Aunt Dimity and the Heart of Gold

by Nancy Atherton

  “What is it, Tilly?” Emma asked. “What did you see?”

  Tilly’s eyes were like saucers as she replied in a breathless murmur, “Wonderful things!”

  Ten

  I hope you’ll forgive me for paraphrasing Howard Carter’s famous remark,” Tilly went on, “but I can honestly say that I understand how he felt when he first peered into King Tutankhamen’s tomb.”

  Since I’d expected her to say that she’d seen a rat, a bat, or the mummified remains of a long-forgotten Roman Catholic priest, I felt nothing but relief.

  “Are you telling me there’s a hoard of Egyptian treasures hidden in my wall?” Emma asked skeptically.

  “Not Egyptian,” said Tilly.

  “I’m going in,” I said impatiently.

  I lit my flashlight, bent low, stepped through the opening, and straightened cautiously, though my caution proved to be unnecessary. Emma’s priest hole was nothing like the cramped pockets Tilly had described. Instead, it resembled a long, narrow closet. Though Bill would have whacked his head on the ceiling, I could stand upright, and I could turn around easily, too. Chisel marks indicated that the stone wall had been hollowed out by a skilled mason who’d had the time to create fairly smooth surfaces by chipping off jagged edges.

  The air within the priest hole was frigid, absolutely still, and filled with a scent I couldn’t identify. It was musty, but not unpleasantly rank, so I doubted that it emanated from layers of guano or piles of rat droppings. I could easily imagine how dark it would be with the inner and outer panels shut. The thought of being trapped in impenetrable darkness for days on end sent a shiver down my spine, though the cold air may have been a contributing factor.

  Emma’s face appeared in the opening. “Well? What’s it like?”

  “Not too bad,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to use it as a vacation home, but on the whole—” I broke off with a gasp as I turned to my left. “Emma? You might want to get in here.”

  “Is there enough room?” Emma asked.

  “Just get in here,” I said, “and follow me. Tilly? You come, too.”

  I heard the two women enter the compartment behind me as I moved toward a sight that had already elicited gasps from both Tilly and me. I was fairly sure that it would make Emma gasp as well, but I was too preoccupied to pay attention to her initial reaction. The extraordinary tableau that had caught my eye seemed to be pulling me forward.

  “What on earth . . . ?” said Emma as she shone her flashlight over my shoulder.

  “It’s not Egyptian,” I said.

  “It’s not Christian, either,” said Emma.

  “I believe it’s related to the Hindu religion,” Tilly said helpfully, bringing up the rear.

  “Strong possibility,” I murmured, mesmerized.

  I came to a halt before a plain oak bench draped with a square of silk cloth shot with gold thread and dyed in vibrant hues of red and yellow and green. A small bronze statue of a voluptuous goddess with four graceful arms and a benign smile stood atop the silk cloth. A tarnished brass incense burner and a shallow, tear-shaped brass bowl lay at the goddess’s feet, surrounded by garlands of dried flowers and scattered handfuls of rubies and emeralds.

  An elephant stood beside the statue, dwarfing it, but the elephant wasn’t made of bronze. It was a soft toy decorated with gold braid, beaded tassels, tiny round mirrors, and brightly colored silk embroidery. As dazzling as the elephant was, however, it couldn’t compete with the magnificent object lodged in the space between its tasseled trunk and its front legs.

  The object was a golden heart overlaid with gold filigree, and it was as big as my fist. The bronze goddess gleamed and the gems glittered, but the gold heart shone like a star in the darkness as our flashlight beams converged on it.

  “Oh, my,” Tilly breathed.

  “Uh-huh,” I agreed dazedly.

  “What is it?” Emma whispered. “A box?”

  “Hard to tell,” I whispered back. “I don’t see a hinge, but the filigree could be concealing one.”

  We lapsed into stupefied silence until Emma came out of her trance.

  “I’m getting cold,” she declared in a determinedly everyday tone of voice, “and I can’t think straight when I’m cold. Let’s get out of here.” She hesitated, then added, “Bring the heart, Lori.”

  I stretched my hand toward the golden heart, then looked over my shoulder and said with a guilty wince, “I feel like a grave robber, Emma.”

