Aunt Dimity: Snowbound

by Nancy Atherton

“My mother was English.” Jamie stretched his legs out toward the fire, folded his hands across his dark-blue sweater, and leaned back in his chair. “My parents met in England during the war, wrote to each other afterward, fell in love, and were married. She came to America to live, of course—the classic G.I. bride—but we kept in close touch with her family in England and visited often. I studied at Oxford as well, so I suppose I can’t help being a mongrel.”

  “I’m not complaining,” I said, and I wasn’t. Jamie’s voice was beautifully deep and resonant. I wanted to ask him to read aloud from his book, just for the pleasure of hearing him speak, but chose to achieve the same goal more gracefully by simply keeping the conversation going for as long as possible.

  “Both of my parents served during the war,” I said. “My mother was on Eisenhower’s staff in London and my dad landed at Omaha Beach on D-day.”

  “You must be proud of both of them,” said Jamie. “Did they want you to serve in the military?”

  “I don’t think anyone’s ever pictured me in uniform,” I said, laughing. “Did your dad expect you to join up?”

  “No,” said Jamie. “In fact, he was very much against it.”

  “I’m glad,” I said, without thinking.

  “Are you?” Jamie gave me a questioning look. “Why?”

  “Because . . .” I hadn’t known him long enough to confess that the mere thought of those soft, dark curls falling victim to a buzz cut made me want to gnash my teeth and howl, so I said airily, “Because it’s a dangerous profession.”

  “True,” Jamie agreed. “It wouldn’t have suited me, in any case. I prefer woodland walks to obstacle courses, and I’m no good at following orders. I’d’ve made a rotten soldier.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” I said. “You impressed the heck out of me when Catchpole was waving his gun around. You were so calm, and you disarmed him so easily.”

  “Did I seem calm?” Jamie stroked his beard reflectively. “I suppose I was. Father taught me basic self-defense, so I wasn’t quite as rattled by Catchpole’s antics as you appeared to be.”

  “I wasn’t rattled,” I stated flatly. “I was scared spitless. That’s why I brought the shotgun up to my room. It’s under my bed.”

  “What a good idea.” Jamie nodded. “I should have thought of it.”

  “It comes from being a mother,” I said. “I never leave dangerous toys where little boys can get at them.”

  Jamie laughed. “How many children do you have?”

  “Two,” I said. “Twin four-year-olds named Will and Rob, and don’t get me started on them or you’ll soon be pleading with me to wring your neck.”

  We talked about the boys nonetheless. Jamie, evidently a glutton for punishment, demanded to hear more, and I acquiesced, curling my legs beneath me and serving up my best anecdotes for his entertainment. Even as I spoke, I savored the irony—my paranoia about Catchpole had resulted in a thoroughly enjoyable encounter. Jamie’s companionable presence brought to mind my first trip to England, when I’d stayed up all night in youth hostels, holding intimate discussions with perfect strangers whose paths would never again cross mine. There was something about lousy weather and damp socks that instantly transformed the most casual of acquaintances into the closest of friends.

  “It’s a pity you can’t be home this evening,” Jamie observed, when I’d finally lapsed into silence. “Your husband and sons must miss you.”

  “Believe me, it’s mutual,” I said. “My husband travels a lot because of his job, so having him at home is a special treat. I hate missing it. Are you married?”

  “No.” He shrugged. “I came close to it a few years ago, but my father fell ill and I spent so much time looking after him that I had no time left to look after my fiancée. She was understandably annoyed, and the thing rather fell through.”

  Jamie’s wistful expression brought to mind a few choice comments about worthless, heartless fiancées, but I said only, “Is your father all right?”

  “He died two months ago. Shortly before Christmas.” Jamie turned his head to gaze fixedly into the fire. “It was a merciful release. Alzheimer’s.”

  The last word contained such a world of weariness that a shadow seemed to dim the bright mosaic. Jamie’s eyes darkened, too, despite the firelight, as if he’d been to a place light couldn’t reach and hadn’t yet found a way out.

  “I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “It must have been hard to lose him like that.”

  “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.” Jamie tossed his hair back from his face and went on briskly, “I came over to England to take a long walk and clear my head. I didn’t ex pect to end up at the abbey, but it makes a pleasant change from the VA hospital.”

