Fair Weather

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  It was a rich convent and I already knew its reputation. A large splinter from the true cross and the whole of Saint Gregory’s right leg bone were kept in the holy chapel. Once there had been a few well publicised cases of miraculous healing so this had become a place of pilgrimage, but when the new Italian Abbot had taken charge several years back, all that had changed. He had brought wealth from Europe and now the convent welcomed the younger daughters of the great barons, widows of princes and sisters of bishops.

  The Little Sisters of Angelica were not so little and if all their evening suppers consisted of six courses, then I wasn’t surprised. I already knew the prioress as a square woman and short sighted. It was the indulgent Abbot I liked the look of. He was simply dressed in rough hemp habit and although he had eaten his way through a mountain, his eyes were gentle brown and quick with humour. I felt his gaze on me but I kept my own eyes lowered.

  Two small girls, eight or nine years old, crept into the big hall to clear away the plates. The nuns did not do their own housework it seemed. I’d heard that the convent took in orphans from time to time and once a rumour about some being the illegitimate children of the previous abbot. But there were always rumours.

  The novitiate sitting next to me finished her meal. “I can take you to the visitor’s rooms,” she said, “but first you must see Abbot Bernardo. He likes to speak to everyone who passes through here. I expect he’ll bless your journey.”

  I thought it might even help since I needed all the help I could get, so I bowed diplomatically and waited until the tables emptied. A bell was ringing, perhaps for prayers. I thought they might expect me to join them but no one did and I was relieved. I was far too tired for a mumble of Latin I would not understand.

  “Now,” said a sudden voice above me, “so this is our new guest?” He had an accent and spoke with rolling consonants but his English was perfect. “We rise very early in the mornings and I shall not be able to see you again before you set off. But come with me now for a cup of wine in my rooms before you sleep. I’ll give you a blessing and directions for your journey tomorrow.” The Abbot had me up off my bench and scurrying after his bare heels. If the bell had indeed been a call to chapel, he clearly had no intention of obeying it.

  His rooms were grand with a silk canopy over a high chair. As good as a throne, I thought, not that Tilda had ever seen a throne. The chair was soft cushioned. I sat on a stool by his skirted knees and tried to look attractively beseeching. “Father, is it ever permitted for a guest to stay longer than one night?”

  I trusted his eyes and hoped I read kindness. “Perhaps,” he said, scratching his chin. “You travel alone?” He looked a little deeper, smiling and nodding. “You’re in some sort of trouble I expect? As a man of the cloth, perhaps I could help.”

  “Trouble of a sort,” I said with a sigh of gratitude. Molly’s bizarre imagination shoved poor Tilda aside. I said, “Can I tell you, then, Father? Please don’t send me back. You see, my brother’s the Baron d’Azur. He threw me out of the castle when he discovered I was, well it’s embarrassing to admit it, but I was in love with the stable boy.” Absurd of course, but I thought it would serve well enough. “I left with my maid but my horse went lame. Then my maid died of the dysentery. I’ve been walking for some days.”

  “Good gracious,” murmured the Abbot. “What a series of dreadful calamities. Do you have no other family?”

  “Yes,” I said, thinking fast, “my sister but she lives on the Scottish boarders. That would be a terribly long way to walk. Besides, she might just send me back to my brother. Instead I was, well, perhaps, even thinking of joining a convent.”

  “Indiscretion with a stable boy,” said the Abbot, “hardly seems a good preparation for a life in the cloisters.”

  “I can atone for my sins,” I suggested.

  “Baron D’Azur?” smiled the Abbot. “Perhaps I know him? Is he rather stocky and sandy haired with a short beard?”

  I was confused. “No,” I decided it was safer not to agree, since I thought I’d made him up. “He’s slim and dark and has a terrible temper. But I’d need time to think about taking holy orders of course. If I could just stay for a few weeks, to meditate in peace and clear my mind?”

