Nancy Atherton: Aunt Dimity's Good Deed

His aunts, however, were a different kettle of fish. Honoria and Charlotte were pencil-thin, silver-haired widows in their late fifties, and the moment I met them I understood why Bill’s cousins had fled to California and never returned. My aunts-in-law were as thin-lipped as they were slim-hipped, and they’d welcomed me into the family with all the warmth you’d expect from two women whose hopes of finding a suitable match for their favorite nephew had been dashed when he’d proposed to me.

They objected to me on any number of grounds, but the front-runner seemed to be that, although I was thirty-two years old and had been married once before, I still had no track record as a potential brood mare for the Willis stables. They didn’t put it quite so baldly, but if looks could impregnate, I‘d’ve had twins every Christmas.

The galling truth was that, as a brood mare, I wasn’t likely to win any prizes. I was the only child of two only children who’d taken a decade to produce me, so my chances in the fertility sweepstakes weren’t overwhelmingly favorable.

It didn’t worry me. Much. I won’t deny that I spent more than a few mornings staring at Bill’s dented pillow and wondering if I’d ever hear the patter of his big feet, let alone little ones, but I never admitted it to anyone except to my friend Emma Harris, in England, once, in a moment of abysmal weakness, and she’d promised never to mention it again. But Honoria and Charlotte mentioned it, often. “Have you any happy news for us today, Lori?” was a question I’d come to loathe, because I’d had no happy news for anyone for two long years.

I could have had triplets, though, and Bill’s aunts would have gone on resenting me. Thanks to Aunt Dimity’s bequest, they couldn’t accuse me outright of being a gold digger, but the suggestion of social climbing was always in the air, and they never failed to comment acidly on my numerous gaffes and blunders.

Bill’s friends and, associates commented, too, but to them I was “refreshing.” The governor found my description of the primitive washing facilities in certain Irish youth hostels “refreshing.” A board member of the Museum of Fine Arts had been equally “refreshed” by my story of rescuing a rare Brontë first edition from the birthing stall of a barn in Yorkshire. It seemed that, every time I said something that would shrivel the tongue of a well-bred society matron, I was “refreshing.”

Maybe having a “refreshing” wife got old after a while. Maybe Bill was listening to his aunts. Maybe all of those deeper things we’d discovered in each other at the cottage didn’t matter if the surface things weren’t quite right.

When I tried to talk to Bill about it, he just ruffled my curls and said I was being silly. And I couldn’t confide in my father-in-law. Willis, Sr., had been so utterly delighted by his son’s marriage that I couldn’t bear to tell him that things weren’t exactly working out as planned. Emma Harris was my best friend in England, and Meg Thomson was close by in the United States, and I know they would have listened, but I was too embarrassed to say a word to them. People who get all three wishes aren’t supposed to wish for anything ever again, yet there I was, wishing with all my might that someone would brain Bill with a metaphysical two-by-four and bring him back to his senses, and to me, before it was too late.

In desperation, I arranged an event which I dubbed our second honeymoon. Bill astonished me by going along with the idea, agreeing that we would stay at my cottage in England, unplug the phones, repel all messengers, and spend the entire month of August getting to know each other again. That was the plan, at least, and it might have worked, if it hadn’t been for the bickering Biddifords.

After thirty years of wrangling over the late Quentin Biddiford’s will, the Biddiford family had finally agreed to discuss a settlement. They’d asked Bill to mediate, and with what seemed like malice aforethought, they’d chosen the first of August, the exact date of our planned departure for England, as the start of their summit meeting. The Biddiford dispute was the professional plum Bill had been waiting for—plump, juicy, and decidedly overripe—and since it had been handed to him instead of his father, it had been a no-contest decision. Bill had to stay in Boston.

Heartsick, I’d flown off to England, and Willis, Sr., had flown with me, graciously offering to keep me company until his son arrived. Bill had promised to fly over the moment he’d wrapped up the negotiations, but I couldn’t help feeling that Fate—in the form of the pea-witted Biddifords —was conspiring against me. Thanks to that fractious brood, I was about to spend my second honeymoon with my father-in-law.

It was too much. I couldn’t talk to Willis, Sr., but by then I needed to confide in someone, and Emma Harris was right next door. And that’s why I was knee-deep in Emma’s radishes, and Bill was back in Boston, working, the day Willis, Sr., disappeared.

2.

Emma Harris’s radishes flourished in the southeast corner of her vegetable garden, a verdant patch of land that lay within view of the fourteenth-century manor house where Emma lived with her husband, Derek, and her stepchildren, Peter and Nell. Emma was an American by birth, but her love of gardening had brought her to England, and her love for Derek, Peter, and Nell had kept her there.

Emma’s manor house was about halfway between my cottage and the small village of Finch, in the west of England. It had been three days since Willis, Sr., and I had arrived at the cottage, delivered safely after an overnight in London by a chauffeur friend of ours named Paul, and although I was still too jet-lagged to trust myself behind the wheel of a car—especially in England, where I found driving to be a challenge at the best of times—I’d recovered sufficiently to walk over to Emma’s after breakfast and offer to lend a hand with the radishes.

She needed all the hands she could get. Emma was a brilliant gardener, but she’d never quite learned the lesson of moderation where her vegetables were concerned. In the spring she overplanted, muttering darkly about insects, droughts, rabbits, and diseases. During the summer she lavished her sprouts with such tender loving care that every plant came through unscathed, which meant that, when harvesttime hit, it hit with a vengeance.

Prizewinning onions, cabbages, lettuces, leeks—I’d told Emma once that if the local rabbits ate a tenth of what she grew they’d be too fat to survive in the wild. I was still in awe of anyone who could get an avocado seed to sprout in a jar, however, so perhaps I wasn’t competent to judge. All I knew was that, come August, my normally placid and imperturbable friend became a human combine-harvester, filling wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow with an avalanche of veg.

Derek Harris took his wife’s annual descent into agricultural madness in stride. Like Emma, he was in his mid-forties, but where Emma was short and round, Derek was tall and lean, with a long, weathered face, a headful of graying curls, and heart-stoppingly beautiful dark-blue eyes.

There were deep lines around those eyes. Derek had gone through hard times in his life—his first wife had died young, leaving him with two small children to raise—but he’d survived those difficult years, and his marriage to Emma had healed his grieving heart. He was a successful building contractor, specializing in restoration work, but he gladly put everything on hold in August, in order to help his veg-crazed wife pile up the produce.

He’d made an exception today, though, allowing himself to be called away—by the bishop, no less—to slap an emergency patch on the leaky roof of Saint James’s Church in Chipping Campden, where His Reverence was scheduled to conduct a rededication ceremony in ten days’ time.