A Family Likeness

“Do I?”

“Lately you’re always talking about how capable I am, and how perfectly well I could manage on my own. Are you setting me up, Roger? Is there something you want to tell me?”

He shook his head and went back to his careful whittling. “I don’t like hearing you say you’d have to close the place down if one of us left, that’s all. It doesn’t sound like you, Gina. You’re a fighter, not a quitter.”

“I know. But I’ve grown used to having companions in the battle, that’s all. I’d really hate to be all alone again.”

“So why don’t you find some nice young man to work at your side?”

Gina kicked his leg gently with the toe of her sneaker.

“Stop that,” she said. “Immediately.”

Roger moved his leg slightly. “I mean it,” he said, holding the shaft of wood to his eye like a rifle and squinting down its length. “You’re not that bad-looking, and still reasonably young. Aren’t there any decent prospects out there who don’t mind a skinny, freckled, hot-tempered girl with a will of iron?”

Gina relented and sank onto the grass, sitting cross-legged next to him and frowning at a ragged tear in the hem of her shorts. “All the men I meet fall roughly into two categories,” she said.

“Okay.” He put the wood down and rubbed his knife on a small whetstone, then tested the blade with his thumb. “I’ll bite. What are they?”

Gina plucked a stem of grass and chewed on it thoughtfully. “Well, there’s the kind of man who feels really threatened by a woman living alone and running her own successful business. Those men seem to need to put me down in all kinds of subtle ways just to prove they’re still dominant.”

“Mmm. That’s attractive,” Roger said. “What’s the other kind?”

“The ones who think what I’m doing is great, because they could move in with me and have a nice free ride on my efforts.”

“Equally attractive. So which category’s worse?”

“I don’t know,” Gina said gloomily, throwing the grass away. “I hate them both.”

“Not an attitude that’s going to get your dance card filled, my dear.”

She grinned and got to her feet. “Oh, there are a whole lot of openings in my social calendar, all right. And it’s probably a good thing, because I never have .enough time to get my work done as it is.”

“Speaking of work, what are you doing in the gold room this afternoon?”

“Putting up new wallpaper. You should come and see it, Roger. It looks terrific, especially around the window seat.”

“Isn’t that the paper Mary thought was going to be too yellow?”

“Yes, but now she admits she was wrong.”

“She does?” Roger’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “Now, there’s a first. For such a timid little thing, Mary can be pretty hardheaded in her opinions, you know.”

“You be nice,” Gina told him severely.

She left him under the tree with his whittling, strolled across the grass and let herself through the gate into the courtyard, recalling, too late, that she still hadn’t told Roger about the cracked toilet seat in the blue room.

No rush, she decided. Roger was busy with other things at the moment, and the blue room wasn’t booked for at least a week.

She paused inside the hedge and looked up at the house. Even after all these years, the sight of its massive vine-covered bulk against the distant violet of the mountains and the cloudless blue sky was enough to make her heart beat faster.

“It’s really beautiful, isn’t it?” a feminine voice said at her elbow, echoing her thoughts. “Like a scene out of Sleeping Beauty or something.”

Gina turned and smiled at the honeymoon couple who, dressed in bathing suits now and carrying towels, were on their way down the path to the beach. They were an attractive pair, both medical students from Minnesota who’d just completed their residencies before their June wedding. This Canadian honeymoon had been a gift from the groom’s parents.

“The house is more than a hundred years old, fairly ancient by local standards,” Gina told them. “Actually it’s quite a romantic story.”

“Tell us,” the girl commanded, leaning against her young husband and gazing up at him. “We’re in the mood for romance these days.”

Gina smiled, thinking about their cozy love nest up in the rose pink dormer room with its little stone fireplace.

“The house was built by Josiah Edgewood,” she began. “Josiah was a Scottish nobleman and adventurer who came out to Canada when he was a young man and discovered gold up north in the Caribou region. Josiah made a fortune at his mine and fell in love with the area. He picked the Okanagan Valley for its spectacular scenery and mild winters, and started trying to convince his new wife to come and join him here.”

“But she wouldn’t?” the young bride asked, still looking up at her husband as if unable to believe that any woman would be reluctant to follow her man to the ends of the earth. He dropped a kiss on her nose.

“She was afraid. Poor little Lady Edgewood,” Gina said. “She was barely out of her teens and quite frail, and she thought this whole country was overrun with wolves and grizzly bears. She refused even to consider living in the wilderness unless Josiah could provide her with some decent accommodation.”

“So he built this big house?” the groom asked.

Gina smiled. “Wait till you hear the story. Josiah moved the house. Most of this is the original Edgewood Manor from the family estate near Kilmarnock in Scotland. Josiah had the whole structure dismantled and every piece marked. It was shipped across the ocean in crates, a proceeding that took several years to accomplish. The house was reassembled like a huge jigsaw puzzle right here on the shores of Okanagan Lake. All to please his darling Elizabeth.”

Both young people gazed at her, enchanted. Gina understood their rapt expressions, because she, too, always felt a little thrill whenever she thought about Josiah’s great venture.

If she could ever meet a man like that, a real man with a generous spirit and a strength to match her own, maybe then she wouldn’t be so reluctant to share her life…

“So what happened?” the girl asked. “Did Elizabeth come and live here with him? I hope she didn’t die on the ship coming over and leave him all heartbroken or anything.”

“She certainly didn’t,” Gina said cheerfully. “She arrived to find her manor house completely reproduced on the shores of a Canadian lake, right down to the chandeliers and the stained glass on the stair landings. She was so happy she gave Josiah a big hug and a kiss and settled right in to have babies.”

“How many?”

“Eight. Six girls and two boys. She became the queen of local society and a generous patron of the arts and charities, too. She lived in the house until she died more than seventy years later. That was about 1960, I believe.”

“What happened to the house after that?”

“It went through some pretty hard times,” Gina said. “None of Josiah Edgewood’s offspring wanted to live here, so they tried various money-making projects, like opening the manor up for day tourists and dividing it into apartments. Both the value and appearance declined rapidly, and about fifteen years ago they decided to put it on the market.”

“And?” the young man asked, toying absently with a strand of his wife’s long blond hair.

“And I bought it,” Gina said. “I’d just finished a degree course in hotel management. I was on my summer vacation, like you are. I came out to Azure Bay with a friend to spend a day swimming and lazing on the beach, saw this tumbledown old place and fell in love at first sight. I knew it would be perfect for a bed-and-breakfast, which was something I wanted to run.”

“But you must have been so young!” the bride said in awe. “Younger than we are, even. How could you ever buy a big place like this?”

“Well, for one thing, I had a small inheritance from my grandmother.” Gina’s voice was offhand, but her stomach tightened at the memory of that awful time. “And the bank was really impressed with my plans for restoring the building and developing a business.”

“Bankers aren’t all that easy to impress.” The young doctor looked at her with frank admiration. “Nowadays it seems they only lend money to people who already have lots.”

Gina gazed across the rippling turquoise waters of the lake. “I know. It all happened so long ago the details are pretty hard to remember. But I managed it somehow,” she said with forced casualness. “So, you two are off for a swim?”