Aunt Dimity and the Duke

by Nancy Atherton

  “My father.” The duke sat with his face turned toward the fire, and his animated hands lay becalmed on the arms of his chair. “The thirteenth duke of Penford was an unhappy man. I leave it to you to decide if it was due to his unfortunate place in the succession, but I’m rather more inclined to blame it on his unfortunate place in history.

  “He lost his own father and all of his uncles in the Great War. He lost his first wife in a daylight raid on the Plymouth dockyards, his arm in the Ardennes, and his second wife, my mother, shortly after I was born.” He glanced at Derek, then lowered his eyes. “To pneumonia. Not even a healthy son and heir could put paid to all of those losses, and he became something of a recluse.”

  Derek stirred restlessly. “Look, Grayson, I’m very sorry, but—”

  “Patience, dear boy,” said the duke.

  Nanny Cole glared at Derek. “It’s your fault we’ve been dragged out of our beds in the middle of the night, so you just keep still or I’ll box your bloody ears.”

  Chastened, Derek fell silent.

  “My father,” the duke continued, “left much of my upbringing to my grandmother, who saw to it that I was educated at home by a governess who has since passed on. My grandmother was a wonderful woman in many ways, but she was ... selectively attentive. If I was neatly dressed and well behaved, she would spend hours with me. When I was bad-tempered—”

  “Never had a bad-tempered day in your life,” Nanny Cole stated firmly, and the others murmured their agreement.

  “Let us say, then, that I was, at times, overly energetic,” the duke conceded.

  “Bouncing off the walls, more like,” muttered Gash.

  “At such times,” the duke continued doggedly, “which occurred far too often in my grandmother’s estimation, I was banished from her presence.”

  “And dumped in our laps,” huffed Nanny Cole.

  “Not that we minded,” Gash put in.

  “Didn’t say we minded, did I?” retorted Nanny Cole.

  “As a result,” Grayson went on, “I spent most of my formative years under the watchful eyes of Nanny Cole and the rest of the staff. I adored my grandmother, but these good people ...” He let his gaze travel slowly around the room. “These good people, I loved.”

  “Mawkish nonsense,” muttered Nanny Cole. “Get a grip, Grayson, or you’ll have Kate blubbering.”

  “Mother,” said an obviously exasperated Kate, “will you please allow Grayson to speak?”

  “Never been able to stop him, have I?” Nanny Cole scowled at her daughter, but remained silent as Grayson continued.

  “My father’s decision to withdraw from the world had a catastrophic effect on both the hall and the village. New tax laws encouraged him to dabble in speculation, but he’d neither the skill nor the patience to succeed at that game. He was forced to sell our land in Kent and Somerset, and to dismiss the underservants, all of whom came from Penford Harbor. When they sought employment elsewhere, their houses were left vacant and the village began a slow and painful decline.

  “As for the hall ... Well, I’m sure you’ve heard the story many times before, Derek. Routine repairs were neglected, and the place began to fall apart. My father closed off room after room, until we were all living cheek by jowl in the central block.”

  “It were a bad time,” Gash murmured, and the others nodded solemnly.

  “I’d no idea how bad,” Grayson commented. “The staff shielded me from every hardship and made it seem like jolly good fun to be bunched together like that. After my grandmother died, however, Father dismissed the staff and began selling off the contents of Penford Hall.”

  “Was he allowed to do that?” Emma asked, with a timid glance at Nanny Cole.

  “He wasn’t, actually,” replied the duke. “The hall and all that it contained were entailed to me and should’ve been handed down intact. But with Grandmother gone, there was no one to stop him.” The duke’s gaze roved over the walls, taking in every painting, every priceless ornament, while his hands caressed the rich fabric on the arms of his chair, as though reassuring himself that it was real. “I’m so proud of Grandmother for hiding her emeralds,” he said softly.

  From the comer of her eye, Emma saw Nanny Cole raise her eyes to Kate, who looked quickly away.

  “We think she must have done the same thing with the lantern,” Grayson went on, “and for the same reason. Unfortunately, she neglected to inform anyone of the hiding place. By then, you see, there was hardly anyone left to tell.” The duke folded his hands and tapped the tips of his thumbs together. “Imagine waking up each day to the loss of a beloved sister or brother, uncle or aunt, and you will begin to comprehend the distress I felt when my father began to dismiss the staff. Soon only Nanny Cole remained, and I refused to believe that Father would send her away. With Grandmother gone, Nanny Cole was the only mother I had.”

