Aunt Dimity Beats the Devil

by Nancy Atherton

  “Lori,” she said. “We’ve found the nursery.”

  CHAPTER

  Dusk had fallen, but a last vestige of sunlight cast striped shadows from the nursery’s barred windows onto the serviceable linoleum floor.

  The room was simply furnished and the walls were wainscoted in oak. Above the oak panels a painted parade of gallant steeds pranced around the room. A circle of fair damsels decorated the hearth rug.

  Apart from the horses and the damsels, the room was strangely devoid of personality. The cupboards were empty, the tables bare, as if the room had been stripped of anything that might suggest the presence of children—or anything that might fetch a good price on the open market.

  “Where are the dustcovers?” Nicole asked.

  “Tossed in the corner,” I said, pointing. “The thieves must have left in a hurry. They didn’t have time to tidy up after themselves.”

  “I believe the night nursery is through here,” Nicole said, opening a connecting door.

  The night nursery was equally anonymous. The nanny’s corner held a full-sized bed, a dressing table, a washstand, and a sizable clothes cupboard. A child’s bed sat opposite the nanny’s, its carved headboard touching the wall. The night nursery’s dust sheets lay in a heap between the child’s bed and the windows.

  My heart ached when I caught sight of the small bed. I could almost see Claire curled beneath a quilted counterpane, watching moonlight silver passing clouds and dreaming of the knight in shining armor who would one day carry her away.

  I wandered to the windows, to look out over the darkening moors. The rising moon was nearly full, but clouds were moving in swiftly from the east. With a sigh, I turned to examine the carved headboard, caught my toe in a tangled dustcover, threw my hands out to save myself, and fell headlong through the paneled wall.

  “Lori? Lori!” Nicole exclaimed. “Where are you?”

  “I…I’m not sure.” I pushed myself up on my hands and knees, then got to my feet. A sheet of wood the size of a small door lay beneath me, snapped cleanly from its adjoining panels. “I dropped my light.”

  Nicole ducked through the opening, held her flashlight high, and gasped.

  I gasped with her.

  “Aladdin’s cave,” she breathed.

  “No,” I said. “Claire’s.”

  The windowless storeroom had the wan, neglected air of an abandoned toy shop. It was filled with cupboards and shelves, and every inch of space appeared to be crammed with children’s things.

  There were music boxes, marionettes, puzzles, and hoops; tea sets, clockwork toys, and china figurines. There were prams and cradles and dolls of all descriptions, from the humblest yarn-haired rag doll to the haughtiest porcelain-faced queen. A proscenium-arched puppet theater sat on the stone floor between a spotted rocking horse and a dollhouse furnished from scullery to attics with exquisite miniatures.

  My flashlight lay between the wheels of an elegant wicker pram. I bent to retrieve it, leaving Nicole to clear a trail to the nearest cupboard.

  “Lori,” she said. “Look!”

  She’d found a wardrobe fit for a princess: fur-trimmed dresses, lace dresses, and beaded velvet ones; hats billowing with ostrich feathers; ermine cloaks, frilled petticoats, and boxes spilling over with kid gloves, embroidered handkerchiefs, and silk stockings.

  “Valenciennes lace,” Nicole crooned, lifting a petticoat from a shelf.

  I shone my flashlight slowly over the gorgeous fabrics, marveling at the love Josiah had showered on his only daughter, the child of his old age. It was difficult to believe that a man who’d bestowed such riches upon a child had also held her captive in a barren cell.

  Cold fingers seemed to brush my neck. I trembled, turned, and swept the storeroom with my flashlight. Its beam came to rest, almost of its own accord, on a large, dustcover-draped painting half hidden by a cupboard on the far side of the chamber. While Nicole inspected the petticoat’s fine needlework, I allowed myself to be drawn, as if by an unseen hand, across the room.

  I pulled the painting from behind the cupboard, leaned it against the dollhouse, twitched the dust sheet from its gilded frame, and saw a face I’d seen before.

  She was dressed all in white, her slight frame overwhelmed by a frilled and beribboned morning gown. She had luminous dark eyes, and her raven hair, bound in a knot on the top of her head, was so thick and luxurious that it seemed too heavy for her slender neck to bear. She sat demurely, her left hand crossed gracefully over her right, a fringed shawl draped around her narrow shoulders.