  “I’m sure it does. Did your father reminisce about the war? He must have had a lot of stories to tell.” I checked myself, then added hastily, “If you’d rather not talk about him, Jamie, just say the word and I’ll go back to the perils of potty-training.”

  Jamie smiled. “I don’t mind talking about my father. Sometimes it helps to talk about him. No, he never spoke of the war. I think he wanted to shield me from the horrors he’d witnessed. My mother told me about it, though, and she knew a great deal. As Catchpole pointed out earlier, England had been fighting desperately for three years before the Yanks made their first appearance.”

  I nodded wisely. “That must be why you know so much about Dunkirk and the Blitz.”

  “I’ve done a fair amount of reading on the subject,” said Jamie. “I’m interested in history.”

  “Me, too,” I said, pleased to discover that we had something else in common. “Is your mother still alive?”

  “Very much so,” said Jamie. “She’s eighty-seven, but she’s in good health and her mind’s as sharp as a razor. She encouraged me to take this trip. She said I needed to get the stench of nursing homes out of my nostrils.” He looked up at the mosaic. “She’d love it here. She’s always loved Chaucer.”

  I craned my neck to look at the book Jamie had set aside when I’d burst in on him. “Is that a photo album?”

  “It is.” Jamie glanced at the large volume, but made no move to pick it up. “I found it on one of the shelves. It helped pass the time until you arrived.”

  “It looks old,” I said.

  “It belonged to the DeClerkes,” he told me. “I’m not sure what Tessa Gibbs is doing with it.”

  “My husband said that Tessa bought the house and its contents,” I informed him. “The books in the library must count as contents.” I held out my hand. “May I see it? I love looking at old pictures. They help me feel connected to the past.”

  “Why don’t we look at it together?” Jamie motioned for me to join him as he moved from his chair to the floor.

  We sat side by side on the Turkey carpet, turning the pages of the old morocco-bound album and marveling at the images it contained. It was a DeClerke family memento, a collection of full-length portrait photographs taken at a fancy-dress ball held at the abbey in 1897 to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.

  All of the guests were fabulously attired, but I was particularly captivated by a photograph of the hosts: Grundy DeClerke and his wife, Rose. The handwritten caption below the photograph described them as the personifications of Night and Day, but their costumes might have been designed solely to display the wealth Grundy had amassed selling unmentionables to Her Majesty’s armed forces. Grundy’s short cape, pierced doublet, and flat cap were made of lavishly embroidered and bejeweled black velvet—even his black stockings were patterned with pearls.

  Rose, however, would have outshone the sun. A froth of ostrich feathers spouted from her glittering tiara, jewel-encrusted bracelets encircled her sturdy wrists, her bodice was bracketed by a pair of sunburst brooches, her dimpled fingers were laden with rings, and teardrop diamonds as big as my thumbnail hung from her earlobes. She wore a trailing, ermine-edged white velvet cape over a wasp-waisted white gown. The gown’s plunging neck
line revealed almost all there was to see of her ample bosom, but her personal attractions were overshadowed by the stunning necklace that spilled, like a waterfall of diamonds, from the diamond-studded choker around her neck.

  The necklace, like the tiara, had been crafted to resemble a fan of peacock feathers, and a pair of real peacocks had been posed at the couple’s feet, as if to underscore the theme. The birds stood erect, their long tails draped artistically across the marble floor, their small, pointed beaks cocked smugly toward the camera, blithely unaware that they were playing second fiddle to the breathtaking diamonds adorning Rose DeClerke.

  “I dressed up as a cat last Halloween,” I said with a sigh. “How times have changed.”

  “Conspicuous consumption isn’t what it used to be,” Jamie agreed, and turned the page. “Look. Their sons.”

  I gazed soberly at four boys of varying ages who appeared together in one sepia-toned photograph, dressed as medieval pages. Three of them, I knew, would soon be lying dead in the mud of Flanders. The fourth would lose his life years later in the Blitz, leaving behind a daughter who would one day lose her mind.

  “I wonder what happened to Lucasta,” I murmured, forgetting for a moment that I’d learned Miss DeClerke’s first name from a highly classified source.

