Aunt Dimity and the Village Witch

by Nancy Atherton

  “I’m afraid not,” said Lilian.

  Silence returned as the villagers absorbed Lilian’s weighty words.

  “There’s more?” called Mr. Barlow from the back of the room. “How can there be more, Mrs. Bunting? Jenna Penner got her comeuppance and Mistress Meg lived happily ever after. The story should end there.”

  “Perhaps it should, Mr. Barlow,” said Lilian, “but it doesn’t. There’s another small drawing at the end of the text. There must, therefore, be another page hidden somewhere within the bounds of St. George’s parish.”

  Inspired, no doubt, by a desire to earn Willis, Sr.’s, undying gratitude, Selena instantly volunteered her home, Wren Cottage, for the search, while Millicent all but insisted that we tear Larch Cottage apart to find page five, but both offers were politely refused.

  “I’m sorry, ladies,” said Lilian, “but the new glyph bears no resemblance to a bird or a tree. I’m not quite sure what it is. I tried to replicate it, but my sketches were rather pathetic.” She looked at Amelia. “Mrs. Thistle? Do you think you might have a go at it?”

  Amelia returned to the dais to study the parchment while Lilian held it flat for her on the long committee table. She then took a pencil from her carpet bag and a blank page from Lilian’s notebook and with swift, sure strokes made an enlarged copy of the glyph. Lilian promptly handed it down to George Wetherhead to pass around.

  I was the last to see the sketch, but though I held it right side up, upside down, and sideways, it conveyed nothing to me. The new glyph seemed to depict the face of a yawning monkey, but I couldn’t connect the bizarre image with any reference point. To my knowledge, there was no Yawning Monkey Cottage in Finch.

  The glyph left everyone else at the meeting equally baffled, but the idea of a “next page” struck sparks in more than one imagination. As my neighbors filed out of the schoolhouse, they began a lively discussion of what the fifth page might contain. “Jenna’s Revenge” was a popular theme, along with “The Rector’s Confession” and “The Witch Finder’s Return.”

  “I don’t know why we should bother to find the fifth page,” I murmured after Amelia and Lilian had descended from the dais to join me. “They’re entertaining themselves perfectly well without it.”

  “With tragedy outrunning comedy by a mile,” Amelia observed.

  “They can’t help it,” said Lilian. “Melodrama is in their blood.”

  “Amelia,” I said, “would you make another sketch of the new glyph for me to show to Bill? I’d do it myself, but I find even stick figures challenging.”

  Amelia obligingly produced a second sketch and I tucked it into my purse. I felt no need to inform her that I intended to share it with one other person before I showed it to my husband.

  I was about to press Willis, Sr., master glyph guesser, into service.

  Twenty-two

  Or not.

  Though I went to Fairworth House with high hopes, I left in high dudgeon after Deirdre stopped me at the front door, saying that she’d been absolutely forbidden to interrupt Willis, Sr., for any reason short of a major house fire or a nuclear emergency. As I didn’t qualify in either category, I drove home, but I had no success there, either. The monkey-face glyph meant nothing to Aunt Dimity or to Bill.

  In the morning, I brought the sketch with me into the kitchen, hoping it would inspire a flash of insight. The strategy didn’t work for me, but produced a result nonetheless, from a wholly unexpected quarter. Will and Rob took one look at the drawing and burst into fits of suspiciously merry giggles.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “It’s Howling Hal,” Will managed between gurgles of laughter.

  I stared at him. “Who’s Howling Hal?”

  “He’s one of the funny faces at Anscombe Manor,” Will told me.

  “Whit Kerby tried to wee in him once,” Rob explained happily, “but he couldn’t wee high enough.”

  “And he hit the door instead,” Will continued with a mighty guffaw.

  “No one uses the door, Mummy,” Rob said hastily, seeing my appalled expression.

  “It’s all bricked up,” Will added.