  “We’re not in a grave and you’re not a thief and I want to see the heart more clearly,” Emma said crisply. “Bring it. But try not to disturb the garlands. The flowers look as though they’ll turn to dust if you touch them.” She paused. “They’re marigolds, I think.”

  “Yes,” Tilly said under her breath. “Marigolds.”

  “Turn around, Tilly,” Emma said gently. “We’re leaving.”

  As she and Tilly moved back toward the opening, I allowed my fingers to close around the heart. It was much heavier than I’d anticipated, so heavy that it nearly slipped from my grasp when I lifted it. I held it at eye level for a moment, wondering if it was made of solid gold. The thought of holding a fist-sized hunk of gold in the palm of my hand was so deeply unsettling that I told myself it was gold-plated lead.

  “I’m sorry.” I nodded respectfully to the goddess, but I spoke to the elephant, since the heart seemed to be his special treasure. “I’ll try to bring it back to you when we’re done with it, but the decision won’t be mine to make. I promise you, we’ll take good care of it. We’re not looters.”

  “Come on, Lori!” Emma called from the opening. “You’ll catch your death in there!”

  “I probably will,” I retorted, turning my back on the elephant. “You’ve heard of the curse of the pharaohs, haven’t you?”

  “Need I point out that you’re not in Egypt?” Emma asked with a long-suffering sigh.

  “I’m not sure where I am,” I replied. As I emerged from the priest hole, the heart seemed to catch fire, glinting and gleaming majestically in the light from the wall sconces. “Could be Tudor England. Could be Tudor India.” I held the heart out to Emma. “You tell me.”

  “I’m as mystified as you are,” said Emma. Her gaze lingered on the heart, but she didn’t take it from me. “Hang on to it for now, will you, Lori?”

  “Why?” I said teasingly, waving the golden heart under her nose. “Afraid of the curse?”

  “I’m afraid I’ll drop a national treasure,” she returned. “My hands are frozen.” She tore her gaze away from the heart and smiled wryly as she closed the inner and outer panels. “Derek will kick himself when I show him the latch. He went over the paneling with a fine-tooth comb, looking for signs of dry rot and woodworm, but he missed the priest hole.”

  “Someone found it,” I said. “Someone used it to conceal a secret that had nothing to do with persecuted priests. But who? And when? And what, exactly, was the secret?”

  “I need a cup of tea,” Emma said. “We all need a cup of tea. You must know the way to the kitchen by now, Tilly. Lead on!”

  * * *

  —

  IF TILLY HAD led the way to the kitchen, we would have ended up in the attics. I was intrigued and perplexed by our discovery, but she seemed to be stunned by it. Emma had to put a guiding hand on her elbow to keep her from wandering aimlessly through the manor house.

  Instead of delivering a learned talk on the curse of the pharaohs while we waited for the kettle to boil, Tilly remained tight-lipped and pensive. When I laid the heart before her on the kitchen table, she continued to stare into the middle distance, seemingly unaware of her surroundings. By mutual consent, Emma and I did nothing to derail her train of thought. We’d learned to respect her erudition.

  We sat side by side across the table from Tilly and sipped our tea in silence while the cup Emma had prepared for her
grew cold. We were halfway through our second cups before Tilly spoke.

  “I’ve been thinking and thinking,” she said, “but I cannot explain why someone would create a Hindu altar in a hiding place once used by Roman Catholic priests. There’s not the least doubt that it is a Hindu altar, though it’s a fairly rudimentary one. The bronze statue depicts Parvati, the Hindu goddess of fertility, love, and devotion. The elephant is an obvious reference to Parvati’s son Ganesha, the elephant-headed god. Marigold garlands and incense are still used in Hindu ceremonies and celebrations.”

  I wasn’t in the least surprised that Tilly would recognize the Hindu goddess of love or that she would be familiar with the goddess’s elephant-headed son. She seemed to be a short, plump, human encyclopedia.

  “The brass bowl on the altar,” said Emma. “Is it used for holy water?”

  “It’s not a water bowl,” Tilly informed her. “It’s a diya—an oil lamp with a cotton wick that burns ghee, or clarified butter.”