  “Lucasta?” Jamie closed the album. “Who’s Lucasta?”

  “Miss DeClerke,” I replied, and covered my blunder by saying that Catchpole had mentioned his former employer’s Christian name to me on the way up to my room. “Why did she go crazy?” I took my lower lip between my teeth and glanced anxiously at Jamie. “You don’t suppose she was . . . raped . . . do you?”

  “No, I do not,” he said firmly. “The military authorities wouldn’t be able to hush up something like that. Lucasta wasn’t a shop girl, after all. She was an extremely wealthy heiress who was running a convalescent home staffed by army personnel. If she’d been assaulted by an American, no one could have swept it under the carpet.”

  “I hope you’re right,” I said.

  Jamie’s arm brushed mine as he moved forward to add coal to the fire and I felt an all-too-familiar tingle of physical attraction. Only a week-old corpse, I reasoned, could fail to be attracted to someone as appealing as Jamie Macrae in such an absurdly romantic setting, but I put the brakes on my natural impulses and moved away from him to sit with my back against the seat of my chair. I wondered idly if the young Lucasta and her noble husband-to-be had spent time together in this library, gazing up at the brilliant mosaic and sharing dreams for the future.

  “Maybe Lucasta fell in love with one of her patients,” I mused aloud, “and maybe he rejected her. It would have been a pretty devastating blow, coming so soon after losing her fiancé at Dunkirk.”

  “Unrequited love can be devastating,” Jamie said, so sadly that I wished I hadn’t spoken.

  I’d forgotten about his worthless fiancée. I reached out to lay a comforting hand on his shoulder and nearly clipped him in the jaw as a loud bang! reverberated through the corridor.

  “Was that a gunshot?” I said. “You don’t suppose Catchpole—” I broke off, heart racing, and looked fearfully toward the hall. “Where’s Wendy?”

  “I’ll find out.” Jamie’s dark eyes flashed with anger as he sprang nimbly to his feet. “You stay here and bar the door. I’m going to put an end to Catchpole’s antics once and for all.”

  Eight

  Jamie might have been lousy at following orders, but he was awfully good at giving them. Even though I preferred to be in the front lines, flailing, when the trump of battle sounded, on this occasion I followed his instructions to the letter. I remained in the library, shoved a heavy chair against the door, armed myself with the poker from the fireplace, and waited in breathless anticipation for whatever might happen next. What happened next almost frightened me out of my socks.

  Jamie had been gone for scarcely five minutes when I heard a footstep in the corridor. I raised the poker high and watched in horrid fascination as the doorknob slowly turned, first one way, then the other. When the door bumped hard against the chair, I nearly shrieked.

  “Jamie?” a voice whispered.

  “Wendy?” I whispered back.

  “Lori?” said Wendy.

  “Oh, thank God . . .” My poker arm drooped like a wilting tulip and I heaved a tremulous sigh of relief. “Yes, it’s Lori.”

  “What are you doing here?” Wendy asked. “Where’s Jamie?”

  “Jamie and I were talking,” I answered. “He’s gone to rescue you and to beat the tar out of Catchpole.”

  “Rescue me? Catchpole?” A note of exasperation entered Wendy’s voice. “Let me in, will you? I feel ridiculous, talking through a door.”

  “Sorry.” I pulled the chair aside, but pushed it back as soon as Wendy was safely in the room.

  Her long gray hair was still wound in an elaborate knot at the nape of her neck and she was wearing the same clothes she’d worn earlier, with the curious addition of what appeared to be a miner’s lamp strapped to her head. I restrained the urge to ask about the lamp because I didn’t want to be told that it was, like the pry bar, just another standard piece of gear carried by truly intelligent backpackers, i.e., not me. Besides, Wendy was eyeing me as if I’d lost my marbles.

  “Why are you barricading us in the library?” she asked, in the appeasing tone of voice usually reserved for the dangerously dotty.

  “Catchpole’s on the rampage,” I told her. “Didn’t you hear the gunshot?”

  Wendy rolled her eyes to the heavens, then reached up to switch off her miner’s lamp. “It wasn’t a gunshot. It was a blanket chest.”

