A Demon Summer

by G. M. Malliet

  “Christ alone,” she concluded, “knows the secrets of our hearts. More tea, Father?”

  Chapter 13

  THE LIBRARIAN

  Books are to the soul what food is to the body. Let the sister in charge of the scriptorium be alive to the rare sanctity of her duty.

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

  Max left Dame Ingrid soon afterwards. He knew she had limited time for chitchat, much as she had seemed to be enjoying herself. He first asked about the nunnery’s archivist, knowing they must have one.

  “You’ll be wanting Dame Olive, our librarian,” she told him. “She’s forgotten more about the place than most of us will ever know.” And finding a small scrap of paper in the pocket of her work apron, she drew a map to guide him to the library and scriptorium.

  “I’ll send word ahead that you’re on the way,” she said.

  * * *

  Dame Olive’s face, a pale oval swathed in white linen, floated toward him out of the darkness of the library stacks.

  It was a delicate face, the perfect egg shape of the head emphasized by the cruelly taut wrapping of the coif under her chin. Heavy dark-framed glasses overwhelmed her small features; Max could see the red marks on her nose where the frame weighed too heavily. Her hands as they constantly adjusted the frames were as small, precise, and tidy as a dormouse’s. The coif seemed to bother her, and her fingers slipped often beneath the fabric to hold it away from her skin. Max wondered if she might have been allergic either to the fabric or to the detergent used to wash it. If so, it would be like wearing a hair shirt. Did she need to wear it quite so tightly wound?

  Like Dame Ingrid, Dame Olive greeted Max with an enthusiastic if more demure, “Thank heaven you’re here!”

  Max felt his fame as a sleuth had somehow preceded him. Flattering as it was, he hope the nuns weren’t overestimating his ability to get to the bottom of their public-relations crisis.

  She stood back and gestured him to a seat across from her oak desk. The cavernous stone room was lined floor to ceiling with books, most of them leather-bound and creaky with antiquity. Library ladders ran on rails the length and depth of the wood-paneled room.

  Dame Olive herself looked comfortable in her domain, as if she had somehow always been there, a guardian at the fount of knowledge. They exchanged the usual pleasantries, and Max said, “What an impressive collection you have here.”

  “We have a small assortment of books that can be borrowed, but the archives date back centuries, and they of course cannot be removed,” she told him, as if forestalling any plans he might have to run amok in the stacks. He saw that many of the older volumes were chained in place, a holdover from centuries past when hand-copied books were worth their weight in gold.

  He commented on the chains, saying: “I would imagine much that is here is valuable?”

  “It’s all valuable to me,” she replied. “But thieves, then as now, have always been drawn by the notorious riches of Monkbury Abbey. The gold and silver plate, as well as the books.”

  “Thieves?” asked Max.

  “Oh, I didn’t have anyone specific in mind. No indeed. I was talking of the past.” She adjusted the heavy glasses against her nose. “At Monkbury Abbey, much of the income once was generated by providing access to relics and objects of veneration—that was the case in religious houses everywhere. There was—usually—nothing cynical in this. We had our own miraculous relic in the church—a femur said to belong to St. Lucy, as well as part of her shin bone—but the casket and most of its contents were destroyed by King Henry’s men.”

  “So the visiting throngs of pilgrims vanished overnight,” he said. “It’s a shame, really.” He was thinking more of the casket, no doubt a work of art made of gold and silver and inlaid with jewels. Whether its contents had ever had anything to do with St. Lucy was doubtful. Relics were a dime a dozen in the medieval church, and many were of uncertain provenance. But simply counted as a loss to the historical record, the devastation was sad to witness at places like Rievaulx and Whitby. For Dame Olive, no doubt an historian at heart, the damage must be particularly galling.