  “Nicole,” I whispered. The resemblance was uncanny.

  “Yes?” Nicole turned toward me, gasped, and clutched the petticoat to her breast. “That’s—that’s the face I saw! The face at the window!”

  “You must have seen your own reflection.” I looked from the young woman in the portrait to the young woman standing before me. “You look so much alike, you could be sisters.”

  Nicole crossed the room hesitantly. “Is it…Claire?”

  I squatted to read the engraved plate mounted on the gilded frame. “Claire Eleanora Byrd. This is your great-aunt, Nicole. This is the woman Edward loved.”

  “Josiah must have loved her, too.” Nicole looked down at the petticoat. “He must have built this room after she died, to hold every precious thing her hands had touched.”

  He loved her too much, I thought, gazing into Claire’s dark eyes. That’s why he locked her away. He couldn’t bear to lose his princess to anyone, much less to a man without title or fortune.

  “Adam will want to see this.” I nodded silently to Claire, lifted the portrait from the floor, and carried it out of the concealed storeroom.

  “He must be deeply asleep,” Nicole said. “Perhaps we shouldn’t disturb him.”

  We stood outside the blue room, with the portrait propped between us, waiting for Adam to respond to my insistent knocking. I ignored Nicole’s polite suggestion, and knocked once more before putting my head inside the room.

  “Adam,” I called. “Wake up. We’ve found something really special.”

  I waited a scant half-second for a reply, and when none came, pushed the door wide open. Adam was nowhere in sight, and the bed looked as if it hadn’t been slept in.

  “He must have changed his mind about the nap,” Nicole remarked.

  I thought it more likely that he’d been robbed of sleep by the same tortured thoughts that had driven him to my room in the wee hours. I glanced worriedly at the smooth bedclothes, hefted the portrait, and headed for the main staircase.

  I knew where we’d find Adam. He’d be in the library, brooding over Edward’s letters.

  The library was dark and empty, and the letters lay where we’d left them, on the low table between the sofa and the armchair.

  I dropped my flashlight on the sofa, propped the portrait against a chair, and crossed to the oak table, to light a reading lamp, but before my hand touched the switch, I sensed movement beyond the darkened windows.

  I stared hard, gooseflesh prickling all up and down my arms, and glimpsed an indistinct shape sliding past the terrace balustrade.

  “Nicole,” I said in a low voice. “Call Guy. Tell him we have an intruder. Then find the Hatches and stay with them.” She started to protest, but I silenced her with a glance.

  As soon as she’d gone, I walked stealthily to the terrace door and peered through the wavy panes of glass. Scudding clouds obscured the moon, but a fleeting beam showed a darker patch against the mausoleum’s looming shadow. Someone was out there.

  I couldn’t wait for Guy, nor did I need to. My eyes were accustomed to the dark, I was dressed all in black, and I was familiar with the garden’s layout. What’s more, my dander was up. I didn’t intend to confront anyone, but I was determined to get close enough to identify the creep who’d been giving Nicole nightmares. When clouds buried the moon, I opened the door, crept silently across the terrace, and made my way across the tangled garden.

  I scuttled
in a half-crouch along the weed-grown path, intent on catching sight of Nicole’s tormentor before he fled into the night. When I reached the mausoleum, I paused to reconnoiter. My flesh crept as I touched the fluttering ivy, and my heart nearly stopped when a hand closed round my mouth and yanked me backward.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Guy’s furious whisper was nearly drowned out by the roar of my thundering heart. “Shhh…Listen.”

  I couldn’t do much else with Guy’s left arm wrapped like an iron band around my waist and his right hand still clamped over my mouth, so I strained my ears to hear whatever sound had caught his attention.

  A moment later, I heard it: a faint moan that seemed to come from inside the mausoleum.

  If my constitution had been one-tenth as delicate as Jared had once claimed, I would’ve keeled over in a dead faint then and there. Fortunately, I was the mother of twins.

  “Mrrph?” I said softly.

  “Quiet,” Guy commanded, sotto voce. “Stay behind me.”