  “I was the only one left to make your blasted bed, you mean,” Nanny Cole put in. Her knitting needles had stopped moving and she peered fondly at the duke. A faint pink flush rose in the old woman’s cheeks as she sensed that the attention of the room was on her, and she pulled her needles back into action, growling, “You just get on with the story, my lad.”

  “Where was I? Ah, yes ...” The duke sighed wearily. “Father then informed me that I was to be sent away to school. That was bad enough, but on the afternoon of the very same day, not a month after my grandmother’s death, I saw her harp being loaded into a van and taken away. You must understand that the harp was her prize possession. Its removal forced me to face the awful fact that nothing and no one was safe.

  “Father and I had a terrific set-to that evening, at the conclusion of which I ran away. I was a mere boy at the time—Peter’s age—and the weather was as rough as it is tonight, so I didn’t run very far. I went to the lady chapel, in fact, to have a good, self-pitying weep. Much to my amazement, Aunt Dimity was there when I arrived—”

  “Dimity Westwood?” Derek asked.

  “There’s only one Aunt Dimity,” Grayson replied.

  “But how did she know—” Emma left the sentence unfinished.

  The duke smiled and shook his head. “I have no idea. She’d learned of Grandmother’s death, of course—”

  “And she may have heard rumors about the sale of the harp,” Kate put in.

  “Perhaps,” said the duke. “But ...” He shrugged. “Who knows?”

  A tingle crept down Emma’s back. Dimity Westwood was beginning to sound vaguely supernatural. She returned long-lost teddy bears to bereft little girls, and she just happened to appear out of nowhere to soothe tormented little boys. And the mysterious woman might have had a hand in bringing Emma to Penford Hall, as well. Emma glanced up at Derek’s sapphire eyes and broad shoulders, wondering how far Aunt Dimity’s powers extended, then shook her head and gave her full attention to the duke.

  “Aunt Dimity listened to my woes,” he was saying, “then told me, flat out, that I would think of a way to save the hall. I don’t remember what happened next, but when I awoke the following morning, I felt as though I’d been reborn. I saw clearly that an enormous task lay ahead of me—but not an impossible one. That made all the difference.”

  As though galvanized by the memory, the duke pushed himself out of his chair and stood before the fire. Thrusting one hand into a trouser pocket and clutching a tweedy lapel with the other, he struck a professorial pose. “Now,” he said, “if one asks an adult how to raise an enormous amount of capital in a relatively brief period of time, the adult will invariably reply ... ?” He raised an eyebrow and stared expectantly at Emma.

  “ ‘Rob a bank’?” Emma ventured.

  “Bravo, Miss Porter.” The duke nodded his approval. “If, however, one asks a child the same question, one will receive two dozen different answers, each one more outrageous than the last. I speak as an authority on the matter. I came up with a dozen dozen different schemes over the next few years, but dismissed them all as too time-consuming and/or dang
erously illegal.

  “Then, one night at school, Pogger Pratt-Evans was listening to some particularly noisome rock music. When I asked him to turn it down, Pogger replied with the immortal words ...” The duke turned his face to the ceiling and enunciated each word carefully, as though he were reciting Shakespearean verse. “ ‘Fat lot you know about music. These guys must be good—they’ve made millions.’ ”

  The duke closed his eyes for a moment, as though savoring the words, then began to pace excitedly before the fire. “I couldn’t sleep a wink that night, not with ‘they’ve made millions’ ringing in my ears, and by morning I had put together a plan—an outrageous, ridiculous, impossible plan, which I knew in the depths of my twelve-year-old heart would save the hall. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that it was at that moment that Lex Rex was born.”

  Derek frowned. “Are you saying that you’re—”

  “I am not,” the duke declared. He came to a halt squarely in front of the fire, his hands in his pockets, his hair a golden halo above his shadowed face, looking as though he’d never quite left his twelve-year-old self behind. “I’m saying only that an idea was born.” He spread his arms wide. “It was this distinguished collection of geniuses who nurtured that idea until it became the loathsome creature we know as Lex Rex.”

