She might have been talking about events from yesterday. In this atmosphere, surrounded by smoke-darkened wood and stones, Max could see how yesterday blended into hundreds of years ago, and hundreds more hence.
“We’ve also survived all manner of natural disasters,” the abbess said. “We even had an earthquake a year or so ago measuring just over five on the Richter scale. Not big by the world’s standards, but big enough I watched my own empty shoes march across the floor. I’d never seen such a thing outside of a cartoon.”
“Was there much damage?” asked Max.
She shook her head. “No. That was a miracle, really. We had to make some structural repairs to the church. The guesthouse plans had to be put on hold for a while. Perhaps you’ve met Piers Montague? Yes, I see that you have. Anyway, one old wall in particular came tumbling down. How he loved photographing that wall: we were constantly having to shoo him away. Piers reminds me of someone from my youth.” Absently, she stroked the head of her little lap dog. From her expression, she might have been thinking, “Someone best forgotten.”
“So, Father. I gather you’ve talked with a few of my sisters already. But I would suggest a talk with our cellaress if you really want to put your finger on the pulse of things here. She manages the day-to-day, you know.”
“Yes, thank you. Everyone has been most helpful. I had planned to talk with—is it Dame Sibil?—tomorrow.”
“The cellaress, yes.”
“I am hoping she can tell me a bit more about your … your various enterprises.”
“You mean our sources of income,” she said candidly, disarmingly. “The inflow and outflow. No need to beat about the bush. I can help you with the big picture, Father. She, of course, knows the details. Much of our income has come from our ties to the local villagers.”
Max, savoring the tomato sauce, which was nearly a match for Awena’s, recalled the bishop’s saying the abbess had a Reaganesque quality about her: an easy and likable geniality, an air of open honesty. He had known such a person when he belonged to a drinking and dining club at Oxford. Hugh Barclay-Watson was the person everyone wanted to be with and be seen to be with—the man who exerted not a single ounce of effort to win the constant devotion of his legions of followers. Who seemed genuinely unaware that he had followers. It was Max’s first real encounter with charisma on such a scale. The man’s murder had come as a shock to everyone in the club, but Max realized in retrospect it should not have done. That kind of effortless power earned one enemies, and if one was spoiled like Hugh by the gifts of charm, one never saw it coming.
Was the abbess similarly blinded?
“What we strive to accomplish every day,” she was saying, “and of course fail to achieve, is the transformation of our old selves. We fail, but we keep trying.”
Failure, he thought. How badly had a nun failed if she had tried to poison one of the guests?
The abbess might have read his mind. “You are here at the bishop’s request to investigate an event that could bring dishonor to this house. A scandal unprecedented in recent history. In fact, to match this, we’d have to look back to the fourteen hundreds, when one of our sisters starved to death in the crypt.”
“Good heaven,” said Max.
The abbess nodded complacently, gratified by his reaction. “She was an anchoress—you know, a recluse—a mystic. In those days extremes of penance and fasting were allowed, even encouraged among ascetics, the sort inclined to extravagant self-denial. The abbey attracted a few of those. Probably she would disappear for a week or more, eating little, doing penance. Then she died and I suppose no one realized … it’s not as if she were expected for supper. Her body was left where they finally found it in the crypt—they simply sealed off the area rather than disturb her remains. We know of her only that, due to her great piety, she acted as the sacrist, entrusted to look after the plate and ornaments, the vessels and ornaments and relics.
“I suppose,” the abbess added musingly, “I suppose it was a natural job for her, to guard the most sacred objects, since she never wandered far from them.”
“I guess thievery was a commonplace.”
“It was always a problem,” she agreed. “You would think the abbey’s reputation for holiness would inhibit people, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. It would be difficult to overstate the wealth and power of the abbey. Which is, of course, what led the church in those days into all manner of folly. Would you like more salad, Father?”
Max nodded, and the postulant, Mary, materialized from the shadows to serve him. He reached for the salad bowl but the abbess stilled him with a raised hand.
“Let her,” she said. “It is our privilege to serve, and it is also how Mary learns. Isn’t it, my dear?”
Chapter 16
THE NOVICE
The novice should be warned in advance of all the hurdles on the path to God.
—The Rule of the Order of the Handmaids of St. Lucy
Max slept well that night, attributing his rest to the abbess’s excellent wine and to the calming silence that surrounded the abbey. Waking early the next day, he joined the nuns for Lauds, spent some time adding to his notes on the case, then decided on a walk to acquaint himself with the grounds and simply bask in the purity of the bright gold morning air.
Sunshine fell like fingers of light through the trees, making patterns on the grass in dark and pale greens, and there was the slight suggestion of a breeze that he tried to will into stronger action. The nunnery was so high up he felt he was walking on Olympus, quite alone. The only sound was the bleating of sheep in the distance, which now he became aware of it was a constant, a simmer of discontent carried on the transparent, gentle wind.
Beware, he thought idly, of those who come to you in sheep’s clothing.