  “I didn’t see a wick or a buttery residue in the, er, diya,” I said, stumbling over the unfamiliar word.

  “There’s no ash in the incense burner, either,” Tilly pointed out. “Whoever created the altar must have decided that it would be unwise to kindle a flame in such an enclosed space.”

  “Extremely unwise,” Emma agreed. “Smoke would fill the compartment in minutes, and I’d hate to think of what would happen if flames reached the oak panels.”

  “A conflagration would ensue,” Tilly said. She tilted her head back to peer at the kitchen’s vaulted ceiling. “The entire manor house could have burned to the ground.”

  “Which is why I’d hate to think of it,” Emma muttered from the corner of her mouth.

  I stifled a giggle and asked, “Could the rubies and emeralds be offerings, Tilly?”

  “They could,” she said, nodding, “but I don’t know what to make of the heart.” She lifted the dazzling artifact from the table and held it in one cupped hand while she studied it.

  “I may be wrong,” I said hesitantly, “but I think the heart may be made of solid gold.”

  “I’m quite certain it is,” said Tilly.

  Emma choked on a mouthful of tea. I patted her on the back while she wiped her chin with a napkin, but Tilly went on as if she hadn’t noticed Emma’s reaction to the news that we’d discovered a small—or, perhaps, a not-so-small—fortune in gold hidden in her wall.

  “The heart is a superb example of Indian goldsmithing,” Tilly continued, “but the initials puzzle me.”

  “Initials?” I said, frowning. “What initials?”

  “They’re woven into the filigree.” Tilly lowered the heart to the table, then used an index finger to delineate a pair of letters all but hidden within the filigree’s complex curvilinear pattern. “You see?” she said. “A C and an M are intertwined at the very center—dare I say, the heart?—of the applied decoration.” She outlined the letters again, then released a dissatisfied sigh. “I don’t understand why the goldsmith employed Roman letters rather than Sanskrit or one of the other elegant scripts associated with the Indian subcontinent.”

  “Can you read Sanskrit?” I asked out of sheer curiosity.

  “No,” Tilly replied regretfully. “I can get by in Latin and Greek, but I’m ashamed to say that I never learned Sanskrit.”

  “I can barely get by in English,” I muttered. I expected Emma to giggle, but she didn’t even crack a smile.

  “Wait,” she said, gazing intently at Tilly. “Back up a little, Tilly. Did you say that clarified butter is used in the brass lamp?”

  “Ghee is used in the diya,” Tilly corrected her. “But, yes, as the Hindu faith prohibits the use of tallow or any other animal fat as fuel, diyas are filled with clarified butter.”

  “Clarified butter,” Emma repeated, looking thoughtful.

  She got to her feet and crossed to a bookshelf in the corner of the kitchen. When she returned, she was holding a loosely bound, bulky volume that looked as if it might fall apart in her hands. She resumed her seat, placed the book on the table, and began to leaf through it gingerly. Each page appeared to contain a recipe written in the same tidy hand.

  “I told you about my handwritten recipe book last night, Lori,” she said.

  “The one you found in the kitchen when you and Derek first moved into the manor,” I said. “I remember.”

  “Then you’ll also remember that I used a recipe from the book to make the sweets everyone liked,” she said.

  “The Indian sweets,” I said, glancing at Tilly, who looked bemused.

  “Here it is,” said Emma. She removed a small sheet of yellowed paper that had been tucked into the book, laid it flat on the table, and tapped it with her finger. “The recipe for besan ladoo, an Indian sweet shared with family and friends during Hindu festivals.”

  “One of the ingredients is clarified butter,” I said, scanning the faded handwriting, “and clarified butter is used in diyas like the one we found in the priest hole. It’s an interesting coincidence, Emma, but—”

  “It may be more than a coincidence,” she interrupted. “Look at the bottom of the page.”

  I shifted my gaze to the bottom of the page and read aloud a single handwritten line that wasn’t part of the recipe: “April 1865. Given to me by Miss Cecilia.”

  “Miss Cecilia,” Emma said urgently, pointing from the recipe to the gold heart. “Could Cecilia be the C in ‘C.M.’?”

