A Demon Summer (33 page)

“That sounds exactly right,” said Max, adding: “It's the eeriest place, is Monkbury.”

“A thin place,” said Awena. “Yes, after all these years, it would be.”

“‘Thin place'?”

“Mmm. There are places where the physical world and the spiritual world collide or intersect rather than running alongside each other as they normally do. It's the thin place where we can hear the voice of the Creator. Usually it is somewhere deep within a forest or near a body of water. Someplace where we stop the incessant yammering in our heads and just listen and wait for the Goddess to speak to us.”

“‘That's how the light gets in,'” mused Max.

“What?”

“Nothing. A poem by Leonard Cohen. Lyrics.”

“How pretty. And yes, that's exactly it. The light gets in through the thin places,” she said in her earnest way.

Awena. How he missed her! Awena with her eyes as clear as the waters of the Sargasso Sea. He asked a few more questions about her health and the baby's and was told the doctor was delighted with her progress. Max scrounged a few more excuses to keep her on the phone, until finally she said in her gentle way, “I have to go and help Tara with a delivery of herbs.”

“What's for dinner?” Max asked idly. While the food at the abbey was splendid, it wasn't a patch on Awena's cooking.

“I'm making pesto from fresh basil. Then I thought I'd stop into Lucie Cuthbert's shop for some freshly grated parmesan and pine nuts. Will you be coming home soon? Please?”

Would he be home soon? What an excellent question it was. He had no idea. The investigation, such as it was, was just getting started. And he had appointments and projects of his own piling up back in Nether Monkslip.

“I will,” he told her. “I promise. Save some pesto sauce for me.”

Awena said, “You mustn't worry. It's bad for your blood pressure. Have some oregano tea. Or tea made from wild rosemary. Do they have herbal teas at the nunnery?”

Max laughed. “If there is a place on earth outside of your shop that's bound to have herbal teas, it's Monkbury Abbey. You would love talking with the herbalist here. Dame Petronilla. Dame Pet, they call her.” Max briefly repeated the contents of his conversation with Dame Pet, the conversation concerning berries—the toxic and the merely irritating ones. Awena, naturally, knew all about the different properties of varying plants and their uses, so Max asked a few specific questions and they chatted awhile longer. Mostly, Max wanted to confirm the time frame of growth for the berry-producing plants that had been found in the fruitcake, which time frame he had heard from Dame Pet, and Awena was able to confirm what had been said. The fall was almost certainly the time when the fruitcake had been tampered with and given to Lord Lislelivet.

The yew tree, Awena told him, had great symbolic value to the pagans. “Because of its longevity, really. The Christians simply adopted it, as they did so many things, to get the populace to go along with the new religion. Oh, and if you're looking at poisons, monkshood would be a very fitting one, given where you are. They call it the Queen of Poisons. If you saw it—it's obvious how it got its name.”

Suddenly Max felt that in coming to Monkbury Abbey he had stumbled into a veritable cauldron of poisons. A few more cheerful tips on what to watch out for (“Deadly nightshade you can easily recognize by its bell-shaped purple flowers. Also called atropine—doctors use it to dilate the eyes before surgery. It's in bloom right about now. Fifteen berries can kill you.”) and then Awena said, “Max, I have to run. Once I've helped Tara I'm expected over at the church. My turn on the flower rota, you know.”

Awena, it seemed, was always on the church flower rota because the other women claimed the flowers lasted longer when she was involved. Max, like nearly everyone else, somehow had come to accept these quasi-paranormal attributes of Awena's as quite normal and only to be expected.

“And then tomorrow there's the Ra Ma Da Sa healing meditation followed by a birthing class in Monkslip-super-Mare. Don't worry,” she rushed on, forestalling his apologies, “this particular class is not something you'd need to attend, anyway. Plenty of chances for that when you get home.”

