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

His hand smoothed his beard.

‘Would you like me to help you, Santina?’

A sigh escaped before I could stop it, then a solitary tear, which I hated myself for. I brushed it off my cheek, but we both knew it had been there.

‘Please say you’ll consider my offer?’ he asked.

I hadn’t invited these blurred lines; he was my employer, not a teacher. I didn’t want to be helped. I wanted to work, survive a year here in exchange for my escape from this town, this place that had never taught me to read, or think about poetry, or hope to live off course from the mountain girl. I was prepared to commit to this time with his daughter and do the job as best I could but my eyes were set on a horizon far from here. Now I sat, within one of my town’s palaces, feeling more imprisoned than when I first left. His face relaxed into something close to a smile.

‘I think I can offer you more than just money, Santina.’ His voice lowered to a syrupy murmur, his expression softened. ‘In return for everything you are doing for my family and me.’

I lifted my eyes. His offer came from a genuine place. He was no more trying to imprison me than I was. I took a breath to answer, but a metallic clatter cut through my pause, followed by a bucket cascading down from the terrace above, crashing into the lemon trees below, tumbling down the brush toward the wall at the end of the garden. We ran upstairs. Adeline was stood before the balustrade that ran the length of her terrace. She was closer to it than made me feel safe. I stopped by the doorway. The Major walked through the bedroom toward the terrace, his feet soundless, as if he were wading through water.

I watched him coax her back inside. When she returned to bed, he crushed a pill into a spoon. He leaned in to give it to her. She spat in his face.

‘I’ll hold her and you give it to her, Santina.’

I took the spoon. She jerked in his grip.

‘Now, Santina!’

I placed it in her mouth. He closed her lips around it. After a few seconds he released his grip. She crawled to the top of her bed, grabbed the sheet and cocooned herself inside.

Her breathing began to even. The crease of bed linen eased down onto the mattress.

‘I will take lunch at the usual time, Santina. That will be all for now.’

I left. My footsteps echoed down the stone stairwell.

It was clear then, that the more unpredictable Adeline became, the more rigid his own routine would be. My lessons would be inescapable after all.

After breakfast the next day, the Major strode into the kitchen and laid a notebook and a wooden box inlaid with geometric patterns of mother-of-pearl upon the kitchen table. His height made the kitchen feel all the smaller. Unlike me, his head reached a foot or so from the ceiling, which arched over us, like a cellar. The walls were painted a brushed pink, and behind the marble counter that stretched the length of one wall there were a dozen lines of decorated tiles of geometric designs in yellow, emerald and turquoise, hopeful swirls of pomp. A wider squat arch graced the space where the hearth stood. A wooden table, dipping in the center with age, stretched halfway across the room.

‘I have decided, Santina, that I was quite in the wrong yesterday.’

I looked at him.

‘I will be grateful if you’d forget my clumsy start, yes?’

It was my turn to let a question evaporate, answerless.

‘Today,’ he resumed, ‘I am going to teach you how to cook one of the dishes I brought home with me to England after my years in India.’

‘Cook?’

His face brightened. I knew he had spent several years in India working for the British army, Adeline had told me that much. She’d intimated that his role was shrouded in secrecy, but I’d never paid it too much mind because Adeline had a wonderful way of painting stories with a brush of mystery, whatever the subject. For the first time I allowed myself to miss her. The eccentric little talks she might indulge me in after breakfast before she began her day in the studio. The way she’d shown off her heath in Hampstead to me; her paintings, bright with freedom and questions and passion. Now I understood. He needed the lessons more than I. It was impossible to shirk the sense that they were as much about the Major having another to converse with as opening my mind up to the poetry he loved best.

‘Cook, yes, Santina, and afterward you will write the recipe into this little book here.’ He picked it up and gave it an optimistic waggle. The cover was black leather, and the center of the front panel featured a tiny painted rose.

We spent the next hour trawling through the details of the dish. First, he asked me to dice an onion. He stood beside me whilst directing me on how to soften it in a pan with olive oil. It was something I did almost every day, but that didn’t stop him inspecting my timing. As the pieces began to sweat, he placed the box next to the stove and opened it. Inside were five jars filled with different colored powders; a palette of deep browns, golden yellow and fiery red.

‘This box goes with me whenever I travel. I knew we wouldn’t be able to source these spices here so I arranged for them to be sent to me in London before we came.’

He lifted one of the jars, unscrewed its lid and handed it to me: ‘Smell.’

I dipped my nose close to the opening, trying not to worry about the onions that were starting to caramelize. A pungent flowery scent powdered up into the back of my cheeks. I couldn’t place it.

‘This is ground coriander, Santina. Next growing season I shall be planting it in my garden and you will help me.’

He handed me each of the jars in turn: aromatic cumin with its sweet and smoky herbal scent that brought church incense to mind, the barky smell of golden turmeric and the provocative punch of ground chilli – my eyes watered in an instant. The final jar contained a fine deep brown powder. This was the most complex smell of all of them. There was smoke, fire, citrus and a muddy tang to it. My eyebrows creased.

‘This is curry powder. Ground in the hills of Jaipur, Santina, by an elderly lady I came to know well. I watched her large wooden pestle and mortar create this pot of wonder. She taught me everything I know about how to use it too.’

His eyes twinkled with the pleasurable memory. I wondered how long it had been since he had been able to talk to someone about this. I knew him as a solitary man, but it was clear that the loneliness stirred by the incessant care of Adeline needed remedy. These five little jars contained just that. He held each of them as if it was a precious jewel, presenting me in turn with reverence and a bottled excitement I’d never noticed before.

Next he gave me specific measurements for each of them. As I sprinkled a spoonful of turmeric, coriander and curry powder over the translucent onions, the small stone kitchen filled with a potent earthy steam. Next we stirred in two fistfuls of rice until each grain was coated with the sticky yellow mixture. The Major poured over almost half a litre of water, put the lid on, simmered it for ten minutes, then took it off the heat, but left the lid on to let the steam finish the job. Meanwhile he instructed me to boil six eggs, this time for four and a half minutes. I rinsed them under cold water, peeled them and cut them into wedges, as directed. Finally, we brought a little milk in a frying pan to a gentle simmer and placed two bay leaves inside. He opened up a paper package with two fillets of fish and slipped them into the warm milk.

‘This ought to be haddock of course, Santina, but I’m using what I could find yesterday afternoon at the fishmonger’s, which was very little I might add, because I made the mistake of waiting till the afternoon to get it. Foolish.’