Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter

by Nancy Atherton

  “Maurice couldn’t find his way through a forest if all the trees in it were chopped down,” Rory said, “so he blundered around in circles half the night. I caught up with him around dawn, near the mouth of the High Point trail. I’d almost convinced him to hand the gun over to me when Leo showed up, staggering down the hill, drunk as a lord.”

  I could feel tension radiating from Kit. He sat as if he were carved from stone, gripping the arms of his chair as though his uncle’s life depended on what the old gamekeeper said next.

  “The two of them got into a slanging match,” Rory went on, “and Maurice started waving the damned shotgun around. When Leo passed out, on account of the drink, Maurice aimed the gun right at the boy’s head.” Rory frowned disapprovingly. “Not sporting. Not the sort of thing a gentleman would do. Be a good lad and hand me the blue whiffer, will you, Kit?”

  Kit passed the inhaler to him. Rory took another hit off it, then passed it back and tucked his hands under the blankets.

  “I tried to keep Maurice from killing the lad in cold blood,” he said, “and in the tussle he managed to shoot himself in the foot. There was blood everywhere, and Maurice never could stand the sight of blood, so he passed out, and I was left with with a right old mess on my hands.”

  Kit’s grip relaxed, and he released a long-pent breath. “That was when Madeline DuCaral came along and straightened out the mess.”

  “She did.” Rory closed his eyes again, and his thin chest seemed to wilt. “I’m ashamed to say it, son, but I helped her.”

  “I’ll take it from here,” said Kit, patting the old man’s arm. “You stop me when I go wrong.”

  Rory nodded weakly.

  “Madeline staged Maurice’s death in order to get rid of Leo once and for all,” said Kit. “First she planted the shotgun on Leo and sprinkled her husband’s blood on him. When Leo came round, she convinced him that he’d killed Maurice and scared him into leaving England for good. Then she whisked Maurice off to hospital, where they patched him up and sent him home. There was no need to involve the police, because the shooting had been a mishap, not a crime.”

  “The wound never did heal right,” said Rory. “Which was a blessing, in my opinion, because it forced Maurice to give up shooting.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “Back up a little, will you? How did Madeline convince Leo that Maurice was dead?”

  “The power of suggestion,” Kit replied, looking to Rory for confirmation.

  “You’re dead right, if you’ll pardon the expression,” said Rory.

  Kit turned to me. “Picture the scene in your mind, Lori. Leo was so soused that he could have lost a leg and never noticed. When he came to, he was spattered with Maurice’s blood and scared out of his wits. The last thing he remembered was grabbing at the shotgun in a fit of drunken rage. His temper had gotten him into trouble so often that he was primed to believe it had gotten him into trouble again.”

  “Only much worse trouble this time,” Rory put in. “The kind of trouble that would’ve got him hanged in the old days.”

  “Madeline used the power of suggestion to manipulate Leo,” said Kit. “She told him that Maurice’s heart had stopped beating, that he’d stopped breathing. And Leo was so muddled that he believed it. Madeline was like a magician, Lori. She made Leo believe what she wanted him to believe.”

  “You’ve got it in one,” said Rory.

  “The only thing I don’t get,” said Kit, turning back to the old man, “is why you went along with it. Maurice and Madeline were trying to keep their daughter from marrying a good-for-nothing young punk. They may have gone about it in the wrong way, but at least they were trying to protect their child. What’s your excuse, Rory?”

  “I wanted the best for Charlotte, too,” Rory said. Then he lowered his eyes and gave a short, defeated sigh. “But I also knew it would set me up for life. The DuCarals paid top dollar for my cooperation. When I retired, they gave me a pension and a done-up cottage—all mod cons. What do you think I’d have got if I hadn’t gone along with them?”

  “A clear conscience,” said Kit.

  “It’s easy for you to say,” Rory mumbled defensively. “But we don’t all have the safety net of being Sir Miles Anscombe’s son.”

  Kit flinched and turned away from the bed, but when he looked back at Rory, something inside him seemed to snap. His nostrils flared, and a flame seemed to leap in his eyes.

  “Being Sir Miles Anscombe’s son isn’t a safety net,” he said, in a low, dangerous voice. “It’s a handicap. It’s a fatal disease.”

