Aunt Dimity Takes a Holiday

by Nancy Atherton

  “It’s more than a suggestion, sir.” Jim must have been very sure of himself because he faced Derek’s wrath without flinching. “If you’ll return to your seat, I’ll explain.”

  Derek gave his father a mutinous glare, but Emma, Peter, and Bill managed to coax him back into his chair, where he sat with folded arms and a face like thunder.

  Simon and I exchanged bewildered glances. His hand moved from my shoulder to his trouser pocket and I knew we were thinking the same thought: How had Derek’s former nanny gotten ahold of the earl’s straight razor?

  “If you would lay the groundwork, sir . . .” Jim Huang nodded to the earl and stepped back.

  “If I could spare you, my boy . . .” Lord Elstyn’s eyes teemed with conflicting emotions as he gazed at Derek—regret, frustration, and hope overlaid with great reluctance. Then he lowered his gaze to the coiled wire and his expression hardened. “But I cannot. I can no longer protect you from the truth.”

  “What truth?” Derek demanded impatiently. “What are you talking about?”

  “Miss Winfield showed signs of mental instability while you were under her care,” Lord Elstyn replied bluntly. “She invented grandiose tales about her past and shared them with the other servants. Giddings informed me of the situation, but I was . . . preoccupied . . . at the time . . . by other, pressing concerns.”

  He was in London, I told myself, watching his wife die inch by inch.

  “Apart from that,” Lord Elstyn added in a firmer tone of voice, “you had become deeply attached to Miss Winfield. Since the fabrications seemed relatively harmless, I could not bring myself to sever a tie that brought you so much happiness.”

  Derek opened his mouth to speak, but Emma shook her head, so he contented himself with a derisive snort. The earl chose to overlook his son’s show of disrespect.

  “Eventually,” Lord Elstyn continued, “a report came to my ears that I could not ignore. Miss Winfield had taken up with my valet, a man called Chambers.” The earl shrugged. “Such things happen, even in the best-regulated households, but when I learned”—he leaned forward and spoke directly to Derek—“when I learned that the pair of them had left you, Simon, and Oliver alone near the lake while they disported themselves in the shrubbery, I was compelled to take action.” He looked pleadingly at his son. “You were seven years old, Derek. Oliver was a mere toddler. Anything might have happened.”

  “The fishing trips,” Simon breathed.

  “The day after you left for school,” Lord Elstyn said, “I dismissed them both, Chambers as well as Miss Winfield. I didn’t know at the time that Miss Winfield was pregnant.”

  Derek became very still. “Winnie . . . pregnant?”

  Jim Huang stepped forward, as if to support the earl’s claim. “Five months after Miss Winfield’s departure, the first of three groups of letters arrived at Hailesham Park. They were addressed to you, Mr. Harris, under your, er, original name: Anthony Elstyn.”

  “What letters?” Derek asked. “I never received any letters from Winnie.”

  “Lord Elstyn intercepted them,” Jim said.

  “They were full of lies,” the earl put in. “She accused me of fathering her child and pleaded with you to intercede on her behalf—you, a schoolboy.”

  “Chambers had deserted her.” Jim clasped his hands behind his back and delivered his report with an air of clinical detachment that stood in stark contrast to the raw emotions flowing between father and son. “His abandonment triggered the first spate of letters. Some were sent directly to your prep school. . . .”

  Other letters had been sent to Hailesham Park, but the earl had intercepted all of them. After reading the first half-dozen, he instructed Giddings to place Winnie’s letters in storage, unopened, whenever they arrived.

  Jim placed his hand on the manuscript box. “Giddings stored the documents in the butler’s safe, along with the family silver.”

  “I intended to give them to you one day, when you were old enough to understand what had happened,” Lord Elstyn said, still speaking to his son. “But by the time you were old enough—”

  “I’d left.” Derek ran a hand through his unkempt salt-and-pepper curls. He stared at the floor for a moment, then looked at Jim Huang. “You mentioned other letters. What became of them?”

  “Giddings continued to follow his instructions,” Jim answered. “He filed the letters without consulting Lord Elstyn. It wasn’t until the recent threats arrived that Lord Elstyn asked to see the storage boxes.”

