I gulped.
“You’re going to persuade the vicar to turn him out,” Peggy continued, with terrifying composure.
“I don’t suppose you’ve talked things over with the vicar,” I said, with wan hope.
Peggy sniffed. “The Reverend Theodore Bunting and I are not, at present, on speaking terms. And if he thinks I’m going to special-order his finicking tinned prawns after he’s ridden roughshod over a time-honored tradition like the Harvest Festival”—she paused for a breath—“he’s very much mistaken.”
I began backpedaling for dear life. “I’m honored by your faith in me, Peggy, but honestly, I don’t know the first thing about the Harvest Festival. I’ve been kind of busy lately, what with the boys and all, and—”
“That’s exactly what I said to Bill,” Peggy broke in. “ ‘Bill,’ I said, ‘Lori’s the only person in the village who isn’t involved in the festival.’ ”
“You’ve been talking with Bill?” I asked, catching a faint whiff of rat in the air.
“I have, and he pointed out that you’re just the person I’ve been looking for. What did he call you?” Peggy peered upward, squinting slightly through her pointy glasses. “An independent witness. An unbiased observer. An impartial third party.”
“Bill said all that, did he?” I pursed my lips and contemplated life as a single parent.
“I had my doubts,” Peggy assured me, “but Bill laid them to rest. You’ve been on the sidelines, he said, you’ve got no ax to grind. The vicar’s bound to listen to you.” She got to her feet and looked down at me, her mad gaze pinning me to the tree. “So you just trot over to the vicarage and tell Mr. Bunting that unless he wants to special-order his own tinned prawns for the rest of his natural life, he’d best give that specky chap the boot. And I’d thank you not to tell anyone that I intend to leave Finch. I plan to announce my departure at the end of the Harvest Festival.” Peggy nodded affably and left the garden by the side path, puffing like a granny on a rampage.
“That rat,” I muttered between gritted teeth. “That low-down, conniving, flea-bitten—” I spotted two pairs of bright eyes peering at me from the solarium and ceased murmuring sweet nothings about my lord and master.
“You can come out,” I said, beckoning to the Pyms. “She’s gone.”
Ruth emerged first, carrying a cup of tea. “It seemed such an urgent interview . . .”
“. . . we didn’t like to intrude.” Louise came to stand beside her sister. “But we thought you might need a little pick-me-up . . .”
“. . . after your visit with Peggy.” Ruth eyed me sympathetically. “One usually does.”
“Thanks,” I said, accepting the proffered cup. “If I weren’t breast-feeding the boys, I’d ask for something stronger. Like strychnine.”
Ruth tittered. “Now, Lori, I’m sure it will all . . .”
“. . . work out for the best,” Louise finished.
“Ha.” I slumped against the tree. “Didn’t you hear? I’m an impartial observer. That’s another way of saying ‘inno cent bystander,’ and we all know what happens to them.”
Ruth laid a gloved hand on my shoulder. “I have no doubt that you’ll rise to the occasion. I’m afraid, however, that we must . . .”
“. . . leave you to it,” said Louise. “Do feel free to call on us . . .”
“. . . should you need our help. We wouldn’t want to keep Mrs. Kitchen from her new life in Little Stubbing.” Ruth turned to go.
“Wait!” I cried, nearly spilling my tea. “Do you know anything about this specky—” I was interrupted by the sound of a telephone ringing inside the cottage. A moment later Francesca came out to hand the cordless phone to me.
“It’s the vicar,” she said.
“Oh, Lord . . .” I groaned.
Francesca went back into the cottage, and the Pyms gave me a synchronized finger-flutter before tiptoeing stealthily out of the garden.
“Hullo?” a voice piped in my ear. “Lori Shepherd? Are you there?”
“I’m here, Vicar.” I paused to listen to the familiar cough of the Pyms’ ancient automobile as it putt-putted out of my driveway. Cowards, I thought bitterly. “What’s up?”
“I hardly know how to answer that question.” The vicar sounded a bit dazed. “Would it be at all possible for you to come round to the vicarage? Something’s happened, you see, of a confidential nature. I’d feel much more comfortable in my mind if you were on hand, as it were, to view the scene of the . . . ahem . . .”
