Aunt Dimity and the Heart of Gold

by Nancy Atherton

  “It looks as though they’re having a party,” said Emma. “Could be a family reunion.”

  “I hope it’s the latter,” said Lilian. “There’s always at least one person who longs to escape from a family reunion.”

  “Do you know what you’re going to say, Lori?” Emma asked.

  “‘Please don’t set the dogs on us,’” I replied stoically. “I’ll see where it goes from there.” I pulled in beside an SUV and switched off the engine. “Just remember to be polite, and if they mistake us for carolers, lead with ‘Deck the Halls.’ The fa-la-las will put them in a good mood.”

  “Why should they mistake us for carolers?” Tilly asked, sounding bewildered.

  “Why else would four strangers show up on their doorstep a few days before Christmas?” I retorted. “We can reveal the real reason for our visit after they invite us in for the customary cup of hot cocoa or mulled wine.”

  “Your mind works in mysterious ways,” Emma commented, and got out of the car.

  My cowardly companions arrayed themselves behind me at a discreet distance as I approached the front door. I could hear loud voices and peals of laughter coming from within the farmhouse when I reached the doorstep. After I rang the doorbell, however, all I could hear was the scrabble of claws and a cacophonous chorus of barks.

  “Good grief,” I muttered nervously. “I was kidding about the dogs.”

  “Wish I’d brought some sausages,” Emma murmured.

  A voice ordered the dogs to back up, and a pink-haired teenaged girl wearing glittery reindeer antlers and an elf costume opened the door.

  “Merry Christmas!” she cried, beaming at us. “Don’t mind the pups. They’re a bit overexcited. I promise you, they wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  The pups included a Rottweiler, a German shepherd, an Irish wolfhound, a Yorkshire terrier, a King Charles spaniel, and a few dachshunds, all of whom were staring at us as if we were sausages.

  “What is it this time?” the girl asked with a friendly smile. “Salvation Army? Help for Heroes? Donkey Sanctuary?”

  She evidently thought we were there to collect charitable donations, which at least excused us from raising our voices in song.

  “None of the above,” I told her, and took a bold shot in the dark. “We’d like to speak with the family historian.”

  “You want Auntie Rose,” said the girl, as if I’d made a routine request.

  From the corner of my eye I could see Emma, Lilian, and Tilly exchange surprised glances as my shot in the dark hit the target, but no one was more surprised than I was.

  “Come in, won’t you?” the girl continued. “I’ll let Auntie Rose know you’re here. Behave, you mongrels!”

  The command was directed at the pups rather than at us, and to my relief, it was obeyed. The dogs wagged their tails and sniffed us enthusiastically after we crossed the threshold, but they didn’t jump up on us, nip at our ankles, or tear our throats out. The Rottweiler took a shine to Emma, the Yorkshire terrier frisked at Tilly’s heels, the King Charles spaniel licked Lilian’s hand, and the Irish wolfhound gazed at me worshipfully while I scratched his handsome head.

  The girl left us in a low-ceilinged, square entrance hall with a black-and-white tiled floor and a door in each of its white plaster walls. A wooden trough beside the front door was filled with mud-stained Wellington boots; coats and jackets hung from an elaborate Victorian coat tree; and scarves, stocking caps, and mittens were heaped willy-nilly on a fine Jacobean settle. The air was filled with the mingled scents of cinnamon, nutmeg, and woodsmoke.

  A dozen joyously raucous children streamed past us at one point, yelling at the tops of their lungs as they emerged from the door on our right and disappeared through the door on our left. The dogs took off after them, leaving us on our own, though we could still hear the clamor of voices and laughter coming from other parts of the house.

  “‘Auntie Rose’?” Lilian said quietly. “You don’t suppose her first name is Cecilia, do you?”

  “It’s a distinct possibility,” I said. “The Pargetters like to recycle family names, remember.”

  “The girl let us in too easily,” said Emma. “Why didn’t she ask us any questions?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” I said, “but let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  The door opposite the front door opened and a burly middle-aged man with a walrus mustache stepped into the hall. He was dressed in baggy corduroy trousers, a blue pullover sweater, and a Santa hat, and if he was surprised to see us, he didn’t show it.

