Aunt Dimity and the Buried Treasure (6 page)

“You were saying?” he said after Bess settled down.

“I was up in the attic, looking for the replacement blender,” I told him, “when I thought I saw some mice hiding behind Aunt Dimity's old trunk.”

Bill's sly grin made me happier than ever that I hadn't fled the attic, screaming for help, like a dim-witted damsel in distress.

“Yes,” I said stoically, in response to his implied question, “I did have a brief moment of panic, but no, I didn't give in to it. I stood my ground, took a second look, and found . . .
this
.”

I pulled the garnet bracelet from my pocket and held it out for Bill to see. He studied it in silence, then gave a low whistle.

“Beautiful,” he said. “Was it Dimity's?”

My husband was one of the scant handful of people who were in on the secret of Aunt Dimity and the blue journal. Unlike me, he'd had the privilege of meeting Dimity Westwood before her death. He'd been a young boy at the time, and the meeting had been relatively brief, but he'd never forgotten it.

“I think so,” I replied hesitantly, lowering my hand. “Well, it must be hers, right? I've never owned anything like it, and I doubt that a stranger would sneak into our attic and drop it behind Dimity's old trunk just for the heck of it.” I frowned at the bracelet for a moment, then returned it to my pocket. “It must belong to Aunt Dimity.”

“There's a fairly reliable way to find out,” said Bill. “Ask her.”

“I did,” I said. “I came down from the attic and went straight to the study to tell her about the bracelet, but when I mentioned it, she cut our conversation short and asked me to come back later, after she'd had time to compose herself. It really upset her, Bill.”

“And upsetting her, upset you,” he said gently. “That explains the gravy.”

“I'm lucky I didn't pour it in my lap,” I admitted.

“Do you think Bobby MacLaren gave the bracelet to her?” Bill asked shrewdly. “Do you think it touched a nerve?”

“I do,” I said. “I wish I'd thought of Bobby sooner. If I had, I would have revealed the bracelet gradually instead of springing it on her. I feel as if I ripped open an old wound.”

“If you did, I'm sure Dimity will forgive you,” said Bill. “Cheer up, Lori. It's not as if she'll never speak to you again. She asked you to come back later, didn't she?”

“Yes,” I said, “but I don't want to upset her again.”

“She's had time to compose herself,” Bill pointed out. “Go ahead. I'll look after Bess.” He gazed down at his little princess and heaved a contented sigh. “I've looked forward to looking after her all day.”

T
he rainstorm had stopped just before sunset. The study was dark and silent. I lit the mantel lamps, then knelt to light a fire in the hearth. The somber gleam in Reginald's black button eyes seemed to soften in the firelight. I took it as a sign of encouragement, reached for the blue journal, and carried the slender volume with me to the armchair I'd occupied earlier.

I stared into the fire, wondering what would happen when I opened the journal. Would its blank pages remain blank? Would they be covered with exclamation points and angry words written in BIG LETTERS? Would Aunt Dimity be cold and distant? Would she pretend that nothing had happened? I didn't know what to expect.

I was so worried about saying the wrong thing that my voice trembled slightly as I opened the journal and said, “Dimity?”

My entire body relaxed when her handwriting appeared, flowing smoothly across the blank page without a moment's hesitation.

Please forgive me, my dear.

“You're asking me to forgive you?” I said in surprise. “Shouldn't it be the other way around?”

No, it shouldn't. It was thoughtless of me to leave you hanging, without a word of explanation. You must have felt as though you'd done something to offend me.

“I thought I'd reopened an old wound,” I said cautiously.

You did reopen an old wound, Lori, but it isn't the wound you're thinking
of. You helped me come to terms with Bobby MacLaren's death. When I remember him now, I'm at peace.

“Then why did you shut down when I told you about the bracelet?” I asked.

The bracelet you found in the attic wasn't given to me by Bobby but by someone else.

I leaned forward, hardly believing what I was reading.

“Someone else?” I said. “I didn't know there'd been someone other than Bobby.”

How could you? I've never told you about him. I haven't thought of him in years, but the garnet bracelet brought it all back—every word, every look, every smile. It's somewhat disorienting to have distant memories rekindled unexpectedly. I had to regain my balance before I could speak with you again.

“I didn't mean to upset you,” I said earnestly. “And if you'd rather not talk about . . .
him
 . . . I'll understand.”

Don't be absurd, Lori. You're a Finch-trained snoop. If I dangled a tantalizing hint in front of you, then refused to talk about it, you wouldn't understand. You'd go stark, staring mad.

“I probably would,” I acknowledged. “But I'd rather go mad than cause you the smallest amount of pain.”

You can ease my pain by listening.

“I'm all ears,” I said readily.

It's rather a long story.

