Aunt Dimity and the Duke (2 page)

1

Twenty years later

“All of the good men are either married or gay,” Rita declared. “And now Richard’s married.” She closed the file drawer with a bang.

Emma Porter touched a finger to her wire-rim glasses and cast a furtive glance at the freesias atop the file cabinet, gathered fresh from her garden that morning. The vase wobbled, but remained upright, and Emma quickly lowered her gaze to the keyboard of her computer. Bending forward, she let her long hair fall like a shield on either side of her face, determined to avoid the same, tedious conversation she’d had every day for the past six weeks.

“Not that Richard was a good man,” her assistant continued, scooping up another armload of files. “I’d’ve scratched his eyes out if he’d run out on me like that. No eyes, no cameras, no sweet young things to drool over.” Clang! Another drawer took the brunt of Rita’s disapproval.

“Please, Rita—the freesias.”

“I’m sorry, Emma.” Rita’s voice trembled with outrage. “But when I think of Richard dumping you like that, after fifteen years—”

“We weren’t married,” Emma pointed out.

“But—”

“We lived in separate houses.”

“Still—”

“We were two independent adults.”

“You were a
couple!”
Rita marched back to stand before Emma’s desk. “For fifteen years you did everything together. You even planned your big trip together. Then he ... he ...” Tears welled in Rita’s eyes.

Without looking away from the computer screen, Emma reached for the half-empty box of Kleenex on the windowsill behind her and handed it to Rita, silently reminding herself to buy a fresh box on her way home. It seemed as though half the women in Boston had stopped by to commiserate since the wedding and each one had ended up in tears.

“Oh, Emma,” Rita managed, trying to stem the flow before it ruined her mascara, “how can you be so
brave?”

Burying her face in a handful of tissues, Rita retreated to her own desk, just outside Emma’s office. When the other women in the department began to cluster around, Emma got up and closed the door firmly. The past six weeks had taught her that a firmly closed door was the only way to keep her sympathetic underlings at bay.

Sighing, Emma reached out to the vase on the file cabinet, plucked a fragrant blossom, and held it to her nose, wishing that her co-workers would mind their own business. It wasn’t as though she and Richard were facing a messy divorce. She’d had no more desire than he to be tied down by marriage vows. Theirs had been a practical relationship, separate but equal, and it had outlasted most conventional marriages. Richard had his town house in Newton; she, her Cape Cod cottage in Cambridge. He’d pursued his career in photography and she’d pursued hers in computer science. They’d been a couple for fifteen years and now they weren’t. That was all there was to it.

The light on her telephone began to blink, and Emma glanced at her watch. Time for Mother’s morning pep talk, she thought wryly. Returning to her desk, she tossed the freesia blossom into the wastebasket and reached for the phone.

“Hello, Mother.” Emma swiveled her chair to face the windows, where the bleak Boston skyline was etched against a lowering April sky.

“Hi, Emma. Heard from that rat yet?”

Emma’s gaze traveled up along the tangled strands of ivy framing the window. She reached for her pair of scissors. “No, Mother, I haven’t heard from Richard, and I don’t expect to.” Pinching the phone between her neck and shoulder, Emma stood and began pruning the tendrils of ivy. “I’m sure Richard is much too busy with his new life—”

Her mother snorted. “His new
wife,
you mean. I told you a thousand times to marry that rat.”

“And I’ve told you that I don’t see how marrying Richard would have changed the situation,” said Emma.

“It would have given you some leverage in court! As it is—”

“As it is, I own my own home, I have a very lucrative position as an executive at CompuTech, and I enjoy my freedom. I don’t think I have too much to complain about, Mother, do you?”

Her mother sighed. “Honestly, Emma, I never expected a daughter of mine to just sit back and take it.”

“What would you like me to do, Mother?”

“Get angry! Throw his picture against the wall!
React!
That’s what normal women do. But not my daughter. I mean, Emma, honey, I know you’re trying to put on a brave face, but did you really have to go to the rat’s wedding?”

