Free Aunt Dimity and the Village Witch by Nancy Atherton Page A

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 herjar 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