Aunt Dimity's Good Deed

by Nancy Atherton

  The bell-ringers’ chamber was at the foot of the square tower, opposite the altar, closed off from the rest of the church by a solid wooden screen with a door in the center. There was a large, open archway above the screen, and through it I could see the bell ropes gathered together like the spokes of an upside-down umbrella, but the door was locked, as bell-tower doors invariably were, for safety’s sake.

  I followed the rector’s advice and thumbed through one of the pamphlets on the wooden table. It had been lovingly compiled by “M.B.”, and I dropped a handful of pound coins in the collection box as a tribute—and as a peace offering to the church finance committee, which was no doubt reprimanding the rector for wasting electricity on a solitary American tourist.

  According to the pamphlet, the Parish Church of Saint Bartholomew had been built in 1871 on the site of an earlier church—the square tower in the back was a thirteenth-century survival. Among the church’s numerous features of interest were a pair of memorial windows, one dedicated to the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose parents had lived in Haslemere, and the other to the poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose home, Aldworth, was just south of town, on Blackdown Hill. Furthermore, M.B. informed me, the Tennyson window had ,been designed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones.

  Since I had a soft spot for Tennyson—not to mention the Pre-RaphaeIites—I returned the pamphlet to the table and crossed to the opposite wall to look at the poet laureate’s window first. The outer darkness obscured the stained-glass image, but not the words below it. They’d been taken from Idylls of the King:

  ... I, Galahad, saw the Grail,

  The Holy Grail, descend upon the shrine ...

  ... And in the strength of this I rode,

  Shattering all evil customs everywhere....

  Galahad, whose pure heart had won him a glimpse of the Holy Grail, had always struck me as a melancholy figure. Tennyson had done his best to convey the virgin knight’s pious joy in battling earthly evil, but I’d detected a note of regret in Galahad’s confession: “I never felt the kiss of love, / Nor maiden’s hand in mine.”

  He was probably bragging, I thought now, looking up at the window. Old Galahad knew a thing or two. The kiss of love wasn’t much of a bargain once you figured in all the heartache that came with it. I smiled sadly and was about to move on to the Hopkins window when I heard a noise behind me. Convinced that the finance committee had voted unilaterally to cut my visit short, I turned to leave, then stopped dead in my tracks.

  Gerald Willis was standing in the doorway.

  11.

  He was dressed as he’d been dressed earlier, in a brown cotton shirt and faded jeans, but he’d pulled on a brown suede jacket as well, to ward off the evening chill. He greeted me with a smile before walking across the back of the church and down the side aisle to where I stood. He paused to admire the Tennyson window, then closed his eyes and recited from memory:

  “ ‘My good blade carves the casques of men, My tough lance thrusteth sure,

  My strength is as the strength of ten, Because my heart is pure.‘ “

  Gerald’s eyes opened and his dimple appeared. “All very admirable, of course, but had he puffed himself up like that at my school, he‘d’ve been stoned to death.”

  “What are you doing here?‘ I asked warily. Gerald’s face might be as handsome as Galahad’s, but his heart was far from pure.

  “Your briefcase,” he replied. “You left it at my house. I dropped it off at the hotel, and asked Nicolette if she knew where I might find you. I didn’t want you to worry about the papers you brought for Cousin William to sign.”

  “Th-thanks.” I hoped that the indirect overhead lighting would conceal my blushes. “I’d have come back for them, but I—”

  “No need to explain,” said Gerald. “Even the most conscientious of executive assistants deserves an occasional evening off.” He let his eyes rove over the altar, the pews, the stained-glass windows. “May I be of service? I’m an excellent tour guide. When I moved here two years ago, I made it a point to explore my new surroundings.” The deep notes of his voice were like organ chords rippling the still air of the empty church.

  “That’s a very generous offer,” I said, backing away a step or two, “but I was hoping for some time to myself.”

  Gerald’s dimple vanished. “Very well,” he said. He turned toward the door, hesitated, then swung around to face me again. “Miss Shepherd, if I’ve offended you in any way—”

  “What makes you think I’m offended?” I asked.

