Aunt Dimity and the Village Witch (8 page)

It was pleasant to sit indoors on a wet Tuesday morning and listen to Amelia reminisce, but I couldn’t help wondering why she’d chosen to leave a place that had clearly meant so much to her.

“You must have been lonely after your husband died,” I ventured, kneeling to stir the fire. “Living all by yourself on such a large estate—”

“Oh, but I didn’t live there by myself.” She gestured to the second photograph, the portrait of the bespectacled, bearded man. “My brother
Alfred lived at Highburn with me until he passed away, nearly a year ago.”

“First your husband, then your brother…” I shook my head sadly as I returned to the armchair and picked up my jar of tea. “The past few years haven’t been easy for you, Amelia.”

“No, they haven’t,” she agreed, “and the Bowenists haven’t made them any easier. You may find it hard to believe, Lori, but a gang of them had the unmitigated gall to invite themselves to Walter’s funeral! A nice constable shooed them away, but I’d learned my lesson. I held Alfie’s memorial service at Highburn, behind locked gates.”

“If you’d learned your lesson,” I said, mystified, “why did you leave Highburn? Why did you trade your safe haven for Pussywillows?”

“I thought I’d be safe here, too,” she admitted sheepishly. “It was naive of me, I suppose, but…Are you familiar with Homer’s tale about Odysseus and the oar?”

I nodded. “After many tumultuous years at sea, Odysseus wandered inland, carrying an oar, until he found a place where no one knew what an oar was. He took it as a sign that his seafaring days were over and settled down to the peaceful life of a gentleman farmer.”

“An excellent summary,” said Amelia. “I visited Finch several months ago in much the same spirit. I spent time in the pub, the tearoom, the Emporium, and the greengrocer’s, and I didn’t hear anyone mention the word
art
, apart from four women who were taking painting lessons from a Mr. Shuttleworth in Upper Deeping, and they were far more concerned with the local art show than they were with the London art scene.” She grimaced ruefully. “Your knowledgeable friends must have been out of town.”

“Grant and Charles are rather fond of the London art scene,” I told her.

“I couldn’t have known,” Amelia said resignedly. “I came away
from Finch with the impression that, to the villagers, the professional art world was as distant as the moon. Better still, not once did I hear anyone mention a television program, a film, a pop song, or a so-called celebrity. Instead, I heard about Mr. Barlow’s broken furnace, the new curtains Mrs. Peacock had made for the pub, which, I might add, most people thought were rather garish—”

“They are,” I put in.

“—and the joke Henry Cook had told about the chicken, the juggler, and the man in the top hat,” she went on. “It was as if the world beyond Finch didn’t exist, not because the villagers were backward or isolated, but because they were so caught up in real life that they had no time to spare for fantasies concocted by the media. I found it immensely refreshing to be among such well-grounded, sensible people.”

A snort of laughter escaped me when I heard Amelia’s generous—and generally erroneous—description of my neighbors, but I turned it into a cough. I didn’t want to be the one to disillusion her.

“I thought I’d be safe here,” she reiterated, “which was a great relief, because I had to come here, regardless of my safety.”

“Why?” I asked.

Amelia’s gaze drifted toward her brother’s photograph. “I have to complete a task Alfie was unable to complete.”

“What task?” I asked, sitting forward and listening closely.

Still gazing at her brother’s smiling, bearded face, she answered: “I need to find a witch.”

My eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Do you mean Miranda Morrow? For pity’s sake, Amelia, you didn’t have to buy a cottage in Finch to meet Miranda. Her phone number’s in the book. She’ll be in Spain for the next two weeks—the vicar’s wife is cat sitting for her and taking care of her indoor plants—but I’ll be happy to introduce you to her when she gets back. She lives two doors down from Grant and Charles, in Briar Cottage. It’s a five-second stroll from here.”

“Who,” Amelia asked, “is Miranda Morrow?”

“She’s a witch,” I replied, as if the answer were obvious, “though you wouldn’t know it to look at her. I mean, who expects a freckle-faced strawberry blonde to be a witch?” Before Amelia could respond, I continued, “Miranda does most of her work over the telephone and on the computer—horoscopes, psychic readings, spell castings, that sort of thing—but she won’t mind meeting with you in person.”

“I don’t wish to meet with her,” Amelia protested, “not unless she knows something about Gamaliel Gowland.”

“Gamaliel…who?” I said, brought up short.

