Sara Alexander - The Secret Legacy - The perfect summer read for fans of Santa Montefiore, Victoria Hislop and Dinah Jeffries

‘All the women in my life have the devil in them this morning. That will be all, Santina, go to the child.’

I left, no doubt with too much eagerness.

The Major always to referred to Elizabeth as The Child. With each day that passed, that small bundle of life was becoming more a part of me. Each time he flicked this title at her, it was as if he pressed a fresh bruise of mine. I could count the times I had seen him hold her. He looked without seeing. A perfunctory glance now and then, someone cross-checking an inventory. It wasn’t hard to understand why, but it smarted nonetheless. This child had broken his wife. The devotion he bored into Adeline consumed all his passion. How could there be anything left for this needy babe? That was what I was there for. He paid me to love her for him. And I did.

Elizabeth’s lament was soon lost to milky nourishment. We sat in the corner of my room, on the chair I had prepared for night feeds. I always opened the shutters for her first feed of the morning, letting the light stream in through the tall glass double doors. The October sun was reluctant to acquiesce to autumn. How different from my first October in London, where the damp air already furled the decaying tips of bronzed leaves. Here, grapes swelled to picking, the mountain air was sweet with chestnuts. I watched the shadows of a passing cloud dance across the tiles. This morning’s sun was proud, radiating with the pretense of summer, mocking the promise of autumn. Perhaps Adeline’s recovery would stay a hope lost to the past too?

When Elizabeth had finished I sat her up on my lap, noticing how her back strengthened each day. I could lose myself in this small human. She absorbed my restlessness, distracted me from the gnawing sadness for having been dragged back to Positano, away from the life I’d planned. It was impossible for me to sink into those thoughts whilst I rubbed my palm in circles around her middle till she let out several belches and looked pleased with herself. The pull of this girl was both a balm and unsettling. This time the following year I would have to leave her; allowing myself to become attached would cause me nothing but more unnecessary heartache. I lay her down in her cot to stretch out for a little so I could return to the Major.

The door was open. I stepped in.

I found him curled around his wife. His hand locked into hers. Her hair was matted with nightmares and sweat. Their breaths rose and fell together. I stood, trespassing. My eye caught sight of the dirty towels. I decided to finish the job at hand, regardless of the imposition. I heaved the pungent pile and caught a bitter whiff.

‘Santina?’ I heard him call.

I turned, feeling even more the intruder.

‘Thank you.’

I always hesitated after he thanked me. It would be rude to say that he was welcome because that would insinuate we were equals, which of course we weren’t. It was rude to say nothing too, of course. Awkwardness puffed through me like a snake of smoke despite, or maybe because of, my best efforts to smother it.

‘I’ll take breakfast at my usual time, then we will begin your first lesson,’ said the Major.

I swallowed a stammer. ‘Will you not rest, sir?’

‘I will take breakfast at the usual hour. You will not shirk your commitments.’ I turned and left. If I had been nervous about my first lesson before, now I was on the precipice of panic.

He ate on the terrace just beyond the kitchen: two eggs, cooked for three and a half minutes once the water reached a rolling boil, two slices of toast, light brown on one side, one spoon of marmalade, two cups of tea from a pot. I added a fig on a small saucer as well. It needed to be eaten that morning; it would be jam by the afternoon otherwise. He peeled the papery purple skin, sliced it into four wedges, chewed each piece several times and wiped his mouth clean afterwards. I cleared the table and wished Elizabeth would call out for me, but the warm breeze seemed to lull her into a nap in the Moses basket upon the kitchen table. I liked her close to me. It helped me intuit every nuance and, with enough concentration, nip hysteria before fear of famine took hold and that round face of hers creased into the kind of fury you’d expect from a spurned woman intent on everyone knowing so.

‘Let us begin,’ he said.

I placed the last of the dishes into the ceramic sink.

‘You may finish your house duties afterwards,’ he announced.

I think he expected me to do something other than stand mute in the doorway.

‘Good heavens, Santina, am I really all that terrifying?’

It was one of those lingering questions that pierce the air, leaving a small, unanswered tear.

‘Sit here.’

He gestured at the chair beside him where Adeline had managed to eat a light supper yesterday evening. That had filled us both with a tentative hope – nothing that this morning wouldn’t have dashed, no doubt. He was a fixer. I suspected that what he couldn’t immediately fix with Adeline, or Elizabeth for that matter, he’d make up for with me and my tentative English.

I sat down, trying to unclasp my hands and failing.

‘You speak fairly well,’ he began.

My lips rose into an unsure smile.

‘Enough to understand instructions, yes. But if I allowed you to sail to America as promised, without a true grasp of English, I would be failing on my word. That is to say, what is English to you, Santina?’

‘What is it, sir?’

‘That’s what I asked.’

‘A language. To talk.’

He took a deep breath now, and as he let it out again, his gaze drifted toward the sea. It was a deeper blue than yesterday at this time, but still clear enough to see the watercolor patches of algae swirling toward Capri. His eyes snapped back to me. I noticed the tiny licks of darker blue that cut across the aqua, framed by thick blond-copper eyelashes.

‘It is not only to talk, Santina. We do that already. I will educate you in a cohesive manner. I will not ask how to buy cheese and bread. Any donkey can do that. I will teach you English – in all its startling, crisp beauty.’

He had lost me several sentences ago.

I watched him open a small book, marked by a slim leather bookmark that looked well loved. He straightened. ‘Oh ye! Who have your eye-balls vexed and tired, feast them upon the wideness of the Sea.’

He stopped and looked at me.

‘Keats, a poet, wrote that, in 1817.’

‘Is that all of it?’

‘You want to know the rest?’

I nodded. I hadn’t understood everything, but I liked the way his voice changed when he recited it. He twisted the book to face me.

‘There.’ He pointed toward the bottom of the page.

I looked at the jumble of letters. I couldn’t bear to raise my eyes to meet his.

‘You see? You carry on where I left off.’

I swallowed.

‘Don’t worry about mistakes, Santina, there’s no one here to laugh at you.’

My ears became attuned to the minutiae of sounds around me, a twitch of a leaf as a grasshopper skimmed its surface, the breeze lifting the sprinkle of crumbs he hadn’t allowed me to sweep away yet. I realized he was calling my name.

‘Santina,’ he said, his voice softer now; it was his Adeline voice, the one he used when her speech began to corkscrew toward ramblings, ‘you can’t read, can you?’

I felt furious that he had cornered me like this. What needed I for poetry? How on earth was that going to help me survive America? Here I was, dragged back to the tiny town that had smothered my childhood, following a man and his sick wife, caring for his daughter night and day, a responsibility I had never sought, and his repayment was a promise and a poem!

He wasn’t afraid of the bristling silence. He let it hang, unhurried, like a dank February morning in London where the clouds merge into one purgatorial white canopy.