  Gerald flung his hands wide. “One moment you were staying to tea and the next you were leaving. I can’t help but feel as though I said or did something to upset you.”

  “I told you—”

  “That you were hastening back to inform your employer about those papers,” Gerald broke in. “Papers so important that you could afford to leave them at the Larches until after you’d finished your stroll. I’m not a fool, Miss Shepherd.” He bowed his head suddenly, and took his lower lip between his teeth. “But I am being rude. Forgive me.” He turned his head to avoid my gaze and edged sideways along the nearest pew, making a beeline for the door.

  “Why do you care?” I called, without thinking. “Why should my feelings matter to you?”

  Gerald stopped his sideways shuffle and leaned on the pew in front of him, his broad shoulders hunched, as though he’d been struck in the chest. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’ve hurt a lot of people recently, Miss Shepherd, and I haven’t been allowed to apologize to any of them. The thought of doing it again ...” His blue-green eyes flashed an appeal in my direction. “Was it what I said about my father? When I spoke of his illness you looked so melancholy that I thought perhaps your own father ...”

  “No.” I studied his face, looking for a trace of duplicity, but finding only pain and confusion. I couldn’t let him go without giving him some explanation. Reluctantly, I slid in beside him as he sank onto the wooden bench, half turned toward me, one arm resting on the pew in front of ours.

  “My father died when I was three months old,” I told him quietly. “I don’t remember anything about him, but I always wondered what it would be like to have a father. When I ... went to work for Mr. Willis, I felt as though I’d found one.” I sighed. “And now it looks as though I’ll lose him, too.”

  “He’s not ill, I hope,” Gerald said, bending toward me.

  “There are other ways to lose people,” I said. “This proposal of his, for example. I know you’re not at liberty to discuss it, and I know it’d be to your advantage, and I know that I have no right to ask you to make such a sacrifice, but if he brings it up again, I’d ... I’d be very grateful if you’d discourage him from following through on it.”

  Gerald sat back against the pew and gazed at the altar. “It’s true that Cousin William asked me to keep our conversation confidential,” he acknowledged. “He doesn’t want his son or daughter-in-law to get wind of his plans until he has his ducks in a row.” Gerald glanced worriedly at me as I gave a low, involuntary moan. “I’m sorry, Miss Shepherd, but I have no power to influence your employer one way or the other. As I told you, I’m through with the law. I have no intention of going into practice again, with Cousin William or anyone else.” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his long fingers interlaced. “That part of my life is over.”

  He sounded so dejected that I laid a hand on his arm and said, “It’s all right, Gerald. I’ll just have to try again with your cousin Lucy.” I felt a slight tremor pass through his body and wondered if Lucy had been the one who’d forced him to leave the firm.

  Gerald turned to face me, and I was once again conscious of the breadth of his shoulders. They seemed to span the space between the pews. “Why are you so set against Cousin William’s plans?”

  “Because I’ll lose him,” I replied, trying to keep my voice from trembling. “Don’t you see? There’ll be a whole ocean between us.”

  “Couldn’t you come
with him?” Gerald suggested.

  I shook my head. I should have been discussing Bill’s father with Bill, not with some cousin so far removed he could scarcely be called family. “You don’t understand,” I said, dropping my gaze. “I have commitments, obligations. Mr. Willis’s son would expect me to ... work for him.”

  “Ah,” said Gerald. He paused, and I felt his bright eyes search my face. “You care about him, don’t you.”

  “The son?” A flash flood of resentment surged through me. “I hardly know him.”

  “I was speaking of the father,” Gerald said.

  I suddenly felt very tired and very close to tears. I rubbed my forehead and tried to steady myself. “Thank you for coming to find me, Gerald. I ... I ...”

  “Hush,” said Gerald. “There’s no need to say anything.” He got to his feet and put out a hand to help me to mine. “Come, I’ll walk you back to the hotel. If you’re planning on an early start tomorrow, you won’t want to sit up late.”

