Nancy Atherton - Aunt Dimity's Death

“All I hear is the wind in the trees.”

“The wind…” The wind of death had silenced the voices in the clearing, as it would one day silence all voices. I rubbed my eyes and tried to shake the cobwebs from my mind.

“RM—a soldier?” Bill mused. “It makes sense. There was a lot of dying being done in those days, and a lot of hearts were broken. It would explain why Dimity was so shaken when your mother met her. It might even explain why she never married. But why would she get rid of the photos? If she loved him, why would she try to erase his memory?”

I ran my fingers along a twisted root, still touched by a sorrow that was, and was not, my own. “Sometimes it hurts to remember.”

Bill let the words hang in the air for a moment. “It hurts worse to forget. Because you never really do, do you?”

“No,” I murmured, “I suppose you don’t.”

“Dimity didn’t. If we’re guessing right, she may have tried to forget, but…” He looked up at the heart on the tree. “RM wouldn’t leave her alone. She’s still hurting, still in pain over… something that requires forgiveness. I don’t understand why she would need to be forgiven for the death of someone she loved.”

“I do,” I said, in a voice so low that Bill had to lean forward to catch my words. “Sometimes you feel guilty after someone dies.”

“For what?”

“For… all sorts of things. Things you did and things you didn’t do.”

“Like suspecting a perfectly innocent man of playing ghost?” said Bill archly.

“Something like that.” I glanced at him, smiled briefly, then plucked a blade of grass and wound it around my finger. “My mother used to do that—say silly things to pull me out of a lousy mood.”

“Did she?”

“She used to tease me all the time, the way you do. I was pretty impossible with her, too.”

“I find that hard to believe,” said Bill.

“It’s true, though. She never said anything about it, but…” I shook my head. “I don’t think I grew up to be the daughter she had in mind.”

“Who do you think she had in mind?”

“Someone who wasn’t stupid enough to study rare books, for one thing.” I began to shred the blade of grass into tiny pieces. “Someone who could manage to keep a marriage together. Someone who wasn’t so damned pigheaded. But I’ve always been that way. That’s why…”

“That’s why what?” coaxed Bill.

“Nothing.” I tossed the bits of grass to the wind. “We’re supposed to be talking about Dimity.”

“We’ll come back to Dimity. Right now we have to talk about something else. That’s why what, Lori?”

“That’s why…” The wind had ceased, and not a leaf was stirring. It was as though the old tree were holding its breath, waiting for me to go on. “She asked me to come home, Bill. She pleaded with me to come home. But I was too proud, too stubborn, too set on proving… I don’t know what. And that’s why…that’s why I wasn’t there when…”

Bill put his arms around me and pulled me to his side. He held me quietly, caressing my hair, then murmured softly, so softly that I could scarcely hear his words, “Did your mother ask you to come home for her sake or for yours?” I stiffened, but he tightened his hold, waiting for the tension to ease from my body before going on. “You shouldn’t have stopped reading those letters when you did. You might have learned a thing or two.” His fingers feathered lightly down my cheek. “You inherited more than your mother’s mouth, you know. You have her chin, too, and it’s a very determined one. That’s how your mother described it, at any rate. I don’t recall her ever using the word ‘pigheaded’. ‘As strong-willed as I am’, were the words she used.”

I shook my head in protest, but Bill continued on, regardless.

“Do you think your mother joined the army because it was a good career move? Do you think she sat down and weighed the pros and cons? She didn’t, Lori. She saw the war as a grand, romantic adventure, and she saw the same romantic streak in you. Why else would you study something as impractical as old books? She didn’t think you were foolish, though. She would’ve supported anything you did, as long as you were following your heart. You know that, don’t you?

“As for your marriage—she understood that, too. She had doubts about it from the beginning, and she was proud of you for discovering your mistake. Yes, she wanted you to come home then, but it was because you seemed lost. She thought you needed her help. She never wanted yours.”

“Because she knew I was useless,” I said bitterly.

Bill’s fingers dug into my arm. “Stop it. You know that’s not true.”

“But—”

“Your mother, Lori Shepherd, was just as pigheaded as you are. She never asked anyone for help. That’s why she clammed up after your father’s death. It took Dimity a long time to knock some sense into her.”

“And did she?” I sat up, my heart racing. “Did she talk about it?”

“Yes, after Dimity did everything but send a brass band through the mail.” Bill pushed a stray curl from my forehead. “Yes, your mother finally came out with it, all of it, all of the pain and the loneliness she’d gone through, along with the joy she’d found in you. She told Dimity all about it, eventually. But she would have saved herself a lot of heartache if she’d spoken of it sooner.”

“I wish she’d told me about it,” I whispered.

“She should have. She should have explained what a nightmare it is to lose someone you love. She should have told you that it took her a long time and a lot of work to wake up from it.”

“Maybe she was trying to protect me,” I said loyally.

“I’m sure she was. But she ended up hurting you. Dimity warned her about it—I’ll show you the letter when we get back. She said you’d grow up thinking that your mother was the Woman of Steel, that you’d want to be just like her. Dimity said there’d be trouble when you found out you weren’t as tough as you thought you should be.”

“When my mother died…”

“You found out that you weren’t made of steel. You had no way of knowing that no one is made of steel. How could you? You had no one to tell you otherwise.”

“You had Dimity.”

“And your mother had Dimity.” Bill raised his eyes to the distant hills. “But who did Dimity have?”

I followed his gaze. Bill’s words had fallen like balm on my wounded spirit, but the thought of Dimity’s unnamed sorrow reawakened the sense of anguished longing I had felt upon seeing the heart. The clearing itself seemed to change when he spoke her name, as though something were missing, or out of place. The sunlight had become harsh and a cool breeze chilled me. The ground felt rough against my legs and when I searched the sky for the soaring hawks, I could not find them.

Bill reached for the bag and stood up, then stretched out a hand to pull me to my feet. “It’s time to go back to the cottage.”

* * *

I spent the rest of that day in the study, catching up on the correspondence. Bill spent it in the Jacuzzi.

19

I would have made a fortune if I’d had the foresight to sell tickets to Tea with the Pym Sisters. It was better than anything playing in the West End.

It helped a lot to have Mother Nature as set designer. It was another sunny day and when Emma showed up it seemed only natural to suggest tea in the solarium. With the aid of Dimity’s cookbook and my ever-growing self-confidence in the kitchen, I baked an array of seedcakes and meringues and strawberry tarts. While Bill set out Dimity’s best china and linen, Emma decked every nook with freshly picked flowers, even seeing to it that Reginald’s ears were adorned with a diminutive daisy chain. By the time she announced the arrival of my guests, the solarium looked like something out of an Edwardian novel.