  “A what?” I said, blinking stupidly.

  “A blanket chest.” Wendy moved the chair away from the door and strode over to hold her hands out to the fire. “My bedroom was chilly, so I went looking for extra blankets. I spotted a big wooden chest at the end of the corridor and took a look inside. The lid slipped and came crashing down. That’s all.” She looked at me over her shoulder. “You can put the poker away. I don’t think you’ll be needing it—unless you’re afraid of blanket chests.”

  I greeted her witticism with a thin smile and returned the poker to its stand by the fireplace. Wendy seemed to be going out of her way to make me feel like the original hysterical woman.

  “Call me a sissy,” I said, “but when I hear something that sounds like a gunshot, I get a little nervous. I have a healthy respect for firearms.”

  “So do I,” Wendy retorted. “But I’m not afraid of them.”

  I folded my arms and said with heavy irony, “I imagine you were cool as a cucumber when Catchpole was waving his shotgun around.”

  “As a matter of fact, I was.” Wendy turned her back to the fire. “He couldn’t’ve shot us even if the gun had been loaded. The safety catch was on.”

  I let my arms fall to my sides in defeat. Wendy sent satellites into orbit, knitted her own sweaters, and designed her own backpacks. She’d figured out how to work a complicated Victorian range in less time than it had taken me to figure out how to operate my microwave. Were there no limits to her competence?

  “You know about guns, too?” I said wanly.

  “My father was a marksman,” she replied with annoying nonchalance. “We always had guns around the house. He taught me how to shoot.”

  I looked at her in alarm. “You’re not carrying a gun in your backpack, are you?”

  “In England? Not likely.” Wendy bent to lift the morocco-bound photo album from the floor. She leafed through a few pages, then set it on the table beside Jamie’s chair, as if it held no interest for her. “What were you and Jamie talking about? Life, the universe, and everything?”

  I bridled at the hint of mockery in her tone, but replied civilly, “More or less. We ended up talking about Miss DeClerke, though—trying to figure out what happened to her.”

  Wendy stepped away from the fire and sat in Jamie’s chair, facing me. “Did you come up with any answers?�
��

  “Not really.” I turned toward the fire, disconcerted by Wendy’s headgear. It was as if I were being interrogated by a Cyclops. “My best guess is that she fell in love with one of the American officers during his stay here. He rejected her and she couldn’t take it, not after losing her fiancé and her father. So she went a little nuts and spent the rest of her life writing letters to the guy, reproaching him or cajoling him or”—I sank into my chair—“or maybe they were love letters. Who knows?”

  “How romantic,” Wendy murmured sardonically. She ruminated in silence for a moment, then shook her head and said, “What a waste. What a stupid, tragic waste. She had so much”—Wendy swept a hand through the air to indicate Ladythorne in general—“but she wasn’t satisfied. She could have made something of her life, something important and valuable, but she wasted it on a futile obsession. I don’t get it.”

  “I do.” I resented Wendy’s cold assessment of Lucasta’s plight and felt driven to defend the dead woman. “It’s not uncommon for a war hero to crack up when the war ends.”

  “Don’t tell me you think of Miss DeClerke as a war hero,” Wendy said, incredulous.

  “Why not?” I said heatedly. “She nursed a lot of wounded men back to health. She turned her home into a sanctuary for them. She gave them everything she had for the duration of the war and then, bang, it was over, they were gone, and everything came crashing in on her, all her losses, all her pain. She realized at gut level, maybe for the first time, that the men she’d lost were never coming back.” I felt my throat constrict in a spasm of sympathy. “It’d be enough to drive anyone over the edge.”

  “If you say so,” Wendy said, in a subdued murmur.

  We sat in silence. It wasn’t the companionable silence I’d shared with Jamie, but an awkward, prickly silence. I was struggling to regain my composure, and Wendy, I suspected, was holding her tongue for fear that I’d snap at her if she made any more insensitive comments about Lucasta DeClerke.

  “I’m sorry,” I said after a time. “I shouldn’t have spoken so . . . forcefully. The thing is, my father fought in the war. If he’d been wounded, I would have gone down on my knees to thank anyone who helped him. So I find it hard to be detached about Miss DeClerke.”