  Alarmed, I put a restraining hand on Kit’s arm, but he shrugged it off angrily and went on, the words pouring out in a torrent, like a flood bursting from a dam.

  “I would give anything to die as you’re dying, Rory,” he said, “with my mind intact, my faculties unimpaired. But I won’t get the chance, because I’m my father’s son. He hanged himself—did you know?—but he’d lost his mind long before that. He was insane, just as his grandfather was, and his great-grandfather, and so on and so forth, for six generations. I know, I’ve checked. The Anscombe men don’t show it at first—that’s why they’ve been able to breed—but it comes to them all in the end. So don’t talk to me about safety nets, Rory Tanner, because there’s nothing between me and the ground. My fall is inevitable.”

  I stared at Kit openmouthed, shaken by a lightning bolt of blinding revelation. His refusal to marry Nell, to marry anyone, suddenly made a certain sort of twisted sense. He believed he’d inherited madness from his father’s side of the family, and he didn’t want to risk passing it on to yet another generation. He was the last of the Anscombe men. He wanted the family curse to end with him.

  “But, Kit,” I said, in a small voice, “you’re not crazy.”

  “I behaved very oddly for four long years,” he said, still breathing hard and fixing his furious gaze on the floor. “I lived on the streets. I checked myself into an asylum.”

  “The asylum was a hellhole,” I countered. “The only reason you went there was to shut it down. And you succeeded.”

  “Do I need to remind you of how we met, Lori?” Kit asked. “You found me lying in your driveway, half dead from self-imposed starvation.”

  “You were overwhelmed with grief for your father,” I said, more strongly. “You weren’t crazy.”

  “Statistics are against you,” he retorted bitterly, still refusing to meet my gaze. “As you pointed out to me just the other day, mental illness often runs in families. It’s cut rather a large swath through mine. I have no reason to believe that it will miss me.”

  To my dismay and immense irritation, our pivotal argument was interrupted by a knock on the parlor door. Leave it to Henrietta, I thought, to choose the worst possible moment to deliver a fruit basket or a roast suckling pig.

  “I’ll get it,” I muttered, and hustled across the room.

  I flung the door open impatiently, fell back a step, felt horror rise like bile in my throat, and let loose a scream of pure, unmitigated terror.

  Rendor, the Destroyer of Souls, swooped into the room.

  Twenty-Two

  “It’s all right, Lori,” Kit soothed. “Calm down, relax, breathe.…”

  “What bee got up her bum?” Rory grumbled.

  “Hush, Rory,” scolded a third voice. “Can’t you see that the poor girl’s upset? I’m so sorry, dear. I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s this ridiculous ointment. It’s enough to give anyone a fright.”

  I was back in my chair and trembling like a leaf. I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten there, because I had no clear memory of what had happened after I’d screamed.

  Kit was kneeling before me, holding my hand and peering up at me solicitously, but the corners of his mouth were twitching in an all-too-familiar way.

  “What’s so funny?” I snapped, glaring at him.

  “Nothing,” he said quickly. “You’ve been very stressed lately, with the twins going off to school for the first time, and you haven
’t been getting much sleep since your husband’s been away, and you and I had been having a heated discussion, so no one blames you for reacting as you did when you saw Charlotte.”

  “Charlotte?” I repeated as Kit’s cue sailed over my head. “But Charlotte can’t be Ren—”

  “Can’t be angry with you for opening the door and screaming in her face,” Kit filled in hastily. “And she’s not. Are you, Charlotte?”

  “Certainly not,” said someone standing behind me. “I’d be the last person to criticize anyone’s behavior, after the show I put on the last time we met.”

  I turned slowly in my chair and saw the tall, slender figure of Charlotte DuCaral towering over me in a pair of pointy-toed black leather boots. She’d thrown open her voluminous black cloak to reveal a lining of crimson silk that had a small, neatly mended tear near the hem. She was wearing bloodred lipstick, and she’d covered her face with a gooey white substance that made her look deathly pale.

  “Your face,” I said shakily. “What’s on your face?”

