Aunt Dimity's Good Deed

by Nancy Atherton

  Then he gasped. Looking straight past me, he flung his arms wide and threw himself to his knees with a cry that was almost a sob.

  “Sybella! I knew you’d come!”

  18.

  Nell’s eyes were as wide as a deer’s in headlights. I’d warned her about Uncle Williston’s delusions, but she obviously hadn’t expected to be included in them. Nor, for that matter, had I, and I watched in wary anticipation as the old man used the chair seat to lever himself to his feet.

  I was struck at once by Uncle Williston’s resemblance to Arthur and, by extension, Bill. I’d always suspected that my husband had grown his beard to conceal a weak chin, but there was nothing weak about Uncle Williston’s cleanshaven features. He had a strong jawline, a fine, high forehead, and the same expressive brown eyes that Bill hid behind black-framed glasses. If he aged as well as Uncle Williston, I mused, Bill would one day be a distinguished-looking elder statesman.

  When Williston had drawn himself to his full height, he straightened his snowy neckcloth, ran a hand over his white hair, and shook out the wrist frills that fell from the sleeves of his black tailcoat. His brown eyes remained fixed on Nell’s face as he crossed over to me and, much to my surprise, pressed a glittering one-pound coin into my palm.

  “I owe you much for bringing forth my lady,” he murmured. “You may go now.”

  “Stay!” cried Nell, and I was perversely pleased to detect a note of panic in her voice.

  Uncle Williston, however, nodded knowingly. “I understand,” he said to her. “You cannot maintain your present form unaided.” He gestured to a gilded footstool beside the door. “You may wait here, Magister,” he told me.

  I sat.

  Williston turned to Nell. “Can you take tea, my lady?” he asked. His question confirmed a suspicion that made this extremely strange encounter even stranger. Uncle Williston, it seemed, thought he was addressing a ghost. And he seemed to think I’d summoned her.

  Nell swallowed hard, then swung into action. She raised her chin, met Uncle Williston’s gaze directly, and refused his offer. “I have not come here today for food or drink, my lord.”

  “Indeed.” Williston nodded gravely. “Pray sit with me awhile, then. We have much to discuss.”

  “And little time to discuss it,” Nell put in quickly. “I must return whence I came before sunset.”

  Williston’s face darkened with distress, but he quickly mastered his emotions. “Then we must make the most of every moment. Come, my lady.” He motioned for Nell to take a seat on a backless settee in front of the windows.

  Williston’s vocabulary was not, strictly speaking, of the eighteenth century, and his mannered delivery brought to mind the fruity accents used by second-rate Shake spearean actors to signal the audience that they were hearing something highbrow that had been written sometime prior to the Great Depression. He stood with one white-stockinged leg well forward, walked with a mincing gait ill-suited to his size, and bowed with a flurry of wrist frills that would have been farcical if his expression hadn’t been so sincere.

  I felt invisible in my perch near the door, but I didn’t object. I was only too glad to be relegated to the sidelines. The game being played in Uncle Williston’s mind was way out of my league.

  Nell, on the other hand, was in her element. Once she’d recovered from her initial shock, she’d slipped into Sybella with an ease that took my breath away. She’d been brilliant as Nicolette, playing a role she’d invented; here she was faced with the much more difficult task of breathing life into a character about whom she knew absolutely nothing. Her concentration was disturbingly intense. Nell had lurked just below the surface of Nicolette, but she’d vanished into Sybella without a trace.

  Williston remained standing, though there was room enough for two on the settee. “I told Mother you would come back, Sybella,” he said, “but she did not believe me.”

  “It is the power of your belief that brought me,” Nell informed him.

  “And the power of my anger that sent you thither.” Williston flung himself to his knees again and held out his hands beseechingly. “Can you ever forgive me, Sybella? I wish fervently to atone for what I’ve done.”

  The undiluted agony in Williston’s voice brought a lump to my throat, but Nell was made of sterner stuff. I could almost hear her mental keyboard clicking as she calculated the best response. Too harsh, and Williston might clam up; too kind, and he might become too besotted to stay on track.

