The Art of Inheriting Secrets(53)

“Yes. It turned out I was a much better glassworker and sculptor than painter. Your mother was always the best painter among us.”

From the satchel I’d brought with me, I took out a children’s book. It was a story about a band of animals, rabbits and wrens and a plucky fox, who had appeared in many of her paintings. “I thought you’d like this. It’s one of the books my mother illustrated. She won a prestigious prize for it, and I think it really captures what she did so well. The writer drew the story from the paintings rather than the other way around.”

Helen picked it up, ran her hand over the cover. “Glorious. So like her.” With a reverence I found touching, she opened the cover and leafed through the pages, pausing here and there. “Oh, look at that! Do you recognize the conservatory?”

“What?”

She held up the page, and there it was, the conservatory that had so captured me, whole and flourishing, with a peacock strutting through it.

“Oh my God. Let me see!”

I took it from her urgently, and yes, that was the conservatory. If I leafed back a page, there were the hills in the distance, and forward a page, then two, and there was the corner of the house. “It’s all Rosemere, isn’t it? I wonder if all of her work is. I mean, I’ve read this book a hundred times, and I didn’t know anything about the estate, but now I recognize it. Now”—I touched my breastbone, that place that ached so much lately—“it was probably because I subconsciously recognized the conservatory that I want so much to restore it, even though Jocasta thinks it is a poor use of funds.”

“May I?” She held out her hand for the book, a patient smile lighting her eyes. “You’ve seen it all, but I have not.”

“Yes, of course. I’m so sorry.” I handed it over and flopped back in my chair. “I wish I could figure out what was in her mind. I can’t understand why she never told me about all of this. Clearly, she loved it. She painted it for fifty years, over and over and over, and the grounds all around it. The animals, the flowers, the woods.”

“Never the house?”

“No.” I leafed through a catalog of her paintings and drawings in my imagination. “Not many buildings at all. A cottage once in a while.”

“This one?” She held up the book to show a picture of a cozy square cottage with a thatched roof—of course—in a grove of trees. Lights burned within, casting yellow light into the dark forest. It looked like the happily-ever-after cottage in every fairy tale ever written, but now I could see the local influence, the weaving of the thatch, the local preference for beams over the windows.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s a friendly place, isn’t it? A refuge. Do you know where it is?”

“I don’t recognize it. I’m sorry. It might not even exist anymore. A lot of those old cottages were demolished when the housing estates came in.”

Paved paradise, Joni Mitchell sang in my mind.

Helen flipped to the end of the book. “I’m so glad she was able to make a life with her painting. She had to fight very hard for it.”

“Really? Her mother’s room is filled with paintings. You’d think she’d be proud of her daughter’s talent.”

Helen lifted a shoulder. “It didn’t seem that way. But of course, by the time I knew the countess, she was—a bit mad.”

“Someone else said that she was volatile: wonderful or terrible. Did she get dementia or something?”

“That’s a good description, but no, I don’t know if it was dementia. She wasn’t that old—only fifties, maybe.”

“I need to make a chart with everything in one place.” I rubbed a spot on my temple. “If it wasn’t dementia, do you think she was mentally ill?”

“She drank, love. Heavily.”

“Oh!” I laughed. “That explains a lot.”

“Even though she was erratic, I adored her,” Helen said and meditatively took a sip of her lemonade. “It’s hard to explain to women your age how different things were for women then. Women were just . . . not that free to be themselves. People weren’t, honestly.

“But your grandmother was. She wore these amazing clothes, all these Indian silks she made into the most beautiful dresses—red and turquoise, with a thousand bracelets, just like an Indian, and she had a spectacular figure, this great head of hair.” She cocked her head. “Like yours. Thick and wavy. You really look like her.”

“Yeah, not the body. I’ve seen her slim self. Just like my mother.” I picked up a strawberry, eyed it, and sadly set it back down on a napkin. “I seem to have inherited all these curves from my father’s side of the family.”

“You’re built like a classic English girl. Luscious.”

I gave her a wry smile. “Thanks. I made peace with it a long time ago, but it pains a fourteen-year-old when her mother’s clothes are too small for her instead of the other way around.”

“I’m sure.” She pointed to the berry. “Strawberries, however, will not make you fat.”

I picked it up again, admiring the quilting of the seeds, the shimmery crimson color. “How did they get along, my mother and grandmother?”

“Not at all well. Caroline was introverted—maybe she changed later, but—”