  “Salvation Army?” he inquired politely.

  “Auntie Rose,” I replied.

  “She’ll be with you shortly,” he informed us. “She’s finishing up a game of chess. Mate in two moves, I reckon. Throw your coats on the coat tree, if you like. Wouldn’t want you to overheat.” He tipped his Santa hat to us cordially and exited through the door on our left.

  “Why do they keep asking if we’re with the Salvation Army?” I said, unbuttoning my impeccable coat. “We’re not wearing uniforms.”

  “I suppose it’s the first charity that springs to mind when they see four neatly dressed ladies of a certain age,” said Lilian.

  “I still have quite a few years to go before I reach a certain age,” I protested, “but I do prefer ‘neatly dressed’ to ‘dowdy.’”

  We’d just managed to find hooks for our coats on the coat tree when the door on our left opened again and a striking woman walked toward us. She was tall, slender to the point of emaciation, and stylishly dressed in an oversized pale-pink satin blouse and flowing oyster-gray trousers. She wore her snow-white hair in a chic pixie cut, and she needed no makeup to emphasize the brilliance of her blue eyes.

  “I’m told you wish to speak with the family historian,” she said in a breathy but authoritative voice. “That would be me.” She extended a painfully thin hand to me. “Rose Pargetter Hilliard.”

  “Lori Shepherd,” I said, gripping her hand lightly for fear of breaking it. I introduced Emma, Lilian, and Tilly, then said, “We’re sorry to intrude on you and your family, Mrs. Hilliard, but we recently stumbled across a rather perplexing mystery, and you may be the only person on earth who can help us to solve it. It involves one of your ancestors.” I watched her closely as I added, “Her name was Cecilia Rose Pargetter.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific,” Mrs. Hilliard said with a good-natured chuckle. “I’m the fifth Cecilia Rose Pargetter in our family. The seventh opened the door to you.”

  “Our Cecilia was born in 1845,” I said.

  “The first Cecilia.” Mrs. Hilliard nodded, then peered at us with polite curiosity. “Forgive me for asking, but are you associated with a university or with a historical society? I have many connections in the academic world, but I’m afraid your names don’t ring any bells.”

  “We’re not academics,” Emma piped up, “but I live at Anscombe Manor.”

  “Good heavens,” said Mrs. Hilliard, looking thunderstruck. “I don’t know if I can solve your mystery, but I’d very much like to hear what you have to say about my ancestor and Anscombe Manor. Please, come through to my sitting room. It’s the quietest place in the house!”

  Twenty

  We followed Mrs. Hilliard through the door on our right and down a long, well-lit corridor hung with colorful paper chains. While she walked, she spoke into a cell phone, asking Mary Charlotte to bring tea for five to her sitting room. I wondered if the current Mary Charlotte had also inherited her names from a forebear.

  “I would have offered you tea in any case,” Mrs. Hilliard explained as she slipped the phone into her trouser pocket, “but I’ve been playing chess with my ten-year-old grandniece and I’ve worked up a raging thirst. I almost regret introducing her to the game. She’s fiendishly clever!”

  Our hostess opened a door at the e
nd of the corridor and ushered us into a pleasantly airy room with a broad window that overlooked the pastures, the orchard, the vineyard, and the cottages on the outskirts of Skeaping village. Framed etchings of village churches and vast cathedrals hung on the whitewashed walls, oak beams ribbed the ceiling, and a plush pale-blue carpet covered the uneven wooden floor. The carpet was strewn with toys, teddy bears, and storybooks, suggesting that Auntie Rose’s sitting room wasn’t always the quietest place in the farmhouse.

  A diminutive walnut desk flanked by low bookcases faced the broad window. A grouping of armchairs, small tables, and a love seat sat before a log fire burning merrily in a stone hearth. Another armchair, this one paired with a plump ottoman, sat in a corner beside a pole lamp. The lamp’s peony-patterned fabric shade matched the blue-and-white upholstery on the chairs, the love seat, and the ottoman.

  I recognized some of the children in the framed photographs that crowded the mantel shelf, having watched them tear through the entry hall while we waited for Mrs. Hilliard, but a pair of rosewood display cabinets, one on either side of the fireplace, held a collection of antique photographs of men, women, and children who’d died long before I was born.