  “I cannot forgive you,” she began, and as Williston’s shoulders started to slump, she added hastily, “until you have told me all.”

  “All?” Williston cast a haunted glance over his shoulder. “I cannot tell you all, my lady. Not even now. Mother would hear of it. I would be punished.”

  “Then tell me what you can,” Nell countered with infinite patience.

  Williston’s knees cracked as he rosc slowly to his feet and asked for Nell’s permission to sit. At her nod, he flipped his tails out with a practiced hand, placed his feet with the precision of a dancing master, and lowered himself onto the settee, half-turned to face her. Nell looked as fragile as a Dresden shepherdess beside his towering figure, but her regal bearing gave her an aura of power that somehow made Williston seem smaller and more vulnerable than she.

  “You were meant to marry me, Sybella,” Williston said plaintively. “That is why we took you in and managed your estates. It was clearly understood by all concerned that you were meant for me. You must have known.”

  Nell nodded.

  “You were so pure, so innocent,” Williston went on. “Mother warned you to be vigilant, but you were not. You succumbed to his advances. You believed his lies. You allowed yourself to be sullied by his touch.” Williston turned his head to one side, and I saw that his eyes were glistening with tears. “I could not allow it to go on, but Mother would not permit me to challenge him. It would hurt the firm, she said. The firm, always the firm ...” Williston bowed his head and groaned.

  “What did you do?” Nell coaxed.

  Williston straightened and his face went strangely slack. “I had no choice,” he answered, in an eerie monotone. “Surely you must see that. I had to keep you from corruption at his hands.”

  “Tell me what you did,” Nell pressed.

  “You know the first part,” Williston told her in the same hollow voice. “But the second part came ... after. It is the latter part, the theft, for which I can still make amends and, perhaps, earn your forgiveness.”

  “How can you make amends?” Nell asked.

  Williston rose and, as though sleepwalking, crossed slowly to the kneehole desk and cleared the writing surface of pens and papers. He reached underneath it, to twist something I couldn’t see, and the writing surface yawned open, revealing a hidden compartment beneath. He drew from the compartment a box. It was made of polished fruitwood, with splendidly embellished silver hinges. Williston carried the box with him to the settee.

  “I can never repay you fully, Sybella,” he said. “I can never return to you the life you should have had, but I can restore a small part of what was taken. Do with it as you will. It is yours.”

  Williston presented the box to Nell, who accepted it gravely and stood. I could no longer hear the keyboard clicking in her mind, or detect any sign of calculation in her actions as she lightly brushed her fingertips across Williston’s anxious brow.

  “Torment yourself no more,” she said. “You are forgiven.”

  “Well?” I said when we’d reached the safety of the hallway. “What’s in the box? Let’s have a look, Nell.”

  Nell didn’t seem to hear. She stared fixedly at a mauve-tinted china vase on a table across the hallway, her cornflower eyes filled with pity and regret.

  “Nell ...” I laid my palm against her cheek. “Nell? Snap out of it. You’re back on Planet Earth now, sweetie.”

  “Hmmm?” She blinked slowly, as though emerging from a trance, shuddered slightly, and raised a hand to shade her eye
s. “Oh my ...”

  “Yeah. That was pretty intense.” I put an arm around her waist. “You want to sit down, catch your breath?”

  “No. I ... I want to see what Williston’s given me.” She lifted the lid of the fruitwood box, peered into it, then looked up at me with such a queer expression that for a moment I thought we were in for another batch of butterscotch brownies. “I think it’s the deed, Lori. The deed to number three, Anne Elizabeth Court.”

  “What?” I reached into the box and took from it a sheet of handmade, deckle-edged foolscap. It was covered with the scratchings of a quill pen and dated June 17, 1701. The spelling was eccentric and the handwriting antiquated, but I had no trouble reading the words. I mumbled through the main body of the legalistic text, but when I got to the bottom of the page, I quoted slowly and clearly. “ ‘We hereby assign the freehold of the aforementioned property to ...’ ” I hesitated, then looked at Nell. “ ‘... to Sybella Markham.’ ”

  “The sleeping dog?” Nell asked.

