Aunt Dimity Beats the Devil (Aunt Dimity Mystery) (10 page)

Nicole’s grateful smile wavered as she looked toward the bedside table. “Is that your family in the photograph?”

I glanced at the framed photograph with the same sense of detachment I’d felt earlier, but this time my indifference jarred me. As if to compensate, I launched into a gushing maternal monologue that would have brought a strong man to his knees.

Nicole was made of sterner stuff. She willingly fetched more photos from my shoulder bag, oohed and aahed in all of the right places, and did not once allow her eyes to glaze with boredom as I yammered on about first steps and baby teeth. When I’d finally wound down, she returned the photos to my bag and sat once more at the foot of the bed.

“Your husband sounds almost too good to be true,” she said.

“Bill’s the best.” I touched a finger to my temple as a dull throb announced the approach of another headache.

As I massaged my brow, Nicole fell into a pensive silence. I wondered if she was comparing my equal partnership with Bill to her oddly subservient role in her own marriage. I was searching for a tactful way to explain the difference between a wife and a doormat when the conversation took an unexpected turn.

“How well do you know Adam Chase?” she asked.

I shrugged nonchalantly, though I could feel heat rising in my face. It wasn’t hard to guess what had inspired Nicole’s inquiry. She was no doubt wondering why a happily married woman would allow her hand to be held so tenderly by a man who was not her husband. I had no ready answer, so I went on the offensive.

“I hardly know him at all,” I said. “But I hope to get to know him better. He saved my life.”

“Has it occurred to you,” Nicole said slowly, “that he also might have put your life in danger?”

“Excuse me?” I said, hoping I’d misunderstood.

“You heard what he said to Captain Manning.” Nicole twisted her fingers in her lap, as though abashed by her own boldness. “Why would the captain investigate Mr. Chase if he didn’t think—”

“Are you telling me that Guy Manning suspects
Adam
of leaving the gate open?” I frowned angrily. “Is that what you two gossiped about over tea this afternoon?”

“N-no,” Nicole stammered. “Captain Manning said nothing to me about Mr. Chase. I just thought—”

“I beg to differ.” I leaned toward her. “If you’d
thought,
you’d have realized that Guy’s job involves running background checks on all sorts of people. He’s head of security, remember? He’s probably got files on you and Jared.”

Nicole smiled placatingly. “His file on me must be a tiny one. I can’t think of a less rewarding subject.”

My anger simmered for a moment longer, then went off the boil. Nicole was, as Adam had observed, very young. She had no idea how much trouble her absurd speculations could cause.

“I didn’t mean to snap at you,” I muttered. “The truth is, I’ve got a rotten headache.”

“You’re probably peckish. I’ll have Mrs. Hatch bring something up.” Nicole slid off of the bed, spoke briefly on the telephone, then returned to her perch. “Uncle Dickie’s always headachy when he’s hungry.”

“Did you live with Uncle Dickie before your marriage?” I asked, glad to steer the talk away from Adam.

“Since my parents died, I’ve never lived anywhere else,” she replied. “I was a sickly child, so boarding school was out of the question. I had tutors, of course, but virtually no contact with other children. When it came time to go to university, I simply couldn’t face it. So I stayed at home with Uncle Dickie.”

As I listened to her story, I began to understand what had drawn Jared to Nicole. Few women nowadays could afford to lead such a sheltered life, and even fewer chose to do so. Nicole’s frailty and unworldliness would be irresistible to a man with such Victorian sensibilities.

“How did you meet your husband?” I asked.

Nicole motioned toward the bedside table. “Major Ted brought us together. Uncle Dickie asked me to have the major appraised by an antiques dealer in Newcastle. Jared was there, with an Edwardian rocking horse. I complimented him on his horse, he admired my teddy, and two weeks later we were engaged.”

“A whirlwind courtship,” I commented.

“Yes,” she said. “Isn’t it romantic?”

“Impetuous” was the word I would have chosen, but since my own courtship had been fairly nontraditional, I wasn’t really qualified to judge.

“The engagement must have come as quite a shock to your uncle,” I said.

