The Art of Inheriting Secrets(28)

“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.”