  “Not just the religious relics—the saints’ bones and bits of cloth from their cowls and so on—but many of the books of the time were destroyed,” she said. “And not all of them religious tomes. There came a point where the destruction was indiscriminate. But someone managed to preserve some Anglo-Saxon poetry that is really quite … erm … earthy. No one knows how it came to be at the abbey.” She smiled. She had a big wide smile, almost too wide for the small features, so tightly wrapped. With her smile, the linen seemed to cut into the skin.

  “But are they valuable, the poems? Or is anything else in the archives?” he asked. He was thinking of Piers, with his shiny Regency tresses and his interest in things ancient, and of Lord Lislelivet, with his beady eyes and his sudden interest in things monastic.

  And of the Goreys, who for all their generosity had an evident interest in things financial.

  “That depends on whom you ask, Father. As Stephen King has said, ‘Books are a uniquely portable magic.’ And as I’ve indicated, value is in the eye of the beholder.” Max muffled his surprise that she would quote the master of horror tales.

  “What is your own favorite reading?” he asked. Not Carrie, surely.

  She sat back, unused to such questions. “We aren’t exactly encouraged to read for pleasure, Father. Nor do we have scads of leisure time. But I would have to say I have a fondness for poetry, a fondness which has never left me.”

  “Ah. Who is your favorite poet?”

  “Oh, I have too many favorites to name just one. I’m reading Leonard Cohen at the moment.”

  Max smiled. Cohen was a poet and songwriter who’d written extensively about religion, having been ordained a Buddhist monk while retaining his ties to his own Jewish faith. He’d also had a lot to say about women and sex, which mysteries seemed to confound him.

  “Surely,” he said, “the Rule of St. Lucy would allow for a little poetry in your lives.”

  “It would, in balance and moderation,” she replied. “St. Benedict was big on balance and moderation.” She hesitated, adding, “But even so, his own monks tried to poison him.”

  “I’ve never quite understood why they did that. They could have just asked him to leave.”

  She smoothed the fine light wool of her voluminous skirt. “I suppose they felt he would not listen. Saints are like that.”

  Did he imagine it, or was she hinting at something? For the reference to poison seemed deliberate. No doubt it was a subject uppermost in all their minds. But try as he might, Max could not see parallels between a sixth-century religious reformer, annoyingly righteous as he may have been, and a twenty-first-century British lord with a reputation for fast cars, fancy women, and underhanded dealing. And yet both had survived attempted poisonings by people they had in some way provoked.

  He looked around at the surrounding walls of books. “I’d like to look through the archives, with your permission.”

  She had a habit of peering over the tops of her glasses in classic librarian style, as if to read the fine print, or to assess the character of the person before her. She was probably just trying to compensate for the near-sightedness that was surely an occupational hazard.

  “How long do you have?” Her small hands fluttered from the desk to adjust her glasses. “Really, Father, you’ve no idea how much accumulates in a nunnery over time. But of course you may browse to your heart’s content. I just hope you’re not allergic to dust. I’m not allergic, but I do have a well-developed sense of smell and being in the stacks can be a torment.”

  “I may just need an hour or two,” said Max, with no real idea how long he needed, since he had no clue what he was looking for. It was too much to hope he’d stumble across a treasure map hidden within the endpapers of an old volume.

  In line with his thoughts, she said, “Research expands beyond the time allotted. Al
ways. When I update our Web site I lose hours if I get distracted by researching other sites. And the use of bandwidth is prohibitive for us.”

  He’d seen the Monkbury Abbey Web site. It was impressive. It not only provided information about the abbey, it had a shopping cart where people could buy the goods the nuns produced. They also took prayer requests online.

  “Where did you learn Web design?” he asked.

  “I taught myself through trial and error.” As with the cook, Dame Ingrid, there was an unmistakable note of pride in her voice. “The site was the cellaress’s idea—she is a great champion of progress. If a nun from the eleventh century were to see the shopping cart, I wonder what she’d make of it.”

  “I had forgotten the abbey went back that far.”