  “Well now, I think that would be quite acceptable,” said the Abbot, standing up and stretching his fingers like a concert pianist, though I was fairly sure even harpsichords hadn’t been invented yet. “Our hospitality here is an important part of our Christian service and although most guests stay just the one night – and we usually encourage short stays – restricted premises you see – under special circumstances, well, that’s quite another matter.”

  I was genuinely grateful. “Thank you Father,” I said. “You’re a man of charity. I appreciate it.”

  “Oh,” he said, smiling down at me, all jovial chins and twinkling brown eyes. “These can be hard times for young women cast out alone. And don’t worry.” He leaned over and patted my hand. “I shan’t send you back, my dear. Neither to your wicked brother the Baron D’Azur – nor to my wicked friend Vespasian Fairweather.”

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Autumn blew east and Molly shivered. I was sitting on the edge of my own doorstep, looking up to the hills. Their wavering peaks rose from a damp mist of low fog that seemed to sink into me I was breathing depression and had no idea what to do next. So I sat all alone and watched the Cotswold Hills blur into cloud and felt it symbolised my life. Vespasian often talked of symbols. But I was back into the twenty first century and Bertie was indoors making lunch. He had become a better cook during my last vaguely muddled half-absence as Tilda.

  Sammie’s loss still hung over the house as a constant reminder of terrifying evil and awful sadness. Wattle’s death had hurt Bertie deeply, but Sammie’s murder was an even greater horror. It had happened in my own home. Sammie was my cousin and I had loved her dearly all my life. She was the only person in all the world who had ever even remotely known me, had understood me and loved me for who I really was, instead of the way I pretended to be, as Bertie had. She had clutched my hand all during my short confused childhood. I had not been with her to hold hers when she needed me. I refused to talk to anyone.

  The police shuffled between sympathy and suspicion. I talked very little even to them, but they seemed to believe I was traumatised and in many ways, I was. They suggested a counsellor and I visited a little William Morris woman with tiffany lampshades who tried to get me to talk to her. I just looked at her and admired her lampshades and her cushions. She had a beautiful ash tree in her big back garden and I admired that too. I sat staring at it over her shoulder through the smears on the window and decided it would be excellent wood for making well spliced bows and nice straight arrows. There was an ash tree bending over Richard’s grave mound and I wished I was there instead of here.

  I slept very badly. Sammie’s face opened its eyes at me under the swirling blood coloured bath water. Tilda called, lost in the guttering candle light of her long past world. I saw Abbot Bernado sitting on the edge of his desk, rolled parchments piled, swinging his plump hairy legs, uncut toenails peeping through his sandals. He was patting my hand. “I won’t tell Vespasian what a bad girl you have been,” he told me. “But how strange to love a grubby stable lad, when Vespasian is there to love instead.” Then his face blurred into eagles’ wings and flew away across the tree tops. Sometimes Richard came through the fog and stood by the side of the misted river. His eyes were hidden behind silver pennies. Behind him Isabel emerged ghostlike, reaching out her arms. Wattle stood between Richard and Isabel and put her hands on their shoulders, guiding their blind eyes. Sammie rose from the river waters, which had all turned red. She smiled at me before she turned and climbed the far bank. She took the arm of Muriel Bunting who was waiting for her there, and they walked back into the fog together.

  I hated my dreams. I cried and cried, stayed awake half the night and couldn’t get out of bed in the mornings.

  The tr
ees lost their leaves, a sad death for summer beauty. The sodden creased leaf colour turned to sludge in the gutters. It was the first of October and I had left all my courage behind with Tilda. She needed it more than I did.