  “My family’s past and our future,” said Mrs. Hilliard, following my gaze. “I’d show you our family tree, but it would put you to sleep in seconds. There have always been quite a few of us.”

  “My family tree would resemble a bonsai,” I said. “I’m the only child of two only children whose parents were only children.”

  “How peaceful it must have been in your home at Christmastime,” she said as she made her way around the room to turn on the desk lamp, the pole lamp, and the lamps on the mantel shelf. “If you move my reading chair and the desk chair closer to the fire, we’ll be able to sit together quite cozily. I’d shift them for you, but I’m not supposed to exert myself.” She placed a hand on her chest. “A childhood skirmish with rheumatic fever left me with a dicky heart.”

  While we moved the chairs, Mrs. Hilliard withdrew a slim gray archival box from a drawer in the walnut desk and retrieved a small hinged leather case from one of the rosewood cabinets. She laid the box and the leather case on the love seat, then sat beside them. Lilian and I sat side by side in the armchairs on her left, and Emma took the armchair to her right. Tilly, of course, insisted on taking the desk chair. A few moments after we’d settled in, a robust, dark-haired woman arrived with the tea.

  “My cousin, Mary Charlotte,” said Mrs. Hilliard. “Thank you, Mary. Would you mind very much if I asked you to be mother? I need to catch my breath.”

  “You should know better than to play chess with Amelia Jane,” Mary Charlotte scolded as she bustled about, placing cups of tea and thick slices of Christmas cake on the small tables at our elbows. “You always get overexcited.”

  “My excitement arises from another source entirely,” said Mrs. Hilliard. She tilted her head toward Emma. “We have a visitor from Anscombe Manor.”

  “Do we?” said Mary Charlotte, eyeing Emma interestedly. “Try not to spring too many surprises on Rose. She might drop dead.” Laughing uproariously at Emma’s dismayed expression, she departed.

  “Pay no attention to Mary Charlotte,” said Mrs. Hilliard. “I’ve been at death’s door for nearly eighty years, but as I’ve outlived my husband and most of my friends, I doubt very much that anything you say will kill me.” She took a sip of tea, placed her cup and saucer on the table beside the love seat, and folded her hands in her lap. “Please tell me about the mystery that concerns my family.”

  I thought I’d have to play the role of spokeswoman for the rest of the day, but to my relief, Emma jumped in before I could open my mouth.

  “My husband and I bought Anscombe Manor nearly twenty years ago,” she said. “We thought we knew every square inch of it, but a few days ago, at our annual Christmas party . . .” Emma went on to describe the peculiar room, Tilly’s recognition of it as a covert Roman Catholic chapel, and her subsequent discovery of the unusually spacious priest hole. When Tilly shrank from explaining what happened next, I took over.

  I knew that I’d never be able to recapture the feeling of utter befuddlement that engulfed me when I first saw the Hindu altar, or the awe that infused my confusion as my flashlight’s beam picked out each precious object in the sumptuous tableau, but I tried. I described the vibrant silk cloth, the glittering gems, the dried marigold garlands, the oil lamp, the incense burner, the voluptuous bronze statue of Parvati, and the dazzlingly decorated elephant that represented, we thought, Parvati’s elephant-headed son, Ganesha, the remover of obstacles.

  “There was one other precious object on the altar,” I concluded, giving Emma a meaningful look, “the most magnificent and the most puzzling object of all.”

  Emma withdrew the golden heart from her shoulder bag and held it in the palm of her hand, where the flickering firelight could caress the sinuous filigree. Mrs. Hilliard gazed at it wordlessly, then sighed softly and shook her head.

  “Please, go on,” she said. “I’d like to hear the rest of your story before I present mine.”

  Emma placed the golden heart beside Mrs. Hilliard’s teacup, reached into her bag again, and drew from it the sheet of yellowed paper containing the recipe for besan ladoo and the single handwritten line that wasn’t part of the recipe: “April 1865. Given to me by Miss Cecilia.” After handing the sheet of paper to Mrs. Hilliard, she took up the story more or less where I’d left off.

