Eleven Pipers Piping: A Father Christmas Mystery

by C. C. Benison

  “Yes …?”

  “Well, you more than I know how Molly has suffered since … Harry’s death. She hasn’t been quite herself, has she.” He watched a shadow pass over Victor’s face. “I went to your cottage yesterday afternoon to return Becca’s torch. She left it at ours last weekend. Those two detectives, Bliss and Blessing, were coming from your cottage …” He paused, noting Victor’s eyebrows knit with perplexity. “Molly didn’t tell you they had visited? She didn’t say that she had—”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” Tom’s heart sank. “Victor, please be mindful of Molly’s state of mind when I tell you this: She confessed to the detectives—and she told me—that she had poisoned Will.”

  “What!”

  A few heads had snapped in their direction. Tom gave them reassuring smiles, then said to Victor, whose face was shot through with anxiety and anger, “Victor, it’s a measure of their disbelief that they didn’t fetch her in for further questioning. They’re not complete monsters. They do know what your family has endured and Molly’s state of mind.”

  “Then why have they removed my things?”

  “Eliminating all possibilities, I’m certain,” Tom replied, though he wasn’t at all certain. Bliss and Blessing may have had a change of heart.

  Or of mind.

  A large white plastic cup filled with a cloudy brown liquid passed under his eyes.

  “You look like you could use a wee drink,” said a lilting voice in his ear.

  “I wouldn’t describe this as ‘wee,’ ” Tom responded as he took the cup from Màiri. He sipped the local scrumpy. It tasted both earthy and vinegary. “But thank you. I was considering going out to fetch one myself.”

  “Was that Victor Kaif looking furious as a box of badgers?”

  “He’s had rather a bad day, I gather, and I think I’ve made it worse.” He explained. “But perhaps you know more than I?”

  “Not really. I’m merely the village bobby.”

  “You do know something.”

  “All I hear is that the DI Bliss is not a happy bunny. He and Blessing have few leads and I’ll wager someone is breathing down their necks. Is that Tamara Prowse on guitar? She’s very good, isn’t she?”

  Not immune to deliberate subject-changing, Tom asked, “What brings you to this event on a dreary winter’s eve?” Over her shoulders, Màiri wore a thick woolen ruana of a deep royal blue that accentuated the bright blue of her eyes. Nice. Her dark hair, released from its workday braid, fell naturally in deep long waves over her shoulders. Nice, too. He noted leather boots, as well, not the wellies everyone else was shod with. Smart.

  “I could say my car brought me—and it was no easy task finding parking, I’ll tell you—but I came for the great pleasure of this ancient ceremony. Thornford’s Wassail is known the length and breadth of these blessed isles, from Land’s End to John O’Groats.”

  “It is not.”

  Màiri laughed. “I came because I was at a loose end. A girl likes to get out on a Saturday night from time to time.”

  Tom glanced at his watch. “It’s all of five fifteen. The Wassail’ll be finished by seven.”

  “The night will still be young, then, will it not?”

  “Well—”

  “Och, Tom Christmas, for a man with a Cambridge education, you’re thick as two short planks. We’ll go have a proper drink after, and not at the Church House, aye? I know an excellent pub down Yealm Road, away from prying eyes, and don’t worry, I’ll have you home in good time. I know Sunday’s your big day.”

  His under-rehearsed sermon tripped through his mind, as did finding some excuse to Miranda and Madrun for an unscheduled break in his—albeit dull—Saturday routine. He felt a tickle in the pit of his stomach, a surge farther south, and his nose seemed to discover some subtle scent from Màiri that vanquished all the prosaic damp smells in the hut. He smiled at her. He knew the pub she meant. The deanery met there once, in the autumn, for its monthly whinge. It was more country inn than mere pub.

  “I expect I could be persuaded,” he responded with a feint at nonchalance, moving his left hand reflexively to the clerical collar peeking from his open jacket, nearly spilling his scrumpy with the other.

  “I’ve noted you still wear your wedding ring.” Her eyes followed his hand.

  “Difficult to remove,” he said, aware that ambiguity freighted the words.

  “The collar comes off, though.”

  “Yes, it slips off.”

  “I’d hate to think you were sewn into it. Does it ever choke you?”

  “Only sometimes.”