  “Giddings brought ten boxes to me, filled with hundreds of unopened letters,” said the earl. “I was appalled by the number that had accumulated over the years. There were far too many for me to deal with.”

  Jim consulted his computer screen. “Miss Winfield sent a total of seven hundred and twenty-three letters to you, Mr. Harris. The first thirty-five were sent shortly after Chambers’s desertion. . . .”

  Jim Huang had read every letter. At the same time, he’d reconstructed nearly forty years of Winnie’s life by following the postal codes on her envelopes. Once he’d determined her location, he’d utilized his computer skills to search the records of various social-service agencies for more detailed information. The paper trail he’d followed was strewn with heartache.

  “Miss Winfield never blamed you for failing to answer her letters,” said Jim. “She assumed that your father had forbidden you to have any contact with her.”

  “Yet she kept writing,” Derek murmured. He seemed dazed.

  “She was not a well woman,” Jim said. “She had a minor breakdown after Chambers left.” He clicked a key on the computer. “She was treated for depression at a clinic in Manchester. It was while she was undergoing treatment that she began writing to you. . . .”

  Motherhood seemed to have a stabilizing effect on Winnie. She wrote to Derek to tell him that she’d given birth to a healthy baby boy, whom she’d named Anthony. Thirteen years passed before she wrote again.

  “You were about to come of age, Mr. Harris,” Jim explained. “Miss Winfield scanned the society columns, searching for news of the celebrations surrounding your twenty-first birthday.”

  “There was no celebration,” Derek said shortly.

  “There was no mention of you at all,” Jim pointed out. “There were, however, many references to your cousin, Simon Elstyn.”

  Simon groaned softly and covered his eyes with his hand.

  “She grew suspicious of your cousin,” Jim continued. “She wrote twenty times to warn you against”—he tapped his keyboard and bent to read aloud from the screen—“‘Simon’s sly plot to snatch Hailesham away from you.’”

  “She was always suspicious of Simon,” the earl added wearily. “She expressed mistrust of him in her earliest letters, accused him of currying favor with me, though he was a mere child. That’s why she came to mind when Simon brought the anonymous notes to me.”

  “She was never entirely rational about Simon,” Jim agreed. “She believed Simon had betrayed her and Chambers to Giddings.”

  “I didn’t,” Simon protested. “I didn’t know they were . . .” He looked helplessly from Derek to Oliver. “I thought Chambers played with us because he liked us.”

  “As I said, sir, Miss Winfield wasn’t entirely rational.” Jim consulted his computer. “When she was twenty-five, she was diagnosed as manic-depressive. She was on medication for many years thereafter and seemed to be functioning fairly well. . . .”

  Having done her duty by warning Derek, Winnie refocused her attention on her own life. She found work waitressing at a swanky restaurant in London, played the organ at her church, and raised her son. At eighteen, young Anthony joined the army. He became an electronics specialist. Winnie was extremely proud of him.

  While Jim droned on about Anthony’s spotless service record, my attention drifted to the coil of wire on Lord Elstyn’s desk. I couldn’t help wondering if the young electronics specialist had taught his mother how to rig radio-controlled devices, such
as a set of flashbulbs that could be conveniently hidden in trailing ivy. My dark musings were interrupted by a subtle change in Jim Huang’s tone. His clipped, businesslike delivery slowed, and when I looked up, I saw a shadow of regret cross his face.

  “Four years later, at the age of twenty-two,” he said, “while on training maneuvers in the Lake District, Anthony Chambers died.”

  A collective sigh wafted through the study. Even Gina seemed moved by Winnie’s loss.

  Jim touched a finger to his glasses. “He was killed while demonstrating a new device for disarming land mines. The device failed. The mine exploded. His death is a matter of public record. . . .”

  After the funeral Winnie had a major breakdown. She was hospitalized for a year. When she was released, she began writing again.

  “From then on she wrote once, sometimes twice a week,” said Jim. “There’s a marked deterioration in her handwriting during this period, and the postal codes vary more often, as she moved from place to place. She began to draw heavily on memories of her days at Hailesham Park. One letter in particular is worth noting. . . .”

