The Art of Inheriting Secrets(21)

We turned left at the end of the tower and took a set of carpeted, littered stairs to the floor below. It was immediately more luxurious. We ended up near the grand staircase, but Samir zigged and zagged around corridors to get to the other side of the house, into the other long arm of the E.

Again I had to stop to look over a railing, this one facing a room—a ballroom?—that was profoundly ruined by water damage and falling plaster. Looking up, I could see light through a substantial hole in the roof. The room was long and had once been quite grand, but it was practically empty aside from the rubble. “Again,” I said, “it seems like there would be paintings on those walls.”

“It does.” He tilted his head. “There are some paintings in this room. Come see.”

The hallway was a mirror image of the one upstairs, following the length of the E, but this floor was more luxurious, with more golden wood on the walls.

“Here,” he said and pushed open a creaky door to reveal a room as lush and surprising in all the rot as a blooming bougainvillea in a desert. Time and ruin showed here, too, but even so, the colors were visible—patterns and embroidery and exuberant fabrics. Paintings of a dozen sizes crowded together on the walls, the frames thick with dust and strings of cobwebs, paintings of peacocks and tropical landscapes and portraits of exotic people—a sultan in a harem, a tall dark-skinned woman with dark eyes as mysterious as a deep lake, a tiger lolling on a carpet amid a crowd of beautiful women. More, too. Many, many more, in all sizes.

“It’s like another world in here.” I turned in a circle, trying to take it in. Then I halted to look at Samir. “Don’t tell me—this was my grandmother’s room, right?”

He nodded, looking up at the paintings. “She died wishing she was in India.”

“How do you know that?”

“My grandmother was her personal maid. What do you call it?”

“You’re asking me? I’m American. Lady’s maid?”

That slight, almost imperceptible lift of his mouth. “You seem like the kind of girl who’d know those things.”

“Woman.”

“Of course.” He dipped his head, but those dark eyes—deep as lakes—stayed locked on mine. He was way too young for me. I was entangled in a not-ended relationship. But I swore he was flirting with me. “Woman.”

Don’t get delusional, Shaw, I told myself and moved away.

“My grandmother talked about Lady Violet to my father her whole life. He knew her, I think, before she died, but there were all these things that happened right then—it’s sort of confusing.”

“What things?”

“Not sure of the order—he could tell you—but my aunt, his sister, disappeared. My grandmother was still alive then, but I don’t remember if your grandmother was or not. You’ll have to ask my dad.”

I narrowed my eyes. “The sister never came back?”

He lifted a shoulder. “No. They never found her. She was only fifteen.”

“That’s very sad.”

“Yes.” He wandered around, poking through things.

“He still lives here, your dad?”

“Mmm.”

“I’m having dinner with Pavi on Tuesday.”

“She said. That’s nice of you.”

“It’s nice of her,” I countered. “It was his restaurant first, right? Does your dad still work with her?”

“Sometimes.” He waved away a net of ancient spiderwebs and picked up a photo. “This is them, in India. Our grandmothers.”

My heart lurched, hard, as I took the photo. It was of two young women, a black-and-white snapshot in an ornate frame. The Indian woman looked directly, unsmiling, at the camera, a long black braid draped over the shoulder of her sari. The white woman, my grandmother, sat in a chair, with her hand resting on the head of a large pale dog. She wore riding pants and boots and a crisp tailored shirt, and I knew her face instantly.

Because it was my face.

“Even our hair is exactly the same,” I said, touching my wavy hair. It fell below my shoulders, unruly and streaky, just like my grandmother Violet’s.

“My dad has a copy of this photo,” Samir said and came behind me to look over my shoulder. “It startled me when I met you. It felt as if you’d traveled forward in time.”

I stared right into my own eyes, looking at my too-wide mouth, my own cheekbones and jaw, so much more aggressive than my mother’s delicate features. “I don’t even know what to think.”

“Pavi looks like my grandmother,” he said, “but not as much as you look like yours.”

His breath rustled the hair on my shoulder, and beneath the strange turmoil the photo stirred up, I was aware of his body along my arm, aware again of that elusively familiar scent.

One thing at a time. I handed the photo back to him and moved away. “I’m feeling very unsettled.”

“Understandable.”

An inlaid dressing table covered with bottles sat beneath a painting of a lush nude reclining on a fainting couch. I picked up one of the bottles and pulled out the stopper. The perfume was dried up—all that remained were the harsh last notes—but it was unmistakably Shalimar. “This bottle is likely worth a fortune on its own. It might be Lalique.” Holding it, I looked around the room and felt the sudden weight of decisions that needed to be made. Paintings and junk and priceless treasures, mysteries and precious keepsakes, tumbledown walls and pristine museums of a lost time. “What am I thinking with this place? There’s so much . . . I don’t even know where to start.”