Aunt Dimity's Good Deed (17 page)

“Well?” I said when we’d reached the safety of the hallway. “What’s in the box? Let’s have a look, Nell.”

Nell didn’t seem to hear. She stared fixedly at a mauve-tinted china vase on a table across the hallway, her cornflower eyes filled with pity and regret.

“Nell ...” I laid my palm against her cheek. “Nell? Snap out of it. You’re back on Planet Earth now, sweetie.”

“Hmmm?” She blinked slowly, as though emerging from a trance, shuddered slightly, and raised a hand to shade her eyes. “Oh my ...”

“Yeah. That was pretty intense.” I put an arm around her waist. “You want to sit down, catch your breath?”

“No. I ... I want to see what Williston’s given me.” She lifted the lid of the fruitwood box, peered into it, then looked up at me with such a queer expression that for a moment I thought we were in for another batch of butterscotch brownies. “I think it’s the deed, Lori. The deed to number three, Anne Elizabeth Court.”

“What?”
I reached into the box and took from it a sheet of handmade, deckle-edged foolscap. It was covered with the scratchings of a quill pen and dated June 17, 1701. The spelling was eccentric and the handwriting antiquated, but I had no trouble reading the words. I mumbled through the main body of the legalistic text, but when I got to the bottom of the page, I quoted slowly and clearly. “ ‘We hereby assign the freehold of the aforementioned property to ...’ ” I hesitated, then looked at Nell. “ ‘... to
Sybella Markham.’
”

“The sleeping dog?” Nell asked.

“Woof,” I replied.

Sir Poppet met us at the head of the main staircase. He looked ecstatic, stretching both hands out to Nell and beaming down at her as he approached. “Oh, Lady Nell,” he said, “you were brilliant,
brilliant.”

Lady Nell regarded him distantly, a hurt expression on her face. “You planned it,” she said quietly. “You knew that I resembled Sybella. You knew he would mistake me for her.”

Sir Poppet had the grace to look guilty. “Lady Nell, I assure you—”

“You might have warned us,” I broke in reproachfully. “You might have told us about Sybella.”

“Sybella Markham is a figment of Williston’s imagination,” Sir Poppet declared. “A projection, a—”

“What’s this, then?” I demanded, holding the deed out for him to see. “ A special effect?”

He was unfazed. “I have a cartload of similar documents, Ms. Shepherd. Williston turns them out by the score.”

My excitement suffered a severe setback as a sound came back to haunt me, a sound I’d heard not an hour ago: the steady
scritch-scritch
of Uncle Williston’s quill pen as he sat writing at the kneehole desk. “Are you telling me that Williston made this deed?” I asked reluctantly.

“And many others like it,” Sir Poppet confirmed. “Each of them in the name of Sybella Markham. Please ...” He motioned for us to precede him down the stairs. “If you’ll come with me to my office, I’ll clarify matters for you.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “I think perhaps you should.”

 

The decor in Sir Poppet’s office was dark and strikingly contemporary—black leather chairs, an ebony desk, matte black torchères in the comers, and abstract paintings on the cobalt-blue walls. Despite my impatience, he’d refused to tell us anything until after we’d had something to eat. It was nearly noon, he pointed out, and Nell had been through a stressful experience.

Nell was subdued—oppressed, I thought, by the notion that an old friend like Sir Poppet would thrust her into such a demanding confrontation without confiding in her first. I was preoccupied with the deed. Sir Poppet’s bland dismissal of its authenticity niggled at me. I’d examined the document under the high-intensity lamp on his desk. If it was a fake, it was the best I’d ever seen.

When our light meal had been cleared away, Sir Poppet sat behind his desk, and Nell and I took our places in a pair of cushy leather chairs. He gazed down at his folded hands for a moment, then looked directly at Nell. “Before I begin, I must apologize for not putting you fully in the picture before you went in to see Williston. It may have been necessary, but it wasn’t very kind.”

“Why was it necessary?” Nell asked.