  Sammie’s murder had left no clues and it was common knowledge that the police were totally bewildered. I spent many hours with them. I went to the tiny station house behind the village, covered in ivy with spiders scrambling through the half open windows, but it wasn’t the local constabulary who interviewed me. It was the top brass from London and they had taken rooms in the big hotel by the stream, sitting huddled in the station each gloomy grey day. They came to my house as well and I made them tea and Bertie handed around biscuits as if they were old friends, which was almost how they seemed. They had come to my hospital bed, sitting outside the isolated private ward, uncomfortable in the squashed passage and occasionally helping the nurses with their lunch duties. Detective Constable Peterson fed me soup for two days. I liked him best. They did not suspect me of butchery and madness and never mentioned my mother’s history though they must have researched it, but they suspected I had secret friends. They thought I might have forgotten some dreadful past acquaintanceship, some awful dabbling in the black arts, some occult dalliance. They suspected Bertie sometimes, or some of them did sometimes. Bertie got fed up with it and fed up with me too and my wearisome lethargy, irascible moods and vague absences. He invited himself back to Wattle’s parents and drove off in a hired car one dull morning, packed up with everything I had hoped he would take with him, leaving me with my spare room spare again. I had been longing for him to bugger off. I had thrown a plate at him (my cooking, not his) and all the shepherd’s pie had slodged down his beige waistcoat like vomit on a rug. “That’s the last damned straw,” he had shouted at me. “I’ve been trying damn hard to help you, Mol. Have you no idea how damned stupid you’re being?”

  I knew. “I have to be alone, Bertie. You don’t see it, do you? You’re so terribly miserable you need company. I’m so terribly miserable, I desperately need to be left alone. Privacy, for God’s sake. Doesn’t anyone know how valuable privacy is?”

  “For a month you act like a damned zombie hardly opening your mouth. Then you come back to life and turn into a harridan.”

  “I’m so sorry,” which was true.

  “Phone me some time,” said Bertie and disappeared up the road in a puff of exhaust fumes and dust.

  I did phone him and apologised properly and I even missed him once or twice too, which I could do more easily now I couldn’t actually see him anymore.

  He’d been such a shit as a husband, selfish, utterly self absorbed, and so regularly unfaithful that it seemed more of a career than a hobby. I had worked endlessly at understanding him and being the good wife. Then one day I’d realised how my idea of a good wife was boring to both of us. Not only was Bertie unfailingly unfaithful to me, but somehow I was being unfaithful to myself.

  So I divorced him. I felt it was essential and overdue and would set us both free. I was excited at first, about getting myself back. It hadn’t resulted in anything of the sort of course, because I hadn’t appreciated how little conscious control any of us actually have over our own lives. And now Bertie was turning into the patient and tolerant housewife, while I was the self absorbed shit.

  But privacy was my bliss and I cherished it. There had been so few really solitary corners to discover during my medieval meanderings. Now I spent all day by myself unless the police called. I even avoided the shops. If I had nothing to eat already mouldering on a shelf, then I missed meals. I had learned a lot from the past and hunger no longer bothered me in the least. I lost weight, my tummy went concave, and I looked far better than I felt. But I had to wear high necks, easier in the autumn chill, as Tilda’s wounds and scars were etched across my body. With the modern inconvenience of mirrors everywhere, I could now see more clearly what had been done to her. In my dreams, I saw her face. I saw she had become beautiful and thought it bitter that all her pain and experience should have widened her eyes into smoky wistful innocence, and filled her body into sensual curves with firm new rounded breasts. She had grown. Her legs were long and slim and strong muscled. I had run and walked and run again. Molly’s sluggish disinclination to exercise had been honed by Tilda’s hardships.

  But I loved to walk too, trudging up onto the hills and through the country lanes. I was filling in time until Tilda would have me back. As Molly I was lost. Most of all I feared hearing of the next victim, for death now all seemed my fault. At least, a selfish thought, there was no one left who was close to me. There was Bertie of course, but the victims were all female, wretched, defenceless women. So the next killing would have to be a stranger. There would be a next killing but I did not know in which world it might come.

  One afternoon when I walked on the hills, I saw a figure coming towards me through the mist. I was so easily spooked in those first weeks of returning to Molly, that I nearly turned to run. Then, even through the clouds of paranoia, I could see that it was neither Vespasian nor Arthur nor anyone from the past. This man wore rubber wellies and had tucked the bottoms of his baggy tweed trousers into his knitted socks. He was the clichéd country gentleman, and waved his walking stick at me as we passed. I nodded back, no need to speak.