“That had nothing to do with bravery,” Emma explained, for what seemed like the hundredth time. “It was simply a matter of facing reality.”

“I’ll tell you about
facing reality,”
her mother echoed scornfully. “When a thirty-nine-year-old woman gets dumped for a twenty-two-year-old ditz, she doesn’t just shrug it off. You’re going to have to deal with your anger, dear heart, or you’re going to come apart at the seams!”

“I’m sure you’re right, Mother.”

There was a pause, followed by: “Okay. Have it your way. But just tell me one thing, Emma. Did you love that rat?”

Emma winced as a long strand of ivy came away in her hand. “Mother, I’m afraid I have to go now. The Danbury project is due before I leave for England, and—”

“Uh-huh. I thought so.”

“Good-bye, Mother.” Emma hung up the phone and put the scissors away, afraid there’d be nothing left of the ivy if she continued to prune it in her present state of mind. Trust her mother to ask the most
impossible
questions. Emma was no starry-eyed idealist. She’d known from the start that her career would leave little room for a demanding emotional life. Marriage and motherhood were out of the question, and she’d given her heart to Richard, in part, because he’d understood that. Richard hadn’t been perfect—his twin passions for bad sci-fi movies and heavy-metal rock music were two reasons to be glad they’d lived apart—but he’d respected her self-sufficiency. Her mother could say what she liked; Emma had
nothing—nothing—to
complain about.

Taking a calming breath, Emma sat down, swiveled her chair to face the desk, and leaned her head on her hands. In two weeks she’d be in England. She couldn’t wait to leave.

Granted, she hadn’t counted on leaving alone. Emma pulled her long hair back into a pony tail, then bent down to retrieve the file of travel brochures that filled the bottom drawer of her desk. She leafed through them until she came to the map, which she spread over the installation specs for the Danbury project. Cupping her chin in her hand, she gazed at it eagerly.

There was Cornwall, protruding like a broken branch from the southwestern tip of England, a jagged, irregular peninsula with the Atlantic Ocean to the north and the English Channel to the south. Emma had been to England many times and toured many gardens, but she’d never seen the gardens of Cornwall. She ran a finger along her intended route, pausing at the circled names: Cotehele, Glendurgan, Killerton Park, and the rest, private estates given over to the National Trust and open now to the pound-paying public.

Richard had planned to close up the studio for the summer, to lay aside. fashion photography in favor of a more serious—some might say pretentious—pursuit: a black-and-white photo essay on the neolithic standing stones that dotted the Cornish landscape. Emma had been so absorbed in planning his trip as well as her own that she’d felt nothing but relief when he’d disappeared from her life for a few weeks.

She’d had no reason to worry. Theirs had been an open relationship, of course, and Richard had a long track record of short-lived flings. There’d been no reason on earth to suspect that this one would be any different.

Then the travel agent had called, informing her that Richard had canceled his airline tickets. Next,. Richard had telephoned, telling her that he’d met someone special. Finally, the wedding invitation had arrived, proof positive that Richard had disappeared from her life for good. Emma had shocked her friends and appalled her mother by attending the wedding, but she’d wanted to go. She’d needed to see the fairy princess with her own eyes.

Emma refolded the map, smiling faintly. The fairy princess—that’s what Rita had dubbed Richard’s bride, and Emma had to admit that it was an apt description. Graceful, slim, and twenty years Richard’s junior, with hair like silken sunlight and eyes like summer skies, the fairy princess hadn’t walked down the aisle, she’d floated. And Richard had been waiting for her, rotund in his cummerbund, a sheen of perspiration on his balding pate, beaming at his wife-to-be with a smile that was disturbingly paternal. Emma blushed at the memory. It had been pathetic to see her free-spirited Richard succumb to something as trite as a mid-life crisis.

