The Art of Inheriting Secrets(2)

For a moment, she stared at me. Hostile. Furious, even.

What the hell?

Finally, she snatched the key from the counter, hung it back on its hook, and took another. “You’ll hear the pub, but no one’ll be singing until Friday.” She leaned over the bar. “Allen! Come show the lady to her room.”

A youth, no more than twenty, rushed from the back of the bar, graceful as a cheetah. “Hello,” he said, grabbing my bag. “This way.”

We wound down a corridor beneath the stairs and across a tidy dining room furnished in chintz. “Breakfast here, miss, starting at seven. She quits at nine sharp.”

“Thank you.”

We walked down another corridor to the end, where a wide door opened into a very pretty room. I sighed in relief, offering him a pound coin. “Wonderful.”

He pocketed the tip with a smile. “No trouble.”

“Does the pub serve food?”

“Best fish-and-chips in town. I could bring you a plate if you like? Or a glass of wine?”

“A pint of ale,” I said, eyeing the wingback chair that stood by the grate. “And the fish-and-chips sound perfect.”

He gave a nod. “Right back, my lady.”

“You don’t have to—” I began.

But he was already gone.

When Allen returned with the food, he showed me how to light the gas fire, handed me a scrap of paper with the Wi-Fi password, and said he’d send someone round in an hour for the tray.

Eating the hot, flaky fish, seasoned liberally with malt vinegar the way my mother served it, I sank into the relief of being here, away from the craziness of my life the past few months.

My mother’s sudden and crushing death had been the final blow in a series of disasters that plagued my thirty-eighth year. It had begun with a car accident that shattered my right tibia, which meant I could not manage the stairs in the San Francisco loft I’d shared with my fiancé, Grant, for six years, so I’d temporarily moved into my mother’s ranch house in Menlo Park to recover. It was the house I’d grown up in, and although my mother wasn’t the sentimental type and had done over my childhood bedroom with clean green lines, there were enough echoes of my teenaged self in the kitchen and bathroom to depress me, even without the fact that I felt wretched about imposing on my sixty-four-year-old mother, who’d suffered from bad health for two decades. And I was furious with Grant, who’d barely made the trip from our apartment—originally my apartment—once or twice a week.

I was still furious with him, honestly. I’d told him almost nothing about what I was doing on this trip, only that I needed to settle some of my mother’s affairs. It was probably time to break it off, something else I had to think about while I was away.

But that was the other point of worry—the time, or rather lack of time, I had to wrap this up. The injury and resulting surgery had forced me to take a leave of absence from my position as editor at the Egg and Hen, one of the premier food magazines in the country. It had started as an eight-week leave. Now the count was fifteen weeks and growing.

A month ago, I’d gone back to writing and some editing, remotely, and I really wanted to get back before I lost my position entirely. I loved the magazine, the beauty of food and the industry, and I’d worked my ass off to get the position. Breathing down my neck, some kindly and some not so much, were a string of others just as ambitious, all of whom would be deliriously thrilled to take my place. I had to get back to it soon or lose it.

The final blow in this string of misfortune had been the death of my mother. She fell ill, pneumonia, just after Christmas. Not a surprise after a decade of lung issues. What was a surprise was that she died of it, simply and swiftly, in two weeks’ time.

Leading to my discovery of the increasingly more urgent letters in her study from a solicitor in England, asking what to do about a legal matter he seemed to understand but I did not.

Which led to the phone call that led me to this moment, eating fish-and-chips in a damp English hotel room, with the locals calling me “lady.”

It was a lot to absorb.

So instead, I did what I’d done since I was a child—I took comfort in food. Not in a binge-eating sort of way, which wasn’t focusing at all, but grounding myself in the here and now by noticing exactly what I ate.

Right now, in this hotel room in front of a gas fire, the fish was fresh and sturdy beneath its crisp breading, the chips thick and expertly salted. My pint of ale was the color of walnuts, with flavor that had been developed over centuries. Salt eddied through my mouth, grounding me, and I thought of an essay M. F. K. Fisher had written about a meal she’d eaten in Paris after getting stuck on a train. It made me feel cosmopolitan rather than lonely. For the first moment since my mother died, I felt something akin to peace. Maybe I’d write about it in the morning.

But for now, it was a relief to be far away from the drama of my life, with a full belly and a sense of quiet stealing over me.

As I was falling asleep, my brain fancifully tried to write limericks with fish-and-chips at the center. They were incredibly clever in my compromised state, and I told myself to remember them in the morning.

It was probably just as well that I didn’t.





Chapter Two

“I’m so sorry,” the solicitor, Jonathan Haver, said in his modulated voice over the phone the next morning. “I’m well and truly stuck out here.”