  “Woof,” I replied.

  19.

  Sir Poppet met us at the head of the main staircase. He looked ecstatic, stretching both hands out to Nell and beaming down at her as he approached. “Oh, Lady Nell,” he said, “you were brilliant, brilliant.”

  Lady Nell regarded him distantly, a hurt expression on her face. “You planned it,” she said quietly. “You knew that I resembled Sybella. You knew he would mistake me for her.”

  Sir Poppet had the grace to look guilty. “Lady Nell, I assure you—”

  “You might have warned us,” I broke in reproachfully. “You might have told us about Sybella.”

  “Sybella Markham is a figment of Williston’s imagination,” Sir Poppet declared. “A projection, a—”

  “What’s this, then?” I demanded, holding the deed out for him to see. “ A special effect?”

  He was unfazed. “I have a cartload of similar documents, Ms. Shepherd. Williston turns them out by the score.”

  My excitement suffered a severe setback as a sound came back to haunt me, a sound I’d heard not an hour ago: the steady scritch-scritch of Uncle Williston’s quill pen as he sat writing at the kneehole desk. “Are you telling me that Williston made this deed?” I asked reluctantly.

  “And many others like it,” Sir Poppet confirmed. “Each of them in the name of Sybella Markham. Please ...” He motioned for us to precede him down the stairs. “If you’ll come with me to my office, I’ll clarify matters for you.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “I think perhaps you should.”

  The decor in Sir Poppet’s office was dark and strikingly contemporary—black leather chairs, an ebony desk, matte black torchères in the comers, and abstract paintings on the cobalt-blue walls. Despite my impatience, he’d refused to tell us anything until after we’d had something to eat. It was nearly noon, he pointed out, and Nell had been through a stressful experience.

  Nell was subdued—oppressed, I thought, by the notion that an old friend like Sir Poppet would thrust her into such a demanding confrontation without confiding in her first. I was preoccupied with the deed. Sir Poppet’s bland dismissal of its authenticity niggled at me. I’d examined the document under the high-intensity lamp on his desk. If it was a fake, it was the best I’d ever seen.

  When our light meal had been cleared away, Sir Poppet sat behind his desk, and Nell and I took our places in a pair of cushy leather chairs. He gazed down at his folded hands for a moment, then looked directly at Nell. “Before I begin, I must apologize for not putting you fully in the picture before you went in to see Williston. It may have been necessary, but it wasn’t very kind.”

  “Why was it necessary?” Nell asked.

  “I had no idea how Williston would react when he saw you—or if he’d react at all. If you’d gone in armed with preconceptions, you might have tried to manipulate the encounter.” Sir Poppet smiled wryly. “I’ve known you all of your life, Lady Nell. I’m well aware of your ... gifts. I knew you’d be capable of following Williston’s lead, if he gave you one.”

  Nell acknowledged the compliment with a modest nod. “I hope you’ll tell us the truth now, Sir Poppet. Who is Sybella Markham? I don’t believe that she’s a figment of Williston’s imagination. She was too real.”

  “Ah, but delusions can seem very real,” Sir Poppet pointed out, “especially when they’re based on someone well known to the patient. Sybella Markham, for example, is based on Williston’s wife, Sybil.”

  “Sybil,” I said under my breath. Emma had failed to pass along this pertinent piece of information. I looked questioningly at Sir Poppet. “And the ‘he’ that Williston talked about, the man who sullied Sybella with his touch—that’s Douglas, right?”

  “I would assume so.” Sir Poppet placed his elbows on the desk and tented his fingers. “Sybil was Williston’s second wife. She was much younger than he, blond, blue-eyed—you are, if you’ll permit me, Lady Nell, an idealized version of Sybil.”

  “And when we showed up, you thought you’d put that resemblance to good use,” I ventured.

  Sir Poppet nodded. “I hoped it would penetrate Williston’s defenses, help him to open up, force him to confront his feelings of guilt over Sybil’s tragic death.”

