Aunt Dimity and the Village Witch Read online

  Aunt Dimity and the

  Village Witch

  Also by Nancy Atherton

  Aunt Dimity’s Death

  Aunt Dimity and the Duke

  Aunt Dimity’s Good Deed

  Aunt Dimity Digs In

  Aunt Dimity’s Christmas

  Aunt Dimity Beats the Devil

  Aunt Dimity: Detective

  Aunt Dimity Takes a Holiday

  Aunt Dimity: Snowbound

  Aunt Dimity and the Next of Kin

  Aunt Dimity and the Deep Blue Sea

  Aunt Dimity Goes West

  Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter

  Aunt Dimity Slays the Dragon

  Aunt Dimity Down Under

  Aunt Dimity and the Family Tree

  Aunt Dimity and the

  Village Witch

  NANCY ATHERTON

  VIKING

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Nancy T. Atherton, 2012

  All rights reserved

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Atherton, Nancy.

  Aunt Dimity and the village witch / Nancy Atherton.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-56179-9

  1. Dimity, Aunt (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—England—Cotswold Hills—Fiction. 3. Genealogy—Fiction. 4. Cotswold Hills (England)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3551.T426A934425 2012

  813′.54—dc23

  2011047393

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Perpetua

  Designed by Alissa Amell

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  For

  R. Patrick Atherton,

  a good brother

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Epilogue

  One

  The small village of Finch nestled sleepily in a bend of the Little Deeping River, a minor tributary that wound its way through the patchwork fields and rolling hills of the Cotswolds, a rural region in England’s West Midlands.

  Finch was in no way remarkable. Nothing of historical importance had happened there and no one born there had achieved the slightest degree of fame. Tour buses bypassed it, day-trippers ignored it, and scholars never mentioned it. The only people who cared about Finch were the people who lived there, and they thought it the most splendid place on earth.

  A humpbacked stone bridge of medieval origin crossed the river at one end of the village and St. George’s Church stood at the other, planted piously in the center of a walled churchyard filled with modest tombs, sorrowing angels, and carved headstones that had settled comfortably over the centuries into a variety of picturesque postures.

  A village green stretched between the bridge and the church. The irregular oval of tufted grass was encircled by a cobbled lane lined with golden-hued stone cottages and small business establishments, all of which overlooked the green. The pub, the general store, and the greengrocer’s shop sat with their backs to a rising landscape of dark woods and sheep-dotted pastures, while the tearoom, the vicarage, and the old village school, which had for many years served as the village hall, backed upon the willow-draped reaches of the Little Deeping. Similarly, each private home faced inward, toward the green.

  Some might consider such an arrangement a shameful waste of good scenery, but the villagers would beg to disagree. They were perfectly content with the views from their front windows because, while they enjoyed watching lambs gambol as much as the next man, they preferred to watch each other. Every glance through a lace-curtained pane afforded them an opportunity to observe the ever-changing, utterly absorbing drama of village life—and to report on the details later. The river’s murmur was indisputably melodious, but as far as Finch’s residents were concerned, it couldn’t hold a candle to the deeply satisfying hum of gossip.

  When Sally Pyne opened the tearoom’s front door first thing in the morning to admit her fiancé and assistant manager, Henry Cook, she could be sure that many, if not all, of her neighbors would be peering breathlessly through their curtains, awaiting a public display of affection that would be described and discussed relentlessly for the rest of the day. If the local vicar paid a call on Opal Taylor, he would inadvertently but unavoidably trigger speculations about Opal’s fragile health, her troubled soul, and/or the type of cake she would donate to the next church-sponsored bake sale. Chocolate gateau? Deathbed confession? It was all grist for Finch’s rumor mill.

  Finch’s merry band of busybodies could also be relied upon to serve a useful purpose from time to time. If a child fell and scraped his knees, he would be nursed back to health by a flock of sympathetic grown-ups who would shower him with disinfectant, bandages, and as many cookies as he could hold in both hands. If a careless teenager sullied the village green with a discarded gum wrapper or a crushed soda can, eyewitness accounts of his misdeed would be telephoned directly to his parents, who would order him to retrieve the litter or risk forfeiting his car keys, his cell phone, and his dinner.

  Perhaps the most useful task performed by Finch’s keen-eyed residents was to render locked doors unnecessary. The villagers knew who belonged where and were only too happy to report suspicious activities to each other, to the police, and to anyone else who would listen. Privacy might be a rare commodity in Finch, but so, t
oo, was crime.

