Aunt Dimity and the Duke by Nancy Atherton

her. “Long-necked ladies in beaded dresses, gents in white tie and tails, a gramophone playing in the moonlight. Bantry made it into a kitchen garden, and very useful it is, too.”
    “It’s impressive,” Emma agreed.
    “Bantry’s magical with plants. Veggies and flowers will sit up and sing for him, but he lacks ... imagination. That’s why he hasn’t tackled the chapel garden. Can’t find Grandmother’s planting records, and without them he’s lost.” Humming a few bars of “Anything Goes,” the duke strolled along a graveled path past the birdcage arbor to the opposite side of the banquet hall. As he lengthened his stride, Emma was forced to scurry to keep up.
    It was a frustrating chase. Emma caught tantalizing flashes of pink and blue and yellow and red, glimpses of clematis clambering up walls and violets peeping from the shadows, but the duke gave her no chance to savor anything. She was working up the courage to call a halt when they came to the southernmost reach of the castle, the part nearest the sea.
    They were facing a tall, green-painted wooden door, the first door Emma had seen since entering the ruins. The green door was set into a sturdy, level wall that stretched east and west for a hundred feet or so. The drabness of the gray stone had been relieved by a series of niches set into the wall at irregular intervals and planted with primroses.
    Gazing upward, the duke explained, “Grandmother had this wall built from leftover bits of the castle. It’s twelve feet tall and three feet thick, to protect that which she held most dear.” He reached for the latch. “No one’s looked after it for years,” he added. “Bantry’s had so much else to do....” He glanced beseechingly at Emma. “What I mean to say is, I’m sorry it’s such a cock-up, but it’d mean a great deal to me if you could see your way clear to ...” He gripped the latch firmly and took a deep breath. “You see, this place meant everything to my grandmother, and she meant everything to me.”
    The duke smiled a wistful, fleeting smile, then lifted the latch. As the door swung inward, Emma stepped past him and down ten uneven stone steps. At the foot of the stairs she stopped.
    “I’ll leave you alone for a while, shall I?” murmured the duke.
    Emma didn’t notice his departure. For a moment she forgot even to breathe, and when she remembered, it was a slowly drawn breath exhaled in a heartbroken moan.

5

    Emma stared at the ghost of a garden. The shriveled stalks that shivered in the breeze held no bright petals or sweet scents, and the withered vines that stretched like cobwebs across the walls would never blossom again. The chapel garden was a tangle of decay and desiccation, yet it held within it the sweet sadness of a place once loved and long forgotten.
    Two tiers of raised flowerbeds, deep terraces set one above the other, encircled a rectangular lawn. In each corner rounded ledges rose, like steps, almost to the top of the wall. To her right lay the dried bed of what had been a small reflecting pool, and a wooden bench rested beside it, bleached silver by the sun. The garden had been beautiful once, but now the ledges were crowded with cracked and crumbling clay pots, the raised beds dotted with dried flowerheads, the rectangular lawn matted with bindweed and bristling with thistles.
    A curious building straddled the center of the long rear wall, one end facing out to sea, the other planted firmly in the garden. Stubby, oblong, built of the same charcoal-gray granite as the castle, it had no belltower, no arches, nothing to entice the mind or enchant the eye. Its only decoration was a thick mat of moss on its steeply pitched slate roof, and a golden dapple of lichen above the low, rounded door. A flagstone path led from the door to the stairs, neatly bisecting the lawn.
    On impulse, Emma dropped to her knees in the damp grass, parted the weeds, and dug her hand deep into the soil. She grabbed up a fistful of