The word crime hovered, unspoken, in the air and I sat up straighter, intrigued. “Can you give me a hint?” I coaxed.
There was a pause. “Dear me,” the vicar said, “I don’t wish to alarm you unduly, but . . . there’s been a burglary at the vicarage!”
4.
There are few more rigorous tests of teamwork than feeding, bathing, and bedding down a pair of active four-month-olds. Francesca and I demonstrated the axiom that four hands are better than two when dealing with twins.
We had novelty going for us, of course. The excitement of having a new grown-up in their lives—one who dispensed with training spoons and dipped their fists right into the farina!—wore the boys out so completely that, once bathed, powdered, and freshly diapered, they required a minimal amount of rocking to send them off to dreamland.
Before I left my babies alone with a relative stranger, however, there was something I needed to clear up. While Francesca loaded the dishwasher with still more dirty dishes, I went quietly into the study, closed the door behind me, and pulled the blue journal from its place on the bookshelves. Then I switched on the mantelshelf lamps and curled up in one of the pair of tall leather armchairs that sat before the hearth.
“Dimity?” I said, opening the journal. “ There’s something I’d like to ask you.”
I spoke in a barely audible undertone because I didn’t want Francesca to come in and find me talking to a book. Bill knew about the blue journal, as did Emma and Derek Harris, but I’d so far resisted the temptation to announce its function to the populace at large. I didn’t relish the notion of being dubbed the village nutcase.
I could scarcely believe it myself, much less explain how it worked, or why Dimity’s spirit lingered in the cottage long after her mortal remains had departed this earth—but I couldn’t deny the evidence of my own eyes. The skeptic within me fell silent each time Aunt Dimity’s words appeared, written in royal-blue ink in her fine copperplate, on the blue journal’s blank, unlined pages.
“Aunt Dimity?” I repeated. “Can you hear me?”
Not very well.
I glanced nervously toward the door as the looping letters scrolled across the page.
I take it that you do not wish Francesca to overhear?
“I think it might give her the wrong impression of her new employer,” I whispered.
Does Francesca meet with your approval?
“She’s fantastic,” I acknowledged. “ The boys took to her right off the bat, and she handles them like a pro.”
But?
I sighed. “It’s something Peggy Kitchen said.”
In that case, I suspect it is sheer nonsense.What did she say?
“Nothing specific. But she implied that Francesca’s father had done something—”
Ignore Peggy Kitchen. She’s quite incapable of judging Francesca fairly. Small minds and unforgiving hearts are the bane of village life.
I looked at the door again, listened intently for a moment, then returned my attention to the journal. “Why can’t she judge Francesca fairly?”
Because she hated Francesca’s father. Piero Sciaparelli was a prisoner of war, you see. He was captured in North Africa in 1942, worked as a farm laborer for old Mr. Hodge until VE day, and a year or two later married a local girl. Piero and his wife raised six children, all of them as English as crumpets, save for their extraordinary names. Still, some people have never ceased to regard men like Piero as the enemy. As I said, small minds . . .
You most certainly will, my dear. But with Francesca at hand, you needn’t worry quite so much.
I closed the journal and caressed its smooth cover with my fingertips. Dimity never ceased to amaze me. Her fiancé had been killed in the Second World War. His death had hung over her soul like a shadow. She’d never married, never had children of her own, yet she bore no grudge against an enemy soldier who’d found the kind of happiness she’d lost. I doubted that I’d have been as generous, had a foreign bullet taken Bill from me, and wondered briefly if some part of Peggy Kitchen’s heart lay buried beneath shifting North African sands.
The mantelpiece clock chimed the half hour, and I put the journal back on the shelf. It was half past noon. I could drive over to the vicarage, view the scene of the ahem, and be back in plenty of time for the boy’s three-thirty snack. I switched off the lights and went to the kitchen, where Francesca had just finished wiping the table.
“Will you be all right on your own for an hour or so?” I asked. “I promised the vicar that I’d come over this afternoon.”
“I should be able to manage,” said Francesca.