“He wasn’t happy about it,” Nicole acknowledged. “He’s always been overly protective of me. But I’d just come of age, so he couldn’t stop me, and in the end, he behaved handsomely. Wyrdhurst means as much to my husband as Major Ted means to me.”

She looked at the bear longingly, but I pretended not to
notice. I didn’t want her to reclaim my new companion until I’d had a chance to introduce him to Adam.

There was a tap at the door, and Nicole called for Mrs. Hatch to come in. The housekeeper entered, carrying an exquisite marquetry bed tray that held a pitcher, a matching pair of rose-patterned cups and saucers, and a footed pastry dish piled high with delicate, pale-brown cookies. She handed the bed tray to Nicole, added coals to the fire, and gathered up the tray bearing my empty soup bowl before leaving.

“Biscuits and a milky drink,” said Nicole. “Uncle Dickie says it’s just the thing to ease his aching head.”

She placed the tray before me, propped on its little legs. While she filled the cups with a mixture of warm milk and honey, I reached for one of the cookies. It was a pretty thing, as dainty as a snowflake and faintly lustrous, as if each golden-brown whorl had been burnished.

“It looks like lace,” I marveled, holding the delicate confection up to the light.

Nicole beamed. “That’s how they got their name. The recipe’s been in the family forever. We call them Claire’s Lace.”

“Claire’s Lace?” The fragile cookie snapped between my fingers. “That’s extraordinary. I found a book in the library this afternoon inscribed to a girl named Claire. I’ve been meaning to ask you about her.”

“It must have belonged to Great-aunt Claire,” Nicole said. “She was Josiah’s only daughter, the child of his old age. His sons were grown by the time she was born.”

“Are there any more? Books of Claire’s,” I clarified, “not cookies.”

“Possibly,” said Nicole. “I believe I saw some books in the east tower.”

“Those are hers,” I said.

Nicole’s eyebrows arched. “You seem very certain for someone who’s yet not seen them.”

I was certain, though I wasn’t sure why. “Librarian’s instinct,” I said. “Josiah’s books are in the library, so Claire’s must be somewhere else. May I take a look at them?”

“I’ll ask Hatch to bring them down tomorrow. If,” she added sternly, “Dr. MacEwan declares you fit for duty.”

The cookie was delicious—crisp and chewy and mouthwateringly sweet. I washed down my first bite with a drink of warm milk, then asked Nicole to tell me more about her great-aunt.

“There’s not much to tell.” She sipped from her cup. “My great-aunt died young, in the influenza epidemic that killed so many after the Great War.”

I sighed, touched by a faint ripple of sadness. Until Nicole had spoken, Claire had been a fairylike figure, roaming the sunny moors with Edward by her side. It was too soon to contemplate her death.

“It must have broken Josiah’s heart to lose her.” I felt a wisp of sympathy for the tight-lipped patriarch. “Maybe that’s why he closed Wyrdhurst and buried himself in his work. Is Claire with him in the mausoleum?”

“I imagine so,” said Nicole. “I suppose we’ll find out once we clear away the ivy. Jared has great plans for the garden.…”

Nicole moved from Claire’s death to Jared’s garden plans without missing a beat, but my mind lagged behind. While Nicole talked about herbaceous borders and flowering
shrubs, I envisioned young Claire curled on the library sofa, laughing delightedly over Aubrey Shuttleworth’s beguiling rhymes.

When my yawns became ungovernable, Nicole moved the marquetry tray to the dressing table, smoothed the bedclothes, and, at my request, closed the window Dr. MacEwan had opened. Fresh air was one thing, I reasoned, but a roomful of dank fog was quite another.

Nicole lingered at the window, gazing past the bars into the darkness beyond. “It’s still raining,” she said. She sighed wanly. “You must think Northumberland has the dreariest climate in the world.”

Adam seemed to whisper in my ear. “If you’re with the right person,” I said, smiling, “I don’t think the weather matters.”

“And if you’re with the wrong person?” she said, so softly and so sadly that I thought her close to tears. She picked up the tray, turned off the lights, and left without another word.