  I scrambled up the scrubby hillside beyond the little pathway, aiming for a jutting rock where I often sat. It wasn’t intelligent in the mist and drizzle but the weather no longer worried me, just as hunger, tiredness and confusion had become familiar friends. Then I slipped in the damp mud and loose shingle and landed heavily on both knees and the palms of my hands. I was certainly still susceptible to pain, perhaps more so. I grunted some sort of expletives and twisted round on my bottom to sit and rub my knees. Then the hand reached out to help me up. “Oh dear me,” he said, “I do hope you didn’t hurt yourself.” He needed his walking stick to lean on himself and wasn’t the ideal person to help a damsel in distress. I could see his own boots were about to slip in the mud and I didn’t want to end up having to help him. “Not ideal weather is it?” he said as he managed to haul me onto my feet. “Perhaps you’d like to come down to the village with me for a hot toddy at the Smith and Joker? That’s where I’m heading, if you’d care to join me. I don’t think you should be up here on your own, you know.”

  I had never seen him before in my life, though I knew most of the village faces. He had a moustache and looked like a retired colonel. He must have been about seventy. He looked vaguely like a character in a film about a respectable country squire. I shook my head. “Thank you but really, I’m O.K.”

  “I hope I haven’t offended you?” The moustache looked quite bedraggled in the steady damp. “I’d like the company. I assure you, I have no despicable ulterior motives. I’m much too old for that.”

  I didn’t want to join anyone for anything and opened my mouth to say no. But my mouth was obeying someone else. “It’s kind of you and I’d love a drink. Just what I need in this chill,” I said. It was not what I had meant to say. The words drivelled out like they did when I was Tilda and she spoke against my will. Perhaps I was lonely without realising. “I’m Molly. I’m delighted to meet you.” I wasn’t at all, but he had a cosy smile.

  “Thomas Cambio, and it’s a great pleasure. It’s a very long time, I can tell you, since I took a pretty young girl out for a drink.”

  He was all brown tweed and plastic mackintosh. He seemed very sweet but it was a nuisance and a distraction. I wanted my confusion all to myself.

  The Smith and Joker was a smaller pub in the little street behind the Post Office and I’d rarely been there. It had a fire in an open fireplace and a stuffed fox on the mantelshelf, reflecting the flames in its manic glass eyes. The old man seemed to think I needed to dry off and he sat me next to the fire on a wide cushioned bench where the fox could gaze at me and I could see the graffiti on the table through the base of my glass. The drink did me good and I let the spices clear my nose. Thomas Cam
bio sat opposite and raised his whisky glass in an age-spotted hand. “To better weather soon. What a dreary October it’s been so far.”

  “It’s only the beginning of the month.”

  “The fifth,” said Thomas. “Five days of rain.”

  We talked about the weather and the new shop in the main street that had recently opened and sold terrible junk for tourists and the latest headlines in the local newspaper all about the council and what a mess they were making of clearing the verges and about the old elm tree outside the hotel which had been diagnosed terminal and was going to have to come down. We discussed the bikers mob that had driven through the village yesterday and frightened everyone by revving up at every corner, bursting the school lollypop lady’s eardrums and frightening the sparrows. Then we chattered about the Newsagent’s son who had been caught smoking reefers on the bridge and contaminating our stream by dropping his hallucinogenic ash into its pretty waters. We didn’t talk about murder.

  The whisky, cloves and hot water and the warmth of the fire made me drowsy. I felt slightly dizzy and cuddled back against the corner wall. “Time to go,” I slurred. “I’m more tired than I thought.”

  “I’ll see you home,” said Thomas. His moustache had perked up in the heat. “No, please don’t argue. I really would feel better if I knew I’d walked you to your door. And I promise, no ulterior motives. As I’ve said, I’m far too old.”

  So he walked me home which was only down the road but it was dark and wet and it was nice of him but I didn’t invite him in. I said goodnight on the doorstep and he didn’t even come inside the gate. “It’s been a pleasure.” I nodded because it was almost true.

  Then I forgot all about him for three days, until I met him again.