Walking slowly, passing the abbess’s lodge and the infirmary and the back of the nuns’ dormitory, he came to the cemetery with its yew trees. Time had obliterated most of the information on the headstones, although a recent entry to the presumed company of saints was the abbess who had been succeeded by Abbess Justina. A line of Thomas Gray’s came into his mind, and he stopped for a moment in reflection: “Beneath those rugged elms, that yew tree’s shade … each in his narrow cell forever laid.”
He tried to avoid walking on the graves themselves, an avoidance he saw more as a courtesy to the dead than a superstitious dread of waking them, even though whatever lay under these old stones had long since turned to dust. This avoidance was not so easy to do, as the stones were scattered willy-nilly, time and geologic upheaval presumably having moved them out of alignment. He did a sort of jitterbug across the area and, shaking off the melancholy of the sad old place, plunged through brush and bushes, heading toward the cliff edge of the grounds. Finally he emerged from a grove of trees beyond the cemetery into a sunlit meadow where goats and the unhappy sheep were grazing. In the water far below, two men went by in a boat. It was a motorboat but they were paddling, their silence probably in deference to the nuns. Max waved, but they didn’t see him, intent as they were on navigating the choppy water.
Max walked to the mountain’s edge and looked down and along the stone wall that rose straight from the river running beneath the abbess’s lodge and the infirmary. A small black door flanked by mooring rings was set into the wall. Presumably it was used for offloading goods or even for catching swans, back in the day when they were prized as much for food as for their beauty.
Max squinted into the sun, peering across the rolling vastness like some ancient mariner, taking in the woodlands and heathlands of the fertile area, imagining that as far as the eye could see was abbey land. He knew Glastonbury Tor sat in the misty distance behind him, pulsing with all the tie-died colors of the rainbow, a sort of small, bare Twin Peak to the wooded tor on which he stood. Archeologists were convinced there was some connection between the two sites but could only guess at what the link might have been.
He came nearer to the grazing animals. Watching the bl
ack-and-white-spotted sheep, Max recalled a documentary where a ewe had been tricked into thinking she had given birth twice, so she could be given another ewe’s lamb to nurse.
The sheep ignored him, continuing their preoccupied bleating, but the goats stared, an audience awaiting its speaker. There was something, Max had always thought, rather uncanny about goats, something knowing and otherworldly and very ancient in their gaze. He agreed with Xanda that they were ever-so-slightly creepy. They watched him closely as he passed, a human-like grin on their bearded, whiskery faces and amusement in their pale eyes—eyes with those strange, horizontal pupils. It was little wonder pagans had adopted them as symbols of wickedness; Christians associated the goat with the Devil himself.
Max thought of the herd mentality, wondering if the nuns, living in such close proximity, could anymore see and think as individuals. Did they all just look to the abbess for guidance, a practice that had become automatic with the years? She exuded a certain comforting presence, an assurance that all would be well. Max had felt it himself the night before at her dinner table.
The more he thought of it, the more it was difficult to see any of them operating independently. But surely committing a crime like attempted murder required a certain gift for autonomy, a certain willingness to step outside the herd, a turning away from convention and toward chaos.
Hearing the sound of feet softly disturbing the grass, he turned.
The novice, as he could see she was by the abbreviated skirt and white veil of her habit, walked over to him. Her name, as he knew from the information provided him by the bishop’s office, was Sister Rose. Watching her approach—she had a steady marching stride, as if she were on parade—he searched his mind for her last name and came up with Rose Tocketts. She had not yet taken vows, at which point she would adopt her religious name, the name under which she would live the rest of her life, the name that would appear on her gravestone when she came at last to be buried under the yews in Monkbury Abbey cemetery. The “Tocketts” would disappear.
“You have a long day,” Max greeted her. “I didn’t expect to see anyone for a while.”
“Do we?” she asked, brushing some dirt off of her hands and then peering up at him, shading her dark eyes against the sunlight. She had a square face with broad, flat cheekbones. Max thought she might be of Eurasian heritage.
“I don’t really notice it anymore. One day is much like the last, and one gets used to waking up early. In fact, I have come to like that feeling we have of being quite alone in the world in the early hours. In the Army I often worked the midnight shift, so it feels familiar.”
“You never take a break?”
She nodded. “We do. In the summer, if it is very warm, we are allowed to take a little nap in the afternoon. So far this year we’ve been spared the flooding of last year, but have been given a bit too much heat instead. I can only hope St. Swithin will come through for us in moderation this time.”
She was referring to the belief that if it rains on St. Swithin’s day, July 15, it will rain for forty days afterwards.
In the county of Monkslip, rain would be most welcome. They had had sun—too much sun. The sort of unrelenting, moist, beating-down heat that made people wonder why, oh why, was nothing being done about global warming?
“I wonder what it is like here in winter,” he said.
“I have only spent one winter here. It was harsh.”
“But not harsh enough to deter you.”
She lifted her shoulders in a shrug, and flipped one end of her veil back over her shoulder. “They give you a lot of time to decide whether you are really cut out for this life. I think I am. But it is easy to delude oneself. The others are an inspiration. They are all so different, from such different backgrounds. And yet they have that serenity…” Her voice trailed off wistfully, as though that were an unheard-of gift she was waiting to have bestowed.
