Aunt Dimity and the Village Witch (12 page)

“I think we can scratch the floor off the list of potential hiding places for the moment,” said Lilian. “Since we must postpone our survey of the rafters, we’re left with the pulpit and the font. Teddy and I will take the pulpit. Lori? William? Mrs. Thistle? The font, if you please.”

Whipped into action by Lilian’s commands, our assigned teams headed in opposite directions.

The baptismal font was as old as the church. The rough bowl and the stumpy square post beneath it had been sculpted from a single block of stone. A raised relief of leafy vines encircled the bowl’s exterior, and each side of the post featured a primitively carved symbol of one of the four evangelists: an angel for Matthew, a winged lion for Mark, a winged ox for Luke, and an eagle for John. The carvings were timeworn and indistinct in places, but there were still plenty of nooks and crannies to explore.

I moved Christine Peacock’s non-floral arrangement from the font to a nearby windowsill, and Willis, Sr., removed the font’s wooden lid and leaned it against the side of a pew. Amelia ran her hand around the bowl’s smooth wooden liner, then began rapping on it with her knuckles. Willis, Sr., bent to examine the vines and I knelt before the eagle.

I tugged on the eagle’s wings, stuck my fingers in its eyes, twisted its talons, pounded its beak, and pressed hard on the stone panel, to no avail. I went through a similar routine with the angel, the lion, and the ox, with the same results. Willis, Sr., and I swapped places to double-check each other’s work, and Amelia took a turn as well, but nothing budged.

After forty-five minutes of intensive poking, prodding, pushing, and pulling, our separate parties regrouped in the center aisle to compare notes. We had to raise our voices to be heard above the rain hammering the roof because, while we’d been busy searching, the drizzle had turned into a deluge.

“Anything?” Lilian asked.

“Zip,” I replied. “How about you?”

“No joy,” said the vicar. He tipped his head back to peer at the rafters. “It looks as though we’ll have to ring Mr. Barlow.”

A gust of wind ruffled the hymn books as Bree Pym pushed the
south door open and walked into the church, clad in a camouflage-print rain poncho and a very wet pair of Wellington boots.

“I was chatting with the aunties when the sky let loose,” she said, striding toward us. Bree’s great-grandaunts had been laid to rest beneath a single headstone in St. George’s churchyard. She liked to keep them abreast of village news. “I stepped onto the porch to get out of the storm and I heard people shouting, so I thought I’d investigate. I’m afraid Mr. Barlow’s gone to Upper Deeping to pick up his new drill, Mr. Bunting, so there’s no point in ringing him. You’re the new woman,” she went on, extending her hand to Amelia.
“Kia ora!”

Kia ora
was a Maori greeting I’d learned during a trip to New Zealand. Bree used it to declare her loyalty to her native land and, I suspected, to throw unsuspecting innocents off balance. If she hoped to wrong-foot Amelia, however, she was in for a big surprise, as were the rest of us.

“
Kia ora!”
Amelia replied, without missing a beat. “
Ko wai to ingoa? He iti noa iho taku reo Maori,
so be gentle with me.”

Bree froze in midstride. Her hand dropped to her side and her mouth fell open. It was refreshing to see someone turn the tables on her for once, but she bounced back almost instantly.

“My name is Bree Pym,” she said, presumably in response to Amelia’s question, “and I don’t speak much Maori either, so we’ll have to be gentle with each other.” She stepped forward and shook Amelia’s hand enthusiastically. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Mrs. Thistle.”

“Please, call me Amelia,” said Amelia.

“Have you been to New Zealand?” Bree asked.

“Once, years ago,” Amelia said. “It was heaven on earth. You’re a Kiwi, I take it?”

“I am, but I’m over here exploring my Pommie roots,” said Bree. “What brought you to Finch?”

“A riddle,” Amelia replied.

“Is it a private riddle or can anyone have a whack at it?” Bree asked.

Amelia nodded to Willis, Sr., who produced the first page of the memoir and handed it to Bree.

“Sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t read Latin.”

“We’re trying to figure out what the symbol at the end of the text means,” I told her.

Bree took a closer look, then handed the parchment back to Willis, Sr.

“I don’t know what the symbol means,” she said, “but I can tell you where to find another one just like it.”

“Are you referring to the wall painting?” Amelia asked.