  “Oh, yes. The original abbey was founded by Princess Aethmurtha of sacred memory. We’re lucky to have retained much of the original fabric of the place. When the nunnery was abandoned following the dissolution, villagers in Temple Monkslip came to pilfer the stone and lead. But whatever was built with the stolen material collapsed or burned to the ground. In the end the villagers decided it was better to leave it alone, and the monastery was left to tumble down of its own accord. Thank God, because that is what saved it.”

  “Superstition,” said Max.

  “Would you call it superstition, Father? I would call it justice.”

  She took off the heavy glasses and polished the frames against the fabric of her gown. Her face without the glasses looked strangely blank, the eyes hollow and unfocused. “We survived so much. Even before King Henry, we had the Black Death. And for a while in the fourteen hundreds the nunnery was in the care of an Oxford College. Those were dark days, indeed.” She said this without a shred of humor. “But then … the centuries passed. It’s always been one thing after another. We will survive.”

  Yes, there was some comfort if one took the centuries-long view. Max looked around him. “It’s a sizable library,” he said, trying to read the faded bindings on some of the books in the row above her. “I suppose many of the nuns were high born and thus able to read.”

  She nodded. “Many also could write beautifully. Our scriptorium was a going concern for many years—it’s the room on top of this one, above the library. We now use it as a reading room.” She replaced the glasses. “Alas, the fire destroyed so much.”

  “The fire?”

  “Yes. Fifteen hundred, or thereabouts. We lost many things of value.” She shook her head, a mournful expression on her pretty face. “There are gaps in the archives to this day. We lost nearly everything—the parchments and scrolls, the records. You’ll see.”

  Max, as his eyes skimmed over the shelves filled with beautifully preserved texts, recalled that in The Name of the Rose the abbey library had caught fire, destroying everything—the books and then the abbey itself. The killer in that book had wanted to prevent the spread of “dangerous” knowledge. The killer alone, of course, got to decide what was dangerous.

  He noticed the “we.” “We lost many things of value.” It was as if it were yesterday, part of their recent history, and as if the loss still rankled. What had happened to the convent’s nuns long dead was the same as what happened to nuns present.

  “How free,” Max asked, “was the abbey of the charges of corruption made by Henry and his men?”

  “Not very,” she replied smoothly. She adjusted the frames to peer at him. “Some of the abbesses in the past went in for spending in a big way and found ingenious ways to pay for what they wanted. The cellarist and the sacrist in particular had many opportunities for cooking the books. There are veiled references to these things in the archives—if you will excuse the pun.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Nuns? Veils?”

  “Ah,” he said. “Of course.”

  “The nunneries were no different from any other place where human beings gathered. The women often wanted autonomy from their bishop, you see—to avoid visitation and inspection and oversight.”

  “It may have been a matter of wanting to be let alone,” said Max. “Some bishops are more interfering than others.”

  “Of course. Luckily, our bishop is quite a reasonable man, as you know. And the … well, other sort of corruption is well in the past.”

  “Other?”

  “We were a double monastery once, you know. That leads to its own particular temptations.”

  “Ah.”

  “Of course, we being British, things never got as bad here as at the motherhouse in France. Heloise and Abelard—that was not a unique situation in the history of monasticism.”

  “Ah,” he said again. The doomed lovers. Although in their case the relationship ended rather than began in the monastic life. “It’s a wonder the system worked as well as it did, for as long as it did.”

  “There was often disagreement. The abbess is supposed to ask everyone for counsel in making important decisions, although the final decision as to whom she chooses as cellaress—just using one example—is up to her. But if it is felt her request for ‘input,’ as the younger nuns would have it, was somewhat lacking in … how shall I say it…”

  “In sincerity?” prompted Max.

  “Sincerity, yes. It can lead to difficulties.”

  “Are you speaking of the present situation?” Max asked. For it seemed to him she had a particular event in mind.