“I’ve noticed it too,” he said. “They seem to carry that certain belief that God always has your back.”
She turned to him with a start. “The last time someone said that to me, I was shot at the next day. I was spared, obviously, but it turned out not to be true for my brothers in arms. God didn’t have their backs.”
He’d often seen that reaction among soldiers come back from Iraq—the instant return to the moment when life hung by a thread, as if no time at all had passed. She was right back there.
He noticed she carried a gardening basket and shears. To divert her from her melancholy, he pointed and said, “Roses instead of guns, now. Much better.”
“A thousand times better. It’s my turn at arranging flowers for the refectory table,” she said, positioning the stems. “Another thing I’m not particularly good at—give me an engine to take apart any day, and I’m happy.” She walked toward the edge of the field, where a colorful wave of summer wildflowers had made their bright appearance. A hare crossing the field stopped in its tracks.
“Is it all that you expected?” Max asked, following her. “The religious life?”
“No,” she said, without hesitation. “You think you know, you think you’re ready. But every day I seem to fu—I mean, mess! Mess up. I seem to mess something new up. I think what comes hardest for me is the isolation—being the new girl, apart from Mary. That and the stillness.”
“And maybe the language?” he asked, teasing her, for he sometimes still had the same problem, matching his vocabulary to fit his new station in life.
She laughed, piercing the air with a great shout. The sheep, startled, turned small faces as one in her direction. Nothing seemed to upset the goats, who continued their disinterested assessment of her and Max.
“Thank you for understanding that,” she said. “In the Army everybody just blew off steam with the foulest language imaginable. I wasn’t one of the worst offenders, but I’m afraid some of it rubbed off. I’ve had to really watch myself since I’ve been here. Bad habits die hard, you should forgive the pun. Anyway, the stillness, when you’re used to being rousted at all hours and sent running about shouting, generally to no purpose—well, it is just takes getting used to.”
“It’s a sea change, yes.” Thinking of his MI5 days, he said, “I think I can relate.”
“We are given many opportunities for quiet reflection,” she went on, “and a part of me says, ‘Oh, no! Not quiet reflection again! Let me weed the garden or milk the sheep or even scrub floors or something, but not that.’”
Max smiled. “I can imagine it all takes getting used to. The cycling down when you’re used to being on alert all the time. So tell me: what is your typical day like here?”
“Well … it starts early, as you know. But the day doesn’t really get going for me until we assemble in the chapter house in the morning, after prayer. The abbess presides, and that is where we get our marching orders for the day. We take turns reading a chapter from the Rule, and the abbess will give a little talk on the meaning of that particular rule. Then the practical matters are discussed—the status of the various projects we have going, how sales are going, which items are being discontinued. It is very like a sales meeting in the outer world, I would imagine—not something I know a lot about. In chapter is also when we confess our shortcomings. That takes quite a while in my case—the breaches of the Rule. And we’re given a penance.”
“Do the sisters ever report each other for breaking the rules?” Max knew in some orders that was required by custom. It had always struck him as a recipe for disaster.
“You mean, rat someone out?” she asked. “Yes, in theory, chapter would be the place to bring up little lapses they may have witnessed in others. But it’s like casting the first stone, isn’t it? I’ve never known it to happen, not since I’ve been here. We all confess our own lapses—mind our own business.”
It had been, thought Max, rather a long shot, that one of them might have seen or heard something untoward and brought it up during the confession period of the chapter meeting.
“Besi
des,” she said, “for anything that happened that was really out of line, we can talk with the abbess about it, in private. That seems infinitely preferable to ratting each other out in public.”
They looked out over the enclosure where the sheep were grazing. He asked her what breed they were. “I’m city bred,” he apologized. “I can still tell you where to get the best table in London at the last minute and how much to tip the maître d’, but I’ve no clue when it comes to sheep.”
“Those ones over there are Friesians,” she told him. “I didn’t know that either, when I first came here. They use their milk to make soap. They’ve also started a little trade in farmhouse cheese.”
“They,” not “we,” he noted—she had slipped back into the “they.” He wondered how long it would take for her to feel at home enough to start talking automatically of “we,” like Dame Olive.
“Don’t they have the most wonderful faces?” she asked him. “You wish they could speak. I suspect they talk about us behind our backs.” One of the sheep walked over to the fence. She stretched out a hand, which it nuzzled.
“And those in the further pasture are Jacob sheep,” she said. “We breed them for their fleece—it’s so soft, like nothing you’ve ever felt. We sell it to hand spinners.”
“You never breed them for food, then?”
“Heavens, no. I couldn’t bear the idea, really, once I got to know them all.”
Max thought of Lily Iverson back in Nether Monkslip—Lily who bred her sheep for their silky wool, which she knitted into award-winning sweaters and rugs. Lily would entirely have understood Sister Rose.
He asked her if it were true that a ewe could be tricked into accepting the offspring of another sheep as her own.
A Demon Summer Page 15