Nancy Atherton

Aunt Dimity

Slays the Dragon

N A N C Y AT H E R T O N

v i k i n g

Aunt Dimity Slays the Dragon

also by nancy atherton

Aunt Dimity’s Death

Aunt Dimity and the Duke

Aunt Dimity’s Good Deed

Aunt Dimity Digs In

Aunt Dimity’s Christmas

Aunt Dimity Beats the Devil

Aunt Dimity: Detective

Aunt Dimity Takes a Holiday

Aunt Dimity: Snowbound

Aunt Dimity and the Next of Kin

Aunt Dimity and the Deep Blue Sea

Aunt Dimity Goes West

Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter

Aunt Dimity

Slays the Dragon

N A N C Y AT H E R T O N

v i k i ng

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,

Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

(a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,

Victoria 3124, Australia

(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

New Delhi – 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632,

New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offi

ces:

80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin,

a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Nancy T. Atherton, 2009

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 slays the dragon / Nancy Atherton.

p. c m.

ISB

N : 1-1 0 1-02 058-X

1. Dimity, Aunt (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—England—Cotswold

Hills—Fiction. 3. Cotswold Hills (England—Fiction). I. Title.

PS3551.T426A93448 2009

813'.54 —dc22

2008037297

Set in Perpetua

Designed by Alissa Amell

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or

introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of

this book.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission

of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

For Claudia and Don Staff ord,

my next-door angels

Aunt Dimity Slays the Dragon

One

T he invasion of Finch began on a mild Monday eve ning in

late May. By the end of August, my peaceful English village would find itself at the mercy of rampaging brigands,

bullies, braggarts, and blundering louts. There would also be an

unexpected death.

None of us saw it coming. On the eve ning in question, my

neighbors and I were sitting quietly—some of us somnolently—in

the old schoolhouse that had for many years served as our village

hall. We were there to attend a village affairs committee meeting,

and nearly seventy of us had shown up because the annual May

meeting was widely regarded as the most important committee

meeting of the year.

The sole purpose of the May meeting was to finalize plans for

Finch’s many summer activities. It was, for the most part, an egregious waste of time, because everyone knew that the summer fete,

the bring-and-buy sale, the gymkhana, the art show, the flower

show, the dog show, and the tidy cottage competition would be run

exactly as they had been run for as long as anyone could remember.

Innovations might be suggested, discussed, and debated, but

they were never adopted. In the end, the same dates would be chosen and the same folding tables would be used, along with the same

frayed linen tablecloths, tarnished tea urns, and increasingly shabby

decorations. The summer fete would be held, as it had always been,

at the vicarage, the gymkhana would take place at Anscombe Manor,

and everything else—apart from the tidy cottage competition—

would be staged, as per usual, in the schoolhouse. In the eight years

since my husband and I had moved to Finch, the routine had never

varied in the slightest.

2 Nancy Atherton

The only thing that ever changed from one year to the next was

the assignment of menial tasks to volunteers. The glamorous jobs

had been snapped up as long ago as 1982 by women who would

defend to the death their right to wear big hats and flowery frocks

while opening the art show or graciously awarding ribbons at the

gymkhana. Competition was understandably less fi erce for the less

glamorous jobs. No one fought for the right to iron tablecloths,

empty rubbish bins, or pick bits of soggy crepe paper out of the

grass on the village green. Since such toil was essential to the success of any event, however, volunteers had to be found.

It was left to our esteemed chairwoman, the all-powerful Peggy

Taxman, to delegate the donkeywork, and it was for this reason,

and this reason alone, that the May meeting was so very well attended. Peggy had it within her grasp to favor us with the pleasant

chore of attending to the tea urns or to condemn us to the noxious duty of scrubbing the schoolhouse floor after the dog show.

We were agog to learn our fates.

“The meeting will come to order.” Peggy banged her gavel,

then pointed it accusingly at the room in general. “And if I catch

any of you napping, I’ll have you removed from the schoolhouse!”

Mr. Barlow, who had already dozed off, woke with a start.

“We done yet?” he asked sleepily.

“Just getting started,” Miranda Morrow murmured from the

corner of her mouth.

“Right.” Mr. Barlow yawned, rubbed his eyes, and lifted his

gaze to the fi ve committee members.

The members sat shoulder-to-shoulder on one side of the long,

linen-draped table that had been set up on the small stage at the

rear of the schoolhouse. Peggy Taxman occupied the middle chair,

a position which allowed her to loom menacingly over the assembled throng. Lesser villagers perched meekly on folding chairs on

either side of a central aisle leading to the schoolroom’s double

doors, through which Peggy would sweep magisterially after she’d

made her final pronouncement.

