Aunt Dimity's Good Deed (21 page)

Nell had evidently gone horse-crazy. She couldn’t say enough about the chestnut mare and foal Swann had introduced to her, and the excitement of Anthea’s return on the big bay gelding made her trip over her words. I’d never thought I’d see Nell’s cornflower eyes fill with rapture at the mention of currycombs, but Swann’s tour—as well as his sunny disposition—had made a convert of her.

Lucy returned, and Swann followed soon after, bearing a tray filled with the warmed-over remnants of the roast-beef-and-Yorkshire-pudding feast he’d prepared in our honor.

“Paul’s gone up,” Swann announced, placing the tray on a table Lucy had pulled in front of my chair. “I’m yours for the evening, ladies, though I warn you: One whisper in praise of the dragon and I’ll vanish.”

“Poor Swann,” said Anthea with mock solemnity. “He suffers from overexposure to you-know-who.” She pointed to the portrait over the typewriter, then held her hand out to her husband.
“Pax
, my dear. I hereby declare a moratorium on family history—for the moment.”

Swann took Anthea’s hand, and she drew him down beside her on the couch, while Lucy curled up in a chair by the fire and Nell launched into another hymn in praise of horseflesh. I started in on the roast beef and contributed little to the ensuing conversation, preferring instead to observe my host and hostess.

They made a splendid couple. Swann was attentive but not fawning, Anthea affectionate but not doting, and though they reigned over separate kingdoms, Swann seemed to take as keen an interest in the stableyard as Anthea did in the affairs of the house. They listened to each other, laughed with fresh delight at stories they’d probably heard a thousand times, and left me feeling curiously elated. If this unlikely pair could achieve such a perfect partnership, surely there was hope for Bill and me.

When I’d finished as much of the meal as I could manage, Swann took the tray back to the kitchen and returned with a pot of Sir Poppet’s tea.

“This is wonderful stuff,” he told me. “Goes down a treat after a large meal.”

“And stays down,” I commented wryly. “I’ve got a trunkful of it. I’ll give you a supply first thing in the morning. I have a feeling that large meals are the rule around here. You’re a brilliant cook.”

“Swann is a treasure,” Lucy agreed. “I put on at least a stone every time I come to visit.”

“Which isn’t often enough,” said Anthea.

Lucy rested her chin on her fist. “It’s not easy to get away, Mother, particularly now, with—”

“With the girls at home having babies and only that great oaf Arthur to lend a hand.” Anthea nodded. “I understand, Lucy, but it’s no use running yourself ragged.”

Nell smoothed Bertie’s cape and suggested innocently, “You could ask Gerald to help.”

The effect of her words was quite startling. Lucy flinched, as though she’d been slapped; then her face crumpled and she ran from the room without speaking. I stared after her, stunned, and for a few moments no one spoke.

“Poor girl,” said Anthea, making no move to follow her daughter. “She’s exhausted.”

Swann snorted. “Nonsense. She’s heartbroken and you know it. Gerald is, too, but he won’t admit it.” His blue eyes flashed in my direction. “Did you speak with Gerald when you visited him in Surrey? Did he happen to mention why he left London?”

I shrugged noncommittally. “He said he made some mistakes and had to leave, for the good of the firm.”

“Utter nonsense,” Swann declared.

“Swann ...” Anthea murmured.

“Sorry, darling, but I’m sick unto death of all of you tiptoeing around the subject. Lucy’s miserable, and when she’s miserable you’re miserable, and that makes me miserable as well.” He returned his attention to me. “Gerald, unlike that great oaf Arthur, is a gifted solicitor. He’s intelligent, charming, discreet, and he loved what he was doing. I simply don’t believe that he decided to leave the firm because of one easily remedied mistake.”

I looked uncertainly at Anthea. “I thought Lucy asked him to leave.”

“Lucy?” Anthea said, her eyes widening. “Ask Gerald to leave?” She gave her teacup to Swann and got up to retrieve a framed photograph from the mantelpiece. After glancing briefly at the picture, she brought it over and handed it to me.

The photograph showed five children, three girls and two boys, decked out in riding gear and posed in the open doorway of the stable. Although it was a group portrait, the two oldest children, a dark-haired girl and a boy with chestnut hair, had pulled slightly apart from the rest and were smiling at each other instead of at the camera.