  I made a mental note to speak with Emma about Whit Kerby’s notion of fun, gave the boys a short lecture on the importance of personal hygiene, and interrogated them about Howling Hal on the way to school. Hal was, according to them, one of a dozen or so stone carvings sprinkled across the rear wall of the manor’s medieval tower.

  The tower’s rear wall met my criteria for a potential hiding place—it was very old, it was easily accessible, and it stood within the bounds of St. George’s parish—so I took the lead and ran with it. On the way back from Upper Deeping, I used my cell phone to call Amelia and Lilian. Both agreed to meet me at Anscombe Manor within the hour. Lastly, I telephoned Emma to warn her of our imminent arrival. I also asked her to hose down the bricked-in door beneath Howling Hal.

  Lilian and Amelia beat me to Anscombe Manor by ten minutes. By the time I arrived, Lilian had introduced Amelia to Emma, Nell, and Kit, who had no lessons scheduled until late in the afternoon and were eager to help with the search. Lilian had also shown them Amelia’s original sketch of the monkey-face glyph. They’d recognized it immediately as Howling Hal.

  “Derek named the grotesques when we moved in,” Emma explained, leading the way around the east end of the sprawling house to the back of the tower. “There’s Howling Hal, Whining Wally, Grimacing Gert, Mourning Millie—”

  “Excuse me,” I interrupted. “What are grotesques?”

  “They’re little stone sculptures attached to a building,” said Emma.

  “Like gargoyles?” I said.

  “They’re often mistaken for gargoyles,” Emma acknowledged, “but grotesques, unlike gargoyles, serve no practical purpose. Gargoyles are downspouts. Rain funnels into an opening in a gargoyle’s back and flows out through its mouth. Grotesques, on the other hand, are purely decorative sculptures. Ours portray human faces, but they can depict imaginary creatures as well.”

  “Grotesques could be quite satiric,” Amelia chimed in. “Stonemasons sometimes gave them distorted but recognizable features, to ridicule people they disliked.”

  “Imagine having an unflattering portrait of yourself set in stone,” I said, shaking my head. “I guess it pays to be polite to masons.”

  As we rounded the tower’s northeast corner, Emma pointed to the “funny faces” Will and Rob had observed. Most of the little sculptures were high up along the crenelated roofline and all had exaggerated expressions, except for Mourning Millie, who would not have looked out of place at a funeral.

  We came to a halt halfway along the wall, before an arched doorway that had been sealed from top to bottom with bricks and mortar. The grotesque Derek had dubbed Howling Hal protruded from the wall at the arch’s apex, with its little eyes screwed up and its wide mouth agape in a perpetual scream. A bucket of soapy water and a scrub brush lay in the grass near the doorway, indicating that Emma had followed my advice to give the bricks a good dousing.

  “Thanks for letting me know about Whit,” she said. “I’ll have a chat with him when he comes in for his lesson on Thursday. The topic will be: setting a good example for our younger students.”

  “Don’t be too hard on him,” I said. “Now that I’ve seen Howling Hal, I have to admit that he’s a pretty inviting target.”

  “But he’s not a good hiding place,” Kit pointed out. “Look at him. His mouth is open to the elements. A scroll of parchment exposed to wind, rain, sleet, and snow wouldn’t stand a chance of surviving for three months let alone for three centuries.”

  “I can tell you for certain that there’s no concealed pocket behind him,” Emma added. “Derek and I didn’t want to be concussed by plummeting grotesques while we were renovating the manor, so we made sure they were firmly affixed to the wall. We looked in Hal’s mouth, too, and we found nothing there but rainwater.”

  “I think we can dismiss Hal as a hiding place,” sai
d Amelia, “but he could be a marker directing us to the scroll’s actual location.”

  My gaze alighted on the disused doorway.

  “What’s on the other side of the bricks?” I asked.

  “A storage room,” Emma replied. “The doorway’s invisible from the inside. It was plastered over to look like a solid wall long before Derek and I bought the manor.”