  Sunk in misery, I waited on the covered porch while Gerald turned off the lights. It had been a brutally long day, and the few moments of peace I’d hoped to find at Saint Bartholomew’s had been shattered by Gerald’s arrival.

  You should have kept a closer watch on Willis, Sr., the small voice whispered, and I flinched, for it was true. If I’d been more aware of his unhappiness, if I’d made more of an effort to bring it to Bill’s attention, I might have been able to prevent this whole sorry mess.

  Gerald returned and, wordlessly, we made our way through the shadowy churchyard to the high-walled pedestrian passage. A gibbous moon cast a silvery light on the asphalt path, and the air was alive with whirring night noises—crickets chirped, frogs trilled, and bats fluttered near the lampposts, but no human voices floated disembodied from behind the redbrick walls; the townspeople had traded the cool of their backyards for the warmth of their hearths. I put my arms around myself and shivered.

  “Here, have this.” Gerald slipped out of his suede jacket and draped it over my shoulders. “It isn’t much, but ...”

  I paused on the path to look up at him. His face was in shadow, but the lamplight picked out the red-gold gleams in his hair. “I know you’d help me if you could, Gerald. And I’m grateful.”

  “Perhaps, if you spoke with his son—”

  “His son,” I retorted bitterly. “His son should be here with me, instead of—” My throat constricted, and I looked away, blinking rapidly.

  “Miss Shepherd,” Gerald murmured. He placed a hand beneath my chin and tilted my face upward. “That married son of William’s is a fool. But I envy him your tears and your devotion.” I felt his hands slip round my waist as he bent his head to kiss me, and though my palms were pressed against his chest, I offered no resistance whatsoever.

  I floated out of his embrace in a red-gold haze, and drifted back to the hotel, nestled close to his side, my tears forgotten, unaware of any sound but the soft, insistent beating of his heart. He raised my fingers to his lips when we reached the Georgian’s doorstep, and strode off without a word into the darkness.

  I watched the night enfold him, then glided up the staircase, and when a distant voice reminded me of the price exacted by intoxication, I ignored it. For the first time in a long time I felt cherished, and the only weight of which I was aware was the remembered touch of Gerald’s lips on mine.

  Nell was asleep when I entered the room, bundled in the far bed, with Bertie tucked in beside her. Reg was still awake, however, sitting up on the pillows of the near bed, looking very much like a father who’d been impatiently checking his wristwatch every hour for the past three hours.

  “Mind your own business,” I muttered, and as I reached for the nightgown Nell had laid out for me, I realized that I’d forgotten to return Gerald’s jacket. I ran my hands along the sleeves, slid the jacket from my shoulders, and, turning my back on Reginald, buried my face in the supple leather and breathed deeply.

  12.

  I awoke at eight the next morning with a guilt hangover so massive it made me sick to my stomach. I couldn’t dial Bill’s number at Little Moose Lake fast enough.

  I carried the telephone to the bathroom, to avoid Reginald’s all-seeing eyes, and perched on the edge of the tub, gnawing my nails, while the phone on the other end rang and rang.

  What had I done? my conscience wailed. Why had I let Gerald kiss me? What kind of a wife was I?

  Granted, I’d been exhausted and depressed, anxious about Willis, Sr., and in need of a shoulder to lean on, but that was no excuse for kissing a strange man in the moonlight. Even if Bill forgave me, how could I ever forgive myself?

  I’d worked myself into such a lather of self-recrimination that I nearly shrieked when a voice in my ear announced frostily: “Biddiford Lodge. Who is calling, please?”

  It was a servant, I realized, a butler or a secretary who evidently disapproved of phone calls at—I did a quick calculation and winced—two o‘clock in his morning. I offered an awkward apology, asked for Bill, and quailed when I heard my husband’s sleepy voice.

  “Lori, is that you?” Bill sounded barely conscious. “Do you have any idea what time it is here?”

  “Bill—” I began urgently, but stopped at the all-too-familiar sound of cavernous yawning.

  “Why don’t you call back a little later, love?” he drawled drowsily. “I’ve been on the run since dawn and I have to be up again in—oh my God—four hours. ”

  “But, Bill—”

  “Lori, I’m whacked. I’m sunburnt and mosquito-bitten and I put a fishhook through my thumb and I have to get some sleep or I’ll be good for nothing tomorrow.”