Max had approached each birthing class session so far with a near-debilitating dread and apprehension while the sessions only seemed to increase Awena's otherworldly calm. The “natal facilitator,” as she liked to be called, was a sweet, grandmotherly woman given to wearing lavender twinsets and fond of using “pain management” slideshows of a stultifying dullness, alternating these with videos of a graphic carnage that held Max, used as he was to scenes of massacre and bloodbath, spellbound in hushed, bug-eyed alarm. How in God's name was anyone brought into the world healthy and alive and whole, given what it took to get here? The fathers-only birthing class he had attended most recently had ended in a wild, boisterous, hours-long session in a nearby pub, which to all the fathers-to-be seemed the only rational response to their looming individual crises.

“But please, do hurry home,” Awena said. “And again, don't worry. You always get to the bottom of these mysteries. You haven't failed yet.”

There is always, thought Max, a first time.

“And do take care,” she added. “Remember Robin Hood.”

“Why should I?”

“He was bled to death by a wicked prioress.”

Max laughed. “I love you,” he said. He got her promise that she would drive safely to Monkslip-super-Mare and would look both ways crossing the street, having got plenty of sleep, and so on.

And finally, having run out of excuses, he rang off.

And called his bishop.

*   *   *

“You said it was a formal visitation,” he was telling his mobile a few minutes later. The bishop's secretary, rather ominously, had put Max's call right through, rather than let him cool his heels or wait for the bishop's callback. “So it was part of a routine visit, planned well in advance?” Max asked his superior.

“Well, it was not a surprise visit,” said the Bishop of Monkslip. “They were given a heads-up by my secretary, but it was not, say, a thrice yearly, scheduled thing. I prefer a little spontaneity so I get a sense for what is really going on. Especially…”

“Especially?” prompted Max, as the pause went on a beat too long.

The bishop sighed. “Especially in the case of the Handmaids of St. Lucy of Monkbury Abbey. It's not as if I was trying to catch them red-handed at anything dishonest—nothing like that. It was just … well. As I mentioned earlier, they tend to drift toward the conservative side of things. Even, one could say, the ultra-conservative. Or there were factions wanting to lean that way. I felt it was a situation worth keeping an eye on. I would hope I've created an atmosphere where it is possible to come to me with any topic, however unpleasant, and I would help them get it sorted. But they were used to running their own affairs, you see. Perhaps I should have been firmer with them. Interfered more.”

He sounded exactly like a worried parent watching his teenaged daughter rebel over her curfew.

“I am not sure,” said Max, “how much there is to worry about. As you say, they have their own minds and very strong wills, and may just have found asking for your guidance … difficult.”

“They take vows of obedience, Max,” the bishop reminded him.

Max, schooled in keeping secrets as he was, wondered if the nuns didn't have a few secrets of their own. The routine, the order—might they not chafe after awhile? That lack of variety, with every day divided into hours assigned to the sacred offices. That lack of
possibility
of variety, to the grave. And then, on top of it all, constantly being supervised and corrected.

In chapter, the abbess would hold her staff of authority, and the cellaress would wear her ornamental keys, and the nuns would inform on one another for the most minor of transgressions: taking the last slice of bread without asking, not stopping work at the very second the bells rang for prayer.

Everyone had to answer to someone at the end of the day. But this was extreme. Might it drive a person to keep a few secrets, to keep something back, to rebel?

Might it perhaps drive someone, unstable to begin with, off the deep end into murder?

“Was there any problem in the past that could account for the current situation, do you think?” Max asked.

“In what way do you mean?”

“I'm not certain, really. How, for example, did the abbess come to be the abbess? Was she a popular choice?”

“Her predecessor died. Abbess Iris.”

“Yes. And she had suggested Abbess Justina as her successor?”

“No, now that you mention it. The cellaress is usually next in line. Rather an unspoken thing, you know: a custom. They all vote for whomever they want, but it is generally the current cellaress who is elected. Rather like in the U.S., where it is expected their vice-president will always run for president once the president has finished two four-year terms. It's because the cellaress knows so much about how the place operates. The only other rival for the position would be the sacrist, for similar reasons, but that was truer in the days when being in charge of altar valuables and sacred relicts and keeping jostling pilgrims in line was a much bigger job.”

