Aunt Dimity Beats the Devil (Aunt Dimity Mystery) by Nancy Atherton Read Free Book Online Page A

am replete,” I announced, pushing my chair back from the table. “Will you take me to the library? I’d like to get started.”
    “Are you sure you’re up to it?” Nicole asked.
    “Absolutely,” I replied, ignoring the slight headache that had begun to tap at the base of my skull. Nothing short of broken bones would induce me to spend the day cooped up in the red room.
    We had to pass through the drawing room, the billiards room, and the study to reach the library. Each room was awash in bric-a-brac, rich fabrics, and period furniture. It was so much like a museum that I found myself unconsciously looking for explanatory labels.
    Nicole proved to be a knowledgeable, if mildly depressing, guide. She pointed out collections of jet mourning jewelry, samplers stitched with morbid sayings, and a black veil allegedly worn by the grieving Queen Victoria at Balmoral. When she paused in the study before a framed landscape made entirely of human hair, I searched for a change of subject.
    “Is the village really called Blackhope?” I asked, averting my eyes from the weirdly intertwined tresses.
    “It’s not as hopeless as it sounds,” Nicole said. “‘Hope’ is a corruption of ‘hop.’ It means ‘secluded valley.’”
    “And ‘black’ comes from the blood of a thousand massacred Scotsmen,” I intoned.
    Nicole’s mouth fell open. “How perfectly awful. Wherever did you hear that?”
    “Captain Manning,” I said, and relayed his gruesome version of the legend behind the Little Blackburn’s name. When I’d finished, Nicole shook her head.
    “Great-grandfather wouldn’t have built his country retreat here if he’d known the legend,” she said. “Josiah thought bathing in the Little Blackburn was good for his health. He loved it here.”
    “Why did he leave?” I asked.
    “There were any number of reasons,” Nicole said. “For one thing, the Great War brought a good deal of business to the family firm. Josiah must have been too busy to tear himself away from Newcastle.” She crossed the study and stood before a pair of finely carved oak doors. “I should warn you,” she said, “that the library’s almost exactly as Josiah left it. Uncle Dickie asked us not to touch it until after you’d completed your survey.”
    She reached for the oversized door-handles and pulled hard. The doors opened with a nerve-wrenching screech, and together we entered a dreamscape of dust and old leather. Gray sunlight filtered weakly through a rear wall of tall windows overlooking a flagstone terrace and a tangled, matted jungle of a garden. The sun reflected dimly from the massive, clouded mirror above the fireplace, igniting fragile, furtive gleams on gilded leather.
    “Oh,” I moaned, my headache vanishing, “how beautiful.” I sat in a high-backed armchair and gazed upward at the shelves, at the filmy cobwebs on the fine morocco, at the ancient, wheeled steps that would allow me access to the remotest corners of this precious and abandoned paradise.
    “Beautiful?” Nicole flapped her hand at the cloud of dustthat had risen from my chair. “You sound like Uncle Dickie. He’s never happier than when he’s clambering about a filthy old bookshop. I’ll have Mrs. Hatch turn the room out before you—”
    “No,” I said. “Please, it’s not necessary, unless you don’t want your clothes to get dirty.”
    “I was thinking of you, not the clothes,” Nicole said.
    “Then leave the room just as it is,” I told her. “If you’ll give me some cotton rags, I’ll dust things as I go along. A flashlight, er, torch, would come in handy too, and I’ll need—”
    “I stocked Josiah’s desk this morning,” Nicole interjected, “after we heard about your car. You’ll find pencils, pens, notebooks, everything I could think of.” She looked past me at the wall opposite the fireplace. “There he is, the old devil.”
    The hairs on the back of my neck prickled, as if the old devil had crept up behind me. I