“Swann is quite right,” Anthea said. “Those two have been in love with each other ever since they first conceived the idea of being in love. They never talked of marriage. It was simply understood. I don’t know why Gerald decided to leave the firm, but I can assure you that it wasn’t because my daughter asked him to.”

The fire crackled and a gust of wind rattled the windows. Anthea returned the photograph to the mantelpiece, resumed her place on the couch, and took her teacup back from Swann. I thought about Lucy, crying her heart out upstairs, and Gerald, eating his heart out in Haslemere. It made no sense whatsoever.

Nell broke the silence. “Then why did Gerald leave the firm?”

I closed my eyes, wishing that she’d given us a few more minutes to recover from the effects of her first bombshell before dropping another, but Anthea took the question in stride.

“God knows,” she said. “If Gerald can lie to himself about his love for my daughter, he can lie to anyone about anything.”

“Anthea’s an expert on liars,” Swann put in.

“I should be,” she said, smiling ruefully. “I was married to one.” She leaned into Swann’s side and gazed at the fire meditatively. “I must admit that there’s an odd similarity between my late husband and Gerald.”

“It must be extremely odd,” Swann commented. “Gerald’s a decent bloke, whereas Douglas was a swine.”

“Yes, but he wasn’t always like that,” said Anthea. “Douglas was basically a decent bloke until he got involved with that doctor....”

“Sally the Slut,” said Swann, with a reminiscent smile. “The ferret-faced physician with the bottomless pill bottle.”

“Dreadful woman.” Anthea shook her head and spoke to me. “She had a husband of her own at one time, but he fled in horror when he realized what he’d married.”

Swann gave an approving nod. “Clever fellow.”

“Sally was a monster,” Anthea agreed matter-of-factly. She turned toward me with a bemused gleam in her eyes. “She actually tried to blackmail me once. Claimed to have compromising photographs of Douglas. I told her to publish and be damned. Never heard from her again, of course.”

“Only way to deal with such vermin.” Swann gave his wife’s knee an encouraging pat. “All I can say is that Sally must’ve learnt some clever party tricks at her anatomy lectures. From what you’ve told me, she couldn’t have got by on looks alone.” He waggled his eyebrows at Anthea, then raised her hand to his lips. “But we shall not allow Sally the Slut to spoil our evening. I hereby declare the moratorium at an end. You may discuss the dragon to your heart’s content, my darling. I’ll go up and have a word with Lucy.”

“Thanks, old boy,” Anthea said, and as he left the room she added, “He’s much better than I at bucking Lucy up. She won’t let me come within ten yards of what’s really bothering her.” She raised her palms toward the ceiling, concluding with a bittersweet smile, “A mother’s lot is sometimes not a happy one. Now, then ...” she continued, rising gracefully from the couch, “Lucy said you might enjoy seeing the documents she’s collected concerning Julia Louise. If you’ll come over to my work area ...”

For the next hour, Anthea, Nell and I played a game of historical show-and-tell, with Anthea keeping up a running commentary as she displayed her treasure trove of family papers. There were letters, legal notices, and calling cards, bills from dressmakers, hatmakers, jewelers, and scent shops—a fascinating blend of professional and personal details that would lend Anthea’s biography a sense of immediacy.

“Julia Louise was a widow from Bath who took London by storm,” Anthea explained proudly. “I hope that today’s young women will regard her as a role model.”

As I examined yet another authentic-looking deed to number three, Anne Elizabeth Court—this one in Sir Williston’s name—Toby Treadwell’s admonition came back to me: “They made fakes back then, too, you know.”

They also destroyed documents, I told myself. I looked up at the portrait, at Julia Louise’s high forehead and steady brown eyes, and noticed for the first time a certain hardness in the way her mouth was set. Julia Louise, I thought, had done a number of unpleasant things to promote her family’s interests. Had she stolen her ward’s property as well?

She’d been gung-ho to move the firm to London. A building located near the Inns of Court would have proved a sore temptation. Had Julia Louise succumbed? Had she buried Sybella’s deed in the firm’s vast files and replaced it with a made-to-order copy?

I felt my heart begin to race, and quickly gave myself a mental shake. I was arguing way ahead of the facts. Anthea hadn’t mentioned Sybella’s name, and none of papers suggested that Julia Louise had ever been anyone’s legal guardian. I pulled my gaze away from the portrait and reminded myself firmly that Nell’s belief in Sybella Markham was based on nothing more substantial than a hunch.

