Aunt Dimity and the Family Tree Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Epilogue

  Aunt Dimity’s Seed Cake

  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 GoesWest

  Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter

  Aunt Dimity Slays the Dragon

  Aunt Dimity Down Under

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Nancy T. Atherton, 2011

  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 family tree / Nancy Atherton.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-47572-0

  1. Dimity, Aunt (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—England—Fiction.

  3. City and town life—England—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3551.T426A933 2011

  813’.54—dc22

  2010033598

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  For Wyn,

  who invited me to tea

  One

  Fairworth House had good bones. Although it had been neglected for nearly fifty years by a succession of hapless owners, the basic fabric of the building had remained sound. I’d been mildly horrified when my father-in-law, William Willis, Sr., had informed me of his decision to purchase what appeared to be a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old fixer-upper, but the engineer’s report had proved that looks could be deceiving.

  The slate roof required repair rather than replacement, the foundation retained its structural integrity, and the mellow limestone walls needed nothing more than patient pruning to rid them of the shaggy layers of ivy that had crept almost to the eaves. Though a handful of windows had been shattered by naughty children armed with slingshots, most were intact, and the splendid parquet floors had not fallen prey to dry rot, woodworm, or water damage.

  The superior skills of those who’d built the house and the quality of the materials they’d used had protected Fairworth from the elements, thus insuring that it would not descend with undue speed into an irretrievable state of decay. Fairworth House had aged, to be sure, but it had aged gracefully.

  Fairworth wasn’t palatial, but it would never be mistaken for a cottage. It was three stories tall, with no fewer than seven bedrooms, a conservatory, a billiards room, two reception rooms, a library, and a study. Any real estate agent worth his salt would have described it as “a pleasant country retreat for a gentleman of means.” If he were honest, he would have added, “Needs work.”

  The chimneys were choked with soot, and the internal workings of the house were hopelessly out of date. After the purchase was completed, the plumbing, heating, and electrical systems received complete overhauls, as did the kitchen, the laundry facilities, and the bathrooms, and a small elevator was installed for the convenience of the staff as well as the new owner, whose knees weren’t quite as springy as they’d once been.

  By far the most significant alteration made to the building, however, was the creation, in the attics, of a self-contained, furnished apartment for the live-in servants who would, once they were hired, be responsible for the smooth running of the household.

  The grounds, too, required serious attention. A professional landscape architect drew up plans for the lawns and the gardens that would be the focal point of the ten-acre estate, and a well-known landscaping firm turned his designs into reality. Barring unforeseen disaster, the kitchen garden would in a year’s time be brimming with fruits and vegetables while the flower gardens flanking the house would produce enough blossoms to fill vases in every room.

  With help from friends in the antiques trade, my father-in-law had, unbeknownst to me, started collecting eighteenth-century English furniture long before he had purchased Fairworth House. When the dust of renovation settled, he simply emptied his storage units into his new home. He worked closely with an interior designer to arrange each room’s furnishings according to floor plans of his own devising, and he supervised the selection of appropriate paints, wallpapers, window treatments, upholstery, and bedding. At my suggestion, he placed a few historically inaccurate but cozier pieces of furniture here and there throughout the house, to make it feel less like a museum and more like a home.

  By happy chance, some of Fairworth’s original contents had been found stashed away in a dark corner of the old stables. A painting, a book, and a few pieces of bric-a-brac that had long kept company with spiders, mice, and bats were freed from their cobwebs and brought forth into the light of day.

  The end result was spectacular, in an understa
ted way. Fairworth House wasn’t a flashy showpiece embellished with turrets, towers, and florid ornamentation. It was a solid, respectable Georgian house—classical, restrained, and relatively modest in size. The place I’d once thought an irreparable ruin had, in fact, been a tarnished gem that had needed diligent polishing—and a hefty infusion of cold, hard cash—to make it gleam.

  The house suited its new owner to a T. William Arthur Willis, Sr., was the patriarch of a venerable Boston Brahmin clan whose family law firm catered to the whims of the wealthy. He’d been born into money, had made a great deal more of it over the course of his career, and would never want for it, now that he’d retired from his position as head of the firm. Although he was accustomed to the finer things in life, he disdained ostentation. Like the house he’d recently purchased, Willis, Sr., was solid, respectable, and thoroughly elegant—in an understated way.

