Nancy Atherton - Aunt Dimity and the Duke

“I was the only one left to make your blasted bed, you mean,” Nanny Cole put in. Her knitting needles had stopped moving and she peered fondly at the duke. A faint pink flush rose in the old woman’s cheeks as she sensed that the attention of the room was on her, and she pulled her needles back into action, growling, “You just get on with the story, my lad.”

“Where was I? Ah, yes ...” The duke sighed wearily. “Father then informed me that I was to be sent away to school. That was bad enough, but on the afternoon of the very same day, not a month after my grandmother’s death, I saw her harp being loaded into a van and taken away. You must understand that the harp was her prize possession. Its removal forced me to face the awful fact that nothing and no one was safe.

“Father and I had a terrific set-to that evening, at the conclusion of which I ran away. I was a mere boy at the time—Peter’s age—and the weather was as rough as it is tonight, so I didn’t run very far. I went to the lady chapel, in fact, to have a good, self-pitying weep. Much to my amazement, Aunt Dimity was there when I arrived—”

“Dimity Westwood?” Derek asked.

“There’s only one Aunt Dimity,” Grayson replied.

“But how did she know—” Emma left the sentence unfinished.

The duke smiled and shook his head. “I have no idea. She’d learned of Grandmother’s death, of course—”

“And she may have heard rumors about the sale of the harp,” Kate put in.

“Perhaps,” said the duke. “But ...” He shrugged. “Who knows?”

A tingle crept down Emma’s back. Dimity Westwood was beginning to sound vaguely supernatural. She returned long-lost teddy bears to bereft little girls, and she just happened to appear out of nowhere to soothe tormented little boys. And the mysterious woman might have had a hand in bringing Emma to Penford Hall, as well. Emma glanced up at Derek’s sapphire eyes and broad shoulders, wondering how far Aunt Dimity’s powers extended, then shook her head and gave her full attention to the duke.

“Aunt Dimity listened to my woes,” he was saying, “then told me, flat out, that I would think of a way to save the hall. I don’t remember what happened next, but when I awoke the following morning, I felt as though I’d been reborn. I saw clearly that an enormous task lay ahead of me—but not an impossible one. That made all the difference.”

As though galvanized by the memory, the duke pushed himself out of his chair and stood before the fire. Thrusting one hand into a trouser pocket and clutching a tweedy lapel with the other, he struck a professorial pose. “Now,” he said, “if one asks an adult how to raise an enormous amount of capital in a relatively brief period of time, the adult will invariably reply ... ?” He raised an eyebrow and stared expectantly at Emma.

“ ‘Rob a bank’?” Emma ventured.

“Bravo, Miss Porter.” The duke nodded his approval. “If, however, one asks a child the same question, one will receive two dozen different answers, each one more outrageous than the last. I speak as an authority on the matter. I came up with a dozen dozen different schemes over the next few years, but dismissed them all as too time-consuming and/or dangerously illegal.

“Then, one night at school, Pogger Pratt-Evans was listening to some particularly noisome rock music. When I asked him to turn it down, Pogger replied with the immortal words ...” The duke turned his face to the ceiling and enunciated each word carefully, as though he were reciting Shakespearean verse. “ ‘Fat lot you know about music. These guys must be good—they’ve made millions.’ ”

The duke closed his eyes for a moment, as though savoring the words, then began to pace excitedly before the fire. “I couldn’t sleep a wink that night, not with ‘they’ve made millions’ ringing in my ears, and by morning I had put together a plan—an outrageous, ridiculous, impossible plan, which I knew in the depths of my twelve-year-old heart would save the hall. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that it was at that moment that Lex Rex was born.”

Derek frowned. “Are you saying that you’re —”

“I am not,” the duke declared. He came to a halt squarely in front of the fire, his hands in his pockets, his hair a golden halo above his shadowed face, looking as though he’d never quite left his twelve-year-old self behind. “I’m saying only that an idea was born.” He spread his arms wide. “It was this distinguished collection of geniuses who nurtured that idea until it became the loathsome creature we know as Lex Rex.”

“You mean, you’re all—?” Emma touched a hand to her glasses and looked from one wrinkled face to another. “You’re all Lex Rex?”

“Our star pupil triumphs again,” proclaimed the duke. He gave them no time to digest this startling news, turning quickly to ask Kate to go on with the story.

Kate Cole cleared her throat. “As you know, Mother and I had moved to Bournemouth after the old duke gave Mother the—after Mother left Penford Hall.”

“Broke her heart to leave,” said Nanny Cole, eyeing her daughter with unexpected gentleness. “But we couldn’t go back to the village. Bloody place was deserted. No school, no children to play with ...”

“So we went to Bournemouth, where Mother worked as a seamstress.”

“Kate was never happy there,” Nanny Cole went on. “Only time she perked up was when she got Grayson’s letters. So, when she came to me with his crack-brained scheme, I thought, Bugger it, I’ll jolly them along. Anything to get Kate up and punching again.” Nanny Cole sighed and looked down at her cobalt-blue yarn. “Hated to see her in such a funk.”

“Mother was wonderful,” said Kate. “She drew all sorts of costumes and I sent the drawings on to Grayson. We wrote to each other three or four times a week. His plan didn’t sound preposterous to me.”

Nanny Cole snorted. “None of Grayson’s plans ever sounded preposterous to you, my girl.” She glanced at Crowley with a devilish grin. “Remember the two of ’em tunneling under the arbor, looking for pirate gold?”

“I do indeed, Nanny,” Crowley replied. “Quite a time we had, pulling them out. I believe it was Miss Kate who christened Lex Rex. Isn’t that right, Nanny?”

“Very true,” Nanny Cole replied. “Lex from Alexander —one of Grayson’s other names—and Rex ... Well, she wanted her duke to have a promotion, didn’t she?”

“I thought it sounded well together,” Kate explained, coloring. “At any rate,” she hurried on, “it seemed to me that the most important part of the plan was that it be carried out in secret.”

The duke nodded eagerly. “Quite right. If I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life as Lex Rex—and I most certainly did not—we would require the help of people whose loyalty and discretion would be absolute.”

Kate smiled. “Grayson had kept in touch with everyone, not just the staff but the remaining villagers, as well, those who’d refused to abandon Penford Harbor. We selected a core group and, with Mother’s help, began to visit them, one by one, to sound them out.”

“The response was quite astonishing,” said the duke. “Within the year, we had the entire staff working together to breathe life into Lex Rex. I knew that I wanted to do something with pop music, but I wasn’t sure what. Hallard’s the one who figured that out.”

“Mmmm?” Hallard peered absently at the duke.

“I was just telling Derek and Emma that you invented Lex Rex,” said the duke.

“Yes, yes.” Hallard blinked owlishly. “Just created a character, really.”

“Hallard,” the duke informed Emma, “is also known as Hal Arden.”

“The writer?” Emma gaped at the bespectacled old man. “Spy novels?”