  For better and for worse, I avoided round-the-clock surveillance by living two miles south of Finch with my husband, Bill, and our sons, Will and Rob, a lively pair of identical twins who closely resembled their dark-eyed, dark-haired, and fractionally less lively father. Will and Rob were seven years old, unnervingly observant, and hopelessly horse crazy. They would gladly have slept in the stables with their gray ponies, Thunder and Storm, if their flint-hearted parents hadn’t insisted on tucking them up in their own beds at night.

  The other member of our family was Stanley, a sleek black cat with a long, curling tail and dandelion-yellow eyes. Stanley adored Bill and regarded the rest of us as second-best sources of food and affection. Bill, for his part, professed complete indifference to Stanley, without seeming to notice that his laptop computer invariably gave way to his laptop cat.

  Although we all were American citizens—except for Stanley, who was English by birth and breeding—my husband and I had lived in England for nearly a decade and our sons had never lived anywhere else. Bill ran the international branch of his family’s venerable Boston law firm from a high-tech office on Finch’s village green, Will and Rob attended primary school in the nearby market town of Upper Deeping, and I scrambled to keep up with the demanding roles of wife, mother, neighbor, friend, community volunteer, gossipmonger-in-training, and head of the Westwood Trust, a philanthropic organization that funded worthy causes.

  We lived in a honey-colored stone cottage with roses round the front door, a lichen-dappled slate roof, and a full complement of modern amenities. Our back garden opened onto a wildflower meadow that sloped down to a sparkling brook and we were sheltered from winter gales by a phalanx of tall hawthorne hedges and an oak forest carpeted with bluebells. Bill and I could think of no finer place to raise our children, and when Bill’s widowed father, William Arthur Willis, Sr., retired from the family firm and made a home for himself in nearby Fairworth House, our happiness was complete.

  Oddly enough, my well-dressed, well-spoken, and extremely well-heeled father-in-law drew the attention and, in many cases, the adulation of Finch’s coterie of ever-hopeful widows and spinsters. Bill had dubbed the most determined of these “Father’s Handmaidens” because of their efforts to win Willis, Sr.’s, heart by catering to his every whim.

  It was generally acknowledged that the Handmaidens would do anything, up to and including committing ruthless acts of social sabotage, to get ahead in the race to become the next Mrs. Willis. Had my father-in-law lived in the village, he would have been besieged by genteel ladies offering to mend his clothes, polish his silver, sweep his floors, clean his windows, cook his meals, and reveal to him the awful truth about their rivals.

  Fortunately, Willis, Sr., did not live in Finch. The entrance to his property could be seen from the humpbacked bridge, but his house sat at the end of a private drive, hidden from prying eyes by a dense shelterbelt of trees. A pair of tall, wrought-iron gates helped to keep the Handmaidens at bay, but Fairworth’s main line of defense was human. Declan Donovan patrolled the grounds while carrying out his dual role of gardener-cum-handyman, and nothing short of an armed attack force could get past his wife, Deirdre, a tactful but resolute young woman who served as Willis, Sr.’s, housekeeper. My father-in-law was an affable gentleman who enjoyed his neighbors’ company, but he recognized the value of good fences.

  Mrs. Amelia Thistle, by contrast, had nowhere to hide. Finch’s newest resident had elected to live in Pussywillows, the cottage next door to the tearoom, in full view of the entire village. Early reports—gleaned from her delightfully indiscreet real estate agent—pegged her as a mild-mannered, middle-aged widow of independent means who intended to make Pussywillows her principal residence. The previous owner, a Londoner who’d used the cottage for weekend getaways, hadn’t made the slightest effort to blend into the community, but it was hoped that Mrs. Thistle, as a year-round resident, would.

  Common courtesy obliged the villagers to allow their new neighbor a decent interval of peace and quiet after she took possession of her property, but eventually they would descend on her with sign-up sheets for whist drives, flower shows, bring-and-buy sales, and a host of other village activities that were the breath of life to Finch. Would Mrs. Thistle join in the fun or would she live as a stranger among us? Only time would tell.

  Though none of us would admit it, most of us believed that moving day would provide useful clues to Mrs. Thistle’s character. A close inspection of her personal belongings as they were transferred from moving truck to cottage was bound to reveal a great deal about her, and the obvious place from which to conduct such an inspection was Sally Pyne’s strategically located tearoom.

