Legacy Read Online Free PDF Page B

picked up the phone. “Mom? How are you?”
    “Just fine, dear. Is everything all right?” Across ten thousand miles her crisp, no-nonsense voice greeted me over the telephone wire.
    “Of course.” I didn’t ordinarily confide in my mother, but something made me tell her. “I’ve only been here two days, and I already have a date.”
    There was silence on the line. “Don’t you think you’re rushing it?” she finally said. “It’s awfully soon after the divorce.”
    When would that word divorce no longer bring a painful tightness into my throat? I struggled to answer my mother. “Please try and understand, Mom. I know it’s only been legal for three months, but I’ve been separated for over a year. Stephen’s already remarried.”
    “Is that what you called about?” Ever-practical Susan Murray didn’t believe in wasting money.
    “Actually, I called to speak to Dad.”
    She laughed. “Of course you did. I’ll put him on.” It was no secret that I had always preferred my father’s conversation to almost anyone’s, including Mother’s. I was definitely a daddy’s girl. Fortunately, I’d been blessed with a mother secure enough not to resent it.
    My childhood had been unique to say the least. Born nine months after my parents’ wedding day, I adjusted quickly to the fact that life with a couple barely out of their teens wasn’t going to parallel the lives of my childhood friends. There were no scheduled bath or bedtimes at the Murray house. My mother’s idea of healthful cuisine was a can of fruit cocktail poured over cottage cheese. Exercise and water cured all illnesses. I was eight years old before I saw the inside of a dentist’s office and that was only because I had fallen on the cement and knocked out a tooth.
    It was a delightful childhood, free of all expectations and most restrictions. Nothing was censured. I had grown up on Shakespeare, D. H. Lawrence, and William Faulkner. Before the age of twelve I’d read The Virgin and the Gypsy , Lady Chatterly’s Lover, and A Streetcar Named Desire with full awareness of their contents. Sometimes I wondered if my unconventional roots and impossible expectations weren’t the cause of major problems in my marriage.
    “Hi, hon. How are you?” My father’s familiar voice, soft on r ’s, interrupted my thoughts. I loved that voice, and so did everyone who listened to it. Donald Murray was a slightly famous trial lawyer. Or at least he had been before he retired. In his last twenty years of practice, he hadn’t lost a case. I still maintain, as I always have, that his enormous success lay in the exceptional quality of his voice. It was low and clearly pitched, every syllable enunciated, a New Englander’s voice, informal, thick with vowels and bare of consonants. That voice never let me down.
    “It appears that I’m due to inherit an eight-hundred-year-old house,” I told him.
    He laughed. “Is it still standing?”
    “I’m serious. And yes, it is still standing. It’s really more of a mansion than a regular home. Have you ever heard of Traquair House?”
    There was silence at the end of the line.
    “Dad? Can you hear me?”
    “I’m here, Chris. Tell me more about Traquair House.”
    “I don’t know anything yet. The lawyers will be here tomorrow. Do me a favor. See if you can locate any information on entailed estates and rights of survivorship. I’d like to know what I’m up against here. And if you can find out anything about our family tree, I’d appreciate it.”
    “I’ll do that. Be careful, Chris.”
    It wasn’t until I’d hung up the phone that I realized he hadn’t said that to me in years.
    ***
    The car that Ian parked at the entrance to Traquair that evening was not the small compact that we had ridden in before. It was a lovely old Jaguar sedan of deep forest green with leather seats. The camel sports jacket and wool trousers he wore confirmed what I’d already assumed. Dinner in Scotland, even in the small town