  Slightly unnerved by his little spurt of lust, by the possibilities of the evening ahead (it’s just a drink!), and by the challenge temptation presented (is it just a drink?), Tom laughed nervously. But Màiri’s attention had been drawn to the middle distance, where two figures were cutting a swath through the swarm of parents and children in good measure because each had a shotgun cocked in the crook of his—and her—elbow. One of them was Penella Neels, a resident of the farm at Thorn Barton who had been an adult confirmand in Tom’s confirmation class in the spring. She smiled broadly and greeted him with a silly finger wave. He couldn’t hear her giggle above the general hubbub, but he could interpret the gesture and the blush that rose to her pretty cheeks.

  “She fancies you,” Màiri remarked over the rim of her plastic cup.

  “Oh, quite unlikely.”

  “They’re not all disinclined to men at Thorn Barton, you know.”

  “I know.” Thorn Barton, the former manor farm, was owned collectively by eight women dedicated to organic produce and humanely raised dairy cows. “Besides, it appears she might be with Nick.”

  “Lucky old her,” Màiri murmured dryly. “I’m not happy their bringing shotguns in here with all these kids running about. I’ve a mind to go speak to them.”

  “I’d be surprised if they weren’t fetching Adam. I’m told he’s one of the Guns.”

  “Nick was last year, too. Will was the third, of course. The Moirs contribute generously to this event. I wonder who recruited Penella?”

  “I would have thought weaponry would have violated the spirit of Thorn Barton somehow.” As Nick leaned to tap Adam on the shoulder, Tom noted the weapon in his hand gleam with a menacing beauty in the hut’s flickering light.

  Màiri hooted. “Fat lot you know about country ways, Tom. There’s vermin galore on a farm, and they’re not likely to hang about on the off chance some man will happen along.”

  “I expect not,” he replied, chastened, suddenly aware of a shift in the atmosphere. Tamara and Shanks Pony continued their plucking and piping and strumming, but attention to them was waning as people shifted towards the Scout Hut door. “I think the lantern procession is to start soon. Miranda,” he called, “sweetheart, are you ready?

  “Are you joining us?” he asked Màiri.

  “I wonder who’s minding Ariel, if Adam is going to be off firing his shotgun. There, the idiot’s gone and left her alone. What is he thinking? Is Caroline here? Of course she isn’t.” Màiri answered her own question. “She’s just lost her husband. Tom, Ariel knows me from my … interlude with her uncle. Shall I suggest she come with us?”

  Tom lowered his voice as Miranda pushed out of her plastic seat. “Perhaps not. Miranda and Ariel are having a sort of … tiff.”

  “I won’t ask why. Never mind, I’ll take Ariel on my own.”

  “Well, there’s Becca’s father.” Tom gestured towards Victor, who was shouldering against the tide to fetch his daughter. “He might take Ariel with them. Bugger, I’ve nearly stepped on Becca’s lantern.”

  Gingerly, he took a step back, nearly colliding with Molly, who had bustled up behind him, shouting, “The crowns, the crowns! I need the crowns!”

  “Don’t worry, Molly, they’re right there.” Tom gestured to the shelf. “Here, let me get them.”

  “Never mind!” Molly surged past him and snatched the bottom box by the stri
ng.

  “Careful!” Tom shouted, but it was too late. Molly swept several of the jam-jar candles off the shelf, sending them cascading to the floor like falling stars. One shattered noisily into a dozen fragments, which skittered across the concrete, the snuffed candle rolling to the wall, while another hit the dowelling edge of the lantern, which seemed for a split second to act as cushion, but didn’t. The jar tumbled to the hard surface and split with an ugly crack, releasing the candle’s living flame, which leapt greedily at the flimsy paper, in an instant transforming the lantern into a blazing, crackling orange ball of fire. Molly released an agonised shriek that arrested all movement in the room for the second. In the collective gasp that followed, Tom sensed a surge of panic, a spark to a stampede that would crush into the confining corridor. He gave Màiri the quickest of glances and together, as if they were toasting the New Year, they raised their cups in unison. Cider had more alcohol than beer, but much less than the brandy that flamed many a Christmas pudding. Onto the tiny pyre, they dashed the liquid—no loss, scrumpy did taste a bit nasty—dousing the flames and sending a plume of odiferous black smoke curling to the ceiling. They stared silently at the sooty puddle for the moment it took to detect a child’s wrenching sob above the renewed hubbub. It was Becca.

