Page 34 of Savage Blooms
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Adam
Adam tried to take Eileen’s advice and entertain himself by exploring the house, but he just got turned around again. When he found himself once again on the threshold of the library, he couldn’t be sure how he got there, but Eileen was waiting for him.
“Welcome,” she said in that antiquated lilt, looking up from a stack of papers on the desk.
“Hey,” Adam responded, shrugging off his backpack. “I brought my laptop in case we wanted to look anything up online.”
“Good thinking,” Eileen said.
Adam drifted past the bookshelves, slower this time, taking in the titles. It was mostly old novels and local history and books of letters from philosophers and politicians Adam had never heard of. He plucked up one ofthe histories, flipping through the pages until he discovered an illustration protected by tissue paper in the center of the tome. It was a penciled rendition of the rolling hills of the Craigmar estate, the house a tiny smudge in the distance.
“How old is this drawing, do you think?” Adam asked, setting the open book down on the table before Eileen.
“A hundred years old or so, I’d say.”
“It doesn’t look any different than the view outside the window now.”
“Craigmar changes at a glacial pace. She was the same when my father was a boy, and when his father’s father was a boy. Industrialization improved the machinery we used and the speed at which we were able to communicate with the outside world, but not much else changed.”
“Where does the money come from?” Adam asked, realizing too late that his all-too-American curiosity about local economics might come off as tactless. Eileen didn’t seem bothered.
“Investments, real estate and sheep, mostly. I own most of Wyke, the little village you passed through to get here.”
“So you’re a landlady,” he said, a smile pulling at his lips as he flipped through the books, admiring another sketch of the rocky coastline beyond the grazing green.
“More or less,” she said.
Adam glanced up to find that Eileen was standing very close to him, her dark eyes fixed on his face. For a moment,he was seized by the thought – the hope? – that she might kiss him.
He cleared his throat and closed the book.
“Sorry, I got distracted. Where do you think we should start?”
“It seems wisest to start with my grandmother,” Eileen said, turning from Adam as though sensing his self-consciousness. Eileen hoisted up an iron poker and stabbed at the crackling fire, still warming the room well into spring. It was colder out here on the coast than it had been on the drive over from Edinburgh, and the house was impressively drafty. “From her birth up until her disappearance.”
“Disappearance?” Adam said. “I thought you said she died.”
“I’m sure she did, eventually.”
“Well, how did she disappear? What happened to her?”
“I don’t know,” Eileen said, shrugging one shoulder. “No one does. Maybe she managed to run away from this place without getting dragged back. That would have been a feat.”
Adam’s hand hovered over one of the boxes of family records, and Eileen nodded, bidding him on. Adam removed the lid and peered down into piles of handwritten letters, some stored safely away in their envelopes, others unevenly folded or crinkled at the edges.
“Looks like this is one of my mother’s boxes,” Eileen said, picking up a letter and running her finger over the name it was addressed to.Jennifer Kirkfoyle.
“They all smell like flowers,” Adam said. “And maybe raspberries?”
“Guerlain Idylle,” Eileen responded with a fond smile. She pressed one of the letters to her nose and inhaled deeply, her face softening into a girlish smile. “Her signature perfume. She was a prolific letter-writer. It was her favorite way to keep in touch with her friends back in England. She sprayed every letter with that perfume.”
“Is England where she met your dad?” Adam asked. He found that he was truly curious about Eileen’s tangled family history, and not just about the way it may intersect with his own. She was a riddle of a girl, and part of him hoped her upbringing might hold some clues to help him solve her.
“At Cambridge,” Eileen said, removing letters by the handful and beginning to sort them into piles. Categorized by the person her mother had been in correspondence with, it looked like. “They were university sweethearts. My mum wasn’t Scottish, though. She was a blonde English rose, if you can believe it. I look nothing like her.”
Adam couldn’t parse her tone, nor read the expression in her downcast eyes, so he asked: “Did you two get along?”