Anthea shared Lucy’s low opinion of Julia Louise’s younger son. “Lord William, like my late husband, was a sneak. The moment his mother’s back was turned, he was off seducing the chambermaids.” She paused, as though she felt the need to clarify the point. “You see, it wasn’t the sex that appealed to Douglas so much as the sneaking around. I sometimes think he fancied himself a secret agent. It kept him from having to grow up, I suppose.”

“Did Lord William seduce Sybella Markham?” Nell asked.

I caught my breath. It was a frontal assault so bold that only Nell would have dared it.

“Sybella Markham is a figment of poor Williston’s imagination,” Anthea said. “Although we all believe she’s based on his pretty, young wife.” That, too, seemed to remind her of her late husband, because she went on talking about him, as though she wasn’t quite ready to let the subject drop. “The thing that made Douglas’s affair with Sally the Slut so pathetic was that she was neither young nor pretty. A tomato on sticks, I promise you. And those eyes ...” She gave a theatrical shudder. “I’d always thought of brown eyes as warm, but hers were cold as ice and hard as flint.”

I laid the deed aside, feeling as though I’d been yanked unceremoniously out of the past and thrust into the present. I’d heard those words before, and recently, too. “A hard-eyed hag?” I said slowly. “A little round dumpling of a woman?”

“Oh, I like that.” Anthea smiled appreciatively. “Yes, perhaps ‘dumpling’ is more accurate than ’tomato.‘ After all, she used a dark-brown rinse to conceal her gray hair, not a ginger one.”

Peg legs, no waist, dyed hair ... That was how Arthur had described the woman Gerald took to lunch at the Flamborough. Not in the first bloom of youth, Arthur had said, which she wouldn’t be if she already had gray hair when she’d been involved with Douglas. But why in God’s name would Gerald be keeping assignations with his late uncle’s old mistress?

Anthea began to put the documents back into the box. “The great difference between Gerald and Douglas,” she said sadly, harking back to the discussion she’d begun with Swann, “is that Gerald’s lies have brought him no pleasure at all. I wish I knew why he felt they were necessary.” With a sigh, she closed the box. “Is there anything else I can show you?”

“Thank you, no,” said Nell. “I think Bertie and I will go up now. It’s been a very full day.”

“Lori?” said Anthea.

I stood. “I’d like to get a breath of fresh air before I turn in, if that’s okay with you.”

“A good idea,” Anthea said. “After that long nap, you may have some difficulty getting to sleep. But a breath of Yorkshire air is as good as a sleeping pill, they say. Would you like company?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “You go on up with Nell. I’ll just take a turn around the courtyard.”

Five minutes later, I was in the front hall, clad in one of Anthea’s warm wool jackets and carrying a long-handled black flashlight that was heavy enough to use as a club. I bid Anthea, Nell, and Bertie good night, opened the door, and welcomed the slap of the cold wind across my face. I hoped it would slow my spinning mind.

It was ten o‘clock at night and preposterously dark outside. Not a gleam leaked from the house’s heavily draped windows, and no security lamp flooded the courtyard with reassuring illumination. The moon and stars had been extinguished by clouds blown in on the wind sweeping down from the high moors, and the surrounding hills cut off what glow there might have been from neighboring farms or the village. My flashlight beam sliced through the darkness neatly, leaving oceans of inky blackness on either side.

It was a noisy sort of darkness. Apart from the usual chorus of insects and the distant rustle of leaves on the forested hillsides, the wind whistled and moaned around the stone buildings, the horses snuffled and stamped, and the stable’s wide wooden door, left partly open, creaked on its hinges. The rhythmic squeak would drive me mad, I decided, and the draft couldn’t be doing the chestnut foal much good. With a groan, I put my head down, pulled my collar up, and crunched across the graveled courtyard to close the stable door.

Wisps of hay sailing through the flashlight’s steady beam reminded me to keep it trained on the ground, lest I should encounter other, less pleasant reminders that horses had passed this way. I was within an arm’s length of the stable, and trying to picture Nell with a pitchfork in her soft, long-fingered hands, when the bay gelding’s braying whinny sent a sliver of ice down my spine and redoubled my determination to see to it that Anthea’s remaining darlings were securely shut up for the night.