  Emma told how she’d made the Indian sweet to serve at her Christmas party, and how the line mentioning Miss Cecilia had returned to her after Tilly noticed the C and the M entwined in the filigree. She then passed the narrative baton to Lilian, who recounted her discovery of the banns of marriage in the church records at St. George’s, how they’d led to our search of the archives at the Upper Deeping Dispatch, and how a chance comment by a Dispatch reporter had led us to Leyburn Farm.

  “Lori thought we ought to come here because—” Lilian broke off and tossed the baton to me. “Perhaps you should explain what you thought, Lori.”

  “Glad to,” I said, and turned to Mrs. Hilliard. “The Dispatch told us a lot about Cecilia, but it couldn’t tell us everything. It couldn’t, for example, tell us who M. was. It seemed to me that Cecilia might tell us herself, if she kept a diary and if her diary had been preserved.”

  Mrs. Hilliard laid the recipe next to the golden heart, then regarded each of us in turn as she said, “I’m a professional historian and I’ve written many books, but I’ve never done as much as you have with so little. You followed a trail of clues that would have been all but invisible to less discerning eyes. I hope you’re proud of yourselves. You accomplished a great deal in an absurdly short space of time.”

  “We’re rather fond of mysteries,” Lilian said modestly, conveniently forgetting to mention her desire to escape nursing duties, my abject fear of incurring Emma’s wrath, and our complete ignorance of Tilly’s personal preferences.

  “Allow me introduce you to the girl who brought you to Leyburn Farm,” said Mrs. Hilliard. She picked up the leather case she’d taken from the rosewood cabinet and handed it to me. “To her family, she was known as Cissy.”

  The hinged leather case opened like a book. One half of the interior was lined with crimson velvet imprinted with the ghostly image of a rose in bloom. The other half held a daguerreotype portrait protected by glass held in place by a beautifully chased gold frame. The face in the portrait stood out despite the beribboned Victorian bonnet and the heavy clusters of sausage curls that threatened to overwhelm it. It was a charming face, oval shaped, with delicate features and a pair of luminous eyes that gazed back at me with the boundless confidence of youth.

  “She has your eyes,” I said to our hostess.

  “I think it’s the other way round, but no matter,” Mrs. Hilliard. “Cissy’s eyes run in the family.”

  I looked
into those eyes for several minutes before I passed the daguerreotype to Lilian. Mrs. Hilliard sat in silence while each of us examined the portrait, and when Emma returned it to her, she stood it atop the recipe, as if she wished to include the girl in our conversation.

  “I’m pleased to confirm your hunch about the diary,” Mrs. Hilliard said, nodding at me. “Cissy was an assiduous diarist, and we’ve preserved all of her writings.”

  I felt a jolt of elation that made me want to jump to my feet and holler “Yes!” but concern for our hostess’s dicky heart kept me silent and in my seat.

  “She recorded her thoughts nearly every day,” Mrs. Hilliard continued, “which is why I was troubled when I realized that the diary she kept while she was in India was missing. I knew it must exist, because she thanked her grandmother for it in a letter. It would have been wholly out of character for her to dispose of it or to leave it behind when she returned to England, so I went looking for it. I eventually found it hidden beneath a floorboard in the bedroom that had once been hers—the bedroom in which she died.”

  Mrs. Hilliard opened the gray archival box she’d taken from the walnut desk and withdrew from it a handsome volume bound in light-brown leather. The cover was stamped in gold with a geometric pattern that encircled an embossed, hand-colored bouquet of pink rosebuds.

  “Cissy wrapped her India diary in a length of cloth before she concealed it beneath the floorboard.” Mrs. Hilliard laid the diary behind the golden heart and lifted from the box a folded length of silk shot with gold thread and dyed in vibrant hues of red and yellow and green.

  Lilian, Emma, Tilly, and I gasped simultaneously.

  “I thought it might look familiar to you,” said Mrs. Hilliard, arranging the cloth around the golden heart.

  “It’s identical to the altar cloth,” I confirmed.

  “I believe Cissy cut both pieces from a sari she brought home with her,” said Mrs. Hilliard. “She described the sari in her diary.”