“Not the wall painting.” Bree pointed at the ceiling. “The bell tower.”

“The bell tower,” Amelia said exultantly. “Much more secretive than a billboard. Dear Gamaliel, I
knew
you wouldn’t disappoint me.”

Eleven

S 
ince the bell tower was too small to accommodate six overexcited adults, and since nothing short of sedation could have prevented Amelia, Lilian, and me from going up there with Bree, the gentlemen volunteered to stay below. The vicar retrieved a ring of keys from the sacristy, unlocked the tower door, and stood aside to avoid being trampled.

Bree led the charge up the spiral staircase, throwing warnings over her shoulder about the uneven stone steps.

“Wouldn’t want you to stumble,” she said, adding for Amelia’s benefit, “Mr. Bunting lets me sit in the tower during Sunday services. I know the staircase by heart.”

“You must know the tower by heart, too,” said Amelia.

“I wish I’d known it when it had real bells,” said Bree. “The tower never had a separate room for the bell ringers. The bells hung in the bell chamber, but the ropes hung down through the tower all the way to the ground floor. The bell ringers stood on the same level as the worshipers when they rang peals. Very simple, very communal.”

It was as good a description of St. George’s as I’d ever heard.

The rain’s drumming became louder as we climbed higher, and when Bree paused to push open a trap door, a gust of wet wind sailed down the spiral staircase, dampening our upturned faces. Bree hauled herself into the bell chamber, then gave each of us a hand up as we clambered through the trap door after her.

The chamber was a sounding box, a square room with a pair of louvered openings set side by side in each stone wall. The oak beams that had once supported the bells were still in place
overhead, but the floor had been covered with modern sheets of plywood.

A metal stand holding four megaphone-shaped loudspeakers stood in the center of the chamber. The metal stand was bolted to the floor and the speakers’ cables ran through a length of plastic tubing that snaked across the weather-beaten plywood into a small opening, the only visible reminder of the holes through which the bell ropes had once dangled.

The wind curled and swirled around us, sending eddies of rain through the louvers. My fingers felt like icicles, Bree’s poncho flapped, Amelia’s bun began to loose its moorings, and the tip of Lilian’s nose was as red as her ears, but no one complained. We were too excited to be put off by the weather.

“Here!” Bree called, squatting in the tower’s northeast corner. “Look here!”

Lilian, Amelia, and I picked our way around the metal stand and bent over the crouching girl, who was pointing at something down low in the dark corner.

“That’s it!” Amelia cried. “That must be it! Oh, Bree, you clever girl.”

The artist’s eyes were sharper than mine. I had to get down on my hands and knees and poke my face into the corner before I could see what Amelia had seen at first glance.

The bell tower’s irregular blocks of limestone were held in place by a cream-colored mortar, but the stone that had provoked Amelia’s outburst was outlined in dark brown. Incised in the stone’s center was a cross within a shield-shaped lozenge.

“I thought it was graffiti,” Bree explained.

“It
is
graffiti,” I said, getting to my feet. “Gamaliel must have carved it after he hid the second page behind the stone.”

“We must break through the mortar,” Amelia declared. “Does your husband own a hammer and a chisel, Mrs. Bunting?”

“I’m afraid not,” Lilian said apologetically. “Teddy isn’t one of nature’s handymen.”

“We may not need a hammer or a chisel,” said Bree.

Her right hand vanished beneath her poncho and reappeared a moment later, grasping a flathead screwdriver. Amelia looked surprised, but Lilian and I merely smiled.

“Have you been helping Mr. Barlow again?” Lilian asked.

“He had to rehang a door for Mrs. Wyn,” said Bree. “I went along to see how it’s done.”

“You must have been a brilliant Girl Guide,” said Amelia, beaming at her.

“I earned my badges,” Bree acknowledged, grinning. She raised the screwdriver and looked up at Lilian. “Do I have your permission to deface church property, Mrs. Bunting?”

“I’m sure Mr. Barlow will be able to repair whatever damage you inflict,” said Lilian. “Have at it!”

Bree used the screwdriver to hack at the brown mortar. Her hand was soon covered with muddy streaks as spritzes of rain turned the mortar dust into paste, but she kept digging.

“Gamaliel must have come up to the tower many times to create his hiding place,” said Amelia.

