The Art of Inheriting Secrets(20)

“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?”

“Right. Floor below is where the fire was. Not sure what happened. It’s always been like that. Pavi and I think someone lived in here, like a homeless person, because it’s like a campfire right in the center of the room. Maybe it got out of hand.”

“Lucky it didn’t burn the entire house down.”

“Yeah.” He tapped a hand on my shoulder. “Let’s go see the good room. You’ll love it.”