“I had no idea how Williston would react when he saw you—or if he’d react at all. If you’d gone in armed with preconceptions, you might have tried to manipulate the encounter.” Sir Poppet smiled wryly. “I’ve known you all of your life, Lady Nell. I’m well aware of your ... gifts. I knew you’d be capable of following Williston’s lead, if he gave you one.”

Nell acknowledged the compliment with a modest nod. “I hope you’ll tell us the truth now, Sir Poppet. Who is Sybella Markham? I don’t believe that she’s a figment of Williston’s imagination. She was too real.”

“Ah, but delusions can seem very real,” Sir Poppet pointed out, “especially when they’re based on someone well known to the patient. Sybella Markham, for example, is based on Williston’s wife, Sybil.”

“Sybil,” I said under my breath. Emma had failed to pass along this pertinent piece of information. I looked questioningly at Sir Poppet. “And the ‘he’ that Williston talked about, the man who sullied Sybella with his touch—that’s Douglas, right?”

“I would assume so.” Sir Poppet placed his elbows on the desk and tented his fingers. “Sybil was Williston’s second wife. She was much younger than he, blond, blue-eyed—you are, if you’ll permit me, Lady Nell, an idealized version of Sybil.”

“And when we showed up, you thought you’d put that resemblance to good use,” I ventured.

Sir Poppet nodded. “I hoped it would penetrate Williston’s defenses, help him to open up, force him to confront his feelings of guilt over Sybil’s tragic death.”

“She’s
dead?”
I gasped.

Sir Poppet looked from my astonished face to Nell‘s, blinking rapidly. “You didn’t know? I thought you did. You said you knew about Sybil and Douglas.”

“We knew they’d run off together,” I explained, “but we had no idea she was
dead”
A horrible thought flashed into my mind. “Williston didn’t kill her, did he?”

“No.” Sir Poppet shook his head briskly. “Both Sybil and Douglas were burned to death in a seedy hotel near Toronto.”

“That’s why he thought I was a ghost.” Nell was gazing down at her white dress and looking a good deal more ghostly than was good for her.

I put an arm around Nell’s shoulders while Sir Poppet picked up the telephone on his desk. He spoke so softly that I couldn’t make out the words, and when he finished, he poured a glass of ice water from the carafe at his elbow, then came around the desk to hand it to Nell.

“I’m sorry for giving you such a turn,” he said. “I honestly thought that the family had told you the entire story. I can see now that the subject must still be too painful for them to discuss in full.”

“Poor Williston,” Nell murmured.

“Indeed.” Sir Poppet half-sat on the edge of his desk. “He blamed himself when Sybil left. He felt that he’d neglected her by spending too much time at the office. When he learned of her death, he was overwhelmed with guilt and remorse. He traded painful reality for a mode of existence in which he could spend every waking hour endowing Sybil with worldly goods she was long past needing.”

I looked over to where the deed lay, atop the fruitwood box on Sir Poppet’s desk. “Such as number three, Anne Elizabeth Court?”

“And the family farm up in Yorkshire, and a good deal more besides.” Sir Poppet sighed. “For the past two years, he’s done nothing but create documents assigning all of his family’s possessions to Sybil. Compensation, I assume, for his earlier neglect.”

I held a hand out toward the desk. “May I keep the deed?”

“I don’t see why not,” Sir Poppet said. “It might disturb Williston to see it again after presenting it to Sybella. Yes, by all means, take it with you, and the box as well.”

Nell shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “Why did Williston talk about his mother?” she asked. “And about a theft? Why Sybella
Markham
instead of Sybella
Willis?
Was Sybil’s maiden name Markham?”

“No. It was Farrand.” Sir Poppet lifted his hands into the air, then let them fall. “I don’t pretend to understand everything, Lady Nell. I’ll have to analyze the transcripts of today’s encounter thoroughly before I can begin to work out the details.”

“Did he mention Sybella to my father-in-law?” I asked.