Yet there it was. A fifteen-year relationship had ended with neither bang nor whimper, but with the whispery sound of an envelope slipped through a mail slot.

She’d spent a long time in her garden after the wedding, raking over the compost and wondering why she felt so ... numb. Emma wasn’t given to expressing strong emotions, but even she had been surprised by the stillness that had settled over her. Was she in shock, as her mother insisted? Or was she merely going through a natural transition that would lead, ultimately, to a mature acceptance of her new situation? Emma preferred the latter explanation. She knew that there were some things in life she couldn’t change.

But there were some she could. She’d gone back into the house and spent the rest of the evening gathering up the odds and ends Richard had left behind—a worn bath-robe, a broken tripod, a stack of CDs and rock videos. As she dropped the garish video boxes in the Goodwill bin, she thought wryly that Richard’s taste in music had been as juvenile as his taste in brides, and the small joke had heartened her. It seemed to prove that she was ready to face the world without Richard.

Her friends—and her mother—remained unconvinced. They thought of her as a victim and expected her to behave like one.

It was ludicrous. Why couldn’t her friends be honest with her? Why couldn’t they just come out and say what they were really thinking? “You’re no kid anymore, Emma. You’re forty, fat, and frumpy, and your chances of landing another man at this stage of the game are nil. We understand, and our hearts go out to you.”

The faint smile returned as Emma put the map back in the bottom drawer. What a surprise it would be if she came home from England with a new man in tow—a six-foot-tall stunner with sapphire-blue eyes, broad shoulders, and ...

Emma’s pleasant daydream faded as common sense reasserted itself. She didn’t need her mother to remind her that men—of all ages—preferred mates who were younger than themselves, girls who were graceful and slim, with hair like silken sunshine and eyes like summer skies. She knew that the doors of romance were more often than not slammed in the faces of plump, plain-looking women approaching middle age.

Emma was proud of her ability to accept the truth, and she prepared for the trip accordingly. Come May, she would be in Cornwall, where she would feast on cream teas, explore pretty fishing villages, and, best of all, enjoy the springtime spectacle of massed azaleas in full bloom. She would do everything her heart desired. Except fall in love.

“Never again,” she murmured, stifling a wistful sigh. “When I come back from Cornwall, I’ll buy a hammock for the garden and settle down to a life of industrious spinsterhood. But as for love—never again.”

On that same day, in an Oxford suburb an ocean away, Derek Harris wiped the last trace of rain-spattered mud from the headstone on his wife’s grave. He could have left the task to the sexton, but Derek had worked with his hands long enough to know that, if you wanted a job done right, you did it yourself.

He tucked the dirty rag into the back pocket of his faded jeans and rose to tower over the grave. He was a tall man, just over six feet, and his deep-blue eyes were shadowed with grief as he read the dates he’d carved into the roseate marble. It had been just over five years since pneumonia had taken her from him. The thought made his heart swell until he could scarcely breathe.

“Ah, Mary,” he whispered, “I miss you.”

The spiderweb tracery of budding trees stood black against a darkening sky, and a chill April wind moaned low among the gravestones. Derek shivered, and thought of going back to the house. Peter would be home from school by now, and Nell would be back from her play group, and their Aunt Beatrice would be stopping by to check up on them.

Still he lingered by the grave, unwilling to face Beatrice’s barrage of questions. She’d already begun to nag him about his plans for the coming year. He wondered, not for the first time, how his sweet Mary could have had such a harridan for a sister.

Wasn’t it a shame that Derek had wasted his first in history—taken at Oxford, too, more’s the pity—and gone into this mucky business of restoration? You’d hardly know he was an earl’s son, such an embarrassment to his family and such a keen disappointment for poor Mary. His university friends were respectable gentlemen by now—financiers and politicians, most of them—and here was Derek, at forty-five, still messing about with leaky thatched roofs, crumbling stone walls, and nasty old brasses. It had turned her hair gray to think of her only sister living in such a higgledy-piggledy household.