  Eleven

  Emma closed the cookbook and returned it to the bookcase, but she left the recipe on the kitchen table. Tilly continued to look from the faded writing to the gleaming heart and back again. I dumped her cold tea in the sink and made a fresh pot. I could almost hear three brains whirring as I placed the teapot on the table and resumed my seat beside Emma.

  “Well?” she snapped.

  I’d seldom heard my friend speak so sharply. Normally, I was the impatient one, the one who jumped to conclusions with the carefree abandon of a circus acrobat, while she was the calm one, the one who thought things through before she expressed an opinion. Yet there she was, biting my head off because I hadn’t jumped to a conclusion based on the flimsiest wisps of evidence. It was a striking role reversal, and I couldn’t deny that it amused me greatly.

  “I suppose the C in ‘C.M.’ could stand for ‘Cecilia,’” I allowed.

  “It must,” Emma insisted. “Think about it, Lori. A Hindu altar? A superb example of Indian goldsmithing with a C on it? Miss Cecilia’s Indian recipe? They must be connected.”

  “They are,” said Tilly. “The thing that connects them is Anscombe Manor. Did you find any other Indian artifacts in the manor when you and Derek purchased it?”

  “No,” Emma replied. “The manor was virtually derelict when we moved into it. Apart from the family archives and a few forgotten odds and ends like the cookbook, it was empty. The previous owner sold the contents to cover death duties after her husband died. They were scattered to the four winds.”

  “A pity,” said Tilly. “A portrait of Miss Cecilia Anscombe wrapped in an Indian shawl would have connected a few dots for us.”

  “Miss Cecilia might not have been an Anscombe,” I protested. “The initials on the heart are ‘C.M.,’ not ‘C.A.’”

  “Perhaps Cecilia M. became an Anscombe through marriage,” Tilly suggested.

  “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that C.M. and Miss Cecilia are the same person,” I said. “Why does she have to be an Anscombe?”

  “Because only an Anscombe would know about the manor’s priest hole,” said Emma. “I can’t imagine a casual visitor stumbling across it by accident. It’s too well hidden.”

  “A casual visitor wouldn’t interact with the cook, either,” said Tilly.

  “Excellent points,” I conceded. “But the altar might not have been made by Miss Cecilia. It might h
ave been made by a member of the Anscombe family as a tribute to Miss Cecilia.”

  “Well reasoned,” said Tilly. “An Anscombe may have created the hidden altar as a tribute to a girl for whom he nursed a secret, perhaps a forbidden, passion.”

  “Aw,” I said with a gusting sigh, touched by the thought of a young man nursing a secret passion. “As a lifelong romantic, I vote for Tilly’s scenario. But who was Miss Cecilia? Which Anscombe fell for her? Why was their love forbidden? How did he acquire his collection of Indian artifacts? How did she acquire an Indian recipe?”

  “One question at a time,” Emma begged. “I’ll get a headache if we tackle them all at once.”

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll start with: Who is Miss Cecilia?”

  “No idea,” said Emma. “But she must have been alive in 1865, because that’s when she gave the recipe to the cook.”

  “She had no title,” Tilly observed. “She was Miss Cecilia rather than Lady Cecilia, which may indicate that her family did not belong to the aristocracy.”

  “Cecilia is an English name,” Emma ventured. “Is it safe to assume that Miss Cecilia was English?”

  “I think so,” said Tilly.

  “To summarize,” I said. “We have an English girl from a nonaristocratic family who gave an Indian recipe to an English cook in Anscombe Manor in April 1865.” When the others nodded for me to go on, I continued, “Question two: How did an English girl get hold of an Indian recipe?”

  “Nothing could have been easier,” Tilly said confidently. “India was under colonial rule throughout much of the nineteenth century. Benjamin Disraeli described it as the brightest jewel in the crown of the British Empire. The British maintained a considerable military, governmental, and corporate presence there, and British enclaves could be found in every corner of the subcontinent. As you can imagine, a great deal of cross-cultural pollination took place. When British soldiers, government officials, and businessmen returned to England, they often brought Indian recipes home with them.”