Aunt Dimity Down Under

Table of Contents

 

 

VIKING
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First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

Copyright © Nancy T. Atherton, 2010

All rights reserved

 

Publisher’s Note

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Atherton, Nancy.
Aunt Dimity down under / Nancy Atherton.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-18993-1

1. Dimity, Aunt (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—England—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3551.T426A93443 2010
813’.54—dc22 2009040139

 

 

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I
didn’t see it coming. As I bustled around my kitchen, making dinner for the men I loved, I didn’t see death hovering in the wings. When life is tumbling merrily along, we seldom stop to think about it ending. We ignore the shadow lurking just offstage. Nothing can prepare us for its entrance.

There wasn’t a shadow in sight on that golden afternoon in late September. The autumn sun shone benevolently on my dark-haired husband and our equally dark-haired sons as they flew a kite in the back meadow, and a balmy breeze ruffled the snowy locks of my newly retired father-in-law, who sat beneath the apple tree, reading the Sunday
Times
. Life, I thought, as I stirred the pumpkin soup and peeked at the ham baking in the oven, couldn’t get much better than this.

My husband, Bill, was tall, good-looking, and as kind as he was wise. Our six-year-old twins, Will and Rob, were happy, healthy, and as bright as buttons. We lived in a honey-colored stone cottage amid the rolling hills and patchwork fields of the Cotswolds, a rural region in England’s West Midlands. Although we were Americans, we’d lived in the Cotswolds for nearly a decade. The twins had never known another home.

Bill ran the European branch of his family’s venerable Boston law firm from a high-tech office in Finch, the nearest village. When Will and Rob weren’t pretending to be dinosaurs or galloping their gray ponies over hill and dale, they attended Morningside School in the nearby market town of Upper Deeping. I looked after my family, helped my neighbors, participated in a plethora of volunteer activities, and ran a charitable foundation called the Westwood Trust.

My father-in-law, William Willis, Sr., had until recently served as the head of Willis & Willis, the family firm. Although he still acted as the firm’s chief adviser, the passage of time and a desire to spend more of it with his grandsons had persuaded him to hand the reins of power over to Bill’s cousin Timothy Willis. Willis, Sr., would have preferred to pass the reins to his son, but Bill had no interest in power and no intention of uprooting his family for the sake of a prestigious title. Willis, Sr., recognizing that his only child was happier in England than he’d ever be in Boston, had let the matter drop without a word of reproach.

Bill, the twins, and I were actively engaged in a campaign to convince Willis, Sr., to move in with us permanently. We’d transformed our former nanny’s room into a cozy but luxurious grandfather’s room and we’d tried every trick in the book—including pleading, guilt-tripping, and reasoning—to force him into the bosom of our family.

Our crusade was supported wholeheartedly by a phalanx of plump ladies in Finch, who considered an immaculately tailored, unfailingly polite, and undeniably wealthy widower in his early seventies to be quite a catch. Whether my father-in-law would trade his massive mansion in Boston for a modest cottage in Finch, however, remained to be seen.

Willis, Sr., had arrived at the cottage three days earlier not simply to visit his grandsons, but to attend an event that would take place in Finch on the following Saturday. My bustling came to an abrupt halt as I caught sight of the kitchen calendar and felt my heart swell with anticipatory joy.

In less than a week, the long-awaited fairy-tale wedding of the century—as I’d dubbed it—would take place in St. George’s Church. Kit Smith would marry Nell Harris and open a new chapter in the sweetest and most suspense-filled romance I’d ever witnessed. There had been many times over the past seven years when I’d had reason to doubt that the pair would wed, but love had conquered all in the end, as I’d hoped and prayed it would.

I took a special interest in the couple’s happiness because Kit Smith was one of my dearest friends and Nell was the stepdaughter of my best friend, Emma Harris, but I wasn’t alone in wishing them well. No one with a functioning heart could be untouched by their unique radiance. The good people of Finch understood that the joining of two perfect soul mates was a rare and precious cause for celebration, and proceeded accordingly.

The women rolled up their sleeves and gave the church a hundred-year cleaning. Its leaded windows gleamed, its candlesticks glittered, its altar cloths glowed, and not a speck of dust could be seen on its polished flagstone floor or its splendidly carved wooden pews. The men mowed the churchyard surrounding St. George’s, raked its gravel paths, and planted fresh fall flowers on every grave. Mr. Barlow, the local handyman, had taken it upon himself to re-shingle the lych-gate’s leaky roof and to give its aging hinges a generous dose of oil, to prevent unseemly squeaking on the big day.

My neighbors had bestowed the same loving care on their own dwelling places and businesses, which had gone from slightly scruffy to sublime. In Bill’s words, Finch now looked as if it were posing for the centerfold of a Prettiest Villages calendar.

There’d been a flurry of shopping trips to Upper Deeping as villagers bought or rented their wedding-day finery. After consulting with Nell’s father, Derek Harris, Bill and Willis, Sr., had decided to wear their best Savile Row suits. My dress—an emerald-green silk with long sleeves and a sweetheart neckline—had been made in the village by Sally Pyne, the local tea shop owner and seamstress, but I’d bought my hat at a swanky boutique in London. Over the years I’d learned that hats were de rigueur for women attending English weddings. I wouldn’t have dreamed of entering St. George’s without one.

Finch was, of course, awash in wedding gossip, to which I contributed freely. My neighbors and I chattered endlessly about the flowers, the cake, the music, the ceremony, and the reception, but our most intense speculation was focused squarely on Nell’s wedding gown. What would she wear, we wondered? Silk? Satin? Lace? Taffeta? Would the style be classic or modern? What dress, however glorious, could possibly do justice to such an ethereal beauty? Opinions varied, but since Emma Harris was keeping the gown a closely held secret—even from me, her best friend—the rest of us could do nothing but wait and see.

Luckily, Emma couldn’t conceal the plans for the reception from me because my sons would be taking part in it. Emma ran the Anscombe Riding Center from the stables of her sprawling home, Anscombe Manor. Kit was the ARC’s stable master as well as my sons’ riding instructor, and Nell was in charge of the ARC’s dressage classes. Since the happy couple’s world revolved around horses, it stood to reason that horses would play a central role in their wedding.

Rob and Will, along with other members of the ARC’s gymkhana teams, would form a mounted honor guard to accompany the newlyweds’ open carriage from St. George’s church to the reception at Anscombe Manor. Because each member of the honor guard would be attired in formal riding gear, Emma had been forced to discuss her plans with the participants’ parents. Needless to say, I gleefully relayed the insider information to my neighbors as soon as Emma passed it on to me.

The names on the guest list had been broadcast at regular intervals by Peggy Taxman, who, as Finch’s postmistress, had personally handled each of the invitations. The guest list had aroused much interest in the village because it included a duke, an earl, several knights, and a retired London police detective as well as a handful of French counts. Friends past and present would walk, ride, fly, drive, and, in once case, pilot a private helicopter to Finch to take part in the joyous occasion.

Emma and Derek Harris had gone to great lengths to prepare Anscombe Manor for the reception. They’d cleaned the great hall from top to bottom, engaged a caterer, hired musicians, brought in professional gardeners to tidy the grounds, and purchased enough champagne to float a battleship. On the morning of the wedding, Derek would rope off a parking area, Emma would put the horses in the pasture farthest from the manor house, and they would both run a brand-new flag up the family’s flagpole.

I could hardly wait to see it wave.