  “Zinc oxide,” she replied. “Dreadful, I know, but quite necessary, I assure you. It’s difficult to tell now, but I was once a flaxen-haired blonde, and my skin still burns quite easily. On a sunny day like today, I won’t leave the house without my cloak and my zinc oxide, but since the ointment bothers you, I’ll wipe it off. I can always reapply it before I leave—which, by the way, won’t be for a while. I have a few things to say to you, Rory.”

  As she turned to leave the parlor, the cloak billowed around her, and I saw superimposed upon it a vivid mental image of an afghan swirling around Rob as he twirled in a half circle in my living room.

  “He swooped,” I said under my breath.

  “What’s that?” said Kit, getting to his feet.

  “Nothing.” I faced the bed again and rested my chin on my hand.

  “You didn’t ought to scream like that,” said Rory. “You scared the birds.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, staring blankly into the middle distance. I had no idea why Charlotte had been standing beneath the apple tree on Emma’s Hill ten days ago, but I also had no doubt that Will and Rob had seen her there. Rendor wasn’t a creepy psycho pervert voyeur who was menacing my children. He was a middle-aged woman who sunburned easily and liked to wear red lipstick when she went out. My vampire hunt, which had begun with so much promise, had ended in farce, and Kit would never let me forget it. I felt ten times a fool.

  “Charlotte seems quite chipper, don’t you think?” Kit said as he carried another chair over to Rory’s bedside.

  “Does she?” I said. “I didn’t notice.”

  “She’s a different woman from the one who played such mournful music in the music room,” said Kit. “She looks ten years younger.”

  “Must be the zinc oxide,” I said indifferently.

  “I think we could all do with some tea,” Kit said, rubbing his palms together vigorously. “I’ll be right back.”

  Rory took up his binoculars and I continued to stare disconsolately at nothing until Kit shoved a cup of tea under my nose and pulled me out of my cheerless reverie. I looked around and noticed for the first time that Charlotte had returned, with a clean face but without her cloak. She was wearing a gray silk blouse with a blue tweed skirt and looked every inch the country matron.

  While I’d been contemplating the mortifying depths to which my vivid imagination had dragged me, Kit had set up an informal tea party on the coffee table, using china from Rory’s kitchen and the food Henrietta had packed for us. One plate was filled with crustless sandwiches, one held eclairs, lemon tarts, and cream puffs, and still another was piled high with jammy biscuits.

  Rory gummed a jammy biscuit happily, but the sight of the raspberry jam on his puckered lips was enough to put me off raspberries for the rest of my life. I helped myself to a watercress sandwich instead and left the repulsive biscuits for the others.

  Charlotte refused the cup of tea Kit offered to her, and instead of sitting in the chair he’d drawn up for her, she stood at the foot of Rory’s bed. When Kit had resumed his seat and we’d all finished eating, she rested her hands on the foot railing and smiled down at Kit and me.

  “I saw you leave Aldercot Hall this morning,” she informed us, “and after speaking with Mrs. Harcourt, I learned that you were coming here, to Rory’s cottage. I followed you, intending to apologize for my intemperate outburst the other day, but as I approached the front door, a few words drifted through the open window that stopped me in my tracks.”

  She ducked her head, and a pink flush rose in her fair cheeks.

  “I don’t eavesdrop, as a rule,” she said, “but I simply couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t keep myself from listening to the story drifting through the open window.” She raised her head and gazed incredulously at the gamekeeper. “Rory, you old fool. Why didn’t you tell me the truth long ago?”

  “I didn’t see what good it’d do,” he said. “You’d only think worse of your parents if you knew how we tricked you, and Leo wasn’t ever coming back, so I figured, let sleeping dogs—” He broke off as someone knocked on the front door.

  Kit and I exchanged perplexed looks.

  “Henrietta,” I guessed. “With quail’s eggs and chilled duck in aspic.”

  “I’ll get it this time,” he said, and went to the front door.

  I heard only a murmur of muted voices coming from the corridor, but Charlotte must have heard something else, because her hands tightened on the footrail, her lips parted, and her entire face seemed to glow with an inner light as she stared expectantly at the parlor door. When it opened, she drew in a shuddering breath.

  “Leo,” she said.

  I turned my head and saw the expression on Leo’s face when he heard her speak his name. He looked like a man uncertain of his welcome.