Aunt Dimity Slays the Dragon

3

No one would dare to stop her or attempt to dispute her decisions. An empire-builder by nature, Peggy ran two major businesses as well as the post office in Finch. She was a woman of

substance, both physically and financially, and her fierce sense of

civic duty drove her to rule the village with an iron hand, a steely

eye, and a voice like thunder. A reproving glance from behind

those pointy, rhinestone-studded glasses was usually all it took to

make the bravest among us quail. When the glance didn’t work,

she employed the voice, and although I’d never seen the iron hand

in action, I had no doubt that, if all else failed, she would use it.

The other committee members were much less daunting. Sally

Pyne, vice chair and tearoom owner, preferred gossip to governing

and was content to let Peggy rule the roost. George Wetherhead,

recording secretary and model train enthusiast, was so bashful that

he rarely raised his eyes from the laptop computer he used to

record the minutes. Mr. Wetherhead would no more think of

contradicting Peggy than he would of challenging her to a wrestling match.

Our treasurer, Jasper Taxman, had been a retired accountant

before marriage to our chairwoman had forced him to rethink his

definition of retirement. No professional career could have kept

him busier than his wife did. When he wasn’t minding the tills in

Peggy’s shops or selling stamps in Peggy’s post offi

ce, he was

keeping the books for Peggy’s myriad committees.

The last chair on the stage was assigned to the least important

member of the committee: me, Lori Shepherd—wife, mother, and

hapless draftee. I sat at the long table because, having made the

grave mistake of missing last year’s May meeting, I’d been appointed,

in absentia, to the post of sergeant-at-arms.

All things considered, I’d gotten off lightly. Although my title

was impressive, my duties were not. I was assigned to keep order

among the villagers during the meeting, and to distribute Peggy’s

work rosters after it. Since our chairwoman needed no one’s

help to keep the villagers in order, and since she wouldn’t release

4 Nancy Atherton

the rosters until she’d finished reviewing her copious notes, I spent

most of the eve ning staring absently into space.

“Item one,” Peggy began. “A few comments on fastening floral

swags to the art show tables. Safety pins are considered unsightly

and will not be used unless the following conditions apply. . . .”

As if by magic, my eyes stayed open while my mind floated out

of the schoolhouse. My first thoughts were, as always, of home.

Finch was nestled snugly in a verdant river valley set amidst the

patchwork fields and rolling hills of the Cotswolds, a rural region

in England’s West Midlands. I lived two miles south of Finch, in a

cottage made of honey-colored stone, with my husband, Bill, and

our six-year-old identical twin sons, Will and Rob.

Although Bill, the twins, and I were American, we’d lived in

England long enough to know the difference between crème fraîche

and clotted cream, and to develop an incurable addiction to the latter. Bill ran the Europe an branch of his family’s venerable Boston

law firm from a high-tech office on the village green, Will and Rob

attended school in the nearby market town of Upper Deeping, and

I divided my time between taking care of my family and serving my

community.

Until quite recently, we’d shared our home with the boys’ nanny,

the inestimable Annelise Sciaparelli, but she’d left us in mid-May to

marry her longtime fiancé, Oliver Elstyn, and her room had been

vacant ever since. With the twins attending primary school full-time, neither Bill nor I felt the need to hire another nanny, and we

agreed that Annelise was irreplaceable in any case.

“Item twenty-four . . .”

Peggy’s bellow jerked me out of my reverie.

“. . . the proper use of dust bin lids!”

I immediately sank back into a stupor shared by almost everyone in the schoolhouse. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been

excited about a committee meeting. My life was in many ways

idyllic—devoted husband, healthy sons, happy

home—but I’d

lately begun to realize that it was also just a tiny bit . . . boring. I

Aunt Dimity Slays the Dragon

5

loved my friends and

neighbors—most of the

time—but their

faces had started to become a tad too familiar, their habits slightly

too predictable. The daily routine of village life, which I’d once

found so fulfilling, had recently begun to seem a little too . . .

routine.

As I scanned the faces assembled in the schoolroom, I acknowledged sadly that there wasn’t much I didn’t know about my fellow

villagers. Mr. Barlow, a retired mechanic, was in the midst of

cleaning the carburetor in a vintage Mustang he was restoring for a

wealthy and recently divorced client who lived in Tewkesbury. Although Miranda Morrow was a strict vegetarian, she spent hours

every day preparing the choicest cuts of meat for her cat. Lilian

Bunting, the vicar’s wife, was currently rewriting the third paragraph of her introduction to a book about stained glass. Dick Peacock, the local publican, had taken up pottery as a hobby, but the

consensus was that his handmade goblets would do little to improve the taste of his homemade wine.

And so on and so forth. I knew without asking whose dog had

fleas, whose roof had sprung a leak, whose grandchildren were

angelic and whose were not. If Finch had any surprises left for me,

it was keeping them well hidden.

“Item twenty-five: Flower show entry forms. Block letters must

be used when filling out . . .”