I dreamt of the accident that night, but it wasn’t the nightmare Dr. MacEwan had predicted.

The dream was brief but vivid. I was at the wheel of the Rover when the road dissolved, but instead of tumbling down the hillside, the car took flight, soaring over the moors like a magic carpet.

Then Adam and I were together, inside a circle of stones that jutted like broken teeth from the tussocky ground. His palm was cupping the nape of my neck and I was pulling him closer.

“I’ll come back to you,” he whispered, and the last thing
I remembered was the pressure of his hand as his mouth closed over mine.

I
foiled Dr. MacEwan’s dire predictions by feeling great the next morning. By the time he stopped in to check up on me, I’d showered, dressed, and gone down to breakfast in the dining room with Nicole.

I was a bit surprised to pass a pair of burly men going up the main staircase as I was coming down. When I asked Nicole about them, she said they’d come up from the village to help Hatch bring Claire’s books down from the east tower.

“Jared wouldn’t approve,” she said, buttering her toast with more force than was strictly necessary. “But there are some things Hatch simply can’t do on his own.”

Dr. MacEwan found me polishing off the last slice of blood pudding and marched me straight up to my room for a quick examination. He seemed almost put out by the rude vigor of my vital signs.

“I won’t insist on you keeping to your bed,” he grumbled, “but I don’t want you to exert yourself unduly. You may be in fine fettle now, but chances are you’ll be flat as a pancake by noon.”

Nicole was adamant that I follow Dr. MacEwan’s orders.

“There’ll be no climbing up and down the rolling steps today,” she declared, as we entered the library.

I looked pointedly at the tall shelves. “How would you suggest I do my job? Stilts?”

“I’ve made other arrangements,” she said, with a pert nod. For someone who’d ended the evening close to tears, she seemed remarkably chipper. I assumed that nothing had gone bump in the night.

I also assumed that she would not be assisting me. She was much too nicely dressed to grub about in a filthy library. She wore a fawn skirt of the finest wool with an apricot-colored twinset, and her hair was arranged in a loose chignon that framed her face with spilling tendrils. She looked so pretty that I wished I’d taken more pains over my own attire. My workaday sweatshirt and jeans were practical but hardly fetching, and my sneakers couldn’t hold a candle to the doeskin shoes adorning Nicole’s dainty feet.

“Come with me,” she said, and led me to a sturdy wooden armchair facing the wall of windows across a rectangular oak table. On the table, between a pair of green-shaded reading lamps, lay an oversized gray ledger and a horn-handled magnifying glass. “Today,” she informed me, “you can examine the catalogue.”

“Stan never mentioned a catalogue,” I said.

“Great-grandfather had it compiled,” Nicole informed me. “It’s handwritten, I’m afraid, but I’m sure you’ll find lots of useful information in it.”

The thought of deciphering handwritten descriptions of books I didn’t even want to look at held little appeal. I caught sight of
Shuttleworth’s Birds
on the end table where Adam had left it, and asked Nicole about the books in the east tower.

“Hatch will be down in a—” She cocked an ear toward the study doors. “Here he is now.”

I turned to watch as the handyman trundled a coffin-sized packing crate into the room on a flatbed cart. The crate’s lid had already been removed, and when Nicole directed Hatch to leave the unwieldy box next to my chair, I saw it once that it was packed tight with books.

“That’s it,” Hatch announced. “No other books up there.”

I thanked him heartily and asked him to thank the two burly villagers as well.

“It really wasn’t too much trouble,” Nicole assured me, when the handyman had left. “Uncle Dickie’s builders left a block and tackle on the roof, to aid in future repairs. The men from the village helped Hatch lower the crate to the ground, and he took it from there on the cart.” She surveyed my work space with a satisfied air, then excused herself, saying that she had to help Mrs. Hatch in the kitchen.

Nicole’s mention of kitchen duty puzzled me. She wasn’t dressed for it, and from what she’d told me, Mrs. Hatch wouldn’t welcome her assistance. Then I remembered the luncheon invitation she’d extended to Captain Manning, and all became clear.