  “I’m sure I couldn’t say,” demurred Dame Olive. But it was clear to him she was longing to do just that. Max waited as she waged this mental struggle, but in the end she returned to an earlier theme. “Yes, if it’s scandal you’re after, there was no shortage of that.”

  Max wasn’t at all sure scandal was what he was after, but he let her have free rein.

  “There is even a prison in the cellar of the abbess’s lodge, did you know? Sometimes people just lost it, I suppose. They’d try to run away but were brought back. The space is used now for storage.”

  “I suppose they had to make and keep their own laws, as isolated as they were out here,” said Max. “A bit like the Wild West, with the abbess acting as sheriff.”

  She nodded. “At times they overcorrected, with an emphasis on strict enclosure—no men allowed except to administer the final sacraments to a dying sister. The priest offering the mass was hidden by a screen, and a turntable was used so the nuns could receive communion.”

  “Rather sad, that.”

  “In a way, but it all meant their autonomy increased. They controlled their own money, you see. Always the first step. No one had ever told them what to do before, these aristocrats, and they weren’t going to start letting men, in particular, take their freedom now. Better to operate in secret.”

  “They played the system to their advantage.”

  “Played it brilliantly,” she agreed.

  And were they still playing, wondered Max?

  “St. Lucy’s, at least for a while, was extremely wealthy, and that, as you know, Father, brings its own problems. The place was better off once it fell back into its forgotten and somewhat neglected state.”

  “It doesn’t look neglected now.”

  “No. People have been most kind.”

  “The Goreys?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lord Lislelivet?”

  “Not so much.”

  And as much as Max may have wished it, it was clear she was not going to elaborate. He tried a change of topic.

  “You have always been assigned to work in the library?” he asked.

  “In recent years,” she said. “But I have helpers, and they alternate. That way, no one person thinks she knows it all. And in case of illness, someone else can take over. Poor Dame Meredith, when she fell ill … that was terrible on many levels. She was the cellaress, you know. A key position.”

  “Perhaps I could visit her while I’m here,” said Max.

  “Oh, I am sure she would like that. It is good of you to suggest it. She doesn’t get many visitors and it would cheer her. I’ll m
ention it to Dame Infirmaress.”

  “No need. I plan to talk with her later today. Dame Olive, how long have you been at Monkbury?”

  “Since I was eighteen,” she said.

  So young. “Did your parents approve of your decision?”

  She laughed. “My parents were appalled by my decision. They just didn’t get it. They still don’t. They show up quarterly for visitation days. My mother, you can tell, wants to drag me out by the scruff like a wayward cat.” She paused, her expression a strange mixture of longing and confusion. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. You have a kind face.” She paused, visibly pulling herself together. She stood to let him know the interview was over. “Now, I will leave you to what research you will. Was there a particular time in our history that interests you, Father?” she asked.

  “All of it, I suppose. Perhaps I’ll start with the Reformation.”

  “Over there,” she pointed. “All that section. It starts with Luther and continues on.

  “I’ll be here for the next hour if you should have any questions, Father.”

  Chapter 14

  THE INFIRMARESS

  A separate building shall be maintained for the ill, and an infirmaress known for patience, piety, and competence shall be appointed to oversee their care.

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

  Max spent over an hour in the archives. It was all fascinating in its way, and a test for his limited Latin, but nothing suggested to him a reason for poisoning Lord Lislelivet. Fantastical tales of treasures and miracles abounded, but if Max or anyone had been hoping for a treasure map, they were out of luck.

  Returning a volume to its shelf, he wondered if he might be wandering too far from his mandate. Since it was poison that brought him here, his time might be better spent talking to someone with medical knowledge.

  He asked Dame Olive for directions to the infirmary. “If it is Dame Petronilla you’re wanting, she’ll likely be in the garden with her herbs and plants on such a warm day. Try the grounds past the cemetery.”

  She gave him detailed instructions on how to get there.