  “Mind you don’t set yourself on fire, Vicar,” an older man with long sideburns quipped, handing Tom a sturdy stick on top of which was nailed a flaming tin can to make a crude cresset.

  “It wasn’t my daddy’s fault.” Miranda glared up at the man, but he had passed on down the motley parade of villagers queued outside to make their way into the orchard, handing the cressets intermittently to whomever seemed to catch his eye.

  “Thank you, darling.”

  Indeed, it wasn’t Tom’s fault that Becca’s lantern had been reduced to wet ash, but he felt an accessory to a crime nonetheless. A sobbing child rends the heart, and when that distraught child is accompanied by a hysterical mother, then it seems there isn’t anything one won’t do to put the world right, even if there was nothing one could do. Miranda, who had joined the circle of woe, had looked doubtfully at her own lovely bell-shaped lantern, and then, in a gesture that clutched at Tom’s heart, held it out to Becca in offering. Becca, surprised into ending her tears, reached to take it until Victor gently pushed his daughter’s arms down, thanked Miranda, and led Becca and his wife away, taking the boxes of crowns with him. Màiri smiled at Tom and as she passed to fetch Ariel whispered in his ear, “You’ve a treasure there.”

  Yes, he did.

  “And thank you for being so thoughtful to Becca,” he added to Miranda, consoling himself that nothing worse could possibly happen at this quaint village gathering. He glanced over at the food tent. Madrun, dressed in a weathered brown corduroy coat, her head wrapped in a scarf like the Queen’s, appeared to be remonstrating with Judith Ingley, who was adjusting paper trays of baked goods covered in cling film. No tainted tartlets to spoil this evening, he thought, though he couldn’t help noting that rather fewer of Madrun’s offerings had been sold than those of the other ladies of the village.

  “Daddy …” Miranda’s tone was cautious.

  “Mmm.”

  “Do you like Màiri White?”

  Bugger, but that tripped him up. His daughter was telepathic: He was only about to let his mind settle on the very subject. “Yes, she seems quite nice.” He bent to murmur this banality into her ear, conscious of the growing crush of people around them. He was sure the woman in front of him, quite short, her head stuffed into burgundy wool, her back unrecognizable, had begun to subtly tilt in his direction. “Don’t you think she’s nice?”

  Miranda shrugged, didn’t say anything. He knew if he ever entered into a new relationship what—or, rather, who—his biggest hurdle would be.

  “Goodness! Your lantern still isn’t lit!” Tom looked up and down the ragged line, seeing glimpses through the deep shadows of villagers he knew who might smoke, then glanced at the blazing cresset he was holding. Catching a light off that would certainly set off another debacle. “Someone must have matches.”

  “I wish I could help you, Vicar.” The figure in front of them turned. It was Violet Tucker.

  “Hello,” Tom said. “Mark not with you?”

  “I left him at home with Ruby. He’s working on—” She lowered her voice and rolled her eyes. “—you know.”

  “We had a good talk after the PCC meeting Tuesday.”

  “So Mark said, and thank you. At least he’s gone off that daft Harvey Porter, Pigblisters notion, but I don’t know.” She sighed heavily. “I really don’t know what to make of it all.”

  “Best to let people try and fail.” Tom offered the encomium, eager not to take up pastoral work on the hoof, as it were, not at this minute. “And you never know, he might have a wonderful success. Anyway, I understand congratulations are in order!”

  Violet’s eyes narrowed into a glare.

  “Did you win something?” Miranda piped up. She bobbed her lantern impatiently on its pole.

  “I …” Violet appeared at a loss for explanation.

  “Mrs. Tucker won a year’s supply of loo paper in a magazine contest,” Tom improvised.

  Violet’s eyes widened, then she fumed, “Mark shouldn’t have said anything. It’s bad luck to tell anyone in the first trimester!”

  “He was that chuffed, Violet. He couldn’t help himself. Anyway, I won’t say a word, and neither will Miranda. Will you, darling?”

  Miranda turned away from Violet and rewarded him an expression of consummate boredom and impatience. She jiggled her lantern again. “Daddy! The others are all lit.”