  “My great-grandfather had the plastering done,” said Kit, “but the bricks predate him. Do you see how irregular they are? They were handmade rather than mass-produced.”

  “Derek thinks they could have been made as far back as the fourteenth century,” said Emma. “I can’t remember his exact reasoning, but it’s something to do with the type of clay, the manufacturing technique, and the weathering.”

  I’d heard enough to convince me that Gamaliel could have used the sealed doorway as a hiding place. I stepped forward and began pushing on the bricks one by one, to find out if any of them would move.

  “Don’t be silly, Lori,” said Emma. “If one of the bricks was loose, it would have fallen out years ag—” She choked slightly when the center brick in the topmost row yielded to my touch.

  “You were saying, Emma?” I asked, glancing back at her.

  “Given that it’s not a weight-bearing brick and that it’s placed beneath the lintel, where it would be more or less protected from the elements,” she muttered, frowning, “I suppose it could have stayed put for a few hundred years without a solid base of mortar.”

  “It not only could,” I said impatiently, “it did.” I stepped back from the doorway. “Kit, you’re taller than I am and you have stronger hands. See if you can coax it out.”

  Kit had to use his pocketknife as well as his fingers to finish the job, but before too long the loose brick was in his hand and a beribboned scroll was in Amelia’s.

  I thanked him, then looked up at the screaming grotesque. “Many thanks to you, too, Howling Hal. I shall instruct my sons to show you due respect in future.”

  “Tea, anyone?” said Nell.

  While the rest of us indulged in tea, scones, and copious amounts of homemade black currant jam at the refectory table in Emma’s enormous kitchen, Lilian retired to the library to translate page five. I was reaching for a second scone when Lilian rejoined us, looking as grave as Mourning Millie. I left the scone untouched and glanced at my watch. To my surprise, she’d been gone for less than an hour.

  Kit pulled a chair out from the table for her, but she shook her head and remained standing.

  “I won’t be on my feet for very long,” she said. “The fifth page is rather short.” She paused, as if to settle herself, then peered down at her notepad and began to read her translation aloud.

  “Jenna Penner died in childbed after freely confessing her many sins. She died clinging to Mistress Meg’s hand, ten months after she falsely accused Mistress Meg of witchcraft. The child, a girl, came alive into the world, to be raised by her father and sisters. Jenna asked with her last breath that the child be called Margaret.

  “A month after Jenna Penner’s death, I was awakened at midnight by strange noises in the churchyard. I rose to investigate and found goats grazing among the headstones. Mistress Meg called to me from the shadows cast by the yew tree near the lane.

  “She said: ‘Do not approach me. I have been nursing the Tollivers but I could not save them. The Black Death took them, mother, father, and all, down to the smallest babe in arms. I cleansed them and their dwelling, but the pestilence followed me home. Its signs are upon me. I will do what must be done. Look after my goats.’

  “She then vanished into the night. I never saw Margaret Redfearn alive on this earth again.”

  “Did you say Margaret Redfearn?” Kit asked.

  “Yes,” said Lilian. “Didn’t Lori tell you? Mistress Meg’s full name was Margaret Redfearn.”

  “No,” Kit murmured. “Lori didn’t tell me.”

  A silence as deep as the ocean filled the room. Each of us sat motionless, absorbed in our own thoughts, until Lilian spoke.

  “The Tollivers,” she reminded us, “were the only members of St. George’s parish to die of the plague. Mistress Meg must have isolated herself after she was infected, to avoid infecting the villagers. She must have died alone in her house in the woods, with no one to ease her passing.” Lilian bowed her head. “God rest her soul.”

  “Our neighbors were right after all,” Amelia said softly. “Gamaliel’s story ends in tragedy.”

  “Um, sorry,” Lilian said. With an apologetic wince, she held up the scroll Kit had liberated from the bricked-in doorway. “It’s not over yet, I’m afraid. There’s a new glyph.”

