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

He removed the fish pan from the heat and let it continue to poach whilst he instructed me to lift the lid on the rice. It was fluffy and golden; the fragrant ribbons of steam that lifted up from it made my mouth water. I watched him stir in the egg wedges, then flake the fish and fold it into the rice. He lifted the pan and put it on top of an iron potholder in the center of the table. He handed me a fork and gestured for me to taste. The caramel of the onion gave way to a woody perfume, a musky taste balanced by the creamy yolk and the tender aromatic fish flesh. My eyes gave away my delight.

‘First poetry lesson complete.’

My head tilted.

‘Now I help you write it. Title: Kedgeree.’

The rest of the morning he sat next to me, a fastidious but patient teacher, as I wrote the list of the ingredients. My scrawl was tentative and messy. He wouldn’t let me leave the table until I had finished. In between hesitations, whirring doubts ricocheted about my mind as I tried to understand how any of this would serve me in my new life.

‘Tomorrow, we will write the method. That is all for now. I will take lunch at midday. You may take an hour to take a stroll with Elizabeth perhaps? I will rest a while.’

He turned and left, leaving the scent of another world suffusing the air.

CHAPTER 6

The following May, the Major and Adeline’s belongings at last found their appropriate places in the villa. New packages had arrived throughout the frigid winter and temperamental spring, then were sorted with care. By mid-summer, the Major’s library, up a few steps behind the kitchen, was complete, his sanctuary at the opposite side of the house from the large dining room. Oil-painted landscapes graced the walls. After my final chores of the evening I’d linger over the depictions of the humid mountainous coffee plantations above the Malabar coast in India, or the city of Jodhpur with its square blue houses clustering the valley, the stone alleys reminding me of an exotic version of Positano. It was clear to me that he’d always been drawn to these landscapes. The Major loved the mountains as much as I. His early morning walks, before the now hordes of tourists began their jaunts, often took him high above our town, into the mossy depths of my childhood. I was relieved, however, that those grotesque carved masks from the London hallways remained in his library.

Although the Major refused to entrust Elizabeth to anyone but me, we had come to an arrangement that I could leave the house for an extended time on Sunday afternoons and take her with me. Rosalia, who had strong-armed her way into my heart, huffed and puffed that this did not, in fact, constitute anything close to a day off. She wouldn’t believe me, but Sundays spent at her home were just that. They forced me to relax, to forget my inconclusive search for my brother who had run away from our uncle’s farm and all but disappeared in Naples not long after I left for London.

Elizabeth and I took our time climbing the narrow alleys that ran behind the neighboring villas. Her hair was a fluff of bright red waves that made the Positanese reach out and touch it out of instinct, so different was she from the dark-haired toddlers discovering gravity along the cobbles. She loved these Sundays as much as I. Rosalia’s sisters and sisters-in-law took turns to hold her and coo into her bright little blue eyes, teasing me that I’d left town only to kidnap a foreigner’s daughter.

One morning in late summer, we negotiated the steep steps down toward Rosalia’s gate and pushed it open. A fragrant canopy of kiwi and lemon trees entwined a high bamboo frame above. The excited chipper of birds greeted us. Along the slim walkway toward the main door, five cages hung with yellow and pale blue budgerigars twittering to each other and out toward the coast.

The door flung open. ‘Just in time!’ Rosalia said, greeting me with a kiss on each cheek, wrenching Elizabeth out of my arms and into hers. ‘You’ve been a good girl, yes? You eat all my food today, yes? No sorbetto if you don’t eat your lunch, young lady!’

I followed her into the kitchen. A huge oak table dominated the squat room. At the far end was her wooden oven, etched into the wall where the mountain rock was varnished but still craggy. This was a room wedged into the stone. Upon the stove in a heavy iron skillet, fresh anchovies melted into warm oil, softening several crushed cloves of garlic. The smell of artichokes followed soon after from a larger pan, their lustrous purple doused with fresh parsley. A simmering stockpot of linguini raced to al dente. Rosalia’s sisters busied themselves with the final fixings on the table, yelling for the men to join us. I could hear the rumble of their husbands and brothers coming down from the terrace above, following the scent toward lunch. In a few minutes the small room ricocheted with too many voices and conversations colliding at once. It was my weekly dose of cacophony, the perfect antidote to the church-like silence at the villa.

Rosalia balanced Elizabeth on one hip, scooping linguini out of the pan with the other.

‘Please, let me take her,’ I offered, reaching out my hands, which she shooed off with the back of the wooden spoon. One of her sisters swooped in and took over by the stove for the final hungry minute before the pasta was cooked.

The door swung open. In strolled Paolino, a basket in his hands laden with fresh romanesco cauliflowers, zucchini, cedri and a pile of sfogliatelle, small crisp pastries stuffed with a rich lemon crème. As he walked by me their vanilla scent powdered the air.

Rosalia had decided several months ago that he and I ought to be the perfect pairing. I loved her for many things, but this was not one of them.

‘You see, Santi,’ she began, bouncing Elizabeth beside me, ‘the man bakes too now.’

This meddling in other’s personal affairs was a pernicious local habit I longed to escape; it made my scheduled sailing to America toward the latter part of this autumn feel like part of a very distant future.

‘You already love him more than I ever could,’ I whispered to her cackle that followed.

‘What you witches plotting over there? You mind it doesn’t spoil our food now,’ Paolino called out from the far end of the table, where Rosalia’s brothers poured him their home-made wine.

‘You just wait, Paoli,’ Rosalia called out to him, ‘you get under our spell and there’ll be no helping you!’

Everyone laughed. The sun syruped through the windows. I took Elizabeth onto my lap and watched her eye the strands of oily linguini Rosalia lifted up with an over-sized fork, swirls of garlic steam wafting across the plates. I cut her portion into small pieces. She dove in with two hands. All meals at Rosalia’s ended with a salty smear of lunch across her happy face. The sisters would pinch her rosy cheeks in praise of her appetite. Paolino teased me that I wasn’t feeding the child enough and perhaps we ought to raise our weekly orders from him. He caught the roll of my eyes.

‘Oh come on, Santina – it’s a little joke between friends.’

I had no memory of friendship.

‘Well, you’d better get used to it. Men around here don’t just sit around and let beauty slip between their fingers like water, no? You’ve been around the British too long.’

I returned a forced smile, thankful Rosalia’s family’s laughter drowned my silence.

‘You’ve changed,’ he continued, mistaking my silence as an invitation for conversation. ‘You left a polio-struck orphan with a tatty dress and a half-hearted smile. Now you look . . .’

His hands waved in the air, as if they might pluck the word out from it somehow. I worried about the gesture that might follow.

‘Eat your food and save us all from this drivel!’ Rosalia’s grandmother piped up from the opposite end of the table, her wrinkled skin creasing into even more tiny folds.