“Your father-in-law was treated to a detailed account of the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1720,” Sir Poppet replied. He gave an impatient little sigh and shook his head. “I don’t think you quite understand. This is the first time in two years that Williston’s spoken his wife’s name aloud. It’s an enormous breakthrough, and I can only say—” Sir Poppet broke off as a knock sounded at the door. He excused himself and left the office, to return a moment later with Bertie in his arms. “Sir Bertram declares that you are to be congratulated, Lady Nell, and I must say that I agree with him.”

 

I watched from the front stairs of Cloverly House as Sir Poppet, Nell, and Bertie took a turn around the lawn. Nell had been thoroughly shaken by her unwitting participation in Uncle Williston’s therapy, and I was grateful to Sir Poppet for taking the time to talk her through it.

We were stuck there for a while, anyway. I’d sent Paul up to London with the deed Uncle Williston had given Nell. I had a friend at the British Museum, an expert on papers and inks, and I wanted him to take a look at it. If Toby Treadwell said the deed was a fake, I’d believe it. If not, I’d begin to ask a whole new set of questions. Such as: Who was Sybella Markham? How had her property come into the hands of the Willis family? And what did any of this have to do with my father-in-law?

I pressed a hand to the small of my back and strolled over to sit on a wooden bench in the shade of a towering oak. It felt good to sit still for a moment and let my mind wander. I’d had what my mother would have called an eventful couple of days, during which I’d expended more emotional energy than should have been humanly possible. Maybe, I thought, bending to pick up one of the acorns littering the grass, just maybe it wasn’t the best time to make a decision that would affect the rest of my life.

I rolled the acorn between my fingers and stared out over the lawn. Bill and I had sat beneath an oak tree once, in the early days of our courtship, on a hill overlooking a peaceful valley. I’d been a basket case back then, nearly as crippled by guilt and grief as Uncle Williston. A lesser man would have kept me at arm’s length, but Bill had pulled me closer. He’d practically carried me through one of the most difficult periods in my life.

Perhaps, I thought, tucking the acorn into the pocket of my jeans, just perhaps I’d been a bit hasty in writing off my husband. I’d awakened him in the middle of the night, after all, and it wasn’t entirely fair to expect instant sympathy from someone who was woozy from painkillers and nursing a sore thumb. Besides, it would be monstrous to pull a Sybil on him and walk away without a word of warning.

I’d call him one more time, I decided, and I wouldn’t let him interrupt. I’d tell him exactly what I thought of the Biddifords
and
his aunts
and
his selfish refusal to talk about our future. Then I’d tell him that, if he still wanted to have a future with me, he’d better get his tail on a plane bound for England or I‘d—

“Missy!”

I blinked, jerked abruptly from my impassioned reverie. Had someone called me “Missy”?

“Hssst.”

The hiss came from behind me. I slowly turned my head and saw the wizened face of a little old man, half hidden by the oak tree’s trunk.

“Over here,” he whispered loudly, beckoning to me with one clawlike hand.

I scanned the lawn for keepers, but the nearest one was twenty yards away, and Sir Poppet, Nell, and Bertie had their backs to me. Ah well, I thought, the guy looks more like a gnome than a serial murderer, and besides, Sir Poppet had said they didn’t accept violent cases at Cloverly House.

I got up from the bench and walked around to the far side of the oak tree. The gnome was wearing a grimy set of blue coveralls and work boots. He was completely bald, extremely skinny, and tiny. I was a mere five feet four inches tall, but the gnome made me feel like a strapping giantess. His face was a deeply tanned mass of wrinkles, and I couldn’t help noticing that he hadn’t put his teeth in for the day.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hush,” he replied. He looked furtively over his shoulder, then peered up at me. “You be the Shepherd, eh?”

“Uh-huh,” I said equably. “I be Lori Shepherd.”

The gnome leaned close to me and I caught a whiff of baby powder, lilacs, and an overpowering blast of motor oil. “I got summat for you,” he told me,
sotto voce.

“Do you?” I asked, and before I knew quite what was happening, he pulled Aunt Dimity’s blue journal from the leg pocket of his coveralls, thrust it into my hands, and sidled toward the front steps of Cloverly House.