I smiled grudgingly but took his arm as we walked down the steps, because I wasn’t really annoyed with him. I was such a chronic chatterbox that anyone who knew me would have found Mr. Bellamy’s question highly amusing. Apart from that, Kit’s cunning plan had succeeded in a way that would delight Aunt Dimity. She’d urged me to speak with the servants, and here we were, on our way to the kitchen.
I doubted that we’d get much out of icy Mr. Bellamy, but cooks were notorious talkers, and the kitchen was the heart of every home. Mrs. Harcourt would know if a shy man who liked children was sitting down to dinner in the dining room at Aldercot Hall or if a vampiric psychopath was chowing down on raw deer meat behind the boarded windows in the attic. If she’d been at the hall long enough, she might even be able to fill us in on the forty-year-old murder.
I knew in my bones that if anyone could be enticed into revealing the DuCarals’ lurid family secrets, it would be Mrs. Harcourt.
I was equally convinced that if anyone could entice her, it would be me. I was determined to prove to Aunt Dimity that I hadn’t lost my edge when it came to extracting information from chatty servants.
“I’ll do the talking in the kitchen,” I told Kit. “You may be irresistibly charming, but I’m a world-class gossip.”
Thirteen
T he kitchen entrance was down a short flight of stone
steps toward the rear of Aldercot Hall. The kitchen windows were the only ones I’d seen so far that weren’t covered by drapes or plywood, but since the kitchen was practically underground, I suspected that the extra light was both needed and welcomed by those who worked there.
Kit had barely withdrawn his finger from the doorbell when the door was flung open by a middle-aged woman of such imposing stature that we both fell back a step. She wasn’t fat, exactly, but she was several inches taller than Kit and at least twice his width, and her bosom was simply massive. If ever a woman were a bloodsucking fiend’s dream-date, it was this one, but as I scanned her neck for bite marks, it occurred to me that she could probably hold her own in a fi ght with a vampire, however supernatural his strength.
It wasn’t the woman’s size alone that startled us. She was also as brightly colored as a parrot. Her vermilion hair was quite short and stylishly spiky, and her vivid green eyes were set off by her florid face. She wore a fl oaty lemon-yellow cotton top with short sleeves and a deep V neckline over the kind of loose-fitting lavender trousers usually worn to yoga classes. A pair of dazzling turquoise socks showed through the straps of the orange huaraches that graced her astonishingly large feet.
She was, in fact, dressed as though it were high summer instead of mid-October, and when the blast of heat from the kitchen hit us, I understood why.
“Well, if ever there was a pair of drowned rats,” she said, planting her hands on her hips and looking us up and down.
“We’re—” Kit began, but he didn’t get any further.
120 Nancy Atherton
“I know, I know,” boomed the woman. “Mr. Bellamy rang to warn me. Whatever were you thinking, going out on a day like this?
Come in, come in, before I’m as wet as you are.”
She didn’t wait for us to step over the threshold but grabbed each of us by a shoulder and hauled us effortlessly into a small foyer with a door in every wall. Once we were all inside, she gestured to an enameled pan sitting on the fl agstone fl oor.
“Bung your boots in there and give me your socks and your jackets,” she said. “I’ll put them near the Aga to dry. I’d ask for your trousers, too, but we don’t run that kind of house.” Her eyes crinkled to slits, and her whole body shook as she laughed at her own risqué joke.
“We have dry socks,” Kit offered timidly.
“Dry socks won’t do much good on wet feet,” she declared.
“You can leave your packs in the scullery to drip, and you can wash your hands and faces in there, too.” She looked askance at us, then barked, “Well? What are you waiting for?”
“Where’s the scullery?” I asked in a small voice, looking desperately from door to door.
“Oh, for pity’s sake,” she said, and grabbed each of us by a wrist.
After that it was a bit like taking a ride in a spin dryer. Mrs. Harcourt pushed and pulled us from place to place until I didn’t know if I was coming or going. She actually cleaned Kit’s face for him with the corner of a dampened towel, and she inspected my hands closely after I’d scrubbed them. She signaled the end of the cycle by dragging us into the spacious, overheated kitchen and planting us, barefoot and somewhat dazed, on a pair of wooden chairs near a dark-red four-oven Aga cooker that was emitting the wonderful scents of baking pastry.
While we recovered our equilibrium, she went on bustling.
First she stuffed our boots with newspaper and placed them near the cooker, then she hung our socks and jackets on a wooden rack Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter
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suspended above the cooker, and then she removed a tray of little cakes from the cooker and placed it beside several others that were cooling on a counter. After testing a few of the cakes with a fingertip, she turned to tower over us.
“There, now, that’s better, isn’t it?” she said cheerfully.