RHYS BOWEN:
TI've always found it amazing that writers see each other as stable-mates and not rivals. Barbara O'Neal and I share the same agent and the same Publisher (Lake Union) and she writes the kind of book I adore..clues from the present unlocking mysteries from the past. And she has a fascinating personal story to tell. So I'm handing over to her right now:
The Lure of Mysterious Objects
by Barbara O'Neal
Inheritance is an odd thing, isn’t it?
When my British partner’s mother died, we headed back to the small Kentish village where she lived to sort out the estate. It was the muddiest January in decades, giving us ample time to go through the toys left over from childhood and all the dishes. The usual things.
Until we got to a little writing desk packed with all kinds of things left over from the time my partner’s father spent in Ceylon, before it was Sri Lanka. Dad was born and raised there, even married his first wife before the British were ousted and returned to a land where none of them had ever lived.
I knew this backstory, of course. The wife died and then Christopher Robin’s father remarried and he was born of the second marriage. But I only have bare bones, no matter how many times I delicately came at the subject. They’re all British and well-mannered so no one was ever interested in sitting down and pouring out the whole story to me. Most of them don't know it, but those who do are not interested in telling it.
Which only makes it more mysterious, right? Also, I am a writer and a former reporter. It's my job to get the story.
When we opened that desk and found all those artifacts, I almost literally swooned. The little key opened a tiny door where I found a set of carved elephants, enough for a necklace and a pair of earrings. Who wore them, I wonder?
No one seems to know.
A drawer contained a fantastic mirrored tablecloth, intricately embroidered and so well kept the the reds are very bright still, all these years later. I found a box of tiny elephants, one dressed with a silver harness and maybe an aquamarine jewel.
Who loved these things? What was life like, back in Ceylon, on the tea plantation? What did they do? How did they live? It always seemed to me that no matter how right the revolutions in India and Ceylon that ended British rule (and of course it was), it must have been so very strange to go back to a cold, northern land when you’d spent your life in the tropics. They must have missed it. Wouldn’t you?
No one else wanted all those things or the desk, so I brought them home (shipped them via slow boat from England to Colorado), and here they stay. The carved trays are polished and hung on my walls. The elephants are lined up with little pools of water made of quarters by my granddaughter.
All of their mysteries remain entirely mute. I've never been able to find out anything more about them, but I do love to think about the former owners of these beautiful things.
A couple of years later, I fell into some BBC reality shows about the country estates that are falling into ruin because they’re so expensive to keep up. Which mixed and brewed with all my questions about Ceylon, and a book was born.
In The Art of Inheriting Secrets
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Olivia Shaw is a sophisticated food editor who discovers after the death of her mother that she is heir to a crumbling estate in a village in England. She travels back to see if she can discover the reasons her mother lied to her all those years, and unravel the story of the house. I fell madly in love with Rosemere Priory and the small village of St. John’s Cross, and the Anglo-British family whose story is irretrievably tangled with her own. I hope you might enjoy it, too. RHYS: Barbara's book is published this week. I am certainly dying for my copy to arrive! And Barbara has offered to give a signed copy to one lucky commenter today.