“So why didn't they choose Dame Meredith? She would have been cellaress at the time, right?”

“I'm not certain. I think she may have been felt to be too conservative. Dame Sibil was mentioned also, but there was a faction that felt she was too progressive,
too
modern. Abbess Justina was chosen as the safer, middle road. I must say I was relieved by their choice. Dame Sibil might have been a disruptive influence, pushing too hard for profits, you know, at the expense of the spiritual side.”

“But now she is cellaress.”

“And held in check to a large extent by Abbess Justina.”

Max wondered fleetingly whether, if anything happened to the abbess, Dame Sibil might finally get free run of the place. Could the poisoning have been about that—about discrediting the abbess and pushing her from her throne of office?

“The politics are rather surprising,” he said. But then, whenever two or more are gathered, there are bound to be two opinions on some things, aren't there? And quiet, behind-the-scenes jostling for position.

Max said as much about the jostling, and the bishop replied, “Quite. There is never anything overt—it's just human nature to have favorites, and somehow Dame Justina became the dark horse favorite. But of course, special friendships are forbidden.”

“Special…?”

“Oh, I don't mean that sort of thing.
No!
No. Not at all. I meant that any hint of favoritism, of excluding others, is poisonous to communal life. It happens, and when it does it has to be stamped out immediately. A too-close friendship, private conversations—all the same sort of thing as you see outside the walls of a nunnery gets magnified in a closed community with so few inhabitants. The slightest hint of that spells disaster. Even among those committed to the ideals of peace and forgiveness and generally getting along.”

Max could see how easily, without a strong leader in charge, the whole thing could dissolve into petty feuds and taking of sides. Maintaining her distance from the fray did appear to be Abbess Justina's strength—that and the Teflon quality of the born politician.

“I will need to step in at some point and instigate better controls,” the bishop was saying. “They need security cameras around the place, I suppose—I never thought I'd see the day. Their reputation is hanging on this, Max. Monasteries used to hold valuables for people, rather like a bank with safe deposit boxes. Because they were known to be honest, that they could be trusted.”

“I know,” said Max.

“We can't have them lose what matters most. Their reputations for fair dealing and integrity.”

“Yes,” said Max. The whole conversation was forcefully reminding him of what he had not yet told the bishop. Talk about a lack of integrity.

“There's something I must t—” began Max.

“I have to run now,” said the bishop. “A cab is waiting to take me to the airport. I'm attending a conference where I'm the keynote. ‘The Role of the Church of England in the Twenty-First Century'—you know the sort of thing. I do hope they don't notice I'm starting to repeat myself.”

“I really n—”

“Talk with you soon, Max—when you've resolved all this at the abbey. I just know you'll get to the bottom of it.”

And the bishop rang off.

 

Chapter 28

AT NASHBURY FEATHERS

Beware the sins of the flesh.

—The Rule of the Order of the Handmaids of St. Lucy

Soon afterward Max left the Running Knight and Pilgrim, setting off on the fifty-mile journey to Nashbury Feathers, the weekend home of Lady Lislelivet and former weekend home of Lord Lislelivet, deceased.

Max supposed she was the Dowager Lislelivet if she had a married son to take over the title from his father. Cotton hadn't mentioned other family but Max recalled some news story or other about the son of Lord Lislelivet's who, being somewhat of a rake, had been sent to spend his days raking in warmer climates.

DCI Cotton had related to Max something of his conversations with the dowager, for Cotton had stopped by Nashbury Feathers on his way to the nunnery. Of course the attempted poisoning had brought the matter to Cotton's attention initially, but now it had all landed squarely back on his desk.

“The wife,” Cotton had told Max, “is concerned about what the coroner may find.”

“That's only natural.”

“But again, she seems mostly to be concerned because of the insurance angle. It can't be death from a heart attack, from where she stands. Or she would prefer it not be.”