Nancy Atherton - Aunt Dimity Digs In

The word crime hovered, unspoken, in the air and I sat up straighter, intrigued. “Can you give me a hint?” I coaxed.

There was a pause. “Dear me,” the vicar said, “I don’t wish to alarm you unduly, but . . . there’s been a burglary at the vicarage!”

4.

There are few more rigorous tests of teamwork than feeding, bathing, and bedding down a pair of active four-month-olds. Francesca and I demonstrated the axiom that four hands are better than two when dealing with twins.

We had novelty going for us, of course. The excitement of having a new grown-up in their lives—one who dispensed with training spoons and dipped their fists right into the farina!—wore the boys out so completely that, once bathed, powdered, and freshly diapered, they required a minimal amount of rocking to send them off to dreamland.

Before I left my babies alone with a relative stranger, however, there was something I needed to clear up. While Francesca loaded the dishwasher with still more dirty dishes, I went quietly into the study, closed the door behind me, and pulled the blue journal from its place on the bookshelves. Then I switched on the mantelshelf lamps and curled up in one of the pair of tall leather armchairs that sat before the hearth.

“Dimity?” I said, opening the journal. “ There’s something I’d like to ask you.”

I spoke in a barely audible undertone because I didn’t want Francesca to come in and find me talking to a book. Bill knew about the blue journal, as did Emma and Derek Harris, but I’d so far resisted the temptation to announce its function to the populace at large. I didn’t relish the notion of being dubbed the village nutcase.

I could scarcely believe it myself, much less explain how it worked, or why Dimity’s spirit lingered in the cottage long after her mortal remains had departed this earth—but I couldn’t deny the evidence of my own eyes. The skeptic within me fell silent each time Aunt Dimity’s words appeared, written in royal-blue ink in her fine copperplate, on the blue journal’s blank, unlined pages.

“Aunt Dimity?” I repeated. “Can you hear me?”

Not very well.

I glanced nervously toward the door as the looping letters scrolled across the page.

I take it that you do not wish Francesca to overhear?

“I think it might give her the wrong impression of her new employer,” I whispered.

Does Francesca meet with your approval?

“She’s fantastic,” I acknowledged. “ The boys took to her right off the bat, and she handles them like a pro.”

But?

I sighed. “It’s something Peggy Kitchen said.”

In that case, I suspect it is sheer nonsense.What did she say?

“Nothing specific. But she implied that Francesca’s father had done something—”

Ignore Peggy Kitchen. She’s quite incapable of judging Francesca fairly. Small minds and unforgiving hearts are the bane of village life.

I looked at the door again, listened intently for a moment, then returned my attention to the journal. “Why can’t she judge Francesca fairly?”

Because she hated Francesca’s father. Piero Sciaparelli was a prisoner of war, you see. He was captured in North Africa in 1942, worked as a farm laborer for old Mr. Hodge until VE day, and a year or two later married a local girl. Piero and his wife raised six children, all of them as English as crumpets, save for their extraordinary names. Still, some people have never ceased to regard men like Piero as the enemy. As I said, small minds . . .

“. . . and unforgiving hearts,” I finished for her. “I should’ve known. Sorry to bother you, Dimity. I won’t worry about the boys now.”

You most certainly will, my dear. But with Francesca at hand, you needn’t worry quite so much.

I closed the journal and caressed its smooth cover with my fingertips. Dimity never ceased to amaze me. Her fiancé had been killed in the Second World War. His death had hung over her soul like a shadow. She’d never married, never had children of her own, yet she bore no grudge against an enemy soldier who’d found the kind of happiness she’d lost. I doubted that I’d have been as generous, had a foreign bullet taken Bill from me, and wondered briefly if some part of Peggy Kitchen’s heart lay buried beneath shifting North African sands.

The mantelpiece clock chimed the half hour, and I put the journal back on the shelf. It was half past noon. I could drive over to the vicarage, view the scene of the ahem, and be back in plenty of time for the boy’s three-thirty snack. I switched off the lights and went to the kitchen, where Francesca had just finished wiping the table.

“Will you be all right on your own for an hour or so?” I asked. “I promised the vicar that I’d come over this afternoon.”

“I should be able to manage,” said Francesca.

“ The phone number for the vicarage is—”

“On the notepad in the hall.” Francesca dried her hands on a clean towel. “Along with the numbers of your husband’s office, the Harris manor, and both car phones.”

“Right.” I headed for the front door, and Francesca followed me. “If the boys wake up before I’m back . . .” I bit my lip and scolded myself silently for being an overprotective mother.

“If there’s a peep out of ’em I’ll ring you straightaway,” Francesca assured me.

“I won’t be long,” I told her, opening the door. “Oh, and Francesca . . .” I turned to her and stuck a hand out awkwardly. “Welcome to the cottage.”

Francesca’s dark eyes lit with amusement, but she gave my hand a firm shake. “Glad to be back,” she said.

I shot a last anxious glance toward the stairs, then left the cottage and climbed into the Mini.

I wasn’t sure what puzzled me more—that a burglary had taken place in Finch, or that the vicar thought I could do something about it. Since Finch’s crime rate was virtually nonexistent, I thought it likely that the vicar’s summons would turn out to be nothing more than Phase Two of Bill’s Fresh-Air Campaign.

I didn’t mind. Despite an occasional geyser from my guilt glands, it felt good to be out and about. I cruised past Emma’s curving drive, waved to the Pyms, who were busily filling the birdbath in their front yard, and called a blessing down upon the Mini as I negotiated the sharp turn just beyond their house.

I’d bought the tiny black car secondhand, though it had clearly passed through more than two before reaching mine. Bill called it a clattering rattletrap, too slow to take me anywhere in a hurry and too small to accommodate the twins’ safety seats, but that was why I liked it. The Mini was mechanically incapable of responding to my lead foot, and its diminutive proportions made the narrow lanes surrounding Finch seem spacious.

Besides, a shiny new car would have seemed out of place in Finch, where nothing was shiny or new. As I bumped over the humpbacked stone bridge and entered the square, I was struck once again by the thought that Finch, unlike so many Cotswolds villages, would never win a berth in a Best-of-Britain calendar.

No one could fault the setting. Finch nestled in the broad bend of a rushing stream that flowed so clearly, anglers could count the speckles on the trout. The surrounding countryside was an undulating mosaic of meadow, cropland, and forest. The lanes were lined with fluttering hedgerows and bedecked with wildflowers. It seemed a shame to desecrate such an idyllic landscape with a grubby outpost of civilization like Finch.

Finch abounded in unrealized potential. It would have been a gem, had anyone taken the time to polish it. Instead, it clustered, unkempt and neglected, around an irregular oblong of semiarid lawn fringed by a ribbon of weed-sprouting cobbles. The glow of the Cotswolds stonework was muted by grayish grime, the green was beset by bald spots, and the dignified Celtic cross memorial izing Finch’s Fallen had been swallowed by a tangle of untamed willows.