  He was also a devoted family man. Despite having the means to buy a much grander and far less derelict estate, Willis, Sr., had chosen Fairworth because of its proximity to his only child, a son christened William Arthur Willis, Jr., but known universally as Bill.

  Bill Willis happened to be my husband. He and I lived with our seven-year-old twin sons, Will and Rob, and our black cat, Stanley, in a honey-colored cottage nestled snugly amid the rolling hills and patchwork fields of the Cotswolds, a rural region in England’s West Midlands. Although Bill and I were Americans, we’d lived in England for nearly a decade. Our sons were more familiar with cricket than they were with baseball, and they celebrated Guy Fawkes Day with the same gusto as they did the Fourth of July.

  Since Bill and I had no desire to uproot our happy family, Willis, Sr., had, upon his retirement, elected to entwine his roots with ours in England. Fairworth House was approximately two miles away from our cottage, a distance Will and Rob could traverse easily on their gray ponies, Thunder and Storm. To encourage their visits, Willis, Sr., had devoted the same care and attention to refurbishing his stable block as he had to restoring his house.

  The nearest hub of civilization was Finch, a small village with no recognizable claim to fame. Local farmers patronized its shops and itinerant artists occasionally immortalized its buildings, but tourists seldom ventured down its narrow, twisting lanes, and historians ignored it altogether.

  Thanks to its backwater status, Finch had defied modern trends and remained a tight-knit community in which everyone took a lively—some might say an obsessive—interest in everyone else’s business. My husband, who ran the European branch of his family’s law firm from a high-tech office on the village green, had learned early on to close his windows before making sensitive telephone calls because, in Finch, someone was always listening.

  My father-in-law had provided enough grist to keep Finch’s gossip mill churning merrily for months on end. Fairworth’s graveled drive skirted the southern edge of the village, giving the locals an excellent vantage point from which to view the parade of heavy vehicles that had rumbled to and from the site during the renovation. Some of the villagers derided Willis, Sr., for throwing good money away on a decrepit dump. Others saluted him for restoring a historic home to its former glory.

  Still others—a small but powerful minority composed principally of widows and spinsters of mature years—believed passionately that Willis, Sr., had made the best decision that had ever been made in the entire history of civilization. Hearts that had long lain dormant fluttered wildly at the prospect of welcoming a well-off, white-haired widower to the neighborhood.

  My husband referred to these worthy ladies as “Father’s Handmaidens,” and it was they who were, in large part, responsible for the fantastic speed with which Fairworth House was made habitable. Age and experience had given the Handmaidens an air of authority they did not hesitate to use. Every morning, rain or shine, they crossed the humpbacked bridge at the edge of town and marched determinedly up Willis, Sr.’s tree-lined drive to hover near the work site like a flock of demanding grannies.

  Workers who arrived on time, took short breaks, and avoided visits to the pub were rewarded with fresh-baked cookies, home-cooked lunches, and the blissful silence that ensues when harpies cease to screech. Slackers were given lukewarm tea, icy stares, and, if necessary, a good talking-to.

  The poor workmen were so eager to return to a world in which they could enjoy an evening’s pint in peace that they accomplished in three months what should have taken them six. By mid-August, Fairworth House was fit for occupation. The library required fine-tuning, as did the billiards room and the conservatory, but the principal chambers were finished and furnished. Willis, Sr., would move in on Thursday, the twelfth of August, and I would throw a gala housewarming party for him on the evening of Saturday the fourteenth.

  The only fly in the ointment was the absence of a live-in staff. Although Willis, Sr., had, with my assistance, interviewed a host of candidates sent to him by a reputable London employment agency, none had proven satisfactory. My father-in-law’s preference for a mature, married couple had made the search ten times more difficult than it might otherwise have been.