  “Oh, Leo,” Charlotte said, and crossed the room to rest her head upon his chest.

  Leo put his arms around her, closed his eyes, and laid his weathered cheek against her white hair. He held her to his heart, breathing in her fragrance, and she released a tremulous sigh, as if she’d reached the end of a long journey. In one suspended moment, the past became the present, and the intervening years faded away, as if they’d never been. The decades Charlotte and Leo had lost meant nothing to them, because true love exists outside of time.

  Kit stood behind them, beaming like a priest at a wedding.

  “Kit,” I whispered loudly, waving to get his attention as I stood. “I think maybe you and I should leave.”

  “I’m not leaving,” growled Rory. “It’s my house. If those two want to canoodle, they can go somewhere else.”

  Charlotte and Leo broke apart, and Leo shook a fist at the old gamekeeper.

  “You’re skating on thin ice, mate,” he said. “I wouldn’t push it if I were you.”

  “No one’s leaving,” Charlotte added. “Leo, may I pour you a cup of tea?”

  “That’d be lovely,” said Leo.

  He didn’t have to tell her how he liked his tea. She remembered.

  A short time later, we were seated in a semicircle at Rory’s bedside. Kit had already brought Leo up to speed in the corridor, so Leo was explaining to the rest of us why he’d come to the gamekeeper’s cottage.

  “It was the way Kit looked at me last night, after I told him about the shooting,” he said. “He looked at me as if I couldn’t possibly have killed a man, not even when I was a young idiot, not even when I was whiskey-drunk. As if I didn’t have it in me”—he tapped his chest—“to do something as bad as that. It got me to thinking. And today I decided to look Rory up and talk over old times with him.”

  “I’m sorry for what I did, Miss Charlotte,” Rory said, staring down at his fingerless gloves. “And I’m sorry for what I did to you, too, Leo.”

  “Never mind,” said Charlotte, leaning forward to put a hand on the old man’s brow. “It all happened a very long time ago.”

  “And you did keep Maurice
from blowing my brains out,” Leo added. “So I guess I can forgive you for everything else.”

  Charlotte sat back in her chair, laughing. “I’ve made a pilgrimage every year to look down on Anscombe Manor and curse your name,” she said to Leo. “I should have known this year’s would be the last.”

  “Why’s that, love?” asked Leo.

  “I tore my cloak on the way back,” she answered, twinkling up at him. “It was an omen.”

  The two of them laughed as though she’d told the funniest joke in the world. I supposed they’d do a lot of laughing for a while, if only to release the joy that was bubbling up in them. I, on the other hand, felt like grinding my teeth, because I now knew why Charlotte had been standing beneath the apple tree ten days ago, when Will and Rob had seen her. Her pilgrimage had sent me on my wild-goose chase.

  “My poor parents,” said Charlotte, her smile fading. “My father’s foot never healed properly, and neither he nor my mother ever got over my brother’s death. They were so proud of him, you see. They thought he’d have a Nobel Prize before he was thirty. But his clinic was far out in the bush, and the airstrip was quite primitive. The medical-supply plane crashed one day, and my brother was killed. After that my parents withdrew from the world completely. If I hadn’t been there to take care of them, they would have forgotten to eat.”

  I sank lower in my chair. I’d concocted so many lurid stories about Charlotte and her family over the past ten days that I couldn’t bear to look her in the eye. She hadn’t been a slave to her dastardly parents. She’d been a good daughter, taking care of a heartbroken mother and father who’d lost their only son. And her brother hadn’t been a psychopathic pervert. He’d been the kind of man who risked his life to help the poorest of the poor. I was so ashamed of myself that I wanted to crawl under Rory’s bed and never come out.

  “My dowry isn’t what it used to be,” Charlotte said, looking up at Leo. “When my brother died, my father stopped keeping track of his investments. I tried to manage them wisely, but the income slowed to a trickle about ten years ago. I had to let most of the staff go and sell the furniture to make ends meet. Luckily, it was worth quite a lot of money. It was fortunate that my mother insisted on hanging blackout drapes throughout the house. Sun-damaged furniture wouldn’t have fetched half as much.”