  “You mean, you’re all—?” Emma touched a hand to her glasses and looked from one wrinkled face to another. “You’re all Lex Rex?”

  “Our star pupil triumphs again,” proclaimed the duke. He gave them no time to digest this startling news, turning quickly to ask Kate to go on with the story.

  Kate Cole cleared her throat. “As you know, Mother and I had moved to Bournemouth after the old duke gave Mother the—after Mother left Penford Hall.”

  “Broke her heart to leave,” said Nanny Cole, eyeing her daughter with unexpected gentleness. “But we couldn’t go back to the village. Bloody place was deserted. No school, no children to play with ...”

  “So we went to Bournemouth, where Mother worked as a seamstress.”

  “Kate was never happy there,” Nanny Cole went on. “Only time she perked up was when she got Grayson’s letters. So, when she came to me with his crack-brained scheme, I thought, Bugger it, I’ll jolly them along. Anything to get Kate up and punching again.” Nanny Cole sighed and looked down at her cobalt-blue yarn. “Hated to see her in such a funk.”

  “Mother was wonderful,” said Kate. “She drew all sorts of costumes and I sent the drawings on to Grayson. We wrote to each other three or four times a week. His plan didn’t sound preposterous to me.”

  Nanny Cole snorted. “None of Grayson’s plans ever sounded preposterous to you, my girl.” She glanced at Crowley with a devilish grin. “Remember the two of ’em tunneling under the arbor, looking for pirate gold?”

  “I do indeed, Nanny,” Crowley replied. “Quite a time we had, pulling them out. I believe it was Miss Kate who christened Lex Rex. Isn’t that right, Nanny?”

  “Very true,” Nanny Cole replied. “Lex from Alexander —one of Grayson’s other names—and Rex ... Well, she wanted her duke to have a promotion, didn’t she?”

  “I thought it sounded well together,” Kate explained, coloring. “At any rate,” she hurried on, “it seemed to me that the most important part of the plan was that it be carried out in secret.”

  The duke nodded eagerly. “Quite right. If I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life as Lex Rex—and I most certainly did not—we would require the help of people whose loyalty and discretion would be absolute.”

  Kate smiled. “Grayson had kept in touch with everyone, not just the staff but the remaining villagers, as well, those who’d refused to abandon Penford Harbor. We selected a core group and, with Mother’s help, began to visit them, one by one, to sound them out.”

  “The response was quite astonishing,” said the duke. “Within the year, we had the entire staff working together to breathe life into Lex Rex. I knew that I wanted to do something with pop music, but I wasn’t sure what. Hallard’s the one who figured that out.”

  “Mmmm?” Hallard peered absently at the duke.

  “I was just telling Derek and Emma that you invented Lex Rex,” said the duke.

  “Yes, yes.” Hallard blinked owlishly. “Just created a character, really.”

  “Hallard,” the duke informed Emma, “is also known as Hal Arden.”

  “The writer?” Emma gaped at the bespectacled old man. “Spy novels?”

  “My publisher prefers to call them espionage thrillers, but never mind,” said Hallard. “Don’t hold much with labels.”

  _ “But I’ve read everything you’ve ever written!” Emma exclaimed.

  “He’ll autograph a complete set for you, won’t you, old man?” The duke beamed at Hallard. “Our writer-in-residence was instrumental in putting together Lex’s biography.”

  “Just listened to His Grace and Miss Kate, really,” said Hallard. “Bit of a poser, really, making a character who was literally three-dimensional. But I liked the challenge.”

  “And rose to it,” declared the duke. “Hallard was the one who discovered that ownership of England’s great estates falls into five basic categories: surviving families, few and far between; foreigners who wish they were English; corporations, which use the houses as retreats for harried executives; the National Trust, which turns them into museums—”

  “And pop stars,” Hallard concluded. “Interesting subject, really, and His Grace made the research that much easier. It was like having an agent in place, really, with him spying on kids like Pogger and telling me what they fancied.” Hallard leaned forward, rubbing his palms together as he warmed to his subject. “Lex Rex couldn’t be a pretty-face pop phenomenon, y’see, because we couldn’t have people concentrating on His Grace’s face. We didn’t want a band with too much staying power, either. A medium-sized hit twice a year for five years would do us nicely. I figured that, if Time magazine called Lex the next Beatles within the first two years of our run, we’d done the job.”