“Gamaliel Gowland,” she repeated. “He’s the man who wrote the secret memoir.”

“What secret memoir?” I asked. I was beginning to feel a familiar spinning sensation in my head.

“The secret memoir that tells the story of Mistress Meg,” said Amelia.

“And Mistress Meg is…?” I said.

“She’s Gamaliel’s witch, of course,” said Amelia, sounding mildly exasperated. “Mistress Meg was also known as Margaret Redfearn. Do either of the names mean anything to you?”

“No,” I said, eager to hear more.

“Oh, well,” she said with a soft sigh. “I didn’t expect to find her on my first full day in Finch.”

She refilled her jar of tea and sipped from it placidly, as if she intended to move on to other subjects, but I refused to budge. As a member in good standing of the Finch Busybody Society, I couldn’t bear the thought of a newcomer knowing more about my village than I did.

“Did Mistress Meg live in Finch?” I pressed. “Why did Gamaliel Gowland write a secret memoir about her? Who, for that matter, is Gamaliel Gowland?”

Instead of answering my queries directly, Amelia deposited her
jar on the tray, stood, and crossed to the cherrywood
secretaire
. She reached into the top drawer beneath the slanted desk lid and returned to her chair carrying a gaudily decorated biscuit tin commemorating Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation.

She placed the biscuit tin on the low table, prized it open, and withdrew from it what appeared to be a handwritten note encased in a protective envelope of transparent plastic. Without saying a word, she passed the mysterious document to me.

I gazed down at the small sheet of parchment—no more than four inches by six inches—covered with a densely written Latin text. The text was punctuated by a curious symbol, a black cross within a shield-shaped lozenge.

“If you’re familiar with Keats and Homer,” Amelia said, “you must be a well-educated woman. What can you tell me about the writing you see before you?”

“I can’t translate it,” I admitted readily, “because I don’t read Latin. And I don’t know what the glyph at the end of the text means because I’ve never seen anything like it before.” I studied the script more closely. “I can tell you that the writer used a quill—most likely a goose quill—and iron gall ink, made from oak galls and a few other components. At a rough guess, I’d say that whoever wrote it lived sometime in the mid-seventeenth century. Handwriting styles are difficult to date precisely because old styles continue to be used long after new styles come into fashion.”

“I’m impressed,” Amelia admitted.

“I used to work with rare books and manuscripts,” I explained, handing the piece of parchment back to her. “Do you know what it says?”

“Yes, I do, thanks to Alfie. He studied and translated the…” Her words trailed off and she peered at me diffidently. “I don’t wish to bore you, Lori. You will tell me when I’ve droned on too long, won’t you?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, waving off her concern. “Some people like comic books and some like paperback thrillers. I like the old, dusty stuff.” I pointed to the parchment. “This is my idea of pizza and a movie.”

“Very well, then.” Amelia returned the document to the biscuit tin, moistened her throat with a sip of tea, and began, “My brother Alfred never married and he had no children. As his only sibling, I inherited all of his possessions. I discovered the parchment after his death, when I was sorting through his things.” She touched the biscuit tin. “He kept it in the tin, under his bed, along with a notebook containing his English translation of the text and all the information he’d been able to gather about it.”

“How did he come by it?” I asked.

“He found it among the papers of one of our great-grandfathers,” said Amelia, “an eccentric antiquarian named John Jacob Bowen. John Jacob was an interesting character—a typical Victorian magpie. He collected all sorts of curiosities, simply for the pleasure of having them about. He purchased the parchment from a cobbler who claimed that it had fallen out of his chimney.”

“A strange place to store parchment,” I commented.

“Is it?” Amelia smiled enigmatically, then continued, “John Jacob examined the parchment before he bought it, of course. I believe it interested him because the man who wrote the text identified himself as Gamaliel Gowland. Gowland is a family name, you see. John Jacob may have believed that Gamaliel Gowland was a distant relation.”

“Was he?” I asked.

“As it turns out, yes,” said Amelia, with a satisfied air. “John Jacob was too busy accumulating oddities to give the parchment the attention it deserved, but Alfie wasn’t. He discovered that the memoir’s author, Gamaliel Gowland, was a many-times-great-granduncle of ours who
served as the rector of St. George’s Church from 1649 to 1653.” She gave me an approving nod. “Your guess wasn’t so rough after all, Lori. The memoir was indeed written in the mid-seventeenth century.”