  Winnie had seen a magazine article describing the restoration of a twelfth-century church in Shropshire. The article had caught her eye because the man in charge of the project had a familiar name.

  When she’d seen the accompanying photograph, her troubled mind had begun to race. Why did the photograph identify Anthony Evelyn Armstrong Seton, Viscount Hailesham, as Derek Harris? Why was Lord Hailesham in Shropshire, restoring an old church, when he should have been at his father’s side, managing the family estate? What had happened to her beloved boy?

  Her interest in Derek became an obsession.

  “She visited Finch, the village near your home,” said Jim. “She listened to village gossip but learned nothing. No one there seemed aware of your true identity. . . .”

  Winnie then returned to Hailesham, ostensibly to view the gardens. While there, she called on old Mr. Harris, who told her about Derek’s estrangement from his father. He also told her that Derek had a son of his own who would come of age in ten years’ time.

  “In a way, Miss Winfield’s obsession helped her,” Jim observed. “It gave her a purpose, a goal, a reason to get up every day and go on living.”

  “What was her goal?” Emma asked.

  “She wanted to make sure that Peter’s twenty-first birthday was celebrated properly,” Jim replied. “She wanted Peter to have that which Derek had willingly given up—the title, the prestige, the wealth. She spelled out her plan explicitly in her letters. . . .”

  Winnie began to reestablish her credentials in the service industry. She went to court and changed her last name to Chambers. She used the contacts she’d made while waitressing at the fancy London restaurant and started at the bottom, cleaning the houses of the restaurant’s well-heeled customers. She accumulated references and worked her way up through the ranks. By the end of the decade, Charlotte Chambers was more than qualified to sign on with the agency Giddings patronized.

  “When Giddings requested a respectable maid-of-all-work four months ago, she was ready.” Jim closed his laptop. “I can’t speak to her actions after she came to Hailesham.”

  “Let’s hope Giddings can,” said Lord Elstyn.

  The earl touched the button on his desk and Giddings entered the study. The elderly manservant was accompanied by a dark-suited underling carrying a large cardboard box. The nameless assistant deposited the box on the desk, beside Jim Huang’s computer, and stood back. Giddings took his place beside the earl’s desk.

  “Well?” said Lord Elstyn.

  Giddings bowed. “Please allow me to offer my sincerest apologies, my lord. Had I been more alert, I might have—”

  “Yes, all right Giddings,” the earl barked, “get on with it.”

  Giddings straightened with alacrity. “We searched the servants’ quarters, my lord, as you requested. I’m afraid we made some rather disturbing discoveries.”

  Lord Elstyn eyed the box suspiciously as Giddings drew from it a clear plastic bag containing a sheet of paper. The paper looked as if it had been crumpled, then smoothed flat.

  “We found this document and many others like it in Miss . . . Winfield’s room,” said Giddings. “I believe, with regret, that she obtained the documents from your waste receptacle, my lord, in the course of her normal duties.”

  Lord Elstyn nodded grimly for Giddings to go on.

  Giddings lifted a second plastic bag from the box. It seemed to contain a cloth cap. A third bag held what appeared to be a pair of rough trousers. A fourth held a moth-eaten woolen sweater.

  “When I approached Miss Winfield’s wardrobe,” Giddings explained, “I detected a strong scent of paraffin, similar to the scent you noted on the night of the fire, my lord.” He swept a hand over the bagged clothing. “These items of apparel were hidden well back in the wardrobe. I can only assume that Miss Winfield used them to disguise herself when she retrieved the paraffin from the greenhouse and used it to set the topiary ablaze.”

  Beside me, Simon stirred. He put his hand in his pocket, walked to the desk, and deposited the straight razor atop the pile of bagged clothing.

  “It’s one of your old cutthroats, Uncle,” he said to the earl. “You must have given it to Chambers, who left it behind when he abandoned Winnie. I believe she left it in the nursery.”

  “The nursery?” Lord Elstyn queried.

  “She cut up the children’s books,” Simon told him. “She used the books in the nursery to create her anonymous threats. You’ll find paper and paste in the toy cupboard.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Giddings. “We shall look into it immediately.”