  “Their predictions inevitably fade,” explained the duke. He smiled slyly and scratched the end of his nose. “Hallard wrote the lyrics for Lex’s songs, as well. ‘Kiss My Tongue’ was, in my opinion, one of his noblest efforts.”

  “I don’t know,” Kate teased. “I’ve always been fond of the ecological motif of ‘Slug Soup.’ And let’s not forget ‘Chafe Me, Baby,’ and—”

  “That’ll be quite enough out of the pair of you,” Nanny Cole scolded. “Hallard may have written tripe, but you, Grayson, wrote the putrid music.”

  “I did,” Grayson admitted sheepishly.

  “But you’re a talented musician,” Emma exclaimed. “How could you bring yourself to—”

  “Create such cacophony? I was following Hallard’s script. Everything about Lex had to be off-putting, to keep people at bay. And there Nanny Cole came into her own.”

  Nanny Cole eyed him suspiciously, then turned to Derek and Emma. “I designed Lex’s costumes and makeup,” she said. “I created his bloody-awful image. Had to turn Grayson into a raving lunatic. Not as much of a stretch as he’d like to think.”

  “Nanny’s costumes were brilliant,” Grayson said. “She has the soul of a poet and it embarrasses her terribly. Hence the bluff exterior.”

  “I’ll buff your posterior if you don’t stop,” Nanny Cole growled, and Derek flinched as she grabbed him by the wrist. “Keep still,” she ordered as she held the sleeve of the nearly finished sweater up to Derek’s arm. “Good Lord,” she muttered, dropping the arm. “Built like a bloody great ape.”

  Grayson snorted. “Nanny shaved my head and painted it red for the cover of the first album. I promise you, not even Grandmother would’ve recognized me once Nanny had finished with her paint pots. I scarcely recognized myself.”

  “Surely you made some personal appearances,” Derek said, rubbing his wrist.

  “Very few,” said Kate. “Lex refused to attend ceremonies of any kind and he was never
seen in public without his makeup. It was perfectly in keeping with the character we’d established.”

  “The press posed some danger,” Grayson went on, “but Hallard solved that as well. Whenever they showed up, Lex would scratch himself rudely and spout all those words one mustn’t say on the telly, at decibel levels impossible for microphones to miss. And we had Newland here, to look after security.”

  Newland nodded but, unlike the rest of the staff, made no effort to explain his role. An uneasy silence enveloped the room, and everyone turned to Kate gratefully when she broke it.

  “And then there were the videos,” she said.

  “A godsend.” Grayson clapped Derek on the shoulder. “Remember the chaps I ran around with in Oxford?”

  Derek nodded.

  “One of them is a well-known rock singer now. I won’t mention his name, as he’s made an assiduous effort to deny his bourgeois past, but he’s the one who put me on to rock videos. That’s how we were able to get in at the right time.”

  Kate’s eyes were dancing. “Lex Rex became the first pop star to take full advantage of the video boom. And we filmed them right here, in Gash’s studio.”

  Gash twiddled his thumbs. “Jury-rigged from start to finish. Had no idea what I was doing, but that didn’t bother His Grace. Had no capital, neither, so I had to make do. Cleared out one of the subcellars, soundproofed it as best I could. Bought secondhand stage lights and cheap video equipment and off we went.”

  Emma rolled her eyes, recalling the praise Richard had heaped on Lex Rex’s “rough-edged authenticity.” She wondered what he would say if she told him that the qualities he most admired were due solely to inexperience, ineptitude, and a tight budget.

  The duke flopped into his chair and crossed his legs. “As it turned out, we had eight years in which to plan the whole thing, down to the smallest detail. I was twenty years old when my father died.”

  “Grayson came down from university to follow in his father’s reclusive footsteps and disappear from public view,” Kate went on.

  “When I reappeared, I did so as Lex Rex,” said the duke. “After eight years of intensive study, I was able to give rock-music fans exactly what they wanted. Then, of course, I gave them more of the same.”