  It was true. Up and down the line, peeking from behind knees and coats, he could see wondrous fat shapes—fish and birds and spaceships and flowers, glowing red and blue and green and yellow—along with more conventional glass lanterns, shop-purchased, held by older children and adults.

  “You might need these.” Judith Ingley joined them, proffering a box of matches. “Madrun said you might forget, so she brought these with her. Hello,” she added, introducing herself to Violet. “Madrun suggested I join you. I thought sales might be better served if I stayed at the stall and she joined you instead.” Judith caught his eye as he bent to light the tea lights nestled inside Miranda’s lantern. “But she insisted.”

  Tom opened his mouth to respond, but the tenor of the crowd changed at that moment, alert to an assertive voice rising above the jabbering voices and reedy accordion near the front of the line.

  “The sleep of winter lies over the land,” the voice declared in a theatrical cadence, as the music stopped and a hush settled. “We must wake the orchard to new life!”

  A throaty cheer went up and excitement, like an electrical current, shot down the line, racing up Tom’s spine. Miranda squealed. As if by common consent, everyone at once took first steps down the path, wellies slapping and slurping in the ooze, chitchat rekindling then swiftly shifting to verse as a chorus of the Wassailing Song drifted into the dark thatch of tree branches above their heads and grew louder. Tom received the cresset back from Violet and added his own poor, sad, unmusical baritone to the massed voices, feeling a tickle of joy as he took Miranda’s hand and shuffled along with her and Judith down the slope, through the crumbling gate, and up the slope into the Old Orchard, pitch-black now, the twisted outlines of the trees faintly—very faintly—limned by a crescent moon cold and silver as ice. The children’s lanterns, swaying and bobbing, marked the passage through the darkness, while flames from the blazing cressets flickered over the faces of the revelers.

  A halt was soon called by the assertive voice, the owner of which, in light afforded by four newly lit torches set in the ground at the cardinal points of the chosen tree, was revealed as a short, plump man in eighteenth-century costume, a blue velvet frock coat, and a matching tricorn hat. The villagers encircled the tree, its branches so gnarled and moss-covered that it blazed in the darkness like a burning bush. Tom watched t
he top of a ladder fall against its trunk, then the king, wearing the golden crown Molly had finished the day before, scramble into the branches followed at a more regal pace by Emily Swan, imperiously tossing back her encumbering cape a time or two before turning and settling herself on her woody throne, draping the green velvet fabric around her white frock fetchingly, and adjusting her crown just so.

  “That child has airs,” Judith murmured, though Tom thought the spectacle of the two children in the tree, crowns gleaming, costumes glowing jewel-like, young faces shining, held an atavistic charm. He could sense Miranda was captured by the scene, too. Her lantern drooped; she stood attentively still.

  “Changing your mind about royal service?” Tom asked his daughter, reaching to restore her lantern. In the spring, at the May Fayre, Emily’s older sister, Lucy, had been queen of the May, a role Miranda had dismissed as feudal.

  “No,” Miranda replied in a sharpish tone that was an echo of Lisbeth caught in a contradiction.

  Tom experienced the dawn of understanding, and smiled. “Who’s the king, I wonder? Is he in Year Four, too?”

  “He’s in Year Five.”

  Ah, an older man, Tom thought. “Does he have a name?”

  “Garner.”

  “Tait? Must be the postman’s son,” he remarked, adding teasingly, “est-il agréable?”

  “Daddy!”

  Tom caught Judith’s eye.

  “I do know a little French, Vicar,” she murmured.

  “Sweetheart, why don’t you push in a bit, so you can see better,” he murmured into Miranda’s ear.

  But the costumed man, master of ceremonies, seemed to forestall further movement, barking out the running order of the rite, as though none of the villagers, lo these many years, had the faintest familiarity with it.

  “I’m going to dip this bread,” he shouted, holding up what looked like a grilled piece of Mother’s Pride in a plastic bag, “into the cider and give it to the king and queen, who are not to eat it, but put it in the branches of the tree!”

  “Curious,” Tom muttered, watching the emcee reverently remove the slice from the bag, dip it in a bowl offered by an assistant, and hand it to Emily, who received the dripping thing with an un-queenly moue of distaste and slid it onto a branch.