  Predictably, the Handmaidens had volunteered to do his cooking, his housekeeping, his gardening, and much more, but he’d politely refused their overtures, knowing full well that to choose one strong-minded woman over another would be to trigger a turf war whose reverberations would be felt throughout the village for years to come. To have all of them in the house at once, competing ardently—perhaps violently—for his attention, would be equally intolerable, so he set his sights on a competent couple who had no ties whatsoever to Finch. So far, no such couple had surfaced.

  My father-in-law was discovering, as many had discovered before him, that good help was hard to find.

  A good daughter-in-law, on the other hand, lived only a couple of miles away. It soon became apparent to me that, if reliable servants failed to materialize, I would be saddled with the difficult task of running two households simultaneously.

  Cooking wouldn’t be a problem—I could throw together healthy meals fairly quickly—and I could rely on my best friend, Emma Harris, to keep the gardens from dying an early death, but the mere thought of keeping up with two extremely active little boys while at the same time chasing dust bunnies from one end of Fairworth House to the other made me want to lie down in a dark room with a cold compress on my forehead.

  I pleaded with the agency to find applicants who weren’t too old, too young, too haughty, too flighty, too lazy, too rude, or simply too stupid to fill the well-paid posts, but as the fourteenth of August drew near with no likely candidates in sight, I began to lose hope.

  On the day of the party, I rose with the sun, drove Will and Rob to nearby Anscombe Manor for their riding lessons, stopped at Fairworth House to make breakfast for Willis, Sr., and returned to the cottage to find Bill devouring a pile of toast he’d made for himself. I waved off the buttery slice he offered to me and headed straight for the old oak desk in the study to review my last-minute to-do list. The months I’d spent dealing with stationers, caterers, florists, and musicians were about to pay off.

  At eight o’clock, two hundred guests would arrive at a flower-bedecked Fairworth House to savor an array of delectable nibbles and to drink champagne toasts to my darling father-in-law while a chamber orchestra played discreetly in the background. I might not be able to install plumbing fixtures or to pleach apple trees, but I know how to throw a good party. Thanks to my meticulous planning, Willis, Sr.’s housewarming was bound to be the most scintillating social event of the summer.

  I was halfway through my checklist when Davina Trent, my contact at the employment agency, telephoned to inform me that a suitable married couple would arrive at Fairworth House before nightfall. The timing wasn’t optimal, but beggars, I’d learned, couldn’t be choosers.

  “How suitable is the couple?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Quite suitable,” came the prim reply. “I will fax the particulars to you immediately, Ms. Shepherd.”
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  Mrs. Trent earned bonus points for calling me “Ms. Shepherd.” People who didn’t know me well tended to forget that, while my sons and my husband were Willises, I’d retained my own last name when I’d married Bill.

  “I give you my personal assurance,” Mrs. Trent went on, “that your father-in-law will be delighted with the Donovans.”

  “We’ll see.” I sighed wistfully, thanked her, and hung up. I could squeeze an interview into the day’s busy schedule somehow, but I wasn’t expecting much. I’d been disappointed too often to believe that the delightful Donovans would live up to their billing.

  As I stretched a hand toward the fax machine, the telephone rang again. This time, the caller delivered news that sent chills up my spine. I stared at the phone for a moment in dumbfounded disbelief, then threw back my head and howled, “No!”

  The receiver dropped from my numb fingers and I slumped forward onto the desk as Bill came tearing into the study.

  “Lori?” he said, rushing over to me. “What is it? Has something happened to the boys? Is it Father?”

  “It’s not William or the twins.” I groaned. “It’s the caterers.”

  Bill heaved a sigh of relief, restored the telephone to its cradle, and put a comforting hand on my back.

  “What’s wrong with the caterers?” he asked.

  “Food poisoning,” I replied tragically. “The entire waitstaff is sick, the kitchens have to be professionally sanitized before they can be used again, and every bite of food has been thrown out.” I buried my face in my hands and moaned dolorously. “My canapés, my beautiful canapés, all of those finger sandwiches, the caviar, the lobster, the smoked salmon, the petits fours, the itty-bitty eclairs, even the crudités . . . gone, all g-gone.” My voice broke and I couldn’t continue.

  “Well,” Bill said reasonably, “we wouldn’t want to poison our guests, would we?”

  “No,” I whimpered.

  “Can the caterers deliver the champagne?” he asked.