“The boys are in bed, and Bess is with Bill.” I leaned back in the chair and stretched my legs out on the ottoman. “I have all night.”

The handwriting paused, as though Aunt Dimity were marshaling her thoughts, then continued to unfurl across the page in graceful lines of royal-blue ink.

I was seventeen when England declared war on Germany. My parents
thought I was too young to enlist, but I was determined to do my duty. I joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service as a volunteer, not as a conscript. Though university had been beyond my reach, I'd taken a secretarial course in Upper Deeping. My qualifications led to my assignment as an extremely junior clerical worker in the War Office. As your mother used to say, “We also serve who only type and file.”

My mother had said the same thing to me, though in the past tense, when describing her contributions to the war effort. To see the familiar phrase appear in Aunt Dimity's familiar handwriting reminded me of how close the two had been.

Two other ATS recruits and I were billeted in a flat in Soho. A single gas ring served as our cooker. We had no icebox, no hot water, and barely enough room to dress, but we spent so much time at the War Office or huddled in air raid shelters that none of it really mattered. We were willing to live without home comforts because we knew we were doing something of value.

Aunt Dimity had never before spoken so fluently of her life in wartime London. I was keen to hear more.

“What was it like,” I asked, “living in London during the Blitz?”

It should have frightened us out of our wits, but it didn't. We weren't naïve. We walked to work through streets piled high with debris. The whole city reeked of charred wood and burning rubber, and there was so much ash and dust floating about, it was like a fog. We saw dead bodies almost every day—some lying in the open, others discreetly draped, all awaiting transport to the overcrowded morgues—but though they saddened us, they didn't frighten us. We learned very quickly to accept death and destruction as the price of war. I suppose we became fatalistic. I remember your mother saying once, “If a bomb has my name on it, there's nothing I can do to stop it, so why worry?” It made all the sense in the world to me.

“Even after you lost Bobby?” I asked carefully.

I lived under a black cloud after I lost Bobby, but your mother's friendship
brought me into the light again. She made me want to work harder than ever to end the war. And it did end, eventually, though we felt its aftereffects for many years. The war nearly bankrupted Great Britain. Cities as well as lives had to be rebuilt at a time when basic resources were scarce. There was a housing shortage, a petrol shortage, a coal shortage, a clothing shortage, every kind of shortage you can imagine. When people saw a queue, they joined it on the off chance that it would lead to something they needed. Food rationing didn't come to a complete end in Britain until 1954—nearly ten years after peace was declared.

“Ten years?” I exclaimed. “I had no idea.”

It's not something that's taught at school. History books describe the euphoria of VE Day and VJ Day—the street parties, the bonfires, the parades—but they seldom mention what came after. We were utterly exhausted, body and soul, yet we had to find the strength to repair a shattered world. It was as if we'd climbed a mountain, only to find ourselves on a false summit, with the highest peak still beyond our reach. When the giddiness wore off, many of us were depressed, disillusioned, and desperately frustrated.

A log fell on the fire, sending up a shower of sparks, and the handwriting paused again. I neither knew nor cared whether Aunt Dimity had forgotten about the garnet bracelet. I had no intention of interrupting her.

My flatmates went home after the war ended, as did your mother. I chose to remain in London, but I had to give up the Soho flat when I was demobbed. Fortunately, I had another friend, a nurse who'd worked at Great Ormond Street Hospital during the war, when it was used as a casualty clearing station. She'd taken a year's leave of absence to study nursing in America, and she allowed me to use her flat in Bloomsbury while she was away. I moved from Soho to number sixteen Northington Street and wondered what to do next.

“Did you know about Bobby's will by then?” I asked. “Did you know that he'd named you as his sole heir?”

Oh, yes. His brother had carried out his wishes and transferred the bequest to me. I was a comparatively wealthy woman when I moved into my friend's flat, but I didn't know what to do with my wealth. I'd grown up in a modest home in a small village. I'd had a good, basic education, but it hadn't taught me how to deal with large sums of money.

“Sounds familiar,” I said dryly. “I was living from paycheck to paycheck when I found out that I was your sole heir. It took a bit of getting used to.”

You had Bill and his father to guide you, Lori. I had no one.

“You had your own good sense,” I said.

You're very kind, Lori, and you may even be right. I certainly had no desire to spend my inheritance on fripperies. It would have been shameful to buy hats and shoes and dresses for myself when so many people were going without. I wanted to use Bobby's bequest in a way that would honor his sacrifice. He'd given his life for his country. He'd set an example of selflessness I wished to emulate.