“Hold on,” I said. “Let’s back up a step. Are you telling me that your many-times-great-granduncle Gamaliel was a rector at St. George’s Church in
Finch
?”

“Yes, I am,” said Amelia.

“Wow,” I marveled, almost spilling my tea in my excitement. “I’d give my eyeteeth to read his memoir—and I’m terrified of the dentist. It’d be worth it, though, to read a firsthand account of everyday life in seventeenth-century Finch. The vicar and his wife will go
bananas
when they find out what you have. Where’s the rest of it?” I shrank back in my chair as a dreadful possibility occurred to me. “Please don’t tell me it was lost or destroyed, Amelia. I don’t think I could stand it.”

“I can assure you that it wasn’t lost or destroyed. Here.” Amelia took an ordinary, spiral-bound notebook from the biscuit tin, opened it to a specific page, and passed it to me. “It will save time if you read Alfie’s translation for yourself.”

I took the notebook from her and read her brother’s spiky, cramped scrawl silently.

I, Gamaliel Gowland, rector of St. George’s Church in Finch, writing alone at night in my private study, record in a secret memoir that which is too dangerous to speak. I tell the forbidden tale of Mistress Meg, known to some as Margaret Redfearn, a fearsome and most potent witch. To write the witch’s tale is to risk calamity for me and for my congregation. I will, therefore, divide and hide my memoir in hopes that it will be found by one who does not fear retribution, long after I and those I serve are with Our Lord. If you would seek the truth, follow the signs (clues?).

Alfred’s English translation ended with a faithfully copied rendition of the glyph I’d observed at the end of Gamaliel’s Latin text: a cross within a shield-shaped lozenge.

I handed the notebook back to Amelia and she laid it in her lap.

“The memoir wasn’t lost or destroyed,” she said. “It was hidden. Gamaliel hid it because it contained a tale that might spell trouble for him and his congregation, namely, the story of Mistress Meg.”

I nodded sagaciously. “Witchcraft was a pretty touchy subject in the seventeenth century.”

“Witchcraft was regarded as a crime punishable by death,” Amelia stated firmly. “To praise it would be to risk dire punishment by church or civil authorities—sometimes both. To condemn it would be to risk a witch’s retribution. It’s not clear whether Gamaliel was afraid of the authorities or of Mistress Meg. All I know for certain is that he separated the pages of his forbidden tale and concealed them in various hiding places.”

“Such as a cobbler’s chimney,” I said, as comprehension dawned. “Did the cobbler live in Finch, too?”

“He lived directly across the lane from St. George’s,” Amelia informed me, “in Plover Cottage.”

“Gamaliel hid the first page of his memoir in Plover Cottage?” I said, astonished. “Opal Taylor lives there now. She’ll be gobsmacked when she hears what was stuffed up her chimney.”

“As rector, Gamaliel would have had ready access to Plover Cottage,” Amelia went on. “It would have been a simple matter for him to place the parchment in the chimney.” She glanced at her brother’s photograph. “Alfie believed that Gamaliel hid all of the pages in and around Finch. He was convinced that they’re still in their hiding places, waiting to be found.”

“It’d be a tall order to find them now,” I said. “You’d have to poke your arm up an awful lot of chimneys.”

“Not necessarily.” Amelia tapped her finger on the spiral
notebook. “Gamaliel states explicitly that he left behind a series of clues that would lead a truth seeker to the rest of the memoir.” She held up the notebook and pointed to the curious symbol at the end of the text. “Alfie believed that the glyph, as you called it, was the first of Gamaliel’s clues. Unfortunately, he was unable to decipher it.”

“Did your brother ever come to Finch?” I asked. “He might have understood the glyph better if he’d seen the village with his own eyes.”

“Alfie was unable to visit Finch,” said Amelia. “My brother was severely handicapped, Lori. He used his computer and the Royal Mail to carry out his research because travel was all but impossible for him. It was the fondest dream of his heart to read Mistress Meg’s story, but illness prevented him from completing his life’s work.” She turned her head to gaze up at her brother’s smiling face. “I intend to complete it for him.”

I sat in silence, touched by the bond that seemed still to exist between Amelia and Alfred, a bond that I, as an only child, had never known. I was humbled by her willingness to share her home with him, despite his disabilities, and I admired her determination to carry out what appeared to be a fairly daunting task. I was about to ask her where she planned to start when a knock sounded on the front door.