Aunt Dimity Down Under by Nancy Atherton
For Vic and Raewyn James,
who took me there and back again
One
I didn’t see it coming. As I bustled around my kitchen, making dinner for the men I loved, I didn’t see death hovering in the wings. When life is tumbling merrily along, we seldom stop to think about it ending. We ignore the shadow lurking just offstage. Nothing can prepare us for its entrance.
There wasn’t a shadow in sight on that golden afternoon in late September. The autumn sun shone benevolently on my dark-haired husband and our equally dark-haired sons as they flew a kite in the back meadow, and a balmy breeze ruffled the snowy locks of my newly retired father-in-law, who sat beneath the apple tree, reading the Sunday Times. Life, I thought, as I stirred the pumpkin soup and peeked at the ham baking in the oven, couldn’t get much better than this.
My husband, Bill, was tall, good-looking, and as kind as he was wise. Our six-year-old twins, Will and Rob, were happy, healthy, and as bright as buttons. We lived in a honey-colored stone cottage amid the rolling hills and patchwork fields of the Cotswolds, a rural region in England’s West Midlands. Although we were Americans, we’d lived in the Cotswolds for nearly a decade. The twins had never known another home.
Bill ran the European branch of his family’s venerable Boston law firm from a high-tech office in Finch, the nearest village. When Will and Rob weren’t pretending to be dinosaurs or galloping their gray ponies over hill and dale, they attended Morningside School in the nearby market town of Upper Deeping. I looked after my family, helped my neighbors, participated in a plethora of volunteer activities, and ran a charitable foundation called the Westwood Trust.
My father-in-law, William Willis, Sr., had until recently served as the head of Willis & Willis, the family firm. Although he still acted as the firm’s chief adviser, the passage of time and a desire to spend more of it with his grandsons had persuaded him to hand the reins of power over to Bill’s cousin Timothy Willis. Willis, Sr., would have preferred to pass the reins to his son, but Bill had no interest in power and no intention of uprooting his family for the sake of a prestigious title. Willis, Sr., recognizing that his only child was happier in England than he’d ever be in Boston, had let the matter drop without a word of reproach.
Bill, the twins, and I were actively engaged in a campaign to convince Willis, Sr., to move in with us permanently. We’d transformed our former nanny’s room into a cozy but luxurious grandfather’s room and we’d tried every trick in the book—including pleading, guilt-tripping, and reasoning—to force him into the bosom of our family.
Our crusade was supported wholeheartedly by a phalanx of plump ladies in Finch, who considered an immaculately tailored, unfailingly polite, and undeniably wealthy widower in his early seventies to be quite a catch. Whether my father-in-law would trade his massive mansion in Boston for a modest cottage in Finch, however, remained to be seen.
Willis, Sr., had arrived at the cottage three days earlier not simply to visit his grandsons, but to attend an event that would take place in Finch on the following Saturday. My bustling came to an abrupt halt as I caught sight of the kitchen calendar and felt my heart swell with anticipatory joy.
In less than a week, the long-awaited fairy-tale wedding of the century—as I’d dubbed it—would take place in St. George’s Church. Kit Smith would marry Nell Harris and open a new chapter in the sweetest and most suspense-filled romance I’d ever witnessed. There had been many times over the past seven years when I’d had reason to doubt that the pair would wed, but love had conquered all in the end, as I’d hoped and prayed it would.
I took a special interest in the couple’s happiness because Kit Smith was one of my dearest friends and Nell was the stepdaughter of my best friend, Emma Harris, but I wasn’t alone in wishing them well. No one with a functioning heart could be untouched by their unique radiance. The good people of Finch understood that the joining of two perfect soul mates was a rare and precious cause for celebration, and proceeded accordingly.