“ The phone number for the vicarage is—”
“On the notepad in the hall.” Francesca dried her hands on a clean towel. “Along with the numbers of your husband’s office, the Harris manor, and both car phones.”
“Right.” I headed for the front door, and Francesca followed me. “If the boys wake up before I’m back . . .” I bit my lip and scolded myself silently for being an overprotective mother.
“If there’s a peep out of ’em I’ll ring you straightaway,” Francesca assured me.
“I won’t be long,” I told her, opening the door. “Oh, and Francesca . . .” I turned to her and stuck a hand out awkwardly. “Welcome to the cottage.”
Francesca’s dark eyes lit with amusement, but she gave my hand a firm shake. “Glad to be back,” she said.
I shot a last anxious glance toward the stairs, then left the cottage and climbed into the Mini.
I wasn’t sure what puzzled me more—that a burglary had taken place in Finch, or that the vicar thought I could do something about it. Since Finch’s crime rate was virtually nonexistent, I thought it likely that the vicar’s summons would turn out to be nothing more than Phase Two of Bill’s Fresh-Air Campaign.
I didn’t mind. Despite an occasional geyser from my guilt glands, it felt good to be out and about. I cruised past Emma’s curving drive, waved to the Pyms, who were busily filling the birdbath in their front yard, and called a blessing down upon the Mini as I negotiated the sharp turn just beyond their house.
I’d bought the tiny black car secondhand, though it had clearly passed through more than two before reaching mine. Bill called it a clattering rattletrap, too slow to take me anywhere in a hurry and too small to accommodate the twins’ safety seats, but that was why I liked it. The Mini was mechanically incapable of responding to my lead foot, and its diminutive proportions made the narrow lanes surrounding Finch seem spacious.
Besides, a shiny new car would have seemed out of place in Finch, where nothing was shiny or new. As I bumped over the humpbacked stone bridge and entered the square, I was struck once again by the thought that Finch, unlike so many Cotswolds villages, would never win a berth in a Best-of-Britain calendar.
No one could fault the setting. Finch nestled in the broad bend of a rushing stream that flowed so clearly, anglers could count the speckles on the trout. The surrounding countryside was an undulating mosaic of meadow, cropland, and forest. The lanes were lined with fluttering hedgerows and bedecked with wildflowers. It seemed a shame to desecrate such an idyllic landscape with a grubby outpost of civilization like Finch.
Finch abounded in unrealized potential. It would have been a gem, had anyone taken the time to polish it. Instead, it clustered, unkempt and neglected, around an irregular oblong of semiarid lawn fringed by a ribbon of weed-sprouting cobbles. The glow of the Cotswolds stonework was muted by grayish grime, the green was beset by bald spots, and the dignified Celtic cross memorial izing Finch’s Fallen had been swallowed by a tangle of untamed willows.
There were no sidewalks on the square. A mutually agreed upon no-wheel zone extended three to twelve feet from the shop fronts, a distance that varied with passing traffic, of which there was very little. Finch’s main road merited a blue line in the atlas, as it had been paved sometime in the early 1960s, but it hadn’t been touched since, and few casual travelers were willing to risk their axles on it.
The village’s one glory lay beyond the square, a hundred yards or so up Saint George’s Lane, in the midst of a walled graveyard shaded by cedars of Lebanon and dotted with mossy headstones. Saint George’s Church had the usual mixed pedigree—a Saxon crypt, a Norman tower—and a pleasantly plain face, but it was blessed with an interior feature that lifted it above the commonplace.
Saint George’s possessed a set of five medieval wall paintings, most notably an imposing figure of Saint George battling a snaky-looking dragon. The paintings had once been hidden by layers of plaster, but Derek Harris had skillfully uncovered and restored them. I found the primitive images vaguely creepy, but scholars had been known to come from overseas to view them.
As I drove into the square, I noted Bill’s bicycle—an old-fashioned black three-speed with upright handlebars—leaning beside the door of Wysteria Lodge, the vine-covered building that served as his office. Few passersby would suspect that the high-powered Boston law firm of Willis & Willis had as its overseas headquarters a modest stone house half hidden by purple wysteria—unless they peeked inside.