  I paused. “All the way through your thumb?” I asked, aghast.

  “Just through the fleshy pad, but it hurt like hell, and the shot the doctor gave me put me out like a light.” Bill interrupted himself with another yawn before continuing, “Please let me sink into oblivion again. I’ve had an incredibly trying day.”

  “But—but, Bill ...” I stared blindly at the spotless tile floor, then raised my eyes to the morning light pouring through the bathroom window. Bill hadn’t bothered to ask about the kind of day I’d had, or why I was calling him at such an ungodly hour, or what my phone number was so he could call me back. His father might have had another heart attack, I might have crashed the Mini, Nell might have plunged headlong from Saint Bartholomew’s bell tower—but all Bill could think about was his sunburn, his mosquito bites, and his thumb.

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “I understand.”

  “Thanks, love,” Bill murmured. “G‘night.”

  I hung up the phone, feeling as though I’d been cut adrift. Was I being unreasonable? Was it asking too much to expect my husband to recognize panic in my voice when he heard it?

  I raised a hand to touch the gold band that still hung from the chain around my neck. It wasn’t the first time Bill had tuned me out, or the first time I’d struggled, in vain, to win his attention. That struggle had begun the moment our honeymoon had ended. I thought back to my conversation with Emma the previous morning and, with a sickening sense of clarity, began to listen to that small voice in the back of my head.

  Bill didn’t want to start a family. A child, after all, would only compound the mistake he’d made by marrying me. That was why he kept me at arm’s length, why he buried himself at the office and evaded all discussion of our future. I’d thought success with the Biddifords would restore my husband to me, but I’d been grotesquely naive. The Biddifords were simply another in a long line of excuses Bill had found to stay as far away from me as he could get. My Handsome Prince had known all along how this fairy tale would end. He’d just been waiting for me to figure it out.

  I sat huddled on the tub, clutching the phone, feeling sick and dizzy, as though the foundations of my life had been snatched out from under me. What would I do? Where would I go? How could I bear to start over again? Trembling, I placed the telephone on the floor and tottered to the sink to splash c
old water on my face. I couldn’t allow myself to cry, because once I started I didn’t think I’d ever stop, so I leaned there, taking deep breaths, until the dizziness had passed. Then I looked at my reflection in the mirror.

  “Willis, Sr., still cares about you,” I whispered. Of that I was certain. But I could no longer say the same about my husband.

  Nell was awake and packing when I emerged from the bathroom, and she looked me over carefully before asking, “What happened last night?”

  “I’ll tell you about it on the train,” I replied shortly.

  “The train?”

  “The train.”

  I wasn’t up to engaging in a blushing match with Miss Coombs—my illicit tête-à-tête with Gerald was still burning holes in my conscience—so we slipped out of the Georgian via the garden, unencumbered by any luggage but the briefcase. I’d settle the bill by credit card, I told myself, and ask Miss Kingsley to arrange for our suitcases to be sent on.

  I’d ask her to have someone pick up the car, too. Conscious of my promise to Derek to avoid driving in London, we left the Mini in the car park at the Haslemere station and caught the nine twenty-five for Waterloo. The carriages were packed with commuters, but Nell had spoken with Mr. Digby’s daughter in the ticket office and secured us a private compartment as well as two Styrofoam cups of milky, sugary tea.

  Nell had discarded her Nicolette blacks in favor of a sleeveless sky-blue dress, a white linen jacket, white pumps, and a soft-sided white leather shoulder bag. She’d dressed Bertie in a blue-and-white sailor suit and selected a similarly summery outfit for me, but I’d opted for the hideous tweeds again. They were the closest thing to mourning she had packed.

  In her pretty blue dress, with Bertie cradled in one arm and Reginald’s pink flannel ears poking out of her shoulder bag, Nell presented a picture of golden-haired innocence as we made our way to our private compartment, but as soon as I closed the door, she scowled like a Tatar.