course.” She gestured toward the carriage house. “Let’s take a peek at these flats.”

  My leg complained, but I did my best not to limp behind her. She noticed my pace and slowed hers to mine, and I assumed that she and Ian had an understanding because he was now filming at his whim, not bothering to keep up with us.

  The first two doors of the carriage house flats were locked, but the third opened into a neglected but very sunny space with a view toward the house. The brick had been exposed and the old beams left in the ceiling. A fireplace with a carved mantle took up the far wall, which would be a sitting area and dining room adjoining a kitchen that must have been built in the twenties, judging by the sink. “Quite charming,” Jocasta pronounced.

  “Agreed.” I poked my head around the corner and found a bedroom, small but again faced with that open brick and a row of windows that looked toward the hills. A bathroom that was the same era as the kitchen was far more charming, with a pedestal sink and a claw-footed tub. “No shower, but that would be easily added.”

  If I’d had any inkling that I’d be returning to my old life, the tide turned in that moment. I saw myself so clearly in this space, writing in that spot by the fire, cooking in that kitchen. Maybe I could get another dog, I thought, and saw her, too, sitting by the fire, a red-coated retriever. “This is perfect,” I said.

  “Chilly, though. Let’s stand in the sunshine and talk.”

  Outside, I said, “What do you think?”

  “It’s a wonderful old pile,” she said. “That staircase alone is worth the price of entry, as will be the maze.” She looked back to the house, then down to the farms and cottages. “According to the public records, the rents and holdings bring in approximately two hundred thousand pounds a year, which will be enough to support you in the cottage, even give you some funds to do the upgrades it needs.”

  I nodded.

  “But it won’t be anywhere near enough to do the repairs that are necessary for the house.”

  “Okay. So . . . ?”

  “I believe the gardens will generate a healthy income if you start there.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Tours. The madness for garden tours grows every year—great busloads of tourists from all over the world.” She propped one hand on her hip, gestured with the other arm toward the garden. “We’ll bring in a landscape architect and a historian, get some estimates, get that going, and then in a few years, maybe start to tackle the house. There are also treasures in the house that should be examined and might generate some revenue.”

  “I love the idea of starting with the gardens. But I don’t want to just leave the house as it is. I think I told you that I have some funds of my own.”

  “That would change the game a bit. Tell me.”

  “I’ve sold my mother’s home in San Francisco for more than three million dollars. Not sure what the conversion rate is at the moment or what my tax obligation will be, but I’m guessing I’d have a pool of at least a million pounds to start.”

  Jocasta blinked. Then she laughed, tossing back that magnificent hair and laughing with her whole body. It made me think of Julia Child, the way she seemed to always be standing in a river of pure enjoyment. “Well, that is a delightful surprise, Lady Shaw. Wonderful.” She flung an arm around me and turned me toward the house. “It won’t be enough to finish, but it is certainly enough to begin.”

  We stopped in the circular drive in front of the house. “I do love this old wreck,” she said quietly, leaning back to take in the top floor. Then she looked at me levelly. “I do not have full autonomy in my choice of material, but I’m going to lobby hard for this. In the meantime, we can get a better picture of what’s going on.”

  We mapped out a plan of visits from various contractors, historians, architects, garden experts, and art experts. She made an appointment to come back in a month, once the others had made their reports, and the first segment would be filmed. “I’ll send the various permission forms, and you can see to them. If you have strong feelings about any of the people I bring in, I’m not attached. Just efficient. I know the networks of people in the business, and
because of my profile, it goes more quickly.”

  “That’s great.”

  “I can probably have a contractor out here to look at the place by the end of the week. The landscape historian I’m thinking of is heading to Italy at the end of the school term, so I’d like to get her out here as soon as possible, too, to see if she can unearth some drawings of the terraced gardens and help us make a plan for the restoration.”

  “Great.”

  “The last thing, my dear, is to think about what you might want to do to support the house once it has been saved. You’ll have to do something. These prodigal houses take endless pots of money, and you will need another means of support. Just giving tours is not enough these days—you’ll have to think about what else you can do.”

  “Like what?”

  “You said you’re an editor—is that right? Is there something with writing or food that comes to mind? Maybe you can—”

  “Maybe a fair on Saturdays, to bring people in.”

  “Good start.”

  “A cooking school. Or—”

  “I suspect you’ll think of something.”

  I suspected I would have to.

  Chapter Eight

  By the time I returned to the hotel, I had worn out my leg completely. It was the first time in days that it had bothered me at all, but I had given it quite a workout. I was half tempted to call Pavi and reschedule.

  But of course I could not. It would be rude to cancel at the last minute, and I did know that she was interested in me, at least in part, because of my position at the magazine. She would have gone to no little trouble to create a beautiful meal.

  A small part of my mind wondered if Samir would be there. Why would he? It wasn’t his restaurant. I’d hoped we were developing a friendship, but I hadn’t heard from him, so maybe not.

  Whatever. I had enough to think about without crushing on a hot thatcher. Though I had to admit, as I flipped through the few clothes I had with me, having a crush was a forgotten pleasure. I’d forgotten the rustle of anticipation, the zing of remembering his wide, beautiful mouth, the way he looked at me so intently. Surely, after everything, I’d earned the right to crush right out.