“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
220 Nancy Atherton
hanging blackout drapes throughout the house. Sun-damaged furniture wouldn’t have fetched half as much.”
“Is that when you boarded up the attic?” Kit asked.
Charlotte turned to him and nodded. “I shut off the central heating and turned off all but the most essential lights as well, to conserve energy and keep the bills low.”
“And you sold the fallow deer for the same reason,” said Kit.
“She kept the herd as long as she could, because her mother liked them,” Rory piped up.
“The deer were among the few things that made my mother smile,” Charlotte said. “But after she died, it was a luxury I couldn’t afford.”
“Could’ve sold Aldercot,” Rory mumbled.
“Yes,” Charlotte agreed, “I could have sold the hall. I’ve been on the verge of doing so many, many times. But my parents and my brother are buried in the cemetery. Who would look after their graves if I left Aldercot?”
“You’ll never have to leave Aldercot,” said Leo, putting his arm around her, “and you’ll never want for luxuries again. We’ll buy a herd of elephants, if you like, and we’ll fill the place with the finest furnishings to be had. We’ll light it up like a Christmas tree and turn the central heating up to sizzle, and we’ll hire enough staff so that you’ll never have to lift a finger. Whatever you want, you’ll have.”
Kit’s eyebrows rose at the exact same moment as mine. Leo caught our skeptical expressions and chuckled.
“I made a few bob Down Under,” he said. “A few million bob, in fact. Your old uncle’s fi lthy, stinking rich, Kit.”
“But you live in a . . . a tin can,” I managed.
“I like living rough every once in a while,” said Leo. “It reminds me of where I started, keeps me from getting too full of myself. But you can have too much of a good thing. When that ruddy storm hit, I hightailed it to Oxford and spent the weekend at the Randolph, being wined and dined by one of my bankers. It made a nice change.”
Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter
221
I picked my jaw up from my lap and tried to revise my image of Leo, but it would take more than a few minutes to move him from St. Benedict’s Hostel for Transient Men to one of the poshest hotels in all of England. In the meantime Kit carried on tying up loose ends I was too embarrassed to even think about.
“When Lori and I were at Aldercot the other day,” Kit said, “we thought we heard someone moving around upstairs. It seemed a bit odd, because Mr. Bellamy and Mrs. Harcourt were downstairs, in the kitchen.”
“It must have been Jacqueline,” Charlotte said readily. “She’s a photographer, you know. She uses the attic as a darkroom, and she locks the door so Bellamy won’t walk in on her and ruin whatever she’s developing. We leave the lights on in the stairwell so she can find her way there. One must make some accommodations to the staff, and she really is quite talented.”