Bill’s father had equipped the place with every electronic office device known to man, which meant that Bill could travel from Hamburg to Padua without ever leaving Finch. I considered stopping in to have a word with him—I still owed him big-time for siccing Peggy Kitchen on me—but decided to wait until after I’d spoken with the vicar.
The village school occupied the northeast corner of the square, and as I rolled past the disputed territory, I noted signs of occupation. A young man was handing boxes from a paneled van to a young woman, who carted them into the school. They wore khaki shorts, colorful T-shirts, and hiking boots, and their shouts of laughter could easily be heard in Kitchen’s Emporium. God help them, I thought, turning into Saint George’s Lane and pulling up, at last, to the vicarage.
Bill and I had held our wedding reception in the vicarage, and fond memories tripped through my mind whenever I came to call. Still, I had to admit that the rambling, two-story house had the same down-at-heels air about it as the rest of Finch, as though it had, like my Mini, passed through a number of neglectful hands. The surrounding garden was little more than a jungle. Lilian Bunting couldn’t be bothered with it—she had a bookish turn of mind—and the vicar believed in leaving nature to God’s mercy.
Lilian Bunting met me at the door. The vicar’s wife was a slender woman in her mid-fifties who favored tweeds and twin sets in winter, linen suits in summer, and sensible shoes all year round. She greeted me with a smile.
“Lori, my dear, do come in. Teddy’s got himself into the most frightful pickle, and I’m counting on you to get him out.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Lilian laughed. “That’s what I hope you’ll discover. But I’ll let Teddy tell you his part in it. He’s been longing to confess his sins to someone.”
Lilian led me to the library, a book-lined room at the rear of the vicarage that stretched the full width of the house. Its mullioned windows and French doors overlooked a broad meadow that sloped sharply down to the tree-lined riverbank. The vicar’s mahogany desk sat before the French doors, but his desk chair faced into the room, as though he found the sight of books more pleasurable than any natural vista. The view through the French doors was obscured, in any case, by a den
se growth of rhododendrons.
The Reverend Theodore Bunting sat slumped in a worn armchair near the hearth. He was a tall man, with short iron-gray hair, a beak of a nose, and a look of perpetual mourning in his gray eyes. He wore a navy-blue cardigan over his clerical collar and shirt, and a pair of scuffed wing-tip shoes on his rather large feet. When I entered the room, he was staring disconsolately at the French doors, but the moment he became aware of my presence, he sprang from his chair and strode over to greet me.
“Lori, how good of you to come,” he said, a note of desperation in his voice. “I’m at my wit’s end. If you can’t help, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Lilian motioned for me to sit on the green velvet couch opposite the vicar’s armchair, then turned to address her husband. “First,” she instructed him, “you’re going to explain the situation to Lori. She doesn’t have the faintest idea why she’s here, Teddy.”
“Of course,” said the vicar.
“You get started,” said Lilian. “I’ll be back shortly.” She gave her husband’s shoulder an encouraging squeeze and left the library.
The vicar heaved a forlorn sigh as he returned to his chair. “Lilian’s too good to say it, but it’s all my fault. I’m so dreadfully absentminded.” He sighed again. “It all began when Adrian Culver came up from Oxford to see me last November.” The vicar gave me an inquiring look. “Have you met Dr. Culver?”
“Not yet,” I said, “but I’ll bet he wears glasses.”
“Half glasses, to be precise,” said the vicar. “How did you know—”
“I’ll tell you later,” I broke in. “Please, go on.”
“Dr. Culver is a university lecturer and a well-known archaeologist,” the vicar informed me. “Last autumn, his nineteen-year-old niece embarked upon a solitary walking tour of the Cotswolds. She paused one afternoon to take her lunch in Scrag End field—”
“Scrag End field?” I said.
The vicar nodded. “It lies alongside Hodge Farm,” he explained, “just beyond the copse of woods at the north end of the village. Scrag End is glebe land, though it’s never brought a groat into the church’s coffers. It’s useless for cultivation. Hence its unflattering name.”
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