Nancy Atherton - Aunt Dimity Digs In

There were no sidewalks on the square. A mutually agreed upon no-wheel zone extended three to twelve feet from the shop fronts, a distance that varied with passing traffic, of which there was very little. Finch’s main road merited a blue line in the atlas, as it had been paved sometime in the early 1960s, but it hadn’t been touched since, and few casual travelers were willing to risk their axles on it.

The village’s one glory lay beyond the square, a hundred yards or so up Saint George’s Lane, in the midst of a walled graveyard shaded by cedars of Lebanon and dotted with mossy headstones. Saint George’s Church had the usual mixed pedigree—a Saxon crypt, a Norman tower—and a pleasantly plain face, but it was blessed with an interior feature that lifted it above the commonplace.

Saint George’s possessed a set of five medieval wall paintings, most notably an imposing figure of Saint George battling a snaky-looking dragon. The paintings had once been hidden by layers of plaster, but Derek Harris had skillfully uncovered and restored them. I found the primitive images vaguely creepy, but scholars had been known to come from overseas to view them.

As I drove into the square, I noted Bill’s bicycle—an old-fashioned black three-speed with upright handlebars—leaning beside the door of Wysteria Lodge, the vine-covered building that served as his office. Few passersby would suspect that the high-powered Boston law firm of Willis & Willis had as its overseas headquarters a modest stone house half hidden by purple wysteria—unless they peeked inside.

Bill’s father had equipped the place with every electronic office device known to man, which meant that Bill could travel from Hamburg to Padua without ever leaving Finch. I considered stopping in to have a word with him—I still owed him big-time for siccing Peggy Kitchen on me—but decided to wait until after I’d spoken with the vicar.

The village school occupied the northeast corner of the square, and as I rolled past the disputed territory, I noted signs of occupation. A young man was handing boxes from a paneled van to a young woman, who carted them into the school. They wore khaki shorts, colorful T-shirts, and hiking boots, and their shouts of laughter could easily be heard in Kitchen’s Emporium. God help them, I thought, turning into Saint George’s Lane and pulling up, at last, to the vicarage.

Bill and I had held our wedding reception in the vicarage, and fond memories tripped through my mind whenever I came to call. Still, I had to admit that the rambling, two-story house had the same down-at-heels air about it as the rest of Finch, as though it had, like my Mini, passed through a number of neglectful hands. The surrounding garden was little more than a jungle. Lilian Bunting couldn’t be bothered with it—she had a bookish turn of mind—and the vicar believed in leaving nature to God’s mercy.

Lilian Bunting met me at the door. The vicar’s wife was a slender woman in her mid-fifties who favored tweeds and twin sets in winter, linen suits in summer, and sensible shoes all year round. She greeted me with a smile.

“Lori, my dear, do come in. Teddy’s got himself into the most frightful pickle, and I’m counting on you to get him out.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Lilian laughed. “That’s what I hope you’ll discover. But I’ll let Teddy tell you his part in it. He’s been longing to confess his sins to someone.”

Lilian led me to the library, a book-lined room at the rear of the vicarage that stretched the full width of the house. Its mullioned windows and French doors overlooked a broad meadow that sloped sharply down to the tree-lined riverbank. The vicar’s mahogany desk sat before the French doors, but his desk chair faced into the room, as though he found the sight of books more pleasurable than any natural vista. The view through the French doors was obscured, in any case, by a dense growth of rhododendrons.

The Reverend Theodore Bunting sat slumped in a worn armchair near the hearth. He was a tall man, with short iron-gray hair, a beak of a nose, and a look of perpetual mourning in his gray eyes. He wore a navy-blue cardigan over his clerical collar and shirt, and a pair of scuffed wing-tip shoes on his rather large feet. When I entered the room, he was staring disconsolately at the French doors, but the moment he became aware of my presence, he sprang from his chair and strode over to greet me.

“Lori, how good of you to come,” he said, a note of desperation in his voice. “I’m at my wit’s end. If you can’t help, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Lilian motioned for me to sit on the green velvet couch opposite the vicar’s armchair, then turned to address her husband. “First,” she instructed him, “you’re going to explain the situation to Lori. She doesn’t have the faintest idea why she’s here, Teddy.”

“Of course,” said the vicar.

“You get started,” said Lilian. “I’ll be back shortly.” She gave her husband’s shoulder an encouraging squeeze and left the library.

The vicar heaved a forlorn sigh as he returned to his chair. “Lilian’s too good to say it, but it’s all my fault. I’m so dreadfully absentminded.” He sighed again. “It all began when Adrian Culver came up from Oxford to see me last November.” The vicar gave me an inquiring look. “Have you met Dr. Culver?”

“Not yet,” I said, “but I’ll bet he wears glasses.”

“Half glasses, to be precise,” said the vicar. “How did you know—”

“I’ll tell you later,” I broke in. “Please, go on.”

“Dr. Culver is a university lecturer and a well-known archaeologist,” the vicar informed me. “Last autumn, his nineteen-year-old niece embarked upon a solitary walking tour of the Cotswolds. She paused one afternoon to take her lunch in Scrag End field—”

“Scrag End field?” I said.

The vicar nodded. “It lies alongside Hodge Farm,” he explained, “just beyond the copse of woods at the north end of the village. Scrag End is glebe land, though it’s never brought a groat into the church’s coffers. It’s useless for cultivation. Hence its unflattering name.”

“Right,” I said. “So Adrian Culver’s niece had just stopped in Scrag End field to have a picnic lunch, when . . . ?”

“She found herself sitting on the business end of a fifth-century Roman spearhead!” the vicar exclaimed.

“Golly,” I said. “ That must have come as a surprise.”

“Indeed,” said the vicar. “Naturally, she reported her discovery to her uncle, who lost no time in returning to Scrag End. While there, he turned up a number of pot sherds, coins, and a small head of Minerva, all Roman, ranging in date from the second to the fifth century.”

“Sounds like quite a find,” I said.

“Adrian was beside himself,” the vicar confirmed. “Scrag End was, he told me, exactly what he’d been looking for. He hoped to conduct a preliminary survey of it this summer. Adrian’s a very persuasive fellow, and when he asked if he might use the schoolhouse as a temporary storeroom and laboratory, I’m afraid I . . .” The vicar leaned back in his chair and moaned.

“How could you possibly forget about the Harvest Festival?” I asked, genuinely curious. “Peggy’s worked on it for years and—”

“No, she hasn’t.” Lilian Bunting had reentered the library, carrying a round tray with two teapots, and a selection of pastries and sandwiches. “Finch hasn’t held a Harvest Festival since September 1913. The Great War put an end to that tradition, as it put an end to so much else.”

“Peggy Kitchen said—” I began, but Lilian shook her head authoritatively.

“Mrs. Kitchen is painfully enthusiastic about reestablishing village traditions.” Lilian placed the tea tray on the table at my knees and sat beside me on the couch. “She has been, ever since she moved here.”