Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter
Nancy Atherton
One
K it Smith hadn’t eloped with Nell Harris, which was a
good thing, because it meant that I wouldn’t have to
push my best friend, Emma Harris, off a cliff.
Before I’d left England for a summerlong vacation in the Rocky Mountains, I’d given Emma strict instructions: While I was away, she was to do everything in her power to keep her stepdaughter, Nell, from marrying her stable master, Kit Smith. If she had to send Nell to a convent and lock Kit in the tack room for a couple of months, so be it. Emma was to prevent anything of a matrimonial nature from taking place between the two in my absence, or face dire consequences upon my return.
It wasn’t that I opposed the marriage. To the contrary, I was rooting for it to happen. I’d been rooting for it for so long, in fact, that it would have killed me—and possibly Emma—if it had happened while I was three thousand miles away. Luckily for Emma, it hadn’t.
“I told you they wouldn’t elope,” she said serenely.
It was a raw and murky Tuesday afternoon in mid-October. My husband, Bill, was at work; our sons, Will and Rob, were at school; and their inestimable nanny, Annelise Sciaparelli, was in the dining room, humming softly to herself while she beaded the left sleeve of her exquisite, hand-sewn wedding dress. The wedding was still eight months away, but Annelise wasn’t the sort of person who left things until the last minute.
Stanley, our black cat, had been banned from the dining room because of his unhealthy habit of pouncing on moving needles. I wasn’t sure where he’d gone, but I suspected that he’d retreated to Bill’s favorite armchair in the living room. Stanley had decided long ago that he was Bill’s cat.
2 Nancy Atherton
Emma Harris and I were seated at the kitchen table, sharing a pot of Earl Grey tea, a plate of fresh-baked macaroons, and the latest gossip. Although bullets of cold rain pelted the windows overlooking my waterlogged back garden, the warm oven kept the kitchen cozy.
It had been ages since Emma and I had sat down together for a good old-fashioned natter, because Emma’s busy schedule usually kept her from sitting down at all. When she wasn’t giving lessons to aspiring equestrians at the Anscombe Riding Center, she was tending to her large vegetable garden, or bottling the fruits thereof, or designing Web sites for demanding clients, or supervising endless repairs and improvements at Anscombe Manor, the venerable home she shared with her husband, Derek.
I’d been utterly delighted when the rotten weather and a burning desire to get away from her endless chores had driven her to my cottage for a cup of tea and a bucket of gossip. Talk of Annelise’s wedding had led naturally to speculation about Kit and Nell’s. The latter was, unfortunately, a very familiar topic, one we’d hashed and rehashed many times before.
“I know you told me that they wouldn’t elope,” I said. “What I can’t figure out is why. Why hasn’t Kit proposed? Why hasn’t he thrown Nell over his saddle and run away with her? He and Nell are a match made in heaven. Everyone knows it, including Kit. What’s holding him back?”
“He says it’s the age thing,” said Emma.
“What’s age got to do with it?” I demanded impatiently. “Okay, so Kit’s a little older than Nell—”
“Kit’s twice as old as Nell,” Emma interjected. “Nell’s eighteen and Kit’s thirty-six.”
“So what?” I retorted. “You know as well as I do that Nell’s always been old for her age. The important thing is that she loves Kit and she’ll never love anyone but Kit. Princes proposed to her when she was at the Sorbonne, but she turned them down because they weren’t Kit. You’d think he’d get the message.”
Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter 3
“I think it’s none of our business,” Emma said quietly.
I clucked my tongue disdainfully and wondered, not for the first time, how two such disparate personalities could get along so well.
Where Emma was calm and analytical, I was hotheaded and intuitive. Her reserved approach to matters of the heart was as alien to me as my passionate approach was to her, but it never seemed to matter. Ours was a classic case of opposites attracting.
“Of course it’s our business,” I protested. “Kit’s one of our dearest friends. He’ll be miserable for the rest of his life if he doesn’t marry Nell, and we can’t allow a friend to make himself miserable.”
I thumped a fist on the kitchen table, rattling the teacups. “It’s up to us to see to it that he makes the right decision.”
“No, Lori, it’s not up to us,” Emma said evenly. “It’s up to Kit.”