I said nothing, but I already knew what Aunt Dimity had done with Bobby's bequest. She'd used it to create the Westwood Trust, a charitable organization that was still going strong more than half a century after its founding. Though I was the trust's titular head, I knew little about its history. I'd never paused to ask myself, or Aunt Dimity, how a young woman from a small village had managed to establish such an enduring institution. I settled more deeply into my chair and gazed at the blue journal with renewed fascination. I suspected that a hitherto untold story was about to unfold before my eyes: the story behind the founding of the Westwood Trust.

A statue wouldn't do, nor would a marble slab inscribed with praise for Bobby's valor. He would have hated the attention—and the pigeons! I turned many ideas over in my mind, and I began to take long walks through London,
searching for inspiration. My walks always ended at the Rose Café on St. Megwen's Lane, a tiny byway just around the corner from my friend's flat. The café wasn't fancy—no place was, in those days—but it was popular among the locals because its proprietor, Mr. Hanover, overcame the rigors of rationing and served a decent cup of tea. That's where I met Badger.

“Badger?” I said. I squinted at the page to make sure I'd read the word correctly.

That's how he introduced himself to me after I accepted his invitation to take a seat at his table. The café was crammed with customers when I arrived. If it hadn't been for Badger's gallantry, I would have had to drink my tea standing up, an unpleasant proposition for a woman who'd spent the day walking.

“Why did he call himself Badger?” I asked. “It wasn't his given name, was it?”

He explained that “Badger” was a nickname given to him by his father when he was a young boy.

“Was he bad tempered?” I inquired. “Badgers can be pretty feisty.”

Badger wasn't at all feisty. He was thoroughly good-natured, and he had a wonderful sense of humor. A bad-tempered man wouldn't have offered me a seat at his table.

“It'd be a good nickname for a church sexton,” I said, thinking of Mr. Barlow and the graves he'd dug in St. George's churchyard. “Badgers do a lot of digging.”

I have no idea what Badger's profession was. He never revealed his given name, either. I knew him only as Badger, the nice young man I met from time to time at my neighborhood café.

“Did he look like a badger?” I asked interestedly. “Did he have white streaks in his hair and a long, pointy nose?”

He bore not the slightest resemblance to a badger, Lori. He had a beard
and a mustache and a headful of dark, tousled curls—like yours, only darker. He had large, lovely dark eyes, and his nose was no longer or pointier than Bill's.

“How old was he?” I asked, with a villager's thirst for details.

I'm not sure, but he couldn't have been much older than I—in his late twenties or early thirties. His clothes were dated and a bit threadbare—patched elbows on his tweed jacket and pleats in his trousers—as if he'd purchased them from a secondhand shop or inherited them from an elderly relation. I assumed he was a gardener.

“Badger would work as a nickname for a gardener,” I said. “Gardeners do even more digging than church sextons.”

He certainly looked as though he worked outdoors. He was fit and trim and very brown, and he had a gardener's strong, rough hands. I doubted that he was an ordinary jobbing gardener, though. He had the accent and the vocabulary of a well-educated young man.

I gave a small snort of exasperation.

“Guesswork,” I said. “Speculation. It's not your style, Dimity. Forgive me, but I'm not the only Finch-trained snoop here. I find it hard to believe that you didn't have Badger's life story down pat within five minutes of introducing yourself to him.”

But I didn't introduce myself to him. Not properly. I would have, but Badger stopped me.

“Why?” I asked.

He said that, once we started down the road of conventional conversation, there would be no turning back. We'd inevitably end up rehashing the war years, and he, for one, had no desire to go through them again. We could, he proposed, discuss the war with everyone else, everywhere else, but while we were together, in the café, we would put it out of our minds, along with our jobs, our families, our backgrounds, and every other predictable topic of conversation. He would be Badger, and I would be . . . well, I had no nickname, so I
had to be Dimity, but we would check our surnames at the door, dismiss formality, and chat freely about whatever took our fancy.

“And you went along with it?” I asked.

I did. I found his suggestion delightfully liberating. Until that moment, I hadn't realized how completely the war had dominated every conversation I'd had for the past five years. It was a relief to put it aside and make room for other things.

“Such as?” I prompted.

Art, music, literature, architecture—the first hour I spent with Badger was one of the most enjoyable I've ever spent with anyone, and I'm happy to report that it wasn't the last. We shared a table at the café two or three times a week for the next three months.

“You spent three months talking to a stranger about art, music, literature, and architecture?” I said doubtfully.

Among many other things. My conversations with Badger inspired me to visit art galleries and museums, to attend plays and concerts, to broaden my cultural horizons. The war had shown me man's capacity for destruction. Badger reminded me of man's capacity to create. When I studied a painting or listened to a symphony or stood beneath St. Paul's magnificent dome, I felt a renewed sense of hope for the future. Though much had been destroyed, much remained, and much would be restored. Civilization would endure.