  Simon returned to my side. There was no trace of triumph in his demeanor. He looked self-conscious and ashamed, as if grieved by the knowledge that he could no longer plead innocent to Winnie’s charge of betrayal.

  “You did the right thing,” I murmured. “If you hadn’t told them, I would have.”

  “It’s like kicking a child,” he said sadly.

  “A dangerous child,” I reminded him.

  Giddings lifted another clear plastic bag from the cardboard box. “I’m not entirely certain whether this item is relevant or not, my lord, but since it was bundled with the clothing, I thought it best to bring it along. It has antennae, my lord. It appears to be a control mechanism of some kind.”

  “I know what it is.” Lord Elstyn lifted the coil of wire and let it drop, as though he couldn’t bear to touch it. “It was used to control an evil device hidden in the ivy covering the hurdles. My granddaughter informed me this morning that Ms. Shepherd discovered the device last night.”

  Simon looked down at me. “When did you . . .”

  “After I left you, it just came to me,” I muttered, offering a reasonable approximation of the truth. “Your fall, Nell’s—no accident.”

  “Miss Winfield tried to kill Simon twice, to prevent him from taking my son’s place,” Lord Elstyn was saying. “She used remote-controlled flashbulbs to spook Deacon. The second time, she mistook Eleanor for Simon.”

  “Dear Lord . . .” Simon gasped angrily and raised his voice to Giddings. “How could you allow her to come under our roof? Didn’t you recognize her?”

  “It has been almost forty years, sir, since I last encountered Miss Winfield,” Giddings replied with unflappable aplomb. “Her appearance has altered greatly.”

  His words tweaked my memory and I began to see the light. “She put on weight,” I said. “She dyed her hair red.”

  “Madam?” said Giddings with polite perplexity.

  “She’s masquerading as the red-haired maid.” I pointed at Jim Huang. “Jim told us that Winnie played the organ at her church. I caught the red-haired maid playing the piano in the drawing room yesterday. She must be—”

  “I don’t believe it,” Derek declared. He stared stubbornly at his father. “Winnie might have threatened Simon. She might even have burnt the turtledove i
n some misguided effort to help me. But attempted murder? Never. Not Winnie. She couldn’t do such a thing.”

  “I knew you would resist the idea,” said Lord Elstyn. “I’d hoped to avoid a direct confrontation, but . . .” He reached for the button on his desk.

  Twenty-two

  Giddings scooped up the bagged items and dropped them into the box, which his assistant whisked out of sight behind the desk. The elderly manservant then straightened his tie and went to stand at the door.

  The door opened. The red-haired maid entered, carrying the tea tray. She curtsied.

  “More tea, sir?” she asked.

  “No, thank you,” said Giddings, and took the tray from her.

  The maid glanced up at his forbidding scowl. Her eyes darted from face to face around the room. When they met Derek’s, he half rose from his chair.

  “Winnie?” he said.

  She took her bottom lip between her teeth and lowered her lashes. When she looked up again, her face was wreathed in the sweetest of smiles.

  “Now, Master Anthony, what did I tell you about standing when a servant comes into the room?” she chided.

  She smoothed her apron and approached Derek, who’d sunk back into his chair. He was so tall and she so tiny that when she stood before him, they were nearly eye to eye.

  “Didn’t I tell you to stand only for ladies?” she asked. “Polite indifference, that’s what you show to servants, remember?”

  “Yes, Winnie,” said Derek.

  “I knew you’d come back to help your son. I had a son, too, but . . .” Her face went slack for a moment and her eyes became hollow caves. Then the sweet smile returned, the adoring animation. “Did you enjoy your treacle tart, my pet? I made it for you, right under Cook’s nose—the porridge, too—and she never tumbled.” Her smile widened. “Who’s the clever boots?”

  “You are, Winnie,” Derek replied as if the exchange was a familiar one, fond words spoken in childhood and never forgotten.

  “My, my,” she crooned. “Haven’t you grown to be a fine, strong, handsome man?” She plucked playfully at Derek’s curls. “Your hair needs trimming, there’s no denying, and those boots . . .” She clucked her tongue. “Haven’t brushed them in a month, I’ll wager. Naughty. I had to dust the nursery all over again after you visited Blackie.”