  He loosed his holds and took off, stopping when he reached the mausoleum’s entrance. A great swag of ivy had been pulled aside, like a curtain, to reveal a pedimented entryway flanked by fluted columns.

  The door between the columns hung open, but the darkness within was impenetrable. A second moan, louder than the first, emerged from the inky blackness, and this time I recognized the voice.

  “Adam!” I cried. “Guy, give me a light. Quickly—he’s hurt!”

  Guy passed a penlight to me, then grabbed my arms. “I must go,” he said. “Get Chase into the house and stay there. Your lives may depend on it.”

  I switched the penlight on in time to see Guy sprint along the path Adam and I had taken the day before. Guy’s fair hair was covered by a black beret, his face daubed with weird streaks of grease paint, and he wore camouflage fatigues. He seemed to be dressed for combat, but I had no time to wonder why.

  Adam needed me.

  He lay in a heap near a crypt in the darkest corner of the mausoleum, groaning and clutching his ribs. Blood dripped from his nose, his lips were split and bleeding, and his left eye was badly bruised.

  I dropped to my knees beside him, reached out to caress his hair, touched dampness, and brought my fingers back, bloodstained. I gasped softly and wiped my hand on my sleeve.

  “It’s okay, Adam,” I said, bending low. “I’m here.”

  “Lori?” His voice was slurred but urgent, and he spat blood as he spoke. “Get away from here. They’ll…they’ll…”

  “No, they won’t,” I said, to quiet him. “Guy’s gone after them. Come on, now. Let’s get you out of this horrible place.”

  I slung his arm around my shoulders and helped him to his feet, but it was slow going after that. We were scarcely two steps beyond the porticoed door when the sky exploded.

  A deafening roar knocked us to the ground and the horizon lit up like Armageddon. Blinding flashes peppered the sky, like fireworks run amok, and the clouds were cobwebbed with shimmering streamers that screamed as they fractured the air. Great gouts of flame geysered skyward and shock waves rippled over us as rolling thunder swept in off the moors to crash against Wyrdhurst’s stone walls. Behind us, the library’s windows imploded in a thousand shattered shards.

  I crawled to Adam, who’d half risen to his knees to gaze at the blazing sky.

  “A beautiful nightmare,” he murmured.

  The phrase was Edward’s and I knew now what he’d meant by it. The light show was spectacular, the fear it engendered strangely exhilarating. The moment would have been magical if not for the distant crack of rifle fire, the staccato bursts of automatic weapons.

  “Get…to house.” Adam winced as he sagged to the ground. “Safer…there.”

  The mausoleum looked pretty good to me, but Adam needed medical attention, and I knew that Guy was handling whatever hell had broken loose upon the moors. The explosions were already fading to a distant, scattered popping when I took Adam’s weight on my shoulders and half carried him back into Wyrdhurst.

  CHAPTER

  I sat up with Adam long after Dr. MacEwan had come and gone. It was nearly dawn when Nicole crept in, as quietly as a ghost, and sent me off to bed.

  Adam had bruised ribs, a mild concussion, a black eye, twenty stitches in his head, and a lot more than twenty bruises on the rest of his body. Dr. MacEwan summed up his condition by saying, “He’ll survive, though there’ll be moments when he’ll wish he hadn’t.”

  Adam had barely spoken after we’d come in from the garden, so I still had no idea who’d beaten him up and dumped him in the mausoleum. But I had my suspicions. Adam was the kind of man who’d risk his neck to save a flannel bunny. It wasn’t hard to envision him taking on a gang of burglars singlehanded. My guess was that he’d seen them breaking into old Josiah’s tomb and tried to stop them. He’d been foolishly, splendidly heroic, and he’d paid the price.

  I had my suspicions about the massive explosions as well—an artillery exercise gone awry, the accidental detonation of an ammunition dump—but since I hadn’t seen or heard from Guy after he’d run off into the night, I knew nothing for certain.

  Mrs. Hatch was with Adam when I looked in just after noon. Major Ted was with him, too, standing to attention on the bedside table, as if protecting a wounded comrade. Adam was still deeply asleep, his head swathed in stark white bandages, his left eye swollen shut, his pale, heart-shaped face cruelly battered. I wanted to hold his hand, to let him know I was there, but I didn’t want to wake him, so I slipped out of the room and made my way downstairs.