  “She’s dead?” I gasped.

  Sir Poppet looked from my astonished face to Nell‘s, blinking rapidly. “You didn’t know? I thought you did. You said you knew about Sybil and Douglas.”

  “We knew they’d run off together,” I explained, “but we had no idea she was dead” A horrible thought flashed into my mind. “Williston didn’t kill her, did he?”

  “No.” Sir Poppet shook his head briskly. “Both Sybil and Douglas were burned to death in a seedy hotel near Toronto.”

  “That’s why he thought I was a ghost.” Nell was gazing down at her white dress and looking a good deal more ghostly than was good for her.

  I put an arm around Nell’s shoulders while Sir Poppet picked up the telephone on his desk. He spoke so softly that I couldn’t make out the words, and when he finished, he poured a glass of ice water from the carafe at his elbow, then came around the desk to hand it to Nell.

  “I’m sorry for giving you such a turn,” he said. “I honestly thought that the family had told you the entire story. I can see now that the subject must still be too painful for them to discuss in full.”

  “Poor Williston,” Nell murmured.

  “Indeed.” Sir Poppet half-sat on the edge of his desk. “He blamed himself when Sybil left. He felt that he’d neglected her by spending too much time at the office. When he learned of her death, he was overwhelmed with guilt and remorse. He traded painful reality for a mode of existence in which he could spend every waking hour endowing Sybil with worldly goods she was long past needing.”

  I looked over to where the deed lay, atop the fruitwood box on Sir Poppet’s desk. “Such as number three, Anne Elizabeth Court?”

  “And the family farm up in Yorkshire, and a good deal more besides.” Sir Poppet sighed. “For the past two years, he’s done nothing but create documents assigning all of his family’s possessions to Sybil. Compensation, I assume, for his earlier neglect.”

  I held a hand out toward the desk. “May I keep the deed?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Sir Poppet said. “It might disturb Williston to see it again after presenting it to Sybella. Yes, by all means, take it with you, and the box as well.”

  Nell shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “Why did Williston talk about his mother?” she asked. “And about a theft? Why Sybella Markham instead of Sybella Willis? Was Sybil’s maiden name Markham?”

  “No. It was Farrand.” Sir Poppet lifted his hands into the air, then let them fall. “I don’t pretend to understand everything, Lady Nell. I’ll have to analyze the transcripts of today’s encounter thoroughly before I can begin to work out the details.”

  “Did he mention Sybella to my father-in-law?” I asked.

  “Your father-in-law was treated to a
detailed account of the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1720,” Sir Poppet replied. He gave an impatient little sigh and shook his head. “I don’t think you quite understand. This is the first time in two years that Williston’s spoken his wife’s name aloud. It’s an enormous breakthrough, and I can only say—” Sir Poppet broke off as a knock sounded at the door. He excused himself and left the office, to return a moment later with Bertie in his arms. “Sir Bertram declares that you are to be congratulated, Lady Nell, and I must say that I agree with him.”

  I watched from the front stairs of Cloverly House as Sir Poppet, Nell, and Bertie took a turn around the lawn. Nell had been thoroughly shaken by her unwitting participation in Uncle Williston’s therapy, and I was grateful to Sir Poppet for taking the time to talk her through it.

  We were stuck there for a while, anyway. I’d sent Paul up to London with the deed Uncle Williston had given Nell. I had a friend at the British Museum, an expert on papers and inks, and I wanted him to take a look at it. If Toby Treadwell said the deed was a fake, I’d believe it. If not, I’d begin to ask a whole new set of questions. Such as: Who was Sybella Markham? How had her property come into the hands of the Willis family? And what did any of this have to do with my father-in-law?

  I pressed a hand to the small of my back and strolled over to sit on a wooden bench in the shade of a towering oak. It felt good to sit still for a moment and let my mind wander. I’d had what my mother would have called an eventful couple of days, during which I’d expended more emotional energy than should have been humanly possible. Maybe, I thought, bending to pick up one of the acorns littering the grass, just maybe it wasn’t the best time to make a decision that would affect the rest of my life.