  “We’re not going to discuss it or even look at it until you sit down and have a cup of tea,” Kit said firmly.

  He rose, plucked the scroll and the notebook from her hands, and led her to a seat at the table. Nell had just lifted the big brown teapot to fill Lilian’s cup when the doorbell rang.

  “I’ll get it,” said Emma and left the room.

  She returned a moment later with Willis, Sr. He was a bit pink in the face and his white hair was slightly ruffled, but his black three-piece suit was as flawless as his gray silk tie.

  “I apologize for the interruption,” he said, “but I am here on a matter of some urgency. I must inform you that Mr. Myron Brocklehurst is at this moment on his way to Anscombe Manor, accompanied by approximately fifty of Mrs. Thistle’s most ardent admirers.”

  Amelia gasped and the color drained from her face.

  “How did they find me?” she whispered.

  “They did not find you, Mrs. Thistle,” said Willis, Sr. “I invited them.”

  “You invited them?” I said, thunderstruck.

  “I invited them,” he confirmed. He walked past me to stand over Amelia. “Do you intend to flee from your oppressors for the rest of your life, Mrs. Thistle? Shall you continue to cower in the shadows while others protect you? Will you remove yourself from the village, purchase another walled compound, and sequester yourself from the world once again?” He shook his head sternly. “You are too brave, too self-reliant, and too sociable to live happily with any of the choices I have presented to you. There will be no more hiding, Mrs. Thistle. The time for confrontation has arrived.” He cocked an ear toward the front door. “And so, too, have our guests. I shall now put an end to a state of affairs that has troubled you for far too long.”

  My father-in-law was a slightly built man, but he looked ten feet tall and broad shouldered as he turned to face the foe, head held high and eyes flashing. In his reflection in the teapot, I thought I caught the glint of shining armor.

  Twenty-three

  Five jaws dropped simultaneously as Willis, Sr., strode out of the kitchen. Nell, the only one among us who didn’t look as though she’d received an electric shock, brought us to our senses by calmly offering Lilian a scone. Suddenly, we were on our feet and chattering like magpies.

  “I’ll get the stablehands,” said Kit. “We may need them for crowd control.”

  “Where are we going to put fifty cars?” Emma asked.

  “I can’t face them,” Amelia groaned. “I just can’t.”

  “Come to the library,” said Lilian. “We’ll bar the door.”

  “They won’t storm the house,” I scoffed.

  “Who knows what they’ll do?” said Emma. “Fanatics are unpredictable.”

  “Then why are we standing around?” I demanded. “We can’t let William face those nutters alone.”

  I sprinted to the front door, prepared to throw myself bodily between my father-in-law and the savage hoard, but when I dashed onto the flagstone terrace I saw that Willis, Sr., wasn’t alone. To the contrary, it looked as though he had a small army at his disposal, but what he was doing with it was anyone’s guess.

  Mr. Barlow and Henry Cook were perched atop a pair of extension ladders, attaching a king-sized white bedsheet to the manor’s facade. Bree Pym sat on a camp chair at
a folding table in the graveled parking circle at the bottom of the broad stone staircase, bending over Bill’s laptop and what appeared to be a slide projector. My father-in-law stood on the terrace next to a long-haired man in a flannel shirt, jeans, and a denim jacket, and my husband stood at the bottom of the stairs, surrounded by stablehands who were armed not with pitchforks, spades, and other traditional crowd-control implements, but with handfuls of sky-blue leaflets.

  At a word from Bill, the stablehands disbursed. Two went to open the south pasture’s gate and the rest stood shoulder-to-shoulder at the foot of the stairs, facing the drive. Mr. Barlow and Henry climbed down from the ladders to join the line and Bree left her folding table to check the connections between a series of extension cords that snaked past me and into the house. She nearly collided with Kit, Emma, and Lilian as they came through the front door, looking bewildered.