  As luck would have it, I happened to be in Finch on the big day. After purchasing a few staples at Taxman’s Emporium—Finch’s well-stocked general store—and stowing them in my Range Rover, I nipped smartly across the green and darted into the tearoom, narrowly avoiding a collision with Henry Cook, who’d just turned up for work. I waved off Henry’s gallant apologies, staked my claim to a table near the front windows, and ordered a stack of Sally’s delectable apple fritters to go along with a large pot of Lapsang souchong tea. The fritters hadn’t cooled before every available table had been taken.

  I shared mine with Charles Bellingham and Grant Tavistock, a pair of middle-aged men who ran an art appraisal and restoration business from the cozy confines of their home, Crabtree Cottage. The Handmaidens, more commonly known as Millicent Scroggins, Opal Taylor, Elspeth Binney, and Selena Buxton, hogged four separate tables, but Mrs. Sciaparelli and Annie Hodge, a mother and daughter who lived on outlying farms, shared one, as did Mr. Barlow, a retired mechanic, and George Wetherhead, the most bashful man in the village. Christine Peacock had left her husband Dick to run their pub single-handedly in order to snag the last remaining table. She sat with a self-satisfied smirk on her face, savoring her triumph as well as her tea.

  Those denied a prime vantage point inside Sally’s tearoom stationed themselves before crates of freshly harvested apples, plums, and pears at the greengrocer’s shop or surveyed the Emporium’s window displays or paused to chat with whomever they met while strolling sedately on the green.

  It was a good day to be out and about. Autumn leaves swirled in a crisp breeze and curls of blue smoke rose from garden bonfires, reminding all and sundry that October had arrived, but the sun shone brightly and the blue sky held no threat of rain. It seemed unlikely that a sudden downpour would dampen Mrs. Thistle’s spirits or her belongings.

  In the tearoom, the occasional clink of cup on saucer could scarcely be heard above the lively flow of conversation. Since no one knew for certain when the newcomer would arrive, it was imperative to make each pot of tea last as long as possible.

  Grant Tavistock smiled to himself as he surveyed his neighbors over the rim of his willow-patterned teacup. He was a well-dressed, good-looking man, short and lean, with a full head of neatly combed salt-and-pepper hair.

  “Tell me, Lori,” he said. “Did Charles and I attract the same amount of attention when we moved to Finch?”

  “Of course,” I said. “But, in your case, the green was less crowded. Almost everyone was driven indoors by the nasty weather.”

  “It was atrocious,” Charles Bellingham agreed. Tall, bald, and portly, Charles could usually be found in bed at ten o’clock in the morning, but he’d abandoned the habits of a lifetime in order to witness Mrs. Thistle’s arrival. “Wind, rain, sleet—I’ve never been more miserable in my life.”

  “The movers took the brunt of it,” Grant reminded him. “As I recall, you spent most of the day in the kitchen, huddled over the Aga.”

  As the Aga cooker was a cast-iron range that emitted a constant supply of radiant heat, Charles’s stratagem seemed perfectly reasonable to me, though I might have thought differently had I wanted his help to unload a moving truck.

  “It was a beast of a day for all concerned,” Charles declared. He gazed envious
ly at the clear sky. “It looks as though Mrs. Thistle will be more fortunate.”

  “And her furniture less wet,” said Grant.

  “I have a confession to make,” Charles said suddenly. “The Thistle woman could stand three feet away from me and I wouldn’t know who she was. It pains me to say it, Lori, but Grant and I have been in London every time she’s come to Finch. We’ve never set eyes on her.”

  “I have,” I said smugly. I patted the table with my hand. “I was sitting right here when she and the decorators came to spruce up the cottage last week.”

  “Description, please,” said Charles, brightening.

  “She drives a silver-gray Fiat sedan,” I said.

  “Dull,” murmured Grant.

  “I don’t care about her car,” Charles protested. “I want to know what the woman looks like.”

  “I’d place her in her late fifties, maybe her early sixties,” I said. “She’s short—about my height—and plump. Not fat, not skinny, just nicely rounded. Gray hair, blue eyes, no makeup. She’d bundled her hair into a loose knot on the back of her head, the kind that leaks wisps and tendrils and comes undone three times a day. Her complexion was a little ruddy. I think she must be outdoorsy.”

  “Ruddy, wispy, and outdoorsy,” said Grant, with a faint shudder. “A rambler, I’ll wager. She probably owns a backpack, a walking staff, and a pair of stonking great hiking boots.”

  “Attire?” Charles said primly, ignoring his partner.