“I hope he chose sunny days,” I said, breathing on my frozen fingers.

“Oh, dear,” Lilian said suddenly.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“The bells,” she said. “It’s almost noon. If the recording starts while we’re standing beside the loudspeakers…” She pressed her hands to her ears and grimaced.

“No problem.” I pulled out my cell phone. “I’ll call William and ask him to ask the vicar to turn the machine off.”

“Teddy’s not very good with machines,” Lilian said doubtfully.

“Hold on,” said Bree. “The mortar’s only a couple of inches deep
and the stone seems to be shallower than the others. There must be a cavity behind it. I’m…almost…there.”

She set the screwdriver aside, inserted her fingers and thumbs into the empty space where the brown mortar had been, and gently wiggled the stone loose from its fellows.

“Oh, my,” breathed Amelia, clutching my arm.

I could almost hear her heart race. Mine, too, began to gallop as Bree reached into the cavity and withdrew from it a loosely rolled scroll of parchment tied with a ribbon of black cloth. She handled it gingerly, to avoid smearing it with wet mortar, and passed it up to Amelia, who slipped it with shaking fingers into the pocket of her billowing trench coat.

“We’ve found it!” Bree roared, her eyes dancing. “Now, will someone please tell me what we’ve found?”

“Let’s get clear of the loudspeakers first,” said Lilian, and led the way through the trap door.

We trailed back to the vicarage looking like a pack of drowned rats, except for Willis, Sr., who was miraculously unsullied. Lilian spread towels under the coat tree to catch the water dripping from our rain gear and invited us to dry our wet shoes on the hearth in the study. Angel, roused from a nap in the vicar’s chair, took one look at us and fled.

While I added a log to the fire and Amelia got her hair under control, Lilian, the vicar, and Bree cleared piles of books from the library table near the French doors and replaced them with a lamp, a pencil box, two hefty Latin dictionaries, and several pads of lined paper. Willis, Sr., added the memoir’s first page to the newly created work space and the rest of us gathered around to watch Amelia place the beribboned scroll in the pool of light shed by the lamp.

“Before we move on,” she said, “please allow me to say how
grateful I am to all of you. I came to the vicarage hoping for a little information, but you’ve given me so much more. Thank you for applying your formidable minds and your tireless enthusiasm to my brother’s quest. I would never have found the second page without you.”

“You won’t find the rest of the memoir without us, either,” I said, “because we won’t let you!”

Everyone laughed, including Amelia, but I was telling the simple truth. A quick glance at the circle of faces around the table told me that Alfred’s quest had inflamed more than one imagination. If curiosity were a fatal disease, we all would have dropped dead on the spot.

“Shall we proceed?” Amelia asked.

“The scroll should be opened in a controlled environment,” I advised. “Parchment is more durable than paper, but it can become brittle over time.”

“Nonsense,” said Amelia. She pressed the scroll lightly with a fingertip and watched it spring back into shape when she released it. “It seems quite supple to me.”

“Ours is a damp climate,” Lilian reasoned.

“Humidity can mitigate brittleness,” I allowed.

“For pity’s sake, ladies…” Amelia clucked her tongue impatiently and reached for the scroll. She discarded the black ribbon, spread the scroll flat on the table, and laid the Latin dictionaries across its top and bottom edges to keep it from rolling up again like a window shade. “There. What do we think?”

We peered down at the flattened scroll in silence. The memoir’s second page was twice the width and nearly three times the length of the first page, and the writing on it was even smaller and more compact. The slanted downstrokes on the
F
’s and the odd curls appended to the
S
’s indicated to me that both pages had been written by the same hand—Gamaliel’s.

The scroll featured two drawings, one at the beginning of the
text and one at the end. The first depicted a tiny bird with a mask-like stripe across its eyes and a black ring around its neck. Amelia immediately identified it as a plover.

“Gamaliel must have included it,” she said, “in case the person who found the second page hadn’t yet discovered the first. The plover refers, of course, to Plover Cottage, where the first page was hidden.”

“Well-reasoned,” murmured Willis, Sr.

“The rector left a new clue as well,” said the vicar, pointing to the second drawing. “What do you suppose it is?”

“A plant?” I suggested. “A stem with long, thin, oval leaves?”

“What are the three little circles at the bottom of the stem?” asked Lilian.