  I came upon Nicole in the dining room, surveying the linen-draped table with a critical eye. A silver bowl dripping with ferns and red roses served as the centerpiece, and three places had been set with gold-rimmed china.

  My hostess had devoted as much thought to dressing herself as she had to dressing the table. She looked charming in a white taffeta blouse and a swirly red tartan skirt trimmed at the hem with black velvet.

  “Are we expecting company?” I asked.

  “Captain Manning called while you were asleep. He wished to speak with us, so I invited him to lunch. He should be here at any moment.” Nicole made her way around the table, tweaking a fork here, nudging a knife there. “We’re having roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. It was Edward’s favorite, you remember, and I thought that, as a soldier, Captain Manning might…” She looked at me anxiously, more concerned about pleasing her guest than curious about the nature of his visit.

  “He’ll love it,” I assured her.

  Our colloquy was interrupted by Hatch, announcing the captain’s arrival.

  “Punctual, as always,” Nicole murmured. She faced the doorway, smiling in anticipation, but the moment she caught sight of the captain, her smile faded.

  “Guy,” she said, her voice trembling. “You’re hurt.”

  Guy was nearly as pale as Adam. His gray eyes were smudged with fatigue, lines of strain creased his brow, and his left arm was bound up in a sling.

  “It’s nothing, Mrs. Hollander,” he demurred, but Mrs. Hollander disagreed.

  “Don’t be absurd,” she snapped. “If it were nothing, your poor arm wouldn’t be in a great enormous sling.”

  I stood back while Nicole swung into action, guiding Guy to the head of the table and ordering Hatch to bring a cushion from the sitting room. She offered brandy, but Guy declined.

  “If I’d known you were hurt, I wouldn’t have asked you to come here,” she said, gently settling his arm on the cushion.

  “I wanted to come,” he told her. “I have information that concerns you. I wanted to be the one to—”

  “You’re not to say another word until you’ve had a bite to eat.” Nicole gestured for me to take my seat and signaled for Hatch to serve the meal. “You look as weak as a kitten. When was the last time you had a proper meal?”

  “I assure you, Mrs. Holl—”

  “Not a word,” Nicole scolded.

  I smiled reminisce
ntly as Nicole fussed over him, remembering my first meal with Adam, when he’d taken the soup spoon from my shaking hand and fed me like a baby. It seemed a hundred years ago, though it had been only six days.

  Guy endured Nicole’s hovering with admirable fortitude, and the roast beef did him a world of good, but when Nicole insisted that he rest in one of the guest rooms after lunch, he took a stand. Nicole gave in gracefully, telling Hatch that we’d take coffee in the library.

  The explosions on the moors had shattered three of the room’s tall windows, but Hatch had already boarded them up and Mrs. Hatch had cleared away the glass. As Hatch served the coffee, I saw that someone had moved my flashlight and Edward’s letters to the oak table, and leaned Claire’s portrait against the massive, clouded mirror atop the mantelpiece.

  Claire’s portrait faced Josiah’s across the long room, and for a moment, the face-off discomfited me. It was as if Josiah were still spying on his daughter, still pinning her with his cold, intrusive gaze.

  The longer I looked at Claire, though, the more certain I became that her portrait was exactly where it should be. I could see her expression more clearly here than in the sealed storeroom. Her gaze was less demure, far more defiant than I remembered it, as if she were letting her father know that she’d finally escaped the prison of his possessive love.

  “Lori,” Nicole remonstrated, “will you please stop staring at my great-aunt and attend to what Captain Manning has to say? I’m sure it’s of the utmost importance.”

  I came out of my trance and sat beside Nicole on the sofa. Hatch was gone and Guy was in the armchair nearest the hearth, his wounded arm resting on a tasseled pillow in his lap, his booted feet propped on a leather ottoman.

  “It’s a rather complicated story,” Guy warned, “one you may find difficult to believe.”

  “I’ll believe whatever you tell me, Captain Manning,” said Nicole.

  Guy acknowledged her pledge by addressing